"For ever and ever": Child-raising, domestic workers and emotional labour in twentieth century Britain

Abstract

Studies in the Maternal, 3(2), 2011, www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk Lucy Delap " For ever and ever " : Child-raising, domestic workers and emotional labour in twentieth century Britain i Relationships between servants, children, and parents have proved enormously historically variable, and a source of popular and scholarly fascination. Many of the historical accounts of these relationships have given us portraits of exploitation of servants by callous employers. They have outlined the equivocal love, resentment, and other emotions that are difficult to name, that were felt by servants and the children they cared for, about each other. This paper will draw on material from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including oral histories and memoirs of servants and employers, to supplement the predominant narrative of victimhood in relation to domestic service, and offer a broader picture. The emphasis here will be less on the upper class models of servantkeeping which have come to dominate contemporary popular memories of this institution, in which the availability of relatively large staffs enabled an unusually high degree of delegation of care well into the twentieth century. Instead, I will focus on the middle class or " suburban " household experiences, where forms of housework were shared by mistress and servant (usually single-handed, and often non-residential), in houses that lent themselves to higher degrees of intimacy between employer and servant. I point to diverse affects and experiences in these relationships of emotional labour, and the material and social relationships in which they were embedded. The paper will focus on key moments where the unsaid is brought into focus, by examining laughter, and gift-giving. These have been relatively underused sources, that can help us understand the nature of the relationships of that developed between servants, mothers and children. Through these cases of the delegation of care, it is possible to gain a greater understanding of the types of care which mothers felt they could pass on to others, and which seemed essential to their mothering. We can also learn something of the material, moral, and emotional dimensions to mothering, its relationship to social class, and its change over time. There are relatively few sources from mothers that reflect their sentiments at delegating care to servants, and this paper draws more on the reflections of children themselves. It was sometimes the everyday conventions that suggest the maternal subjectivities associated with servantkeeping. Mrs Wood-Hill, whose father was a Suffolk