Housework, Housewives, and Domestic Workers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article sets established historical narratives of a mid-twentieth-century turn to privacy, new domestic identities, and new ways of thinking about housework into a broader history of domestic service. I argue that the new forms of domesticity were only ever partially and unevenly established in middle-class households. Domestic service emerges as a tenacious institution, which continued to be influential in the organization of middle-class or privileged homes throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Middle-class women were exhorted to manage their homes without servants, and were offered the consolation of greater privacy and intimacy within their homes, as well as the dignity and emotional rewards of a housewife identity. But few found that this made the prospect of being “servantless” attractive. I will therefore examine the failures of the “servantless” home and the “strange survival” of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain.