Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England
Cambridge University Press, 11/12/2009
EAN 9780521516372, ISBN10: 0521516374
Hardcover, 426 pages, 23.5 x 15.8 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
This is a unique account of the hidden history of servants and their employers in late eighteenth-century England and of how servants thought about and articulated their resentments. It is a book which encompasses state formation and the maidservant pounding away at dirty nappies in the back kitchen; taxes on the servant's labour and the knives he cleaned, the water he fetched, and the privy he shovelled out. Carolyn Steedman shows how deeply entwined all of these entities, objects and people were in the imagination of those doing the shovelling and pounding and in the political philosophies that attempted to make sense of it all. Rather than fitting domestic service into conventional narratives of `industrial revolution' or `the making of the English working class' she offers instead a profound re-reading of this formative period in English social history which restores the servants' lost labours to their rightful place.
Prologue
the servant's dream
1. Introduction
a new view of society
2. Servants numberless
theories of labour and property
3. Frances Hamilton's labour
Necessity
4. Lord Mansfield's women
5. In a free state
Horses
6. The law of everyday life
7. Policing society
servant-stories
8. Servants and childcare
Ann Mead's murder
9. Food for thought
10. An ode on a dishclout
11. A servant's wages
Stays
12. Conclusion
the needs of things.