MISTRESS, MAID AND MARKET: THE TRANSFORMATION OF DOMESTIC SERVICE IN NEW ENGLAND, 1790-1870

Between 1790 and 1870, domestic service in New England underwent a decisive transformation. The Puritan understanding of service as a special family status, a form of domestic apprenticeship based on reciprocity and deference, disappeared. Under the impact of market forces, service became primarily a class-specific, wage relationship, even while employer and employee still shared both home and workplace.;The last three chapters examine the experiences in service of three different social groups. Farmers' daughters found by mid-century that service was no longer a sure route to happy domesticity. A disproportionately large segment of Boston's small black community took employment in service because discrimination barred them from other work. Finally, the young Irish women who inundated Boston welcomed the ambiguous wage relationship which allowed them to save cash by working and living in their employers' homes, and thus aid their kin in both the Old World and the New. Yet, caught in the dynamics of cultural conflict and economic change, contemporary observers held the Irish responsible for the "degradation" of service which had, in fact, for several decades, been advanced more by mistress and market than by maid.;This thesis explores the transformation of service, including the changing composition of the servant labor force and shifting conflicts between mistress and maid. Chapter One examines the notion of a "Golden Age of Service" in colonial New England. Chapter Two provides a case study of the decline of reciprocal ties as seen in the demise of domestic apprenticeship for pauper girls in Salem, Massachusetts. Chapter Three compares domestic service to other employments of working women in antebellum Boston, finding it the most despised, although not necessarily the least remunerative, employment opportunity within the very narrow range of work options so necessary for the survival of working-class women and their families. Chapter Four examines the way in which mistress and maid increasingly met each other not through personal referrals or even charitable institutions but in the "intelligence office"--the employmet agency able to profit from the wage-labor relationship in the home.