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.

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).