Far from being symbols of a bygone era, servants remain central
to life in modern Britain. One in ten British households currently
employs domestic workers.1 The ‘disappearance’ of service —
already heralded in the 1920s, when press coverage of ‘the servant
problem’ was filled with nostalgic laments for the faithful
Victorian maid—never happened. Change, of course, did occur
—the live-in housemaid of the 1900s was replaced with the parttime
cleaner of the 1950s — and it is that transition on which I
focus here. I therefore treat the history of twentieth-century
domestic service as one of development, rather than decline.
Moreover, I argue that relations between servants and their
employers illuminate the important and dynamic role that class
has played in modern British history — though we would not
know it from the silence on service that characterizes the major
historical studies of class in twentieth-century Britain.2
This article builds on existing histories of domestic service
by moving beyond the polarization of socio-economic and cultural
history. Between the 1960s and the 1980s sociologists and
social historians were preoccupied with whether ‘deference’ or
‘defiance’ shaped servants’ behaviour and actions. While some
scholars argued that servants were socialized into unquestioning
obedience,3 others suggested that deference in fact masked covert
defiance.4 Both groups used close analysis of the interaction between servants and their employers to place them within an
existing paradigm of class relations.5 Most of these studies
agreed that domestic service had ‘disappeared’ by the 1950s,
largely because young working-class women found the occupation
oppressive and left when job opportunities increased in
factories, shops and offices.6 The recent insights of cultural
historians have challenged this older methodology and the conclusions
derived from it. Judy Giles and Lucy Delap have used
middle-class women’s writing and, in Delap’s case, servants’
memoirs, to suggest that service was a positive experience for
many working-class women.7 These different strands of scholarship
have produced immensely valuable work, but none has successfully
explained the coexistence of servants’ and former
servants’ positive testimonies with the replacement of ‘live-in’
service by part-time domestic work after the SecondWorldWar.
