Domestic worker

In the broader sense, a servant is a hired helper permanently residing in the household for work in the home and agriculture. In the narrower sense, it is a worker employed in the household. The heyday of the servant system in Western Europe was the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. For bourgeois households of that time, the employment of at least one maid was an essential characteristic of one's status. Today, servants are still widespread in countries where income disparities are high and where the employment situation differs greatly between urban and rural regions.

Tasks

In Western Europe, servants were typically female. According to a survey, 96.8% of servants in Berlin in 1882 were female. The employment of male servants was limited to upper middle-class and aristocratic households, as they received higher wages. Maids belonged to the typical service personnel in well-off bourgeois, but also petty bourgeois households. In this, maids differed from maids - female servants who performed the "menial" and physically harder work, typically on farms ("Scheuermagd", "Kuhmagd"). The classic 19th-century maid was responsible for all household chores. Working hours ranged up to over 16 hours a day, and food and lodging were considered meager. At the end of the 19th century, the term "hourly maid" was common for women who were not permanently employed; if several maids were employed in a household, there were "second maids" who, for example, did not cook or take care of the children, but cleaned, tidied, did the laundry and sewed.

Maid in hall, slightly bent standing at table with feather duster, studio photo.

Feminization and urbanization in the 19th century

With industrialization, a strong structural change began in Western Europe at the beginning of the 19th century. In the first two decades of the 19th century, the agricultural and commercial servants still outnumbered the men. Industrialization created employment opportunities that enabled the male rural population in particular to find work outside agriculture. At the same time, an urban educated and propertied middle class consisting of doctors, bankers, civil servants, priests, professors, lawyers and entrepreneurs became prosperous.

For this stratum of the bourgeoisie, neither their housing situation nor their financial resources allowed them to house and employ a servant of several heads. Instead, it became common to employ one or more maids, who carried out all the typical household tasks. In the 1880s, between 30 and 40 percent of all women registered as employed in Europe worked in private households. Detailed figures from individual European countries confirm this. In 1851, for example, one in three British women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four was employed as a maid. Regardless of age, this was true of more than one in six British women. Overall, the proportion of servants among the female labour force was 40 per cent. The proportion of women who earned their bread by factory work, on the other hand, was somewhat higher in early industrialized Britain as early as 1851. By 1900 the proportion of servants had fallen only slightly. Of the four million employed British women, about one and a half million worked as servants.

Conversely, between 1851 and 1871, out of 100 British households, 35 each employed one servant and 25 had two. Some of the remaining 40 households had more than two servants, but the majority had none. The employment of servants was not necessarily an indication of wealth. The British actress Sybil Thorndike, whose father was a canon at Rochester Cathedral and who grew up at the end of the 19th century, emphasized several times in interviews how poor her childhood and youth had been. Nevertheless, her family employed no fewer than four servants. In E. M. Delafield's largely autobiographical novel Diary of a Lady in the Country, which recounts the life of an upper-middle-class British family in the 1930s, a cook and a maid are employed despite the family's financial straits, and the daughter of the house is brought up by a French governess.

Historian Judith Flanders argues, on the basis of available statistics, that contrary to current perceptions, in many middle-class households of the nineteenth century, women who belonged to the bourgeois middle class either did the housework together with their maid, or many middle-class women had to manage without any help. Advisors around 1900 actually advised households that belonged to the lower middle class against employing servants. It was considered more sensible for these households to occasionally employ laundresses and maids by the hour for rough work. Only the wealthiest households could afford to employ such a large number of servants that the female part of the servants' household did not take on any share of the housework.