Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England

by Carolyn Steedman

This is a unique account of the hidden history of servants and their employers in late eighteenth-century England and of how servants thought about and articulated their resentments. It is a book which encompasses state formation and the maidservant pounding away at dirty nappies in the back kitchen; taxes on the servant's labour and the knives he cleaned, the water he fetched, and the privy he shovelled out. Carolyn Steedman shows how deeply entwined all of these entities, objects and people were in the imagination of those doing the shovelling and pounding and in the political philosophies that attempted to make sense of it all. Rather than fitting domestic service into conventional narratives of `industrial revolution' or `the making of the English working class' she offers instead a profound re-reading of this formative period in English social history which restores the servants' lost labours to their rightful place.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature

426 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Carolyn Kay Steedman, FBA (born 20 March 1947) is a British historian, specialising in the social and cultural history of modern Britain and exploring labour, gender, class, language and childhood. Since 2013, she has been Emeritus Professor of History at University of Warwick, where she had previously been a Professor of History since 1999.

Steedman graduated from the University of Sussex with an undergraduate degree in English and American Studies in 1968, and then completed a master's degree at Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1974. She was a teacher from then until 1982, when she joined the Institute of Education in the University of London as a researcher; for the 1983–84 year, she was a Fellow there, before lecturing at the University of Warwick, where she was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1988, Reader in 1991 and Professor of Social History in 1995. For the year 1998–99, she was Director of Warwick's Centre for Study of Social History. Steedman returned to Newnham College to complete her doctorate, which was awarded in 1989.

In 2011, Steedman was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Reviews

[Farah Mendlesohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The loss of a star is because if this was a piece of knitting you'd be muttering about how the tension was too tight. Dear g-d is this fundamentally fascinating book *dense*. The opening section is much too theory heavy and sometimes I found myself thinking "you really are working at this", while the evidence she presents is sometimes repetitious and presented with huge import.

But I promise you faithfully that if you persevere this book is fantastic and if you want new periods of history to write fiction about and to be able to construct plausible lives of domestic servants this is your go to book.

The book focuses 18th century and explains the changes of the first decades of the 19th when yearly contracts gave way to short hires and fewer rights. (Sound familiar?)

There are good bits worth noting:

Servants seem to have been a stroppy lot: forget the idea of faithful retainers, refuse to provide tea with breakfast and they were off.

A year contract in service gave a woman a right of Settlement ie a claim to parish relief. Which means there is a lot to be found in Parish appeals about whether a woman had or had not acquired such a claim in her area of service.

Charlotte Howe was a slave. She walked out and was denied parish relief. Lord Mansfield (who had a black neice, Dido Elizabeth Belle and who ruled that no one could be a slave in England) ruled that she was not however a servant in the above sense because she had been forced to work and therefore didn’t have a contract.

Servants on a year contract were entitled to health care. If they had a bad accident in month one, the employer had to support them until they were well. They were fed, clothed and paid but often not until the end of the year. If they left early they sometimes went to court to secure the correction portion of wages.

Children were often taught to be disdainful and snooty to servants. Servants fought back and stood on their rights as adults.

Having babies in the house caused so much extra work that servants often wouldn't stay, and the move to cotton made it worse: linen diapers were soaked in lye and urine; cotton diapers had to be boiled and scrubbed.

And cooking gained in esteem steadily in the late 18th century, moving from a despised cook-maid towards the 19th century cook (some of whom wrote poetry and instruction manuals in their spare time).

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally! I've been curious as to where theories of labor have located immaterial production for some time now and this book brings that out strongly. I truly enjoyed reading this book! It beautifully highlights how gender and labor often work together. It's an excellent book! It addresses an important void in labor history, explaining how domestic laborers (and todays service industry) fit into the working class.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a badly written, book. Steedman frequently inserts commas, where rather than clarifying, her meaning they muddy and distract, from comprehension, as these sentences imitating her demonstrate. Her attempts at cleverness or humor are embarrassing, as in this example, the first sentence of Chapter 2: "There were a lot of servants in the English eighteenth-century; they were there--the reason to climb mountains and for social historians to account for them."

I'm so glad I got this through inter-library loan rather than buying it, and glad as well that it turned out not to be useful for my purposes, so I could stop reading it. But Steedman did at least introduce me to Elizabeth Hands, so I'll give her 2 stars instead of 1.