Domestic Service

Title

Domestic Service

Subject

Domestic labor

Book or manual

Statistical or administrative record

Gender and labor

Class and labor

Race and labor

Archival framing

Representation and bias

Institutional power

Archival silence

Early 20th century

United States

Description

Lucy Maynard Salmon's Domestic Service is a 1901 investigation of women's household labor as part of the broader American economy. The book draws on more than a thousand surveys collected in the late 1880s from employers and workers, and documents wages, skills, national origins, living arrangements, and working conditions. The author outlines three major historical phases of domestic labor. The colonial period is when most household work was performed by enslaved people, indentured servants, or the very poor. After the Revolution, when free labor became more common and households briefly imagined themselves as more egalitarian.  By the mid-19th century, new immigrants, especially Irish, German, and Swedish women, entered domestic service in large numbers, making the work more widespread but lowering its social status. Salmon's data shows that most workers lived in cities, worked long hours with limited freedom, and earned an average of about $3.23 per week, often supplemented with room and board rather than full wages. Employers often treated household labor as personal labor rather than paid work, and employers had little power to negotiate conditions. Salmon proposed reforms, including abandoning the term "servant," ending tipping, dividing household tasks into defined roles, and establishing training schools to recognize household management as a skilled profession.

Interpretation Note
Salmon's study plays an important role in understanding how written records define women's labor. By converting lived experiences into surveys, tables, averages, and typologies, Salmon exposes domestic labor as economic labor governed by the same principles as factory or farm employment, which opposes the widespread belief that household work was merely women's natural duty. Yet, her methodology also demonstrates the trade-offs of institutional documentation. The precision of her statistics gives domestic labor new legitimacy, but the process of abstraction can smooth over the emotional, interpersonal, and racial dynamics that shaped daily life inside employers' homes. In this sense, Salmon's work echoes Saidiya Hartman's point about how the archive can make people visible while still muting their voices, since the workers appear as data rather than as narrating subjects. Her historical timeline shows how race and class determined which workers' stories were preserved and which were sidelined. Enslaved Black women, indentured servants, and immigrant workers played a pivotal role in the development of domestic service, yet their voices appear only through employers' accounts or through Salmon's own categorizations. The book demonstrates how genre (in this case, a sociological survey) can validate women's work by recognizing its economic value in the broader national economy, while also repeating the same hierarchies and omissions that define the archive.

Creator

Lucy Maynard Salmon, 1853–1927

Source

Project Gutenberg eBook no. 73921, based on the second edition of Domestic Service (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1901)

Publisher

Project Gutenberg

Date

1901

Contributor

Online Distributed Proofreading Team, from images made available by the Internet Archive

Rights

Public domain in the United States. Users outside the United States must check the copyright laws of their country before using this ebook. For full terms see the Project Gutenberg License at https://www.gutenberg.org

Relation

Original print edition: Domestic Service. Second edition, with an additional chapter on domestic service in Europe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901.

Domestic Service | Project Gutenberg

Digitization credits: Produced from images made available by the Internet Archive.

Format

Online text, HTML with images

Language

English

Type

Text

Identifier

Project Gutenberg eBook no. 73921

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/73921

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/73921/pg73921-images.html

Coverage

United States and Europe, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Alternative Title

Domestic Service: Second Edition, with an Additional Chapter on Domestic Service in Europe

Extent

1 online resource (HTML text with illustrations)

Medium

Digitized book

Bibliographic Citation

Salmon, Lucy Maynard. Domestic Service. Second edition, with an additional chapter on domestic service in Europe. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901. Project Gutenberg eBook no. 73921.

Text

Full digital text available through Project Gutenberg (EBook No. 73921), including the complete second edition of Lucy Maynard Salmon’s Domestic Service with its additional chapter on domestic service in Europe.

Original Format

Printed book, second edition (1901), published by The Macmillan Company, 5.25 x 7.75 in. approx., with tables, illustrations, and bibliographic notes.