The Invisible Woman

Aspects of Women's Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Carré

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351887359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Most social historians writing about working women in pre-nineteenth century Britain have tended to concentrate on fairly large groups, such as factory workers or domestic servants, often in an attempt to reach some conclusions regarding their standards of living and social position. Another approach has lead feminist historians to search for underlying causes of women's exploitation through the locus of class and gender. Without ignoring these crucial issues, this volume written by cultural historians takes a slightly different approach, focusing on the status of small, sometimes tiny, groups of women holding marginal positions in the labour market, and often employed on an irregular basis. Women such as housekeepers, nurses, camp followers, governesses, actresses and musicians, to take some of the cases examined in this volume, generally did not have stable, permanent employment. Even female tradesmen often only worked for short periods of their lives. The temporary, unreliable character of such work can be partly related to the changing needs of women at different periods of their lives, but it also has much to do the status of women's work in eighteenth century British society. Providing case-studies of women's work in three different environments - middle and upper class households, male dominated communities and societies and the world of the arts - this collection asks fresh questions about women's aspirations and identity at various levels of society. In comparing and contrasting these varying spheres of female employment, this book throws in sharp relief the contrasting attitude to women's work inside and outside the home, and how the latter was often regarded as having a potentially destabilising and transgressive effect on British society.

Part I
Women in the Domestic Sphere

Chapter 1
The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and her Status in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Gilly Lehmann

Although there have now been several studies of eighteenth-century servants since Hecht's book, The Domestic Servant Class, appeared in 1956, most have enlarged our knowledge by focusing on servants in general, with particular emphasis on women and on service in houses below the level of the aristocracy, whether in the analysis of the parish settlement examinations at St Martin's-in-the-Fields by D. A. Kent (1989),¹ which attempted to make more visible the unseen body of maidservants working for the urban middle class, or more recently in Bridget Hill's book, Servants (1996), which explores lesser-known aspects of domestic service among the gentry and professional class, such as the widespread use of kin as servants, or the relationship between master and servant. The aim of the present study is to focus on a specific job, that of the housekeeper, who was at the top of the female domestic hierarchy, in order to examine the questions of job status, wages, and why women servants, even the most highly placed, were apparently so under-valued, in terms both of image and rewards. In order to try to answer these questions, it is necessary to begin by looking at how the job developed, and who did it; both of these problems are rather more complicated than one might imagine.

Surprisingly, the use of the word 'housekeeper' to refer to a woman in charge of supervising the household, is not attested before the eighteenth century: the references given by the OED (Compact Edition, 1991) date from 1724 and 1766. And yet the activity of 'housekeeping' and thus the word 'housekeeper' to designate the person who performs such an activity date back much further. The earliest meaning of the first word refers to the maintenance of a house, and thus a 'housekeeper' in the fifteenth century was simply a householder; by the sixteenth century the first word was also being used (with a qualifying adjective) to mean keeping a good table, and the 'good housekeeper' was one who kept open house and offered hospitality. The use of the word 'housekeeper' to mean a person in charge of a house, or indeed an office, dates from 1632, and the citations given by OED all refer, without exception, to men. Thus the early modern uses of the word covered a variety of situations, and it is often difficult to disentangle the precise meaning in texts dating from before the nineteenth century. By the time the word took on its modern meaning it had acquired the idea of domestic management, but was also linked to the public face a household presented to the world as a dispenser of hospitality. As we shall see, these apparently arcane considerations do have a bearing on the development of what seems to have been a relatively new profession in the eighteenth century.

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 seventeenth-century 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.

It was only in the very grandest houses that the all-male domestic establishment was the norm. Here, the lady of the house was not involved in any managerial role, although she and her waiting-gentlewomen shared the prestigious household tasks of preparing medicines and sweetmeats. These upper servants were drawn from the ranks of respectable society, and service in a grand household was a way to learn household skills, and to make useful contacts and perhaps an advantageous marriage.⁴ Early in the seventeenth century, Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676) recorded in her diary that she and her maids shared such domestic activities as gathering fruit, making sweetmeats, and even on one occasion tossing pancakes at Candlemas.⁵ This was during her first marriage, when she lived at Knole from 1608 to 1619; although Lady Anne kept a record of her own expenditure, mostly on rewards to messengers, she had no need to trouble herself with the running of the great house: the 1613 list of the household shows that there was a steward, an auditor, and two clerks of the kitchen. The list records the presence of six gentlewomen, who dined at the 'parlour table', but the only other women servants worked in the nursery or the laundry, with the addition of a dairymaid.⁶ At the end of her life, in 1676, Lady Anne recorded that one of her waiting-gentlewomen, Mrs Frances Pate, made preserves and sweetmeats for her; in other words, the servant had taken over a task which was normally shared by the lady and her gentry companions.⁷ In such grand establishments, there was no need for a housekeeper, but the fact that the mistress and her waiting-gentlewomen were associated in some domestic activities is a significant pointer to later developments. Another point is that these waiting-gentlewomen were much more likely to be literate than the lower servants, and would therefore be in a position to help the mistress with such tasks as keeping her private accounts, copying receipts, and transmitting written instructions to the other servants.

Even very slightly lower down the social scale, however, there are signs of a much greater female presence. One Tudor lady who was an expert in medicine, Lady Grace Mildmay (1552-1620), prepared remedies herself, and when she was away from home, sent precise instructions to her maid Bess, her 'housekeeper', about making them;⁸ quite what Lady Mildmay meant by the term is uncertain. It is impossible to determine whether Bess was the housekeeper in our sense of the term, or simply a personal maid who stayed at home and thus 'kept the house'. Another, less ambiguous, Tudor reference to the 'housekeeper' comes from the accounts of Sir William Petre at Ingatestone: in 1550 the quarterly wage lists show that although there was a male house-steward, acater and cook, there was also a housekeeper, Mistress Percy, as well as the more usual nursemaid, plus four other maids. The housekeeper received the same wages, 10s. a quarter, as the butler and the cook (while the house-steward and the acater received no wages but held farms at low rents),⁹ and the courtesy title in the wage lists indicates that she was on a par with the two waiting-gentlewomen who were employed in 1554, when Petre's household had grown from 17 to 60 servants.

At a lower level of society again, even the gentlewoman who had a number of servants was her own housekeeper. The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1571-1633) for the years 1599-1605 shows her spending her days in private devotions, reading, sewing, and ordering her household. This last activity was mostly supervisory, and included keeping an eye on outdoor work on the estate, as well as on the work of the indoor servants. Within doors, she gave orders to the servants, paid bills and kept the accounts, but she also made remedies, preserves and sweetmeats herself, although she did not normally cook food for dinner. There was a big difference in the status of kitchen and still-room, the latter being the domain of the mistress of the house, where she prepared distilled waters and preserves and sweetmeats.¹⁰ The other important part of her role as mistress of the house was to doctor neighbours and servants: dressing sores and wounds was a regular occurrence.¹¹ The daughter of a prosperous Yorkshire landowner, she had been trained in these activities by service in the household of the Countess of Huntingdon. Lady Hoby's diary shows the vast extent of the skills involved in 'housekeeping', at a time when the notion of hospitality still implied various services to the local community: feeding and sometimes housing casual guests, putting on a show of largesse for visiting dignitaries, offering medical assistance to dependants and neighbours.¹² Here, the mistress made remedies and preserves herself; these skills were more specialized than general cookery, and required precise measuring of expensive ingredients as well as the ability to read a receipt. Lady Hoby's personal maid, Annie France, was illiterate, and so it is not surprising to find Lady Hoby sewing with her maids, but preserving alone.

Such examples are easy to find, and give a picture of increasing involvement in domestic management and in certain tasks on the part of the mistress of a household and her women servants as soon as one goes even a little down the social scale, and it seems clear that some households did employ housekeepers well before the seventeenth century. Even in the seventeenth century, however, they were probably not employed in very great numbers: it is significant that when the justices of Buckinghamshire set wages at the Easter sessions in 1688, they fixed the wages of cook-maids and dairy-maids at £2 10s. a year, and those of other maid servants at £2; no mention was made of housekeepers.¹³ But after the Restoration, the housekeeper does become more obviously visible. One household whose staff can be followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that of the Brownlows of Belton, shows the shift to more women servants in the seventeenth century. Whereas the 1617 accounts and documents from the 1660s and 1670s show that men still dominated in the household (in 1679 there were thirteen men and four women), and that the steward and cook were both men, by 1691 there was a housekeeper and a woman cook.¹⁴ That housekeeping was just beginning to be a recognized job is shown by the various books of advice to women written by Hannah Woolley (c. 1622-after 1674) and others. Woolley herself served a 'Noble Lady' as what would in modern parlance be called her 'personal assistant', and it was from this employer, who recognized her talent and bought her books, as well as from her family, that she picked up the lore she then transmitted to others through her books.

In 1670, in the second part of The Queen-like Closet, Woolley gives advice to several categories of servant: the cook, the cook-maid, the butler, the carver, and the servants, male or female, who wait at table; these pages are followed by directions to the 'Gentlewomen who have the Charge of the Sweet-Meats, and such like Repasts'.¹⁵ The directions explain how to set out the banquet (i.e. dessert) course in summer and winter, and Woolley explains that she gives these instructions in order to help gentlewomen who are forced to become servants because of family impoverishment due to 'the late Calamities, viz. the late Wars, Plague, and Fire'.¹⁶ Three years later, a book which bears Woolley's name on the title-page (but which was, in fact, a compilation based on her w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: WOMEN IN THE DOMESTIC SPHERE
• PART II: WOMEN IN MALE STRONGHOLDS
• PART III: WOMEN AND THE CULTURAL SCENE
• Index