Maids and mothers: Domestic servants and illegitimacy in 19th-century Australia

Historically, domestic servants have been overrepresented amongst women whose ex-nuptial pregnancy became a public “problem.” Despite such apparent vulnerability, female rescue-workers also saw domestic work as the pathway to redemption for such women. Drawing on extensive Australian data on single mothers and their children in the 19th-century, this article investigates the complex relationship between domestic service and illegitimacy. While it will argue that the overrepresentation is more apparent than real, a product of the situation of the domestic servant whose workplace was her home and whose continued employment was often dependent on maintaining high moral standards, it will also contest the viability of domestic service as a “solution” for the mother compelled to work to support her child.     

Women Prisoners at the Dawn of the 21st Century

Abstract

The contemporary experiences of women in prison at the beginning of the 21st century must be understood within the context of the monumental increase in incarceration of specific U.S. populations in the last three decades of the 20th century, a truly unique period in history. How race and class impact on the increase of women in U.S. prisons attests to the importance of an intersectional and structural analysis (of race, class, and gender) in explaining the huge number of poor, heavily Black and Latina women incarcerated today. Women are criminalized for the same kinds of crimes today as in the past (nonviolent larceny-theft, forgery, and prostitution)-with the critical addition of drugs (and the “net widening” of previously noncriminal or nonviolent behaviors). And with drugs, the racialized impacts are even more profound. The socially structured conditions of class, race, and gender in the context of globalization, unemployment, and the prison industrial complex help to explain these findings.     

The cost of educating children: The accounts of a nineteenth century girls' boarding school in Orléans,France

Using a collection of 73 bills of a boarding school in Orléans (France), the article examines the cost of educating a child at the end of the nineteenth century. These bills concern the four daughters of a family from the Brittany nobility who each spent about 12 years at boarding school. Items on the bills reveal details of the daily life of the young girls through general boarding expenses, education costs, private lessons, clothing, medicine, and trips home for the holidays. Aspects of the family life of the girls and the boarding school (meals, religious instruction, health, and welfare) are described.     

Screening of Women in Jail for Health Risks and Needs

Abstract

In order to address the relative lack of services for women who come into contact with the criminal justice system, there is a need to develop quick and easily administered screening tools. This pilot study was conducted with 110 women in two urban county jails in Ohio. The purpose of the project was to develop and pilot a quick multidimensional screening instrument for women in jail to identify risk and rehabilitative needs. The project resulted in a 15-item screening tool which can be used in urban crowded jail settings to identify women at risk for health, substance abuse, mental health, family, employment or housing risks.     

Justice or Welfare? Nordic Women's Shelters and Children's Rights Organizations on Children Exposed to Violence

Efforts to promote the protection of, and support to, abused women have opened up new understandings concerning children who see, hear, or in other ways are exposed to men's violence against women and its consequences. On the basis of a redefinition of children exposed to violence into children subjected to violence, some important policy changes have recently been made in the Nordic countries as regards children's status as crime victims. To enable a better understanding of the context of such changes in policy, this article explores the extent to which Nordic women's shelter/crisis centre organizations and children's rights organizations draw upon a justice discourse in relation to the issue of children exposed to violence. The analysis is based upon a study of 10 organizations working at a national level in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.     

One of the family: Domestic service in early modern Japan

This study investigates the effect of domestic service upon social practice and asks if domestic service led to self-affirmation and individualistic behavior in early modern Japan. It begins by describing various employees classified as domestic servants. Next the role of the servant as a member of the employer's family shows fluid kinship relations that resulted in changes in the family system and family practice. Contemporary theater is used to address some of the conflicting issues that these changes offered as challenges to patriarchal authority and how society reacted to these changes.     

The true servant: Self-definition of male domestics in an Italian city (Bologna, 17th–19th centuries)

Some historians have classed as servants only people living with their masters; some have excluded farm servants; some have included married domestics living with their own families. The archive of the Bolognese Confraternity of San Vitale, also known as Università dei Servitori, is analyzed in this article to show how one group of servants defined a “true” servant. Their solution was to exclude from their association people who performed what they deemed “filthy” tasks. They also excluded women, giving us a particular insight in the history of gender and masculinity. In their view, the “true” servants were bourgeois (and locally born) men rather than lower class (migrant) women who are often identified as the stereotypical servants. Moreover, most members of the association were married, they had their own families in Bologna and did not always live with their masters. This makes possible the analysis of married male servants living with their own families, a category of servant that has received less attention than life-cycle servants.     

The true servant: Self-definition of male domestics in an Italian city (Bologna, 17th–19th centuries)

Some historians have classed as servants only people living with their masters; some have excluded farm servants; some have included married domestics living with their own families. The archive of the Bolognese Confraternity of San Vitale, also known as Università dei Servitori, is analyzed in this article to show how one group of servants defined a “true” servant. Their solution was to exclude from their association people who performed what they deemed “filthy” tasks. They also excluded women, giving us a particular insight in the history of gender and masculinity. In their view, the “true” servants were bourgeois (and locally born) men rather than lower class (migrant) women who are often identified as the stereotypical servants. Moreover, most members of the association were married, they had their own families in Bologna and did not always live with their masters. This makes possible the analysis of married male servants living with their own families, a category of servant that has received less attention than life-cycle servants.     

Service to servitude? The decline and demise of life-cycle service in England

Life-cycle service was an essential institution in early-modern England that slowly died during the transition from a pre-industrial to a fully industrial economy. A socially pervasive and culturally broad movement of young people from their parental homes to live and serve in the homes of others, life-cycle service was integral to the demographic, economic, and social framework of the era and could not survive when that framework changed. This article examines the institution of life-cycle service, some of the underlying demographic, economic, and social structure that supported it, the changes in that structure that led to its demise, and the ramifications for young people of that demise. Although inevitable, the loss of life-cycle service with its broad social base denigrated service as an institution and was not without other costs especially for young women.     

Domestic service and female domestic servants: A port-city comparison of Bremen and Liverpool, 1850–1914

The author analyzes the development of domestic service in Bremen and Liverpool as two examples of major commercial ports in the 19th century characterized by significant merchant wealth and casual, dock-related employment. The migration pattern and age structure of domestic servants are examined and key aspects of their employment history are explored in terms of residential location, length of service, and social background of their employers. Census data are used for both port cities (drawing, in particular on the relational database currently being constructed for the Liverpool Mercantile Project), together with the Bremen civil registers for marriages and deaths, and qualitative material, such as diaries and autobiographies from members of the merchant class. By developing an explicitly comparative analysis within the framework of an established typology the article provides a basis for assessing the extent to which the nature of domestic service in the two port cities, as well as the recruitment and retention of domestic servants, was determined by similarities in the growth of merchant wealth and culture or by distinct regional or national characteristics in the underlying pattern of urban migration.     

Domestic service and female domestic servants: A port-city comparison of Bremen and Liverpool, 1850–1914

The author analyzes the development of domestic service in Bremen and Liverpool as two examples of major commercial ports in the 19th century characterized by significant merchant wealth and casual, dock-related employment. The migration pattern and age structure of domestic servants are examined and key aspects of their employment history are explored in terms of residential location, length of service, and social background of their employers. Census data are used for both port cities (drawing, in particular on the relational database currently being constructed for the Liverpool Mercantile Project), together with the Bremen civil registers for marriages and deaths, and qualitative material, such as diaries and autobiographies from members of the merchant class. By developing an explicitly comparative analysis within the framework of an established typology the article provides a basis for assessing the extent to which the nature of domestic service in the two port cities, as well as the recruitment and retention of domestic servants, was determined by similarities in the growth of merchant wealth and culture or by distinct regional or national characteristics in the underlying pattern of urban migration.     

Choices and constraints in the migration of families: The central Netherlands, 1850–1940

This study investigates the lives of the women and children who accompanied the soldiers to the British garrison at Gibraltar during the last decades of the 19th century. Marriage in the army was controversial, and officials were divided on the subject: some saw the benefits of married life and realized the large amount of unpaid labor contributed by the women of the regiments; others believed that marriage was the “serious evil of marching regiments.” This study uses a military census taken in 1878 to analyze the age and sex structure of the military population at Gibraltar. Its structure is distinctive with no elderly individuals and few children in their teens. This pattern was the result of army directives, such as those governing the age of dependents and controlling marriage among the troops.