5 - The Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland

Summary

This chapter examines the ‘servant problem’ from the servant’s point of view through a history of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910). It is the first ever in-depth history of this or any other servants’ trade union in Britain. It provides an important new perspective on both class relations in the suffrage movement and the gender politics of labour organising in the years leading up to the First World War. My account relies upon the correspondence pages of the Woman Worker and the Glasgow Herald, and on press cuttings from the local and radical press. These letters provide an unusual opportunity for the voices of rank-and-file domestic workers to be heard discussing working conditions and the possibility of self-organisation. The DWU aimed to be a union run ‘by servants for servants’. It sought to reconfigure the mistress–maid relationship as a formal employment contract, and did not shy away from the potential for class antagonism between these two groups of women despite also having its roots in the suffrage movement.