6 - Servants and Co-operative Housekeeping

Summary

Co-operative housekeeping, the socialisation of housework through new built environments and housing for women, was widely discussed in the suffrage movement yet has caught the attention of only a few historians of ‘first wave’ feminism. Although these projects claimed to do away with the ‘servant problem’, this did not mean the end to domestic service but simply that servants would be employed by the community at large rather than by individual mistresses. This chapter uncovers the working conditions and organisation of domestic service in feminist-inspired plans for co-operative housekeeping. It examines blueprints put forward by Jane Hume Clapperton and Clementina Black, alongside schemes that were put into practice in Henrietta Barnett’s Waterlow Court and Alice Melvin’s Brent Garden Village. By focusing on the degree to which the boom in co-operative housekeeping was framed by the ‘servant problem’, I trace previously unrecognised connections between the housing schemes of middle-class feminists and the campaigns for public facilities. These working-class campaigns were informed not only by a critique of conditions endured by unwaged housewives, but also, I argue, by an awareness of the struggles of servants such as those involved in the Domestic Workers’ Union (DWU).