ABSTRACT
How did an upper-class household manage its domestic affairs before the arrival of the housekeeper? The standard answer to this question has traditionally looked at the aristocratic model of the household. Before domestic service became feminized (and exactly when this took place is a matter of debate, with some historians situating it at the beginning of the nineteenth century, others proposing a late seventeenthcentury take-off point2), household management in the great houses was shared among various male servants, such as the steward, the acater, and the clerk of the kitchen; some of the duties which were later to become part of the housekeeper's role were carried out by the mistress of the household herself. Until the seventeenth century, virtually all the servants in an aristocratic household were men, apart from the nurses and laundrymaids. The only other women were the lady of the house and her daughters, and the waiting-gentlewomen who acted as companions and upper servants to the ladies of the family. Not until the middle of the seventeenth century did this almost exclusively male household begin to accommodate more women, and thus not until this period did housekeepers begin to appear. This is the picture presented by most commentators who have focused on the upper classes.3 But this model conveniently ignores what was going on lower down the social scale, and as a result has presented over-simplified conclusions about female involvement in the day-to-day running of the upper-class household. Even in Tudor times, mistresses and female upper servants performed at least some of the tasks which we now associate with the housekeeper, the degree of involvement varying according to the social status of the household. A few examples from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will demonstrate the variety of situations even amongst the upper classes.
