Last month, the Nation had a summary by Elaine Blair of Alison Light’s fascinating “Mrs Woolf and The Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life In Bloomsbury.”
The history of the servants of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell in their Bloomsbury residences in Edwardian times and the period between the Wars allows us a close look at the last generation or two of domestic service to the middle class.
Light describes former domestic servants in the 1950s and ’60s looking back on their old lives as if from a hangover. Social changes had come so quickly and definitively that the culture of service and subservience they had taken for granted as young women seemed impossibly antiquated: “When they looked back in old age the girls who had gone into service were often mystified, sometimes furious or appalled, that they had emptied those earth-closets, scrubbed the stone flags, washed their employers’ clothes” …
The idea of doing arduous, messy work that rich or middle-class people considered beneath them came to seem “anachronistic and demeaning,” Light writes, to working-class women who “increasingly had other options: clerical, shop or factory work, work as a waitress or a chambermaid, receptionist, florist, beautician, anything that gave them their evenings or weekends off, the freedom to meet friends, or simply to stay at home.”
The availability of choice was often combined with a distaste for the arrogance of class that still permeated the master-servant relationship even in households that occasionally broke social barriers.
Woolf’s diaries and letters are sprinkled with careless snobbish comments about servants, and her and Vanessa’s dislike of having servants shades easily into disdain for the servants themselves. They make everything “pompous and heavy-footed,” Virginia writes to her sister, who in another letter complains that her “brains are becoming soft…by constant contact with the lower classes” during a vacation when her family and their servants were living in close quarters.
And then there was the question of money.
Though Woolf and her sister had moderate leftist leanings–later in life, under the influence of her husband, Woolf would become active in the newly formed Labour Party–their political beliefs did not translate into a desire to improve the economic situation of their servants. The Woolfs paid their help the meager wages typical of the era, a shockingly small proportion of their income: according to Light, they gave their servants £40 a year when they earned £4,000.
I look forward to reading the book which covers the cusp between one cultural norm and its successor. Final thought: when the middle class were obliged to give up their domestic servants, the gap between the rich (who could still afford a full personal services staff) and everyone else grew much wider than it had been before.
