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Suited for Service

Racialized Rationalizations for the Ideal Domestic Servant from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Enobong Hannah Branch  and
Melissa E. Wooten
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Abstract

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From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic servant” relationship marked the historical moment in which a subordinate racial identity became a precondition of servanthood. The semantic change from help or hired girl to domestic servant reflected a more fundamental change in the nature, organization, and expectation of the work role. Using a comparative-historical approach, we provide a sociological analysis of how shifting labor patterns and societal demands led to the decline of help, the rise of domestic service, and the centrality of a racialized identity to the performance of household work during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Summer 2012 , pp. 169 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2012 

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