ABSTRACT
With the crisis in domestic service at the turn of the 20th century, it looked like a period in history – that of servile work, social pomp and extreme exploitation in private – had come to an end. The obligations attached to the master-servant relationship had always defined the domestic worker as heteronomous. This was why the right of servants to vote was challenged at the time of the French Revolution. Community service jobs — one of the new ways of designating paid domestic service work — vies with industrial work as a subject of debate on contemporary jobs. Research is too compartmentalised to lend itself readily to a conceptualisation at the intersection of service work, democracy and gender equality, or again of domestic chores, care-giving, bodily intimacy, ordinary dirt and government responsibility. Employers and employees have repeatedly raised the issue in the course of this century, by opening schools of domestic science, and by modifying their vocabulary.
