Below Stairs: domestic service remembered in Dublin and beyond 1880-1922
Mona Hearn
(Lilliput Press, £)
Husbandry to Housewifery: women, economic change and housework in Ireland 1890-1914
Joanna Bourke
(Clarendon Press, £)
Most dwelling-houses still have kitchens separate from the ‘public’ areas of the house where an impression of effortless ease and comfort is presented, and many state-of-the-art fitted kitchens even hide fridges and other major appliances behind smooth wooden doors which blend in with the rest of the kitchen presses. Thus, the rituals of life-maintenance and renewal upon which every household depends are kept virtually invisible. This kind of work is even easier to overlook when we are talking about the past. Who cooked Parnell’s meals? Who washed and dried James Connolly’s winter woollies? Who starched and ironed the lovely clothes the Pankhursts wore when they went on demonstrations for women’s right to vote?
These behind-the-scene workers had a low profile, but as both Hearn and Bourke seek to demonstrate, their working lives were complex and varied. Historians often describe, even dismiss, such work as ‘low-paid, low-status’, but was it invariably? On the face of it the working life of a domestic servant seems to have been awful — day-to-day subordination, on the job round the clock, with very little time off. Such a perspective, though, ignores the context within which such work existed. Hearn shows that many girls and women saw their time in service as temporary, something they did for eight or ten years until they got married or went into some other line of work, or else they viewed it as an apprenticeship to becoming an upper servant — a highly skilled cook or housekeeper in a big house, for example. A hardworking servant with generous and considerate employers had a working environment far superior to that of a factory hand or shop assistant who could expect to be on her feet for twelve hours at a stretch. The servant could, in a reasonable household, pace herself. In a bad household, however, she could suffer all kinds of exploitation — bad food, unhealthy accommodation, sexual abuse. Domestic service was, right up to the 1940s, considered by most social authorities (including many feminists) to be the ideal occupation for girls from the ‘labouring class’; it provided them with an apparently ‘safe’ working environment; it provided middle-class people with cheap labour; and it was supposed to ‘train’ the workers themselves for the care of a house. Throughout the nineteenth century there was a strong emphasis on domestic training in schools and orphanages; most workers, however, received on-the-job training from the mistress or from an upper servant. One big-house cook was remembered with great resentment by a former kitchen maid because she deprived the maids of valuable training by locking herself in the larder whenever she was preparing anything special. Hearn concentrates on servants in Dublin and in big country houses. The book is beautifully-produced with several pages of illustrations and its easy, flowing style makes the solid and wide-ranging research underpinning it as invisible as the hand stitching of a good lady’s maid. The appendices and notes alone are a good read.
While Hearn’s book is narrowly focused Joanna Bourke attempts to cover a broader field. Her central argument is that farm women in Ireland lost a certain amount of economic power, 1890-1914, but that they gained in domestic authority as household responsibilities increased and widened in scope. She is at her best analysing the public perceptions of women’s work and the various initiatives to which they gave rise in this period when the Congested Districts Board, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction and many other government bodies were handing out grants to small industries and educational groups. Women’s work in the home, particularly the rural home, was seen to be crucial to economic regeneration. But the small industries which were conceived as a support for low rural incomes failed for a variety of reasons. The rise of the creamery system meant that women making butter and selling milk were increasingly described as ‘dirty’.
However, Bourke’s claim, that farm women were being phased out of heavy agricultural work and ‘back into the home’, is not entirely convincing. Articles in periodicals, books of advice about farming, letters to newspapers, agriculturists, philanthropists and many others argued that there should be a distinction between men’s and women’s work on the farm, and that women should concentrate on tasks directly related to the house and its members. Not all women necessarily followed their advice, or were even aware of it. Bourke claims that women were increasingly given the lighter agricultural tasks to preserve their hands as ‘soft mothering appendages’. This was the ideal but was it the reality? There is always a wide gap between what opinionated social commentators believe should happen and what does happen. Bourke’s chapter on paid employment marshals a lot of statistics to tell us that certain kinds of paid employment were in decline for women in these years, and she quite rightly speculates that a life spent keeping house for husband, brother or father might have been preferable to badly-paid employment, in addition to household tasks, which was the lot of working women who could not afford servants. But I fail to see how she supports her argument that household work became ‘more important’, unless she is confining herself to prescriptions. For example, it might well be true, as Bourke claims, that husbands beating their wives increasingly gave the excuse that their wives were bad home-makers. Her authority for this? Not newspaper reports of court cases over a long period, nor the records of charitable organisations dealing with women and children, but simply a comment by that cantankerous and indiscriminate critic of all aspects of Irish life, M.J.F. McCarthy. McCarthy pitied the husbands, a sentiment echoed by George Russell, Katharine Tynan and others, and rested on a belief that Irish women of the house were dirty, slovenly, lazy, and needed training. Bourke is not critical enough of this middle-class opinion; she comments, for example, that the function of sweeping the floor changed by the end of the century from being a ritual to placate the fairies to a cleanliness ritual. She forgets that apparently superstitious rituals often have other in-built functions, such as cleanliness and health. An inclination to runaway conclusions like this one seriously weakens this work. This is a pity, not just because the subject matter is so important, but because there are parts of the book that are really good, and seem solidly based, like the sections on domestic industries, domestic education and on rural service. ‘Husbandry to Housewifery’ is a nifty title, but the sub-title should be ‘Perceptions of women’s work in Ireland 1890-1914’.
Caitríona Clear