Twentieth-Century Servants
Aspirations and Emotions
This chapter describes the varying circumstances in which young people became servants, and their experiences as servants. It explores the relationship between servants and their parents, the influence of mothers, and the significance of wages. The work of cleaners and chars is foregrounded, and the existing historiography is criticized. The persistent tendency to see servants only as victims is rejected through attention to the very diverse narratives that emerge from oral histories and memoirs. Finally, social class is explored within these narratives, and held to be an insufficient framework for capturing the subjectivities of domestic service
Keywords: class, servants, domestic service, employment, labour, char, cleaner, oral history, wages, mothers, working class
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .