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Scotland (Counties as in 1851-1901) => Scotland => Topic started by: GordonFindlay on Thursday 07 January 21 00:05 GMT (UK)
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The greater part of my female ancestors 1800-1925 who have occupations recorded (usually before marriage) are reported as "Domestic Servant". The censuses for example are full of them.
I find it hard time believing that all of them were in paid employment, or even working for bed and board.
Might women who were still in the family home, and doing domestic work there, be recorded as "Domestic Servant"?
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They could be living at home but going to work each day elesewhere - just like today. Many were "live in" domestic servants as well.
It was a very common occupation for women - and also men - in those days.
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Might women who were still in the family home, and doing domestic work there, be recorded as "Domestic Servant"?
Yes, here in NZ (1920's) my Aunt was living with her widowed mother and is recorded as a Domestic Servant, while her sister had a live-in job.
While in Glasgow, 1840's/50's, my GGrandmother and her brother were living with an Aunt, while Aunt ran a Boarding House GGrandmother was listed as a Servant.
Cheers
KHP
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I find it hard time believing that all of them were in paid employment, or even working for bed and board.
You have to remember their days were hard and long, and most of them only got Sunday off.
Cheers
KHP
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Probably most female domestic servants were "general domestic servants". Some are more specialised e.g. "Domestic servant (cook)". Female domestic servants were so common, even at fairly humble levels of society, that they were not taxed. Those employing a male domestic servant, e.g. a footman, had to pay an annual tax of 15/- per servant.
In the days before modern labour-saving devices, looking after a household was even more work than it is today. If the daughters of the family were not yet old enough to help their mother, their father would be more likely to employ a servant than to assist personally with the cleaning and washing! Wages were low, especially for young girls. My own mother, in 1938, was paid 5/- a week plus her keep, as a 14 year old general domestic servant in the household of a shopkeeper, his wife and one son.
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If they were in their parents' home they were probably working in another household as live-out servants.
If in another household they were live-in servants, who would have been paid a few pounds a year plus food and accommodation.
I had a look through some of the parish accounts at https://stataccscot.edina.ac.uk/static/statacc/dist/county/Lanark - the New Statistical Account (1845) for the parish of Lanark says that a labourer's wage was 9s per week, and a woman's was 1s per day. In East Kilbride a man was paid 10s a week in winter and 12s in summer (£1 = 20s so 10s a week in winter and 12s in summer is about £30 per year), but a quarryman might be paid more, while (male) farm servants got £14 to £20 a year plus their food. There might be other parish articles that give annual wages for live-in servants. The accounts are well worth reading anyway for the background information they provide.
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I was thrilled to find my Grandmother on the 1911 census age 18, her relationship to the head was written as Domestic servant (Cook) then the other girl was Domestic servant. They lived in and were employed by a Priest of Holy Order's who was married but had no children.
I found the house once when on holiday down south. I had been to the graveyard to put flowers on my Grandmas grave, No. 208, always remembered as same as radio Luxembourg :)
In 1911 the house was called ‘The White House’ and I walked up and down the street trying to find it. By process of elimination by age proximity I worked out which one it was....now numbered 208 :o
I visited an Uncle who lived locally, he said his mum didn’t really like working for the ‘Vicar’ as she had to go to church three times on Sundays !
On researching my own house, a Victorian terrace, I have found many interesting small adverts in The Scotsman newspaper on the British Newspaper Archive advertising for Domestic servants.
There seemed to be quite a hierarchy re the status in the levels of work I.e. No heavy work, light duties only, personal care for elderly lady, six children in the household etc, fascinating :)
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There were fewer opportunities for paid work for working-class females in 19th century unless they lived near a factory. Being a servant was safer than working in a mine.
Shopkeeper son of my boilermaker ancestor had a servant on 1891 census. They were working-class. Boilermaker's daughters worked in mills.
My Irish grandmother, daughter of a small farmer in Western Ireland, was a domestic servant. Irish girls had even less choice of career. Her posts took her far from home - Belfast (a prison warden's house), England, then England again (a wealthy farmer) after she was widowed. She had a sister who was a servant in U.S.; sister was going to find her a position but she remained in England.
I don't know about Scotland but pauper girls in England might be found positions as live-in servants from a young age. Industrial schools for girls at risk of neglect or falling into crime provided training in domestic skills alongside the 3 "R's" so that they could be gainfully employed + have a roof over their heads.
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Thanks all for the information.
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Most of my research has been into fishing families in my native East Neuk of Fife. Even poor fisher households would often have a "servant", as we learn from the censuses, and often she was a young relative skivvying for her older sister or brother until she got married and had her own household. We think of servants nowadays as working for well-to-do families, but these "servants" in working-class households were just working for their board and lodging and I don't think they would have been paid in cash.
My dad's eldest sister never even got to secondary school, her mother insisted on keeping her at home to help with the domestic chores, including doing the washing for a family of 12 and I suppose helping with the menfolk's fishing gear. And my granny's own eldest sister had to skivvy for her mother, and being a bit physically handicapped, never got an offer of marriage. Tough times.
Harry
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In this age of electricity and machines for washing and drying clothes and dishes, heating house and water and cooking meals, we forget how much work was involved in keeping a household. The wood had to be brought in for the water to be heated -- sometimes the water had to be fetched and carried from room to room. The washing hung and brought in and folded or ironed. The veggies planted, grown and brought in. Groceries and meat bought. Ice for the ice-chest chipped.
I am little over pension age but I remember washing day with a copper (ours thankfully electric) and grated soap and blue. I remember the wooden stick used to push the clothes down in the copper. I remember transferring between sinks of water to rinse and I remember turning the mangle or ringer handle. Then there was pegging out, bringing in -- in a hurry if it rained -- carrying the basket -- folding and ironing. I was not a domestic servant I was a child.
My mother-in-law had a fuel stove so cooking for her involved cutting wood, getting a fire going and tending to it besides everything else.
Households were very labour intensive. A pregnant mother probably needed a servant just to survive. Domestic servants were poorly paid. If you could get it done for free by your wife and kids why would you pay?
Domestic servants and those wives who appear as doing domestic duties -- well --
without them none of us would be here --
and most of them were sadly under-appreciated and under-paid.
We forget too soon what lives were like.
Women still have not achieved equal wages.
In my lifetime I have been paid half the wage of a man doing the same work.
Some women still die because their partners believe they don't keep house properly.
phenolphthalein
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I had a 3 x great-grandmother in Cellardyke, Fife, who, rather rashly, married a widower from the next village of Pittenweem with about six children. She bore him a son shortly afterwards so maybe she married him because she was pregnant, I don't know. Anyway, he died suddenly within the year and, faced with the prospect of being a single-stepmother to a bunch of kids she hardly knew, with her own on the way and away from her natural support group of relatives, she skedaddled back to her home village and went to live with her brother and his wife.
I've seen the Pittenweem kirk-session records in the National Archives of Scotland. The session clerk wrote to the eldest of the six kids, a girl of fifteen who was working away from home as a servant, offering to pay her a small wage from kirk-session funds if she would agree to come home and look after her siblings. I don't know if she did or not, but I'm glad to say she eventually married and had her own family.
In the Church of Scotland the kirk-session is the minister and elders sitting regularly in committee to run the affairs of the church. In the old days they acted as a kind of social work department, distributing money etc. to the poor of the parish, as well as a vice squad (punishing fornicators!).
Harry
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In some households there was the cow or goat to milk, in quite a few the hens to feed and eggs to gather but in every house there was the bread, cheese, cold meat and bacon to slice. The peas to be podded, the beans sliced, the carrots peeled, the potatoes peeled, boiled and mashed. There were cakes to be made, oranges to be juiced. No frozen vegetables, no convenience foods, no meals out or home delivered. Chicken was often the most expensive meat -- kept for birthdays and Chistmas and then all the scraps and feet used for soup. And this in my lifetime when things were more convenient than 20 years before.
Washing the floors was done on hands and knees. There were no iron free fabrics, plastic bags, disposable containers no dishwashers etc etc
pH
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May I add to phenolphthalein's jobs descriptions ...
Blacken the Metters fuel stove
Turkey brush the cobwebs
And worst daily task for me ... handling the soiled nappies of my youngest siblings as mum was very ill after every birth .... I actually remember trying to avoid the stink by wrapping a scarf around my face.... I was 8, standing on upside down empty Apple case at the concrete tubs with hand wringer on the dividing wall ....
And the laundry copper was heated by fire under, and the prodder stick was taller than me...
Ahh..... rural New South Wales in the 1950s .... child labour .... there was no one else to help. I was allowed to be late to school, and our Head Mistress would organise for me to be driven home if it looked like rain and I had two lines full of washing drying on them. .... Dolly pegs ....
JM