Author Topic: What is a "Domestic Servant"?  (Read 1395 times)

Offline hdw

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Re: What is a "Domestic Servant"?
« Reply #9 on: Friday 08 January 21 14:31 GMT (UK) »
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

Offline phenolphthalein

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Re: What is a "Domestic Servant"?
« Reply #10 on: Friday 08 January 21 15:01 GMT (UK) »
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

Offline hdw

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Re: What is a "Domestic Servant"?
« Reply #11 on: Friday 08 January 21 15:18 GMT (UK) »
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

Offline phenolphthalein

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Re: What is a "Domestic Servant"?
« Reply #12 on: Friday 08 January 21 18:29 GMT (UK) »
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


Offline majm

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Re: What is a "Domestic Servant"?
« Reply #13 on: Friday 08 January 21 21:06 GMT (UK) »
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
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