Work And Play 6: Women, Households, Service and Emotional Labor

Making of a Historian

In this--another short episode!--we talk about a group of workers who are often written out of the story of the Industrial Revolution. The mostly female ranks of domestic servants, who cleaned houses, made food, educated children, made medicine, and generally made the home a homey place to be. When historians usually deal with servants, they treat them like holdovers of an old regime--their work never really gets mechanized, and they seem to slowly fade away over the 20th century. But I argue here that they are actually precociously modern: they do emotional labor, and so anticipate the modern service industry, where we not only have to WORK, but we have to evoke particular EMOTIONS. We're all servants now.