Daily Diary, August 3, 2022, Day 702:
The writing on my next science fiction book is going very well, but I thought I would take a break and dish up some historical tidbits for you all. For those of you who have read any of my Victorian San Francisco mysteries will know that domestic servants are some of my primary characters. In fact, it was a diary by a real servant, that was the inspiration for my series. Back 1979, when I was doing research for my doctoral dissertation on working women in the west, I found a fairly detailed diary by Anna Harder Ogden, a San Francisco German servant. Ogden held a variety of jobs as a servant, in private homes and boardinghouses, and she was very frank about how she felt about her jobs and her employers. (I read her diary on microfilm, but excerpts can now be found in the book, Women of the West.)
Like most live-in servants, Ogden got one night out a week. In one of the houses she worked, when she returned early in the morning from her night out she would find the door to the kitchen locked. This was very frustrating because she knew she would be expected to get breakfast and do all of her chores, no matter how late she got started. She wrote about sitting outside, week after week, waiting for someone to finally wake up and let her in.
As I read her diary entries, I couldn’t help but think of the classic locked-door mysteries of the past, and the plot for Maids of Misfortune was born.
What follows is some background on what domestic service was like for the young San Francisco women who held this job in the 1870s and 1880s. The information is primarily from my dissertation and the article on domestic service that I wrote for the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia (WSE).
Domestic service was not a new occupation, but most of the people who could afford servants in Europe and the United States before the 19th century were wealthy, employing complex staffs of servants, and male servants might outnumber females. This is the model we see portrayed in T.V series like Upstairs Downstairs, or Downton Abbey.
In the United States, this model continued to exist for the very wealthy, (see the new series Gilded Age) but the social and economic changes that came with industrialization and urbanization dramatically transformed the nature of domestic service for most women. Servants in the United States were no longer neighbor girls of native birth and heritage who were hired by their neighbors as “help,” in rural or small town households, nor there they necessarily members of large domestic staffs for the very wealthy.
Instead, servants were increasingly found living and working in the expanding number of urban middle class houses. These servants were still young women, but they were primarily immigrants, or the daughters of immigrants, with Irish, German, and Scandinavian girls predominating. For example, over seventy percent of the women working in Portland, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in 1880 were either foreign-born or the native-born daughters of immigrants.
In addition, unlike the large domestic staffs we have seen in TV shows (see photo), most American domestic servants at the end of the 19th century worked alone, or with no more than one other servant, usually a cook or nursemaid.
Servants in San Francisco were no exception. Ninety percent of young single women who were servants in the three western cities I studied listed their jobs in the 1880 census as general domestics, and eighty percent of these general domestics lived-in. This is why I started out giving Annie Fuller’s boardinghouse two servants, Beatrice O’Rourke, the cook, and Kathleen Hennessey, the maid-of-all work.
The ethnicity of these two servants followed national patterns as well. For instance, seventy percent of the young single Irish women who lived and worked in these far western cities, like Kathleen Hennessey, worked as domestics.
However, there was an interesting difference in the experience of young domestic servants in San Francisco, when compared to national patterns. Nationally, by 1870, no more than ten percent of domestic servants were male, so very few female domestic servants worked in households with live-in male servants. Yet, in western cities like San Francisco, among those servants who did work alongside another servant, over half worked with a male servant.
This appears to be in part the result of the demand for domestics outpacing the supply of available women, in a region where men still outnumbered women. At the same time, it was in the west that you could find a large group of men, Chinese males, who didn’t have the cultural prescription against domestic labor that most European immigrant and native-born men had.
As a result, I found that the majority of female servants who worked in households with male servants were working with a Chinese male servant, like the character, Wong, in Maids of Misfortune.
Domestic service entailed long hours, and a variety of difficult tasks in which many young servant girls had little or no prior training. To make matters worse, in San Francisco in this period, nearly two-thirds of these “maids of all work” were the only live-in servant in the house and therefore they cooked, did the dishes, cleaned, did the laundry, mended the clothing, and cared for their employer’s personal needs, as well as tended the children, all by themselves.
This meant that routinely a servant worked for ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, with only an afternoon or an evening out. And they were still expected to get their normal chores done before the left for their time off. In addition, they were on call twenty-four hours in a day, particularly if there were babies or sick people in the home.
Anna Harder Ogden, who tried to keep a daily diary, usually wrote in this diary late at night. She made a special note one day when she had a moment to sit down in the afternoon, writing: “For the first time, since I have been here, I got a chanc o sit down in the afternoon.Finished ironing before Lunch. It does pay to get up at 4 A. M.”
These long days, filled with multiple, often back-breaking tasks, meant that many servants did not stay long at their jobs. For Anna Ogden saw leaving a job as her only form of vacation, or the only way to recuperate from an illness. She was able to do this because she had family she could go to stay with, and she also felt sure she would be able to get another job when she was ready to go back to work, the demand for servants was so great in San Francisco during this time.
Interestingly it was not the work itself, (or the pay that was actually better than most other work women could find when you factor in that live-in servants got free room and board) that was the basis of most servants’ complaints. It was how they were treated by their employers.
Unlike the relationship between my protagonist Annie, and her servants, many employers looked down on their servants because of their ethnicity, class, and religion, often treating them, in the words of Anna Harder Ogden, “Like a machine or an animal.” For my protagonist, her own experience trying to run a house on little money during her disastrous first marriage, then her five years spent being passed from household to household as free labor for her former husband’s family, had already made her more careful than most in her treatment of her servants. Then, with Maids of Misfortune, I got to give Annie a chance to actually work as a servant, an eye-opening experience for her, and I hope the reader.
Needless to say, I could go on and on about what life was like for a 19th servant, but time for me to get back to work, trying to imagine what life was like for a young woman in a new world in a galaxy far, far away.
Loved this backstory about women's lives as domestic servants. Working as a "housekeeper" also occasionally served as a stepping-stone to marriage, even as late as the 1930s/40s. One local woman in the Western ranching town where I live was "placed" by her father with a prominent ranch family so the father could travel elsewhere for work. Just a teenager at the time, she eventually won the elders' trust and admiration, and *they* convinced the son of the family to marry her. I just finished writing a true history of a Comstock-era mining magnate who hired a housekeeper in 1876 (oddly enough, the only woman in a household of several men). She was quite the beauty, and half her boss's age, and four years later they were married (possibly to silence wagging tongues in town!) And yes, as their relationship grew he hired her a "China boy" (likely not really a "boy" at all but a young man, and the term he used at the time) to do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning.
Tidbits, such as described in your blog, are what I love discovering in your Victorian series. I like that "behind the scene" glimpse into people's lives during a real time in history.