This chapter examines how working-class women born in Britain and their India-raised daughters understood domestic service. The slipperiness of status in India was most visible in the presence of servants in the homes and workspaces of British of all classes. Working-class women, many of whom had worked as servants themselves before coming to India, found themselves transformed into mistresses upon arrival in the country. Women could assign their domestic duties to servants, take them up again when they chose, and even take on roles as servants themselves. These changes in relationship to service came about not just as the result of changing financial circumstances, but in response to causes as disparate as the birth of a child or a change in the season. Working-class women born in Britain tended to see their status as employers as unstable, but that instability did not necessarily provoke anxieties over racial degeneration. Girls raised, educated, and remaining in India balked at the notion of going into domestic service, even as the schools designed to educate them attempted to train this second generation for that purpose.

Landscape played many roles in Beatrix Cresswell’s life. Left as a young woman by her older siblings to look after their ageing and querulous mother, she sought relief by walking on nearby Haldon Hill or taking long cycle rides through the Devon lanes, mud and snow notwithstanding. Flower-gathering ministered to her sense of beauty and gave opportunities to connect with friends. She delighted in Dartmoor’s wildness and open spaces, which spoke to her refusal to submit to personal or social constraints. Above all, her ruralism expressed deep-seated loyalties formed early in life to the Anglican faith in which she had been raised, to her county and to her beloved clerical father, whose unexpected death affected her profoundly. These unwavering commitments came together in the central project of her life, a remarkably ambitious attempt to visit every one of Devon’s Anglican churches, which took her up hill and down dale across the Devon countryside. For Cresswell, what mattered most about the countryside was that, in her eyes, it was stable and unchanging, guaranteeing continuity in a way she had learnt she could not rely on other aspects of life to provide.

Using the rich funerary epigraphy from Rome and environs, this chapter reconstructs the organization of court domestic service, establishes a taxonomy of the various service roles attested at court, and explores the significance of the structural differentiation that can be observed among the (mostly servile) domestic servants. It then considers the impact of the emperor’s domestic servants on court politics, exploring the relationships that developed between the court and the outside world. Literary texts suggest that some domestic staff controlled access to the emperor, that others acted as brokers in distributing imperial patronage, and that a few became favourites of the emperor. The latter could rise to great heights of influence, but could also become lightning-rods of discontent with the regime. As a result, a reconfiguration of power within the court or a change of regime could see the expulsion of favourites from the inner circle – or worse.

The Black press was produced almost exclusively by male writers and editors. Those writers, joined by a small number of women authors, frequently addressed themselves to women readers or took up women’s issues. While the papers often invoked the ideal of Black women leading fulfilled lives in the home, caring for their husbands and children, they also acknowledged that for most Afrodescendants, that ideal was simply unattainable. Writers supported the efforts of Black (and White) domestic workers to organize and achieve the workplace protections enjoyed by industrial and commercial workers.Motherhood was a fraught and frequent topic in the Black press. The papers worried about high rates of illegitimacy and single motherhood in their communities, and enjoined mothers to prepare their children to lead honorable and productive lives.Women’s contributions to the papers offer evidence of Black women's political participation, before and after the advent of female suffrage, and the limits of that participation. Finally, female beauty was a regular topic in the Black press, which offered advice on how to achieve it, public contests to determine who best embodied it, and debate over fashion from the perspective of both morality and women’s equality.

This chapter examines the impact of the war on women’s paid employment in diverse sectors including agriculture, domestic service, clerical work, munitions, the railway industry and the medical profession. Providing the first in depth all-island study of Irish women’s employment in this period, it contributes to international scholarship on the emancipatory nature of women’s war work. The chapter assesses the important role played by Irish women in the war industry, particularly through munitions work and questions the extent they were motivated by economic or patriotic factors. The urban/rural experience is contrasted, and the Irish case compared with Britain. Ireland’s economy was very different to Britain in 1914 due to the predominance of the agricultural sector in Ireland and this divergence increased over the course of the war due to the absence of conscription in Ireland. However, there was nevertheless some substitution of men in the Irish workforce and some evidence of a shift in societal attitudes towards female employment. The chapter concludes that the war gave women increased agency as workers, evident in their desire to move away from domestic service and into other sectors, their lobbying for pay increases and their significantly expanded trade union participation.

Mistresses found the incessant round of searching for, hiring, training-up and getting used to a new servant, only for so many of them to move on after a short period of time, extremely irksome. Servants, on the other hand, endured poor wages, uncomfortable living and working conditions and unwarranted restriction of personal freedom. Were suffrage-supporting mistresses any better than the average employer? This chapter examines the ‘servant problem’ as it manifested in the homes of suffrage activists Mary and Emily Blathwayt of Bath, Helen Clark of Street and Mary Talbot Muirhead of London and Birmingham. Their feminism does seem to have encouraged a somewhat more progressive approach to servant keeping, and these mistresses sometimes shared suffrage sympathies and even occasionally forged friendships with their maids. Yet this did not prevent them from approaching the employment relationship as ultimately one of economic exchange. I therefore argue that attention to the personal, intimate and affective histories of domestic service should not obscure the significance of the wage relation with which they were always intertwined.