The modernization/development process, both historically in Europe and in developing nations of the twentieth century, has involved the transformation of the labor force from one primarily engaged in agricultural pursuits to one largely involved in secondary- and tertiary-sector activities. This change has often been brought about in stages, beginning with the introduction of nonagricultural work in rural areas—proto-industrialization—as a supplement to industrial development in urban locations, concomitant with or followed by massive migration of the rural population into cities. Proto-industrialization may have been a response to population pressure, serving as a means to provide work for the surplus rural labor force when cultivable land became overtaxed and as a way for households to gain much-needed additional income during periods of agricultural shortfall.

Edward Jarvis’s (1971 [1855]) study of insanity in 1854 Massachusetts still receives attention as an exemplary study of mental disorder. It is cited as the first American study of the “true” prevalence of mental illness in a general population (Dohrenwend 1975), the first American study to show that social standing (pauperism) was related to mental illness (ibid.), and the first American study to show that a substantial number of ill people were not receiving “professional” help (ibid.; Fox 1984). Likewise, Jarvis’s focus on social causation—social factors cause mental disorder, versus social selection, according to which mental disorder impairs social functioning and achievement—identified an important issue that still receives attention in the mental health literature (Dohrenwend 1975; Fox 1990; Turner and Wagenfeld 1967; Wheaton 1978).

In his 1911 film What Shall We Do with Our Old? D.W. Griffith dramatized the belief that urban, industrial America had no place for the elderly. Fired for being too slow at his work, an impoverished old man cannot buy food or medicine for his wife, who languishes in their drab, one-room apartment. Justice Benjamin Cardozo told a similar tale in upholding the constitutionality of the Social Security Act (Helvering v. Davis, 301 U.S. 619 [1937]): “The number of [aged] unable to take care of themselves is growing at a threatening pace. More and more our population is becoming urban and industrial instead of rural and agricultural.” Cardozo relied on studies by the U.S. Social Security Board (1937: 3), which found that “the major part of the industrial population . . . earns scarcely enough to provide for its existence. Savings are small and generally cover little more than the cost of burial insurance.” As a result, “industrial workers in [urban] areas . . . reach old age with few resources” (ibid.: 33).

The articles on American domestic service that appear in this issue of Social Science History were part of a 1989 Social Science History Association Annual Meeting session. They reveal that, despite the investigations of Katzman (1978), Sutherland (1981), Dudden (1983), Glenn (1986), and others, there is still a great deal to know about domestic service in the United States. Each article offers a different perspective on transformations within domestic service in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and provides new information about different demographic categories of domestic servants. Taken together, they suggest creative new ways of understanding the occupation and its relationship to race, ethnicity, gender, and the industrial labor market.

Several hours before dawn on 5 August 1835, a Washington slave slipped into his mistress’s bedroom, axe in hand. Anna Maria Thornton awoke to see a drunken Arthur, her longtime house slave and the son of her trusted cook and maid, Maria, threatening her with, she believed, murder. Luckily for Mrs. Thornton, Maria was in the room and, “being fortunately awake, seized him & got him out” while her mistress sounded the alarm to the neighbors. Shocked and horrified, Mrs. Thornton recorded in her diary the attack and Arthur’s escape, subsequent capture, and criminal indictment (Thornton, Aug.—Oct. 1835). Some of Washington’s less reputable citizens reacted with hate and violence. In the ensuing days, out-of-work white mechanics gathered at the steps of the city hall, looking for a scapegoat for the disorder Arthur represented. On 12 August the mob turned its wrath on the vulnerable free black community. The “Snow Storm,” named for a victim of its destruction, free black Beverly Snow, was Washington’s most infamous riot. The crowd burned Snow’s restaurant, along with several other symbols of free black success (Werner 1986: 243–45; Curry 1981: 99–100).

American women’s disdain of employment in domestic service was common knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the logic behind this disdain was not. Lillian Pettengill investigated why American women viewed domestic service so negatively. In her research, based upon actual experience as a servant, Pettengill found that a major complaint about domestic employment was the “social stigma” attached to it (ibid.: 366). More recent research on domestic service supports her findings. Katzman (1978: I4ff.) found that most American women viewed household employment negatively in large part because of its lack of prestige in American society. Young native-born white women refused opportunities for domestic work for fear that they would be looked down upon by friends, lose their social position, and be less attractive on the marriage market.

Much of the historical literature on working women has emphasized the extent to which employment varied along racial and ethnic lines. Domestic service in turn-of-the-century America attracted by far the largest proportion of employed women, and female domestics tended to belong to specific ethnic and racial groups. Immigrant domestics, most often Irish, Scandinavian, and German, were generally from areas of the so-called European marriage pattern, and employment for these women was normally temporary and limited to the life-course phase preceding marriage. Domestic work of this sort was a product of small-scale rural economies and was associated with late marriage. It was further marked by shared productive activity among all household members and by loosely defined social roles. In contrast to immigrants and native-born white servants, black domestics were older and far more likely to combine wage labor with marriage and motherhood. Their greater proclivity for day work and separate residential patterns, although clearly southern in origin, was replicated in northern cities and represented a trend toward the application of industrial work rules to domestic service (Dudden 1983). In other words, immigrant domestics seemed to compose the informal, “help” component of the domestic labor force, while black women, although marginalized and subject to discrimination in employment, appeared to represent an expanding, semiprofessionalized segment of the nation’s servant pool.