A Job Like Any Other? Feminist Responses and Challenges to Domestic Worker Organizing in Edwardian Britain*. (24th September 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Schwartz, Laura
• Is Part Of: International labor and working class history. Number 88(2015:Autumn)
• Page Start: 30
• Page End: 48
• Publication Date: 2015-09-24
• Subjects: Working class -- History -- Periodicals; 305.56205
• DOI: 10.1017/S0147547915000216
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0147-5479

Abstract

<abstract abstract-type="normal"> <title>Abstract</title> <p>This article focuses on the Domestic Workers' Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910), a small, grassroots union organized by young female domestic servants in the years leading up to the First World War. This union emerged against a backdrop of labor unrest as well as an increasingly militant women's movement. The article looks at how the Domestic Workers' Union drew inspiration from the latter but also encountered hostility from some feminists unhappy with the idea of their own servants becoming organized. I argue that the uneven and ambivalent response of the women's movement toward the question of domestic worker organizing is significant not simply as an expression of the social divisions that undoubtedly characterized this movement, but also as reflecting a wider debate within early twentieth-century British feminism over what constituted useful and valuable work for women. Attitudes toward domestic worker organizing were therefore predicated upon feminists' interrogation of the very nature of domestic labor. Was it inherently inferior to masculine and/or professional forms of work? Was it intrinsically different from factory work, or could it be reorganized and rationalized to fit within the industrial paradigm? Under what conditions should domestic labor be performed, and, perhaps most importantly, who should do it?</p> </abstract>