'What we think is needed is a union of domestics such as the miners have': The Domestic Workers' Union of Great Britain and Ireland 1908-14

Abstract

This article provides the first in-depth account of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–10). In a period of intensifying labour unrest, young female servants working in private homes attempted to organize their own trade unions. Short-lived and disrupted by the First World War, their efforts left little formal documentation and have never before been the subject of historical study. Their activities can, however, be traced in the pages of women’s movement periodicals and the correspondence columns of local and radical newspapers. The idea of organizing domestic servants as workers was an anathema to many in both the labour and the women’s movements. Nevertheless, the Domestic Workers’ Union provides a fascinating case study of how, in this moment of exceptional social unrest, elements of trade unionism and feminism converged to challenge entrenched gendered divisions between the public and the private, the workplace and the home.