Domestic Servants

The article deals with one of the under-researched themes of Indian history, which is the history of domestic servants. Thinking about servants raises two fundamental questions: who were they and what did domestic service mean? The identities of a servant as a contract wage earner or a person either belonging as a member or tied to the family through fictive/constructed claims of kinship were not mutually exclusive. Servants’ identity existed in a continuum running from ‘free’ waged coolie on the one hand to ‘unfree’ slave on the other. The article traces the history of domestic servants along two axes: the slave–servant continuum, but, more importantly, the coolie–servant conundrum, which is a lesser-explored field in South Asian labour history or burgeoning scholarship on domesticity and household.

The domestic labour market in India reflects how various classes of women manage their daily lives, whether as employers of domestic workers or as employees. The cultural underpinnings of various intersecting relationships implicated in this scenario have remained underresearched in India. Based on a qualitative study in a specific neighbourhood of New Delhi, this article shows that certain cultural strategies pursued by female employers explain their differential behaviour towards specific groups of maids. Observing that these female employers in Delhi prefer Nepali maids over native Indians, even if the latter are willing to work for lower wages, we set out to analyse why and how these employers evaluate immigrant Nepali maids as sharing ‘our’ culture, while native Indians are classified as the cultural ‘other’.

This chapter from a collection on service in the Later Middle Ages tries to grapple how people at the time actually understood the term 'servant' and what it was to be a servant in the narrower sense of working for and living with an employer. The page extent is 1-20.

The studies on the history of Ottoman women indicate that there were a large number of sexual
assault cases in the court records. In these studies the risks of suing someone for rape and sexual allegations were
discussed. In spite of the risks seen, it is tried to understand why women choose to go to court in the light of the
knowledge given by shari’a court records. The records of the nizamî courts that appeared in the 19th century
contained much more information than the shari’a court records offered to the reader about criminal cases. The
statements of the plaintiff, the defendant and the witnesses were recorded in the interrogation reports. These files in
the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archive allow us to hear the arguments of women from the first-hand who go to the
court with the claim of rape and the ways they defend themselves. This study reviews the allegations of the plaintiff,
the defence of the defendant and the testimonies of the witnesses and the records of the nizamî courts belong to a case
of 1862 and focus on how the crime of rape was punished in the 19th century. Also it is going to be tried to be
examined that after 1858 Criminal Code and the regulations made in following years, how did the state approach to
sexual assault crimes and the effect of modernization on the attitudes of women in such cases.

É por isso que às vezes eu digo que eu tenho muito mais medo de falar para as minhas companheiras do que falar para outras pessoas. Hoje eu não tenho problema de falar para autoridade, para Papa, para governador. Isso não me atinge, não me tenho vergonha. Porque eu sei o que estou fazendo. Eu falo meu português errado, eu não me preocupo (…) Agora, quando eu falo para meu mundo de doméstica, aí eu sempre digo: 'O que eu estou falando vai ajudar ou não vai?' LENIRA, Só a gente que vive é quem sabe: depoimento de uma doméstica

Our «raw material». The Slovenian Women As Domestic Servants in Gorizia Between the 19th and 20th Centuries
The following text tackles the issue of Slovenian servants in Gorizia between the 19th and 20th Centuries, when the relationships among individual ethnic communities, especially between Italians and Slovenians, had become particularly tense. In the struggle of Slovenians for the right to their own culture and language, as well as their ever growing efforts for recognition in economic terms, housemaids had become the protagonists of nationalistic spurs that had been forming in the area. Thus, if on the one hand they were being taken away from the dullness of anonymity in this situation-which became evident when census was being taken, as they were being encouraged to declare Slovenian as their language of use in order to increase the size of the Slovenian community-on the other, they were subject to the supervision of the city elite, both morally and physically. Due to the predominant ideal of the purity of the «body of the nation», these women represented a potential threat to their own Slovenian community, simply because, given the nature of their work, they were able to cross, undisturbed, the national (and cultural) borders that were dividing the opposing local communities. One should also keep in mind that in those years housemaids were also involved in both public and personal, ever more heated struggles for better working conditions and a better social position and for political rights.

Reyes y nobles de la Edad Moderna estaban obligados a mostrar su privilegiada primacía social a través de la ostentación. Palacios, fiestas, festines, carrozas, séquitos y obras piadosas eran manifestaciones de esa supremacía, y en ellas participaban como comparsas necesarias criados y esclavos. En los palacios reales y de la nobleza cortesana, en las lujosas casas de los integrantes de la alta administración de la Monarquía, pululaban numerosos criados, esclavos, libertos, de ambos sexos y muy diversas procedencias. De ellos y de sus de relaciones "upstairs" y "downstairs", en ocasiones de amistad y compañerismo, en otras de tensiones y peleas, trata esta obra.

The article examines the situation of slaves and former slaves who were brought, presumably by force, from Africa, Asia and America to the European part of Denmark-Norway during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to work as domestic servants in households, often alongside local servants. Based on source material from servant reward
societies, censuses, newspapers and court cases, it is argued that state and society utilised a number of strategies to classify and categorise slaves and former slaves. In censuses, ethnicity and skin colour were sometimes listed, but not always, and information on ethnicity
in censuses was not actively sought until well into the nineteenth century. In court, the issue essentially revolved around whether the person was a slave or not, whether he was free or unfree, but it is also emphasised how this was not subject to state-wide policy, but decided locally, with subsequent different results. Such examples and variation show how
colonial realities and logic could affect the colonial power’s categories and practices, by, for example, utilising a dichotomy between free and unfree labour that resembled what was used in colonies more than what was common in the colonial power.

North India in the fifteenth century is uncluttered by the absence of large imperial formations. Literature of the period often carries unusual details about a range of ideas and practices. The paper seeks to trace out the glimpses of the lives of servants during this period in Mithila (north Bihar). What were the ways in which servants are perceived in real time and in literature? It also seeks to explore the emotional and ideational templates within which domestic servants and the bhakta of the devotional movements were located.

Knygoje yra siekiama atskleisti, kokie buvo XVI a. – XVII a. pirmos pusės Lietuvos Didžiosios Kunigaikštystės bajorų namai ir kas juose gyveno, kartu ir pateikiant patikrintą būdą skaitytojui mintimis nusikelti ir pasižvalgyti po šią privačią namų erdvę, egzistavusią prieš keturis ar penkis šimtus metų. Ką gi buvo galima pamatyti užsukus į to meto bajoro namus? Kokius žmones ten sutiktume? Ir netgi – kuo būtume ten pavaišinti? Šie ir kiti bajorų kasdienio gyvenimo klausimai knygoje gvildenami remiantis daugybės įvairių istorinių šaltinių analize.

Throughout African history, domestic labour time, directed at meeting the basic consumption needs of family members, dwarfs any other labour time allocation. Domestic labour, commonly termed ‘housework’, is conventionally conflated with ‘women’s work’.  Housework encompasses childcare, cooking, washing, cleaning and general household maintenance. It is perceived as a jumble of multi-tasking activity dominating women’s daily lives, motivated by love, duty, care and concern for family and lineage rather than monetary gain. This chapter attempts to piece together a historical narrative of the changing nature of domestic labour since 1900 based on social science literature. This article traces domestic labour’s evolution with respect to domestic labour performance, the household division of labour, and how unmonetized family-based domestic labour is affected by the general expansion of labour commodification in African economies through time: the colonial period, 1900-1949; the nationalist and early post-colonial period from 1950 to 1979; economic crisis, deagrarianization and income diversification, 1980-1999; and the neo-liberal economic boom, urbanization and sectoral realignment, including natural resource extraction in African national economies from 2000 to the present.

The aim of this paper is to read A. S. Byatt's novella, "Morpho Eugenia," from the perspective provided by the postcolonial paradigm shift regarding definitions of the "domestic." In the light of the postcolonial contestation of conceptualizations of the domestic as an insular site exclusive of the "foreign," this paper is built on the premise that domestic has always been informed by what it has left outside its boundaries. I will argue that the country house, Bredely Hall, where the story is set in "Morpho Eugenia," is a site deeply informed by Britain's imperial position in that the domestic hierarchies in the house are entangled with colonial/global hierarchies. Therefore, explicit references to "whiteness" and "darkness" in Byatt's text in relation to the masters/ mistresses and servants in Bredely Hall should be read bearing in mind this entanglement of the domestic and the global. In "Morpho Eugenia" Byatt re-defines "whiteness" and "darkness" to contest, from a global perspective, their hierarchical associations with "masters" and "servants," respectively. Interestingly, in "Morpho Eugenia," the parties associated with hierarchical categories of "whiteness" and "darkness" do not change: both masters/mistresses and servants in Bredely Hall continue to be characterized by being "white" and "dark," respectively. Yet, "whiteness" is emptied of its association with "moral superiority" and luminosity emerges as a quality that could obstruct clear vision whereas "darkness" is foregrounded as a quality that can contribute to visibility. Furthermore, Byatt's text problematizes the hierarchical dichotomy between "culture"/ "cultivation" and "nature"/ "savagery" used in connection with the European (colonizer) and the non-European (colonized). One textual strategy contributing to this is the deconstruction of domesticity embodied in the figure of the "pure" domestic woman: Eugenia Alabaster, an upperclass white woman, is portrayed as sexually-desiring and in an incestuous relationship, which she attempts to "justify" by its "naturalness." What is more, domestic life in an English country house is represented in terms of its glaring similarities to practices carried out in "nature." As pointed out in many critical readings of "Morpho Eugenia," there is an explicit analogy between society in Bredely Hall and ant communities. The mistress of the house, Lady Alabaster, for example, is

'Colonial Domesticities, Contentious Interactions : Ayahs, Wet-Nurses and Memsahibs  in Colonial India'

This important, pioneering paper examines the history of domestic servants in  British India. It explores the race/class/gender dynamics inside the colonial nursery. Nineteenth and early Twentieth century colonial writings projected the colonial home in British India as a microcosm of the empire. However,  as this paper argues, the memsahibs’ imperial authority was often undermined by the dynamics of domestic relationships inside the home. The complexities of daily encounters between white mistress and 'native' female servants (viz. the ayah and the wet-nurse),  which cut across boundaries of race and class, often threatened to render the colonial home an ambivalent—and even contested—space.
This paper draws upon a range of sources, including colonial housekeeping journals,;
medical handbooks written by colonial physicians; memsahibs' memoirs, diaries and letters, as well as  colonial newspapers,and journals.

KEYWORDS:
ayahs; colonial household;  colonial nursery, cross-racial gendered interactions;  memsahib-ayah relationship;  wet-nurses;  medical handbooks, housekeeping manuals, colonial childhood