Domestic service was the main industry for women in paid work 150 years ago. 100 years ago it was dying out and it's now rare in private homes. The women who worked these difficult and all-consuming jobs rarely left detailed records, so (with one exception) Tessa Boase has to reconstruct their lives from public records and somewhat random items saved by their employers. She profiles five women:
Dorothy Doar, the rare married woman in the role who lost her position for requesting a few weeks of maternity leave during the high Victorian period
Sarah Wells, an older woman who'd been in service before marriage and returned as housekeeper to a former dairymaid's cousin who'd inherited both a house and a name (Sarah kept extensive diaries, and her time at Uppark was also recorded by her son Bertie)
Ellen Peketh, accused of theft by her insecure and unprepared mistress and ended up working as a hotel cook
Hannah MacKenzie, the cook-housekeeper at a country-house-turned-WWI-hospital forced out in a power struggle (she ended up as the housekeeper to Grace Vanderbilt, a definite case of "falling up")
Grace Higgins, whose time as housekeeper to Vanessa Bell lasted into the 60s and brought her close to the Bloomberg Set.
Although the stories are personal, we can extrapolate from them to see that the work was backbreaking, tenure was at the whim of the Lady of the House, and even "kindly" mistresses were thoroughly classist. Boase's writing style is a bit dry and but the lives of the women she profiles are far more interesting than their day-to-day routines.
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