Servicing the Middle Classes

Class, Gender and Waged Domestic Work in Contemporary Britain

Nicky Gregson, Michelle Lowe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134885817
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Servicing the Middle Classes investigates the recent rise in demand by middle class families for waged domestic labour and the consequent growth of a new `servant' class.
Examining the position of nannies and cleaners, the authors explore the national socio-economic trends which have led to this new phenomenon and the profound changes this reflects in our concepts of motherhood and class and gender relations.

Part I


THE RESURGENCE OF WAGED
DOMESTIC LABOUR IN
CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN

1
INTRODUCTION WAGED DOMESTIC LABOUR IN CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN

Daily nanny (Central Reading)—Sole charge, two children, must be driver/non-smoker.

Smileys Nanny Agency. Permanent and temporary nannies and mothers’ helps. Full professional service operated by qualified NNEB. No registration fee to staff.

Nannies where are you? Not going to London or the south-east when there is such a good job on offer here in the north-east. We are looking for a super person used to infants and babies to look after our two children. You will have to be a non-smoker, a car driver, very very reliable and adaptable, smart and intelligent. Your duties are varied and include some evenings and weekends. Travelling abroad and in the UK. Live in or out. Very good negotiable salary and car provided. Newcastle area.

Domestic required. 3 mornings per week. General housekeeping duties. £2 per hour. Jesmond area. References essential.

Domestic cleaner wanted. Approximately 4 hours per week. Chatteris Way, Lower Earley.

Busy Bees offer you a domestic cleaning service. We have no archetypal Mrs Mopp amongst our staff, with nothing more than a steel bucket and a mop of dubious age and origin. Our staff come equipped with modern cleaning equipment and cleaning products plus skills and know-how of when and where and how best to clean.

Each week the national magazine The Lady—founded in 1885 and labelled the Exchange and Mart of domestic help (Higgins, 1991)—as well as regionally based newspapers, such as the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, the Hexham Courant and the Reading Chronicle, carry advertisements like those above. The advertisements are placed, in the main, by households, although some stem from agencies specialising in the recruitment and supply of various types of domestic staff. Most of these advertisements are for jobs in Britain but others are placed by households living outside Britain and by agencies recruiting for overseas clients. Behind these advertisements are households which are primarily, although not exclusively, middle-class.¹ In most of them, male and female partners are employed, usually full-time, and usually in either professional or managerial occupations. In other cases the female partner may not be in paid employment. In yet other circumstances the advertisement might be placed by a single parent in professional employment. For some of these households hiring domestic help is nothing new. But for the majority of British middle-class households, it is. Domestic service may have been an historical fact but for most of the current generation of employers paid domestic help is a new experience. Instead, for most of the post-war period, domestic labour has been the domain of the fulltime unwaged housewife (Oakley, 1974).

Running parallel with the explosion in the small ads have been increasing levels of demand reported by employment agencies specialising in the recruitment and/ or supply of domestic staff, and an expansion in the number of firms specialising exclusively in home-cleaning services. The Belgravia Bureau, for example, one of the oldest agencies in London, reported a steady demand from traditional sources for dailies, live-in housekeepers and cooks through the 1980s, but a burgeoning in demand for paid domestic help from younger people (Phillips, 1991). Moreover, in the late 1980s brightly coloured vans (with appropriate ‘mop and bucket’ or ‘Victorian maid’ logos, advertising services such as ‘The Maids’, ‘Upstairs Downstairs’, ‘Poppies’ and ‘Dial a Char’) were to be seen everywhere, particularly in the ‘affluent south’. Such vans ferried teams of cleaners, many of them uniformed, to their client middle-class households, there to perform the regular weekly service, spring cleaning or, indeed, pet care, gardening, ironing or even granny minding.

The 1980s in Britain, then, generated some profound changes in the mode of daily social reproduction within a significant number of middle-class households. Not only was domestic labour (or at least certain aspects of this) within these households frequently assuming a waged, as opposed to unwaged, form, but small business capital was expanding into the provision of domestic services. It is this resurgence in waged domestic labour in Britain, specifically its documentation and explanation, as well as the form which this has taken within individual middle-class households, which constitutes the focus for this volume.

Whilst waged domestic labour within middle-class households in contemporary Britain has received little academic attention, it has been the subject of repeated media interest.² Stories of, for example, Filipina ‘slaves’ imprisoned within diplomats’ houses in London, and of Middle Eastern and African women entering Britain as the domestic servants of wealthy immigrants, surfaced periodically in the late 1980s and early 1990s.³ Given their invisible, ‘minority interest’ subject matter, such stories were not headline news as was, on the other hand, waged domestic labour in relation to childcare. Thus in the summer of 1992 both the quality and the tabloid press devoted considerable space to the kidnapping of baby Farrah Quli by a woman posing as what the press labelled as a ‘childminder’.⁴ Alongside details of ‘the story’ were statements from police and representatives of the National Childminding Association and the Professional Association of Nursery Nurses regarding procedures for risk minimisation in the employment of childminders, mothers’ helps and nannies. At precisely the same time, the Beeson v. Longcroft case was being heard in the Old Bailey. Here a twenty-nine-year-old maternity nurse (described variously as either a nurse or a nanny) was cleared of throwing a baby at his mother. However, in the course of the trial the public was treated to predictable suggestions of guilt, accusations of improper motherhood, examples of explosive tensions between nanny and mother and slurs on the professional working mother.⁵ In both of these cases reporting made no attempt to stress that such instances represent the exception rather than the norm. Furthermore, no effort was devoted to showing positive examples of childminding or nannying arrangements experienced by many professional working parents. Instead, what we had were high-profile examples of scaremongering and the ‘backlash’ against those women who seek to combine motherhood and a career (Faludi, 1992; French, 1992). Here then are the journalistic equivalents of the 1992 box office success The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, the film which critics suggested would do for professional working mothers what Fatal Attraction did for the single career woman.⁶

Waged domestic labour then in contemporary Britain, and particularly that relating to childcare, is an emotive issue. It is a phenomenon which appears to challenge the associations between all women and domestic labour and the assumption that domestic labour is an unwaged activity, carried out for love not money. In addition, it appears to be generative and reflective of some major differences and divisions between women. As we move through this volume it will become clear that such representations, as well as the assumed polarities between the women who work as waged domestics and those who employ them, are grave over-simplifications of an extremely complex phenomenon. Indeed, as we show, waged domestic labour within individual middle-class households in contemporary Britain can only be understood and accounted for in relation to its unwaged form and the ideology and identities which underpin this. Hence, demand for particular categories of waged domestic labour by middle-class households, labour supply, and the social relations of waged domestic labour are shown to be permeated with the unwaged form of domestic labour; with highly traditional ideas about the gendering and form of specific types of domestic labour, and with a strong sense of working for love, as opposed to money.

The research on which this volume is based is part of a larger study which also examines the effects of waged domestic labour on the domestic division of labour within middle-class households with both partners in full-time employment (Gregson and Lowe, 1993, 1994). However, the central concern was with waged domestic labour; specifically its incidence and form within contemporary Britain. The project had three main components. Firstly, we examined the pattern of demand for waged domestic labour within Britain over the ten-year period July 1981 to June 1991, both nationally and within our two case study areas, Newcastle upon Tyne and Reading. Secondly, we surveyed approximately 300 middle-class households in both our study areas in which both partners were in full-time employment in professional and managerial occupations. Such households are the major source of new demand for paid domestic help within contemporary Britain, so this component of our work enables us to discuss the general incidence of waged domestic labour within this particular household form. Finally, through two case studies—conducted in the Reading area of Berkshire in south-east England and the Newcastle and Durham City areas of north-east England—we examined the nature of the nanny and cleaner forms of waged domestic labour. Demand for these two categories of paid domestic help was particularly buoyant through the 1980s.⁷ They also represent two different types of domestic work, and, as such, we anticipated that they would constitute two very different forms of waged domestic labour.

The case studies themselves consisted of interviews with 25 nannies and 10 cleaners in both the study areas and of interviews with 29 employers in the northeast and 40 in the south-east.⁸ In both cases, 10 matching pairs of nannies and their employers and 5 matching pairs of cleaners and their employers were interviewed. All interviews with nannies and cleaners were conducted either in the homes of their employers (in the employer’s absence) or in their own homes. Employers were, for the most part, interviewed at home and were allowed to decide for themselves who should be interviewed. Whilst most of our south-east employing households chose to be interviewed together, the majority of our north-east households decided that this was something for the female partner to deal with!⁹ The interviews with all categories of respondent were semistructured, and frequently long and involved. Most interviews with nannies and employers were over an hour in duration, whilst others lasted over two hours. Cleaner interviews tended to be shorter, but some were of an equivalent length and complexity to those with employers and nannies. All interviews were transcribed fully prior to coding and manual analysis.

Implicit within our case study research design was the expectation that there would be significant differences between the two study areas both in the form of waged domestic labour and in its incidence.¹⁰ At the time we anticipated that these differences would reflect the different local economic contexts of both areas in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Typically, our a priori expectations proved to be erroneous. Instead, as we proceeded with our analysis, it became more and more apparent that the differences, such as they were, were slight. Such findings are manifested in the structure of this volume, in which we discuss across space and across our case study areas. As will become clear, it is only where we consider space to matter that we emphasise spatial distinctions and differences. Thus, whilst we show our two local areas to have exerted some influence on waged domestic labour, particularly in relation to labour supply, it is national scale ideological influences and arrangements internal to households which are shown to have been more influential—particularly in producing demand for specific categories of waged domestic labour and in shaping the form which waged domestic labour takes within individual middle-class households.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

Chapter Two is concerned with establishing the pattern of demand for particular categories of waged domestic labour in Britain over the ten-year period 1981 to 1991, and with the pattern within our two case study areas over the same period. This analysis enables us to show the extent of t...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF FIGURES
• LIST OF TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PART I: THE RESURGENCE OF WAGED DOMESTIC LABOUR IN CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN
• PART II: NANNY AND CLEANER EMPLOYMENT WITHIN CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY