ABSTRACT
This paper is concerned with a particular sector of women's employment—the domestic sector—and, more specifically, with the relations of employment within that sector. It deals with the ways in which these relations shaped men's perceptions of women, and women's perceptions of each other. It seeks to show that not only the range of opportunities for employment, but also the longstanding assumptions underpinning the character of “women's work,” remained remarkably stable over the best part of a century, despite the interruption of World War I. Structures and models of relationships that evolved in the Victorian and Edwardian periods in the apparently restricted sphere of the private household proved highly resilient to change when transplanted to very different contexts. These structures and relationships constitute the “domestic-service paradigm.” The first half of this paper gives examples of the way it was transferred intact to female spheres of philanthropic and professional work in the Victorian and Edwardian periods; the second half advances the argument that even the exceptional circumstances of 1914–18, when women entered occupations hitherto confined to men, and participated in a national emergency in which many social conventions might have been expected to be discarded, did not seriously weaken the paradigm.
