Worlds Between

Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class

Leonore Davidoff

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745609843
  9780745609836
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745666105
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

This book presents a series of pioneering studies which together constitute a reappraisal of our understanding of the relationship between gender and history.

1

Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England

During the first half of the nineteenth century, an increasing proportion of the working population was employed as factory labour. Factories and workshops were growing larger. At the same time the nature of farm labour changed as the yearly hiring was gradually replaced by a more casual monthly contract and young, unmarried farm servants no longer lived in their employer’s household. Integral to this fundamental change to a more limited contract, was the long and sometimes savage conflict over the abolishing of the Law of Master and Servant and its replacement by the Employer and Workman Act of 1875.¹

At about the same time, there began a very gradual shift in the conception of the married woman’s relationship to society (a process that is by no means complete even now); a move to make marriage a contract, voidable like other contracts involving two legal personalities.² This basic change, too, was reflected in some of the legislation that made inroads into the ancient common law concept of couveture: ‘the husband and wife are one and the husband is that one’, Blackstone.

Despite all the political and social ferment these changes generated, the impassioned debates in Parliament and in the press, there were two groups who, almost unnoticed, were hardly touched by the new order. Domestic servants and working-class married women continued, up to the First World War and beyond, in their pre-industrial, almost biblical, subordination to their masters and husbands. Regulation by Factory and Workshops Acts, trades boards or investigations into sweated labour passed them by. Trade union organization proved to be unworkable for servants, unthinkable for wives. Insurance schemes left them aside. Enfranchisement was not for them for they had neither domicile nor property of their own. Their legal definition and, in significant ways, their real situation was closer to the age-old common law doctrine of potestas: children, wives and servants are under the protection and wing of the Master.³ He is the intermediary to the outside world; he embodies the governing principle within the household. It is no accident that such a relationship is called paternalistic, the basic elements of which are given in Max Weber’s classical description of what social and political theorists have called patriarchal domination.

Under patriarchal domination the legitimacy of the master’s orders is guaranteed by his personal subjection and only the fact and the limits of his power of control are derived from the ‘norms’ yet these norms are not enacted but sanctified by tradition. The fact that this concrete master is indeed their ruler is always uppermost in the minds of his subjects. The master wields his power without restraints, at his own discretion and above all, unencumbered by rules insofar as it is not limited by tradition or competing powers.⁴

This term can apply to general expectations for society as a whole, for certain groups within a society or for certain relationships only within a society built on quite other norms, e.g. our attitude towards children in contemporary society. What (the franchise, labour relations, etc.) is being studied will determine which one of these is stressed. Here I am concerned primarily with the interpersonal relations between master and servant, husband and wife. By definition the subordinate group within each pair had few other links to the wider society.

I

In this essay I should like to examine this relationship in detail, looking at both the conventional expectations embodied in law and expounded by dominant groups as well as the reactions to it by those in subordinate positions. What happened to this doctrine under pressure from an increasingly cash- and market-orientated economy, where home and workplace had become physically separated?⁵ What were the forces which led to its decline in service, and its attenuated survival in marriage?

In such a speculative essay, precise documentation is not possible, for necessarily the discussion covers a very long time-span. Much of the argument stems from sociological concern with the nature of authority, stratification, deference and similar abstract concepts. Nevertheless, it is important to make every effort to ground such abstractions in historical time and place. It is at this point that the problems of documenting personal interaction can lead to treacherously simple generalization. Domestic service and working-class marriage are exceptionally elusive areas of study as so much of their activity took place in private homes. Surviving written evidence is overwhelmingly from the superordinates’ side and from the more articulate and powerful individuals within even that stratum.⁶

Bearing these problems in mind, the first question that must be asked is how the relationship operated on a day-to-day basis.⁷ Second, there is the extensiveness of control through all areas of life for the subordinate. The existence of alternative loci of independence, including the right to be independent in any sphere, becomes crucial. For example, the assertion that, because even living-in servants had to sell their labour in the market-place, if only once a year, their relationship to their master was not patriarchal,⁸ neglects this dimension. The cash reward may be seen as an extension of bed and board⁹ regarded by the servant as a form of enforced savings for young maids and youths before marriage. The existence of cash payment in itself does not mean escape from paternalistic control; it only creates possibilities for an alternative way of life. This point is supported by looking at the way the wife’s earnings have continued to be seen as part of the family income. The effort to maintain the paternalistic relationship within marriage by denying an individual wage to the wife is a thread which runs through debates on family income from the Poor Law of 1834 (which resulted in some unions paying for children to be fostered by strangers rather than pay the mother direct out relief), to the present controversy over the payment of Family Allowance directly to the mother or in the form of tax rebates to the father.¹⁰

Finally, and perhaps most important of all, is the extent of control over the lifespan of the subordinate. Again this can be seen as a matter of degree rather than as a polar opposition, a continuum of control. At one end the father has complete control over the child until one day, no matter what the struggle for independence involves, they both know that the subordinate will break free, if only through the death of the parent.¹¹ The servant is attached to the master for an unspecified time; often the master wished to believe that the attachment was permanent when in fact many people seem to have served only when they were young and single, causing a high turnover. The wife, on the other hand, knew it was for ever. John Stuart Mill recognized the significance of this point when he said:

surely if a woman is denied any lot in life but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot, and is dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she would be allowed to try this chance only once … since her all in life depends upon obtaining a good master she should be allowed to change again and again until she finds one.¹²

By looking at the context in which such relationships took place, asking basic sociological questions about the size and structure of the groups involved,¹³ it should be possible to avoid some of the pitfalls of an extreme reductionist psychology.¹⁴ What was the physical setting, how much of the individual’s time was spent in this setting through the day, the week, the year? Were there alternative groups for subordinates to identify with and was this identification and interaction ‘legitimate’ within the system or did it have to be carried out covertly¹⁵ (e.g. was time off given to servants as a right at stated times or did it have to be taken in snatches between tasks)? Could servants see whom they wished when off duty or were their companions overlooked or even banned by the employer (the ‘no followers’ rule)?

The intense privacy of the English middle-class household in individual dwellings often surrounded by gardens, in isolated settings or suburbs separated from working-class districts, made English domestic service exceptionally confining. This was in contrast to continental cities. There the custom was to have all the maids sleep together on the top floor of blocks of flats. When flats finally began to be built in London towards the end of the century this feature was deliberately omitted for fear of losing personal control over the servant.¹⁶

As the rest of the society changed, the service relationship, always fraught with potential difficulties, came under increasing pressure. In 1908, Simmel described this transitional stage as a breakdown in the ‘objective idea’ which occurs at either of the extremes of the service relation:

under the condition of full patriarchal subordination, where the house still has, so to speak, an absolute value which is served by the work of the housewife (though in a higher position) as well as by that of the servant; and then, under the condition of complete differentiation where service and reward are objectively pre-determined, and the personal attachment… has become extraneous to the relationship. The contemporary position of the servant who shares his master’s house, particularly in the larger cities has lost the first of these two kinds of objectivity without having attained the second.¹⁷

That this is a transitional stage can only be revealed by hindsight. No unilinear development can be taken for granted. A political and economic regime pledged to permanent exploitative paternalism can seemingly continue the relationship indefinitely.¹⁸

In this context, the most important fact about our period is that the majority of girls moved from paternal control, in their parents’ home, into service and then into their husband’s home – thus experiencing a lifetime of personal subordination in private homes. This was in growing contrast to boys and to those girls who began to find other forms of work towards the end of the century.¹⁹

In the following discussion, I have no wish to strain the analogy between the situation of domestic servants, both men and women, and working-class married women. In certain respects, most crucially in the presence of dependent children but also in legitimate expectations for sexual relationships and affection, they differed. In other, sociologically decisive areas they were similar.

II

The image of a working woman in nineteenth-century England is that of the mill girl or possibly the milliner or seamstress. Yet it is well known that servants – in the early part of the century farm and later purely ‘domestic’ servants – made up by far the largest occupational group of working women, indeed the largest occupational group in the whole economy except for agricultural labourers. In 1881, servants of both sexes represented one person in every 22 of the population. In London the proportion was 1 in 15; in Bath 1 in 9, while in Lancashire it was only 1 in 30. However, the great majority of indoor residential servants was made up of girls and women.

Numerically they grew from 751,541 in 1851 to a peak of 1,386,167 in 1891 and never fell below one million until the late 1930s.²⁰ They were 34 per cent of all women employed in 1891 and still 23 per cent in 1930. A high proportion of female domestic servants was young: those under twenty were 39 per cent of the total in 1860,42 per cent in 1880 and 31 per cent in 1911. In 1881,1 in 3.3 girls aged fifteen to twenty was classified as a domestic servant (Census of Occupations, England and Wales). A minority remained as servants all their lives, some experienced ten to fifteen years of service and then married; some left after a short time. It is impossible to tell the exact proportions in each category.²¹

Whatever proportion remained as ‘career’ servants, a great number of working-class women must have gone through some experience of service at sometime in their lives, usually including the formative years of adolescence. At an early age, in the first half of the century as young as nine or ten years old, servant...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Mastered for Life: Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England
• 2. Landscape with Figures: Home and Community in English Society (with Jeanne L’Esperance and Howard Newby)
• 3. The Rationalization of Housework
• 4. Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Case of Hannah Cullwick and A.J. Munby
• 5. The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century England
• 6. The Role of Gender in the ‘First Industrial Nation’: Farming and the Countryside in England, 1780–1850
• 7. Where the Stranger Begins: The Question of Siblings in Historical Analysis
• 8. Regarding Some ‘Old Husbands’ Tales’: Public and Private in Feminist History