ABSTRACT
Each week the national magazine The Lady-founded in 1885 and labelled the Exchange and Mart of domestic help (Higgins, 1991)—as well as regionally based newspapers, such as the Newcastle Evening Chronicle, the Hexham Courant and the Reading Chronicle, carry advertisements like those above. The advertisements are placed, in the main, by households, although some stem from agencies specialising in the recruitment and supply of various types of domestic
staff. Most of these advertisements are for jobs in Britain but others are placed by households living outside Britain and by agencies recruiting for overseas clients. Behind these advertisements are households which are primarily, although not exclusively, middle-class.1 In most of them, male and female partners are employed, usually full-time, and usually in either professional or managerial occupations. In other cases the female partner may not be in paid employment. In yet other circumstances the advertisement might be placed by a single parent in professional employment. For some of these households hiring domestic help is nothing new. But for the majority of British middle-class households, it is. Domestic service may have been an historical fact but for most of the current generation of employers paid domestic help is a new experience. Instead, for most of the post-war period, domestic labour has been the domain of the fulltime unwaged housewife (Oakley, 1974). Running parallel with the explosion in the small ads have been increasing levels of demand reported by employment agencies specialising in the recruitment and/ or supply of domestic staff, and an expansion in the number of firms specialising exclusively in home-cleaning services. The Belgravia Bureau, for example, one of the oldest agencies in London, reported a steady demand from traditional sources for dailies, live-in housekeepers and cooks through the 1980s, but a burgeoning in demand for paid domestic help from younger people (Phillips, 1991). Moreover, in the late 1980s brightly coloured vans (with appropriate ‘mop and bucket’ or ‘Victorian maid’ logos, advertising services such as ‘The Maids’, ‘Upstairs Downstairs’, ‘Poppies’ and ‘Dial a Char’) were to be seen everywhere, particularly in the ‘affluent south’. Such vans ferried teams of cleaners, many of them uniformed, to their client middle-class households, there to perform the regular weekly service, spring cleaning or, indeed, pet care, gardening, ironing or even granny minding.
