Female Domestic Servants Research Articles

Female relatives and domestic service in nineteenth‐century England and Wales: Female kin servants revisited

AbstractThis article uses the full sample of the 1851 census enumerators’ books (CEBs) to revisit and reanalyse the well‐known phenomenon of female kin servants in the British census. We find that the recording of female kin servants points to three distinct possibilities – day servants, domestic work at relatives’ homes, and work at relatives’ homes as part of the family business unit. Accordingly, we argue that female kin servants offer a rare opportunity to look into the interaction between gendered work, household economy, and market economy, and they should be considered as much in the labour force as classic servants. We further offer tentative methods to revise the number of female domestic servants. Our revision suggests that domestic service probably employed more women than manufacturing activities of all sorts put together. It highlights the limited impacts of industrialization on most women's work experiences as well as traditional sector's importance for women's employment, even as late as the mid‐nineteenth century.

Amah Activism: Domestic Servants and Decolonization in 1960s Malaysia and Singapore

The privatized nature of employment as a domestic servant is often inimical to collective action. Yet in the early 1960s there was significant trade union interest in the working conditions of female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya. Studies of female domestic service in Malaya (later Malaysia) and Singapore are dominated by work focusing on Chinese-born servants before the Second World War, and migrant maids associated with economic transformation from the late 1970s. If scholarship on pre-war domestic servants leans toward an emphasis on agency, then studies of maids from the 1980s tend toward experiences of abjection. What of the intervening period, during the Cold War, when rapid decolonization introduced new factors into the demography, structure, and regulation of domestic service in Malaysia and Singapore? Did this provide opportunity for greater autonomy, mimic older colonial relationships, or herald new protections for domestic servants in the modern postcolonial state? The considerable historical literature devoted to the relationship between imperial power, colonialism, and domestic service rarely extends to the persistence and dynamics of domestic service in the era of decolonization between the 1950s and the 1970s, although it does explore the increasing feminization of the occupation. This article explores a confluence of factors—the politics of anticolonialism, economic dependence, and apprehension about the privacy of the home—that cohered in a controversy in the 1960s known as the “amah strike,” when female domestic servants in Singapore and Malaya threatened to walk off the job over a proposed change to their employment conditions.

Remembering the tatas: an oral history of the Tetouan elite about their female domestic slaves

Affluent families in Tetouan (Morocco) had female domestic servants from slave origins until well into the twentieth century. I present here a reconstruction of the trajectories and living conditions of those women, based on the recent memory of the slave-owning families themselves. This exercise raises different methodological challenges about the use of memory, while allowing us to present the transformations that the slavery system underwent in colonial Morocco. The position of female domestic servants was diverse and paradoxical, since in many cases they achieved a degree of closeness with the families, while at the same time finding themselves under a system of class and gender domination.

“Powerless power”: The status of female domestic workers in Russia in the second half of the 19th - early 20th century

The proposed article investigates the specifics of social status of urban female domestic servants in post-reform Russia. On the basis of a wide range of sources, including statistical materials, printed press, household manuals and ego-documents, the author distinguishes between two groups in this category of population that were fundamentally different in their status in the master’s family. In the post-reform period in Russia, the work of maidservants was not standardized, there were no guarantees from hirers regarding both working conditions and cases of dismissal and disability. Widespread sexual harassment and abuse seriously worsened the position of maidservants. A significant influx of peasant girls, who considered themselves fully prepared for the work of domestic servants, into the city, created a gigantic supply At the same time, the overwhelming majority of the job seekers did not have any idea about the activities that they were to carry out. Making endless blunders, the clumsy peasant girl acquired professional skills and learned to live in the master’s family, suffering insults and harassment and working hard only to avoid being kicked out. As a result, those girls who had been able to endure several years of torment, acquired not only professional skills, but were trained to live in the city, to use their position to earn money, to protect themselves from encroachment, or to use their attractiveness as a weapon. With the growth of education of female peasant youth, their increasing familiarity with judicial institutions, and the intensification of the activities of various organizations involved in helping those women with education and employment, female domestic servants felt more secure and ready to defend their rights. As a result, despite the seemingly gigantic supply, it was, in fact, extremely difficult to find a suitable maidservant for the household. The choice available to the owners was limited to two options - a docile slouch, or a maid knowing her worth and requiring consideration of her interests.

Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants, Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

ABSTRACTFar from being a trivial detail, clothes fundamentally define who we are and how we are perceived by others. Drawing on a large sample of French and British servants’ memoirs, this article explores how dress served a crucial but contrasting role in the way French and British servants articulated their identities within and outside the home between 1900 and 1939. It argues that servants’ dress was deeply linked to the nature of the occupation in each country and the structure of their respective female labour markets.

The Arrival of Foreign Female Domestic Servants in Antwerp and the Role of Compatriots and Relatives as Intermediaries, 1860–1880

Gender & HistoryVolume 31, Issue 3 p. 584-604 Special Issue The Arrival of Foreign Female Domestic Servants in Antwerp and the Role of Compatriots and Relatives as Intermediaries, 1860–1880 Thomas Verbruggen, Thomas Verbruggen orcid.org/0000-0002-1715-2866 Search for more papers by this author Thomas Verbruggen, Thomas Verbruggen orcid.org/0000-0002-1715-2866 Search for more papers by this author First published: 22 January 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12456Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume31, Issue3Special Issue: Migration, Institutions and Intimate LivesOctober 2019Pages 584-604 RelatedInformation

Some Observations on Dickens's Will and Codicil

Some Observations on Dickens's Will and Codicil Jeremy Parrott (bio) This article will address three points related to Charles Dickens's last will and testament and its codicil, all of which have a connection to my ongoing research into All the Year Round. The first point concerns the identity of the two witnesses to these legal documents, the second relates to the whereabouts of the physical will drafted by Dickens and the third concerns the sole beneficiary of the codicil, Charles Dickens the younger. Let's begin at the end. Both the will of 1869 and the codicil of 1870 were witnessed by the same two individuals, who each give as their address 26, Wellington Street, London – the office address of Dickens's weekly magazine All the Year Round. One of the signatories was G. Holsworth, whilst the other signed himself variously as H. or Henry Walker. My reason for taking an interest in these individuals was that their active involvement with Dickens and the conduct of the magazine towards the end of the 1860s made them the most likely candidates as the scribe or scribes who annotated the marked set of All the Year Round which I discovered in 2014. Having already eliminated on the basis of their handwriting the most obvious suspects: Dickens himself, Wilkie Collins, Henry Morley, Harry Wills and Charley Dickens – I was left casting around for other members of the office staff who would have had access to either the ledger or another working set of the magazine (both of which are now presumed lost) from which the data given in the marked "Parrott" set must have been extracted. Since Holsworth and Walker were both employed by Dickens and trusted by him as witnesses to the extremely sensitive information contained in his will, it seemed (and still seems) highly plausible that he may also have entrusted them with annotating a luxuriously bound 20-volume set of the magazine, naming all the contributors over a 10-year run, for his own, personal use. I published my preliminary findings on Holsworth and Walker in an article for the Dickensian in 2016,1 outlining the life of George Holsworth [End Page 95] and suggesting two bearers of the very common name Henry Walker, either of whom could have been, on the basis of the evidence then available to me, the signatory to Dickens's will. As the identikit picture of Holsworth that I constructed has not altered significantly in the past three years, I would refer the reader to that Dickensian article for details and will merely summarize my findings here. George Vincent Holsworth was born in 1830 and baptized on 12 October in the St. Pancras area of London. The 1851 census shows him as living with his widowed mother, two brothers and a female domestic servant at 44 Morton Villas, St. Pancras and gives his profession as "clerk." In the same year his name was first associated with Charles Dickens (who consistently misspelt his surname), appearing in a letter to Wills of 14 May 1851: "I sent word through Mr. Holdsworth that you would be at Devonshire House after 7" (Letters 6: 390). The letter was sent from the office of Household Words and we can infer that Holsworth was by then working for Dickens at the magazine. Occasional references to him by Dickens in letters to Wills in the mid 1850s clearly establish Holsworth as a clerical assistant, answerable to both Dickens and Wills. Towards the end of the decade Dickens started to endow Holsworth with traits of character (or caricature), suggesting that he was the object of an in-joke shared by Dickens and Wills: "Holdsworth smiles on me with a limp and sickly benevolence," he wrote on 3 April 1858 (Letters 8: 541). Whatever Dickens's private feelings were about Holsworth, he was retained when Household Words ceased publication and All the Year Round took its place just a few doors away in the same street. Once again in correspondence with Wills in August 1861, this time discussing sales of the journal, Dickens alludes to Holsworth with heavy irony as –"Holdsworth the Brilliant" (Letters 9: 450). For George Holsworth himself, the position...

Het Antwerpse en Brusselse rekruteringsgebied voor buitenlandse dienstmeiden (1850-1910)

Historians have observed that the recruitment areas of several nineteenth-century European service cities expanded beyond the cities’ hinterland. This development is inextricably connected to the democratisation of long-distance migration and the mobility transition in this period. As several European cities were located close to each other, the question arises how these cities influenced each other’s recruitment areas. This article focuses on the recruitment areas for foreign female domestic servants of Antwerp and Brussels between 1850 and 1910. The local foreigners’ files of both cities not only provide information on the birth place of each foreigner who entered the city but also on the place of departure, which allows for a better reconstruction of urban recruitment areas than previously used source material. The hypothesis is that the recruitment areas of both cities gradually came to overlap as a consequence of the short distance and many transport links between the two cities, the high degree of mobility of servants, and the similarities in the domestic service labour market of both cities.

MUI TSAI IN STRAIT SETTLEMENTS (MALAYA) 1920s-1950s: A CONFLICT OF LAW AND DEFINITION

The Mui Tsai system has been described as domestic servitude, a form of slavery, and in the same breath, a charitable act. These descriptions are at opposite ends, and it is this conflict of definition that has resulted in much debate surrounding the Mui Tsai practice. In the Strait Settlements between the 1920s-1950s a number of key legislative provisions were passed by the then Colonial government in an attempt to regulate and to eradicate this practice; in particular the Female Domestic Servants Ordinance 1925 and the Mui Tsai Ordinance 1932. While legal effort to legislate the Mui Tsai practice was made, it continued to flourish. The article examines this conflict, the complexities within the Chinese customary practices surrounding the Mui Tsai in the Strait Settlements, and how English law evolved and attempted to mould existing definitions to fit the various permutations and versions of what a Mui Tsai is. The article also reveals in its wake, the superficiality of the Strait Settlements government in approaching the concept of Mui Tsai and concludes with several possibilities on why these efforts were thwarted. Although much has been written on this practice in Hong Kong, comparatively little has been documented in Malaya and in the Strait Settlements, particularly from a legal perspective. It is this lacuna that the article hopes to fill.

KSZTAŁCENIE ŻEŃSKIEJ SŁUŻBY DOMOWEJ W ŚWIETLE «PRZYJACIELA SŁUG» (1897 – 1918)

The monthly called «The Friend of Servants» issued in Krakow within the period of 1897 – 1918 was the sort of magazine which only until the year 1910 represented and supported the matters of female domestic servants. One of its publishers had been for many years the social and educational activist and teacher Adela Dziewicka, but its editor was Katarzyna Platek. Until 1910 the periodical covered cultural, educational, social and didactic issues. They were also publishing religious and edifying talks, or even series of articles of patriotic and historical content. Quite varied were the columns of correspondence and advertising. Since 1911 the periodical altered in quality to become more religious and even preacher-like in character. Many articles were not signed, which is the reason why they can be assumed to come from the publishing staff. The periodical provided additionally the information on the ways of educating house-keeping servants in the specially formed schools which were available throughout both Galicja (Krakow, Lwow, Przemyśl) and Wielkopolska (Dobrojewo). In those schools the young servants were mainly instructed in reading, writing, calculating, religion, sometimes singing, and even history. In Przemyśl and Dobrojewo the girls were taught to perform all the household chores as assumed by house-keeping servants (ie. the cleaning, washing, ironing, sewing, cooking, taking care of farm animals, poultry and the like. The schools intended for domestic servants offered free education. The classes were mainly held on Sunday afternoons. Any abscence from school was excused by the employer. Their teachers did not receive any pay. In Dobrojewo the older girls were trained in apprenticeship by the younger ones, and they were trained in cooking by a qualified cook. It cannot be denied that they were also trained by the school founder herself countess Barbara Kwilecka, in whose mansion the school was situated. At the end of the school year dedicated and gifted students were mostly awarded with belles-lettres and religious books. In the Dobrojewo school, the apprentices got paid as when being apprenticed they were performing all the duties of the domestic servants. The unemployed servants were admitted support from the community of the Daughters of the Love of God in Krakow. In their convent on Sundays and other holidays they could learn reading, writing, calculating and needlework. Those abilities helped them to find a job. The educational centres for servants chiefly focussed on the intellectual development of their charges as much as on their practical knowledge and morality.

White Plague, Mexican Menace

This article examines a debate that emerged in El Paso, Texas at the turn of the twentieth century surrounding the transmission of pulmonary tuberculosis from predominantly Anglo American migrants to the city’s ethnic Mexican population. Reports of Anglo-to-Mexican infections came from cities and towns throughout the U.S. Southwest, but by 1915 El Paso had emerged as the epicenter of the debate. Using popular and professional sources, the article tracks a shift in dominant perceptions of tubercular contagion from an association with white bodies to Mexican ones. An early narrative casts the Mexican female domestic servant as a victim of the infectious indigent white consumptive male health seeker. In 1915, as the Mexican Revolution raged and tensions between whites and ethnic Mexicans in the city sharpened, federal public health authorities published a report dismissing health seekers as a source of contagion to ethnic Mexicans. This article highlights the power of notions of race, gender, and class in shaping perceptions of and responses to epidemics, often with tragic results.

Fashionably Dressed, Against All Expectations

This paper is based on a study of how female domestic servants living and working in the city of Guadalajara (Jalisco, Mexico) between 1877 and 1910 created their own personal image through the creative use of fashion in clothing. Traditionally regarded in historical accounts of the time as passive “secondary figures,” this paper illustrates their agency. Based on a unique Register of Domestic Servants that recorded photographs and descriptions of 2,350 female domestic workers and other primary sources, this study found that the women showed great intelligence and skill when creating their visual identity. In dressing for their portraits, they wanted to both fit in and stand out during a transitional time of social mobility.

Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston. By Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) 257 pp. $34.95 cloth and e-book

Robert Love’s Warnings examines the operation of the poor law in Boston. The city’s selectmen hired “warners,” such as Love, to search for newcomers and warn them to leave. Strangers could stay and seek employment, but if they needed relief, the colony would have to pay for it. The book provides biographical sketches of those people whom Love warned. Love, who searched Boston’s streets for transients and recent arrivals, left detailed accounts of strangers’ names, birthplaces, last habitation, occupation, Boston residence, and the number of people in their party by age and sex. The biographical sketches are based on Love’s records and its nominal linkage to other sources that uncover the lives of those warned.The book sustains George Ravenstein’s “Laws of Migration,” as revised by twentieth-century demographers. Just as in late nineteenth-century England, most of the migrants in Dayton and Salinger’s research had moved a short distance, in this case relocating to Boston; nearly all of them came from New England. Boston received more migrants than any other New England town, but most of them left soon after arrival, usually for the countryside—a common final destination in the early modern world.A number of them came in search of opportunities in domestic service, desperately in need of wages sufficient to feed and clothe themselves and their families. The authors argue, however, that Boston’s migrants were primarily from the middling sort—yeoman farmers and artisans. Their classification of only one-fifth of those whom Love warned as poor challenges earlier historians’ insistence that nearly all of those warned were poor. But the story is more complicated. The book presents enough compelling data to challenge its own conclusions. Boston migrants certainly included a substantial number of the middling sort. But this group probably did not constitute four-fifths of the strangers entering the town. Love includes travelers (both poor and middling) who came to Boston by sea or by land, planning to leave immediately for elsewhere. But he excludes two groups traditionally considered poor—sailors, a constant and large portion of Boston’s population, who fell under the jurisdiction of a ship’s captain, and British occupying soldiers, who were the responsibility of their officers.The operation of the Massachusetts Poor Law compounds these problems. Love probably identified nearly all of the absolutely destitute strangers in Boston. After all, the selectmen wanted him to locate those most likely to need public assistance. But many of the others that he warned were probably among the working poor—young female domestic servants, wage laborers, or journeymen artisans down on their luck—a group that the authors combine with the middling sort.Boston’s population never reached 20,000 before the American Revolution. Yet it attracted thousands of strangers during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Even during the severe recession following the Seven Years’ War, migrants continued to arrive. As New England’s largest town and entrepôt, Boston played a vital role in New England’s economy, attracting apprentices and domestic servants, as well as those without visible means of support. The turnover was great. Those who came for only a few months or years, expecting to return to their home villages or move to a growing frontier, were replaced by a steady stream of new migrants.Robert Love’s Warnings adds much to early American history, the history of American and global poverty, and the study of law and public welfare. Its thick description of the lives of poor people and of struggling workers humanizes a mostly unknown part of the colonial population and sheds some light on how the early United States dealt with the problems of internal migration and immigration.

A Job Like Any Other? Feminist Responses and Challenges to Domestic Worker Organizing in Edwardian Britain

AbstractThis article focuses on the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910), a small, grassroots union organized by young female domestic servants in the years leading up to the First World War. This union emerged against a backdrop of labor unrest as well as an increasingly militant women's movement. The article looks at how the Domestic Workers’ Union drew inspiration from the latter but also encountered hostility from some feminists unhappy with the idea of their own servants becoming organized. I argue that the uneven and ambivalent response of the women's movement toward the question of domestic worker organizing is significant not simply as an expression of the social divisions that undoubtedly characterized this movement, but also as reflecting a wider debate within early twentieth-century British feminism over what constituted useful and valuable work for women. Attitudes toward domestic worker organizing were therefore predicated upon feminists’ interrogation of the very nature of domestic labor. Was it inherently inferior to masculine and/or professional forms of work? Was it intrinsically different from factory work, or could it be reorganized and rationalized to fit within the industrial paradigm? Under what conditions should domestic labor be performed, and, perhaps most importantly, who should do it?

Factors underlying sex preference of domestic servants in Nigeria

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to examine factors underlying gender preference of domestic servants (DS). Children in domestic service constitute the most common form of urban child labour. Literature has shown that domestic service employment has a gender face with the girl-child more susceptible. This is the gap this research fills.Design/methodology/approach– The study employed both quantitative and qualitative strategies selecting respondents and analysing the study. The respondents were employers of DS and were mainly women. Qualitative data were generated from 15 employers reached through the snowball method. The stratified purposive sampling technique was used to identify private and public organisations in the selected localities where copies of a questionnaire were administered.Findings– The results showed that factors considered for employing DS are linked to traditional conception of household tasks. Consequently, girls (86.4 per cent) were preferred for performing domestic chores, providing emotional support for employers’ children and were viewed as receptive, “mouldable”, and hardworking to male (11.4 per cent). Not minding these functional roles they perform, some employers reported that female DS could “snatch” their husbands, influence their children negatively, and may be spiritually possessed and physically “unclean”. Male servants were considered foul, repulsive, and revolting to correction; besides, they sexually assault female children of employers; hence they were least demanded.Research limitations/implications– Because of the size of the sample which is small, the research results may lack generalisability. More expansive works are needed in this regard.Practical implications– The paper includes implications for policy initiative concerning the plight of working women and security of DS.Social implications– The paper reveals the social factors considered in recruiting DS and their implications on family relations.Originality/value– This paper fulfills the identified gap to study gender preference in domestic servitude.

Maids, Mistresses, and “Monstrous Doubles”: Gender-Class Kyriarchy in The Female Quixote and Female Quixotism

Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) and Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Female Quixotism (1801) are both notable for the ways in which the quixotic imagination enables Arabella and Dorcasina to wield unlikely agency within patriarchal households. Lost amid the many critical conversations about the empowerment of female quixotes with respect to their surrounding male characters, however, is the curious power dynamic between socioeconomically privileged quixotes and their female domestic servants. Through a comparative and transatlantic analysis of mimetic violence between female quixotes and their maids, this essay argues for greater consideration of socioeconomic power differentials as an additional sphere of ethical concern in these novels.

More Than Recipes: Kosher Cookbooks as Historical Texts

The Jewish Cookery Book, published in 1871 by Esther Jacobs Levy of Philadelphia, is widely accepted as first kosher cookbook in United States. In a tone described by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as defensive, Levy set out to show Philadelphia Jews identified with English cultural standard of local elite . . . how their elegant tables could also be kosher.1 This desire for elegance foreshadowed an ongoing undercurrent in kosher and Jewish life in United States: drive to emulate and belong without losing an autonomous identity.If, as Steven Tobias writes, cookbooks contain not only recipes but hidden clues and cultural assumptions about race, gender and ethnicity,2 then Levy's book offers a unique glimpse of American Jewish life for a nineteenth-centuiy urban matron. The full title of Esther Jacob Levy's text is Jewish Cookery Book on Principles of Economy, Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers, With Addition of Many Useful Medicinal Recipes, and Other Valuable Information Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management. In introduction, Levy sets tone with information as to manner of strictly keeping a Jewish house, including a reminder on need for mezuzahs, instructions on Sabbath preparations, kashering and carving meat, supervising servants, checking bills, and preparing for Passover.3Levy places her audience firmly in women's sphere when she describes preparing home for Passover as a time when Jewish women feel pleasurable emotions at seeing everything in house looking brilliantly clean. She writes that all Jews should feel delighted inasmuch as all cleaning was preparation for becomingly celebrating our wonderful deliverance from bondage.4 Cleaning for Passover means stripping a house bare of any sign of products containing leavened flour (chomets), and casting massive undertaking as a delight can be read as an attempt to elevate drudgery by imbuing it with religious significance couched within work ethic that is at core of American character. It is a notion that echoed a similar book of era; in The American Woman's Home, coauthors and sisters Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe emphasize importance of placid and cheerful temper and tones as a necessary component of a Christian home. The authors suggest that women needed to cultivate those characteristics and make them habitual, in order to maintain a happy household.5 Even if through self-delusron, Benjamrn Franklin's virtues of order, industry, and cleanliness6 are embedded into both Beechers' and Levy's narrative.Levy stressed that her readers should carry out specific traditional duties and responsibilities in their households, each continuing a biblical tradition as a woman of valor described in Proverbs 31.15 as one who riseth while it is yet night and giveth provision to her household. It was assumed that this late nineteenth-century woman would be kosherobservant, despite reality that Reform Jewish leaders were just a few years from declaring kashrut unnecessary. Additionally, 187-page Jewish Cookery Book assumed that its audience would have servants. This was consistent with late nineteenth-century middle-class American urban lifestyle. In years between 1870 and 1910, there was a dramatic increase in number of female domestic servants in United States, an increase David Katzman explained as a result of the rapid industrialization and accompanying urbanization7 of country combined with what Faye Dudden observed as a new concern for status.8 As Levy educated her readers about supervising servants, she was both reflecting and predicting their economic status as upwardly mobile Americans.Levy's text begins with Arrangement of Table, describing how table should be set for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. For breakfast, this includes instructions on placement of cutleiy and plates, salt shakers and cruets, tea and coffee pots, milk, hot milk, and cream, as well as what should be placed on sideboard. …

Domestic servants and diffusion of fertility control in Flanders, 1830–1930

This article uses a mixed method approach to analyse whether urban domestic service functioned as a diffusion channel in the fertility decline. The central hypothesis is that nineteenth century female, rural-born domestic servants were influenced by the reproductive habits of their middle and upper-class employers, who were vanguards in the adoption of family size limitation within marriage. This happened via a process of social learning, a mechanism of social influence in heterogeneous social networks. Female domestic servants are an excellent research population to study reproductive ideas and behaviour because they were large in number and had a particular social position in between the working and upper classes and in between rural and urban environments. This paper is unique in its use of qualitative information to analyse social fertility diffusion and in the incorporation of geographical mobility in the statistical part.

Talking to Bessie: Richard Wright's Domestic Servants

Over the course of the debate concerning Wright's depiction of black women, critics have ignored the manuscript and extensive body of research to which Wright immediately turned after Native Son, a project Wright explicitly identified as female-centered and for which his publisher suggested the title “Native Daughter.” To concentrate an assessment of Wright's black female domestic servants solely on the portrayal of Bessie Mears in Native Son obscures the radical evolution in his construction of the black female domestic servant from Mears to Ollie Knight (“Black Hope”) to Carl “Lucy” Owens (“Man of All Work”) as a result of Wright's extensive interviews with and research on the female domestic servants in the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 1930s and 1940s. Wright's decision to meet and talk directly with the women of the so-called modern slave markets results in a remarkable oral history of these spaces and in a novel that should transform the critical conversation surrounding Wright and women.

Female Domestic Servants as Desirable Refugees: Gender, Labour Needs and Immigration Policy in Belgium, The Netherlands and Great Britain

The immigration policies adopted by Western European states during the interwar period were marked by increasing restriction, especially after 1933. One notable exception to this was the relatively generous treatment afforded to women who were prepared to take up employment as domestic servants. This article looks at the reasons behind this anomaly and compares the responses of three states that were in the front line of the refugee efflux from Germany and Eastern Europe in the years leading up to the Second World War.