Seven servants and their mistress: towards a social ecology of domestic service in Street, Somerset (1900–1905)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article looks at the seven general maids who were employed by a single employer, either separately or together, between 1900 and 1905, in Street, Somerset, U.K. Its methodology is that of microhistory, identifying each of these servants by name from a set of letters written by their employer, which also detail their work for her. The background of each, together with her later life, is also then traced through official and other more public sources. Its aim is to recover these women as particular persons, rather than ‘types’, and thus to create for each of them a history of her own. It argues that by such methods it is also possible to explore what I here term a ‘social ecology’ of this particular local labour market, one that suggests how such work was structured in part by the family and community relationships of both servants and employer in this small Somerset town, and the social norms that surrounded domestic service there.