ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with an appreciation of the way female domestic servants effaced, and male domestic servants affirmed, their working status and identities, allowing people to explore how historical discourse about ‘work’ has been deconstructed. Conventionally speaking, many of London’s female domestic servants described themselves by default as having neither trade, profession, calling, nor even employment, but simply that they ‘got their living by going to service’. Domestic servants were recognisably distinct in role and status from apprentices, with their indentures and long-term contracts, and journey-workers, paid weekly or even daily wages. Thorstein Veblen posited a cultural stage theory which achieved something of an intellectual impact in the early twentieth century, in which a model of domestic service’s historical development played a crucial role. By the stage of ‘predatory culture’, ‘conspicuous abstention from labour becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement’.
