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Ving-cinq ans après

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Enrica Asquer
, 
Anna Bellavitis
, 
Isabelle Chabot

Circulations – migrations – métissages

From household to household

The circulation of servants and domestic workers, a crucial issue from local to global level

Raffaella Sarti

Résumé

The question of the gendered dimension of migrations is a topic that for some decades has involved a growing number of scholars – both historians and social scientists – in a sense, it is a theme that shows the gulf between the current approaches and the historiographical landscape where the (albeit innovative) History of Women edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot was conceived, written and published. Out of the five-volume work, only the one on the 19th century, edited by Geneviève Fraisse and Michelle Perrot themselves, included a specific section on migrations and travels (written by Perrot). Since then, growing numbers of studies have focused on female mobility and migrations and their features compared to male ones in the twentieth century and today as well as in medieval and modern times. The problematic presence of massive migration flows in today’s world has indeed prompted the interest in the mobility and migrations of the past. In this context, research on the circulation of female and male domestics over both short and long distances has played a rather important role. On the one hand, entering into service in someone else’s household has turned out to be a privileged channel for mobility and migration. On the other hand, servants and domestic workers constituted and constitute a key component among people flows on short, medium and long distances. This had and has significant implications for the subjective identity of the servants and domestic workers themselves, the experience of the (more or less socially and culturally distant) families where they work (ed), cultural circulation, cultural exchanges and conflicts, the accumulation of goods, the flows of resources, marriage patterns, urbanisation, colonisation, imperialism, the development of trans-national families, etc. My article will review these studies on servants and domestic workers, focusing on the themes they deal with, the results they have achieved and future research perspectives.

Texte intégral

Gender and migration: today and 25 years ago

  • 1 Perrot 1991, p. 460-468.
  • 2 Ground-breaking studies are Morokvaśic 1984; Moch, 2003. Useful review essays are Donato et. al. 20 (...)

1The issue of gender and migrations shows the gulf between the current approaches and the historiographical landscape where the (albeit innovative) History of women edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot was published. Out of the five volumes, only that on the 19th century included a section on migrations and travels (by Michelle Perrot).1 Since then, studies have increasingly focused on past and present female mobility and migrations. Massive migration has prompted a scholarly interest in the issue, while developments in women’s and gender history have widened the attention to the presence and roles of both men and women within migration flows, as well as to the impact of migration on males and females, both migrants and home-stayers.2

2In this context, research on the circulation of domestics has played a rather important role. On the one hand, entering into service in someone else’s household has turned out to be a privileged channel for mobility and migration, especially for women. On the other hand, servants and domestic workers constitute (d) a key component in people flows on short, medium and long distances. This had and has significant implications for the identity of the servants and domestic workers themselves, the experience of the families where they work (ed), cultural exchanges and conflicts, the accumulation of goods and money, the flow of resources, marriage patterns and celibacy rates as well as urbanisation, colonisation, imperialism, the development of trans-national families, and many other issues. The individual (more or less free) choice of millions of people to move from their households to work in that of a more or less distant other, had and has far-reaching implications at local, regional, national, international and, definitely, global levels. People often considered as marginal have turned out to play a crucial role in making past and present history.

  • 3 Sarti 2008, 2009, 2014, 2016.
  • 4 For recent overviews see Moya 2007; Sarti 2014; Hoerder 2015; van Nederveen Meerkerk 2017.

3This article will offer an overview of research on the subject, by way of summarising some previous essays of mine,3 presenting new data, and providing the readers with (inevitably selected) references.4

Servants’ short-distance circulation

  • 5 Laslett 1969, p. 219.
  • 6 Sarti 1997, 2014,
  • 7 Sarti 2014.
  • 8 Ariès 1960.
  • 9 Laslett 1977a, p. 104, p. 110; Laslett 1977b, p. 12-49. For recent updates see Whittle 2017.
  • 10 Doveri 1993; Viazzo – Aime – Allovio 2005; Sarti 2017b.
  • 11 Sarti 2001; Hartman 2004; De Moor – van Zanden 2010; Foreman-Peck 2011; Zucca Micheletto 2011; Denn (...)

4In 1969, Peter Laslett wrote that “the substantial proportion of persons who turn out to be living in the households of other” as servants “looks to us like something of a sociological discovery”.5 Even though earlier research on domestic service had existed,6 in the 1960s domestic workers, considered workers destined to disappear with modernisation, were under-researched not only by social scientists but also by historians.7 Important exceptions were Philippe Ariés, who had stressed that in medieval and early modern times it was common to educate and train the young by way of sending them to serve a master,8 and Laslett himself, Hajnal and the other scholars of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. In 1977, Laslett introduced the concept of life-cycle servants to define those people who served before marrying, generally working in households not far from theirs. Although with significant differences between places and periods, life-cycle service in many regions of preindustrial Europe involved high percentages of young boys and girls.9 According to the Cambridge Group scholars, life-cycle service was a crucial component of the “European marriage pattern” which was late and required the formation of neolocal households. This implied accumulating resources before marriage, often by working as servants. Such a custom, according to some scholars, was also crucial for economic growth. In fact, not every form of life-cycle service was linked to resource accumulation and late marriage: in rural Italy, most servants were children and teenagers who often served – without a salary, or with a small one – to relieve their poor families from feeding them, or, if they were orphans, to have a “family”. Moreover, they usually stopped serving long before marrying.10 Nonetheless, in several other European regions, the “classic” life-cycle service, implying accumulation of resources and late marriage, was rather widespread. Whether this accumulation really stimulated economic growth remains however an open question.11

Urbanisation and gendered cities

  • 12 Chatelain 1969. For recent updates Moch 2009; Dubert – Gourdon 2017.
  • 13 Alexander – Steidl 2012.

5In 1969, Abel Chatelain stressed the importance of female servants’ migration to understand urbanisation.12 At that time, the role of servants in migration was far from obvious. Scholars believed that migrants were largely men and that women, if and when they migrated, generally moved to join their fathers, brothers, boyfriends or husbands. They overlooked the fact that millions of young, unmarried girls had migrated alone to go and serve a family other than their own, even though, as early as the 1880s, geographer Ernest George Ravenstein, in his “laws of migration”, had argued that short-distance and within-country moves were normally dominated by women. According to contemporary scholars, Ravenstein actually underestimated men’s short-distance mobility; yet, for about a century afterwards, scholars undervalued both size and importance of autonomous female migration.13

  • 14 Walser 1986, p. 7-8.
  • 15 McBride 1976, p. 117.

6For a long time, the maids’ flow was overlooked by scholars interested in women’s history, too. The emphasis on factory work as a feature of female modernity entailed a focus on industrial work. Recognising that working in a traditional and “backward” sector as domestic service had been the main avenue through which women of rural origin had become integrated into “modern” urban society and culture implied an important interpretative change.14 “Almost paradoxically it [domestic service] served as a means of the modernisation of rural labor and particularly of women” during industrialisation and urbanisation, Theresa McBride wrote in 1976.15

  • 16 For cases where servants were generally not migrants see Dubert 1999, 2002, p. 273-319; Sarti 2005c
  • 17 Comparative data in Sarti 2005b.
  • 18 Fauve-Chamoux 1998. See also Salinari 2004.
  • 19 Arru 1995.

7Research shows that in most early modern and modern European cities, though not in all16, servants and domestic workers were (and frequently still are) mainly immigrants from more or less distant places, and that, conversely, servants and domestic workers were and are often numerous among immigrants.17 This had and has important implications. In the 1990s, Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux suggested that the sex ratio of pre-industrial cities, where women generally outnumbered men, had much to do with the arrival of rural girls who worked as maids.18 However, there were some cities where men were more numerous than women, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Rome. As for Rome, Angiolina Arru argued that the traditionally “male” city of the Pope in the 19th century became more feminised mainly thanks to the inflow of maids.19

  • 20 Perrot 1991, p. 461-462.
  • 21 Roche 1978, 1981. In relation to the 20th century see Sarti 2004.
  • 22 Hecht 1956, p. 220-228.

8Perrot in the Storia delle donne – Histoire des Femmes explained that the rural women who migrated to the cities, particularly the maids, were cultural mediators of urban lifestyles, and even contraception.20 As for fashion, consumption and lifestyle, the domestics’ role as mediators in 18th-century France had been researched a few years earlier by Daniel Roche,21 while already in 1956 Joseph J. Hecht had spoken of the “servant class” as a “cultural nexus” between different social groups, and between countryside and cities in 18th-century England.22 Referring to Hecht and Joseph Ambrose Banks, in 1974 Leonore Davidoff wrote that

  • 23 Davidoff 1974, p. 428, n. 81.

Servants as “cultural carriers” is an intriguing idea. It is particularly important in areas of private life, e.g. the adoption of ideal family size. The generation who were young servants in the middle- and upper-class households in the late nineteenth century, where completed family size was declining, were the generation of working-class married women whose own family size fell in the beginning of the twentieth century.23

  • 24 Ibid.
  • 25 Banks 1968, p. 287.
  • 26 Banks 1954, 1981; Banks – Banks 1964.
  • 27 Woods 1987; Szreter 1996, p. 478-480.
  • 28 Vanhaute – Matthys 2007; Matthys 2012, 2013.

9Davidoff, following Banks, actually concluded that “no direct connection can be drawn between these two sets of facts”.24 According to Banks,25 maids did not learn birth-control techniques from their mistresses, but elaborated new values about the ideal family size thanks to the confrontation with the families, lifestyles and aspirations of their masters and became crucial agents in spreading them.26 Banks’ ideas were criticised,27 but recent publications, too, consider domestic service as a channel for the spread of fertility decline thanks to social learning.28

  • 29 Boccagni – Decimo 2013, editors’ Introduction; they quote Levitt 1998, p. 926.
  • 30 Porceddu 2013.

10The domestics’ role as cultural mediators has also been highlighted in relation to past and present international and long-distance migrations. For instance, today some scholars speak of “social remittances”: first coined in the late 1990s, this stands for “the ideas, behaviors, identities and social capital that flow from receiving to sending country communities”,29 and domestic workers play a crucial role as agents of them. According to Francesco Vietti, to quote but one example, large part of the remittances by foreign migrant domestic workers employed in Italy are used to improve the lifestyle of their families left behind and to refurbish their houses in a “European style”.30 Such individual choices, being often shared by many migrants, may have a strong social impact on their countries of origin.

Long distance migrations, colonisation and imperialism

  • 31 Sarti 2008, 2009.

11The international migration of people destined to become domestic workers is often considered a modern phenomenon and the so-called globalisation of domestic work a novelty of the last decades. Long-distance servant migrations actually have a long history, even though today such flows may involve more people than in the past (in fact, it is difficult to compare numbers over time, also considering the extraordinary demographic growth in the last two centuries).31

  • 32 Sarti 2008, p. 78-79; Sarti 2009, p. 55-57. For examples of these servants see Hecht 1954; Hardach- (...)

12From the second half of the 17th to approximately the late 19th century, for instance, the European elites often hired French servants as a way to learn the French language, manners, fashion and cuisine. Similarly, in the age of colonialism, the local elites of non-Western nations were often eager to acquaint themselves and their children with the culture of the dominant Western ones. To this end, they often hired European governesses and nannies. I have defined these servants, hired to carry their own countries’ language and customs into the families of their employers, “imperialistic servants”. This implied a rather paradoxical reversal of roles: servants who were inferior to their masters had to teach them the dominant culture of the time. Unsurprisingly, “imperialistic servants” might be seen as a threat.32

  • 33 Sarti 2008, p. 79-80; Sarti 2009, p. 57-59.

13Nowadays, migrant domestic workers generally arrive in Western countries from impoverished ones (often their former colonies). Conversely, until about the mid-19th century, the more common pattern of long-distance servant migration (excluding the slave trade) was probably from richer to poorer countries. I have defined those Europeans who migrated to the colonies, working there as servants at least for the first years (often as indentured servants in the British colonies or engagés in Canadian New France, i.e. as people who sold themselves for a certain period to pay for the costs of their passage), “colonialist servants”. “Imperialistic servants” were supposed to improve the civility of their masters; “colonialist servants” to have a civilising effect on the colonies as a whole.33

  • 34 Haskins – Lowrie 2015; Lowrie 2016.
  • 35 This is the title of Hamilton – Higman, 2003.
  • 36 Horn 2001, p. 162. See also Barber 1991; Arat-Koc 199; Boucher 2014.
  • 37 Arat-Koc 1997, p. 60, p. 55.
  • 38 Hamilton – Higman 2003; Horn 2001, p. 163-169; Harzig 2003; Sarti 2008, p. 85; Sarti 2009, p. 64-65

14The complex role of domestic service in colonisation and imperialism is attracting growing attention.34 To distinguish the different types of servants involved in such phenomena, we need to add a new category: the “servants of the Empire”.35 When Canada, Australia and New Zealand became dominions, their authorities tried to expand the supply of domestics through immigration, particularly from Britain. Britain accepted to “export” domestics despite their scarcity because “the growth in imperial sentiment” “emphasised the importance of strengthening the British presence in the white dominions”. The dominions’ authorities considered respectable and healthy middle-class women as the ideal civilisers, yet such women worked as servants only if they were impoverished and were therefore scarce. Thus, children from urban slums and charities (whom the Britons were happy to export) were also accepted as servants.36 To facilitate migration, New Zealand (in 1919), Australia, Canada and South Africa started to offer free or assisted passages, especially to preferred domestics. In 1922, the Empire Settlement Act authorised the British government, too, to subsidise such passages. Women were encouraged to work as domestics in the empire through advertising and training centres, too. The Canadian authorities regulated immigration to control the racial composition of the country. They introduced schemes to attract white British domestics regarded as “daughters of the Empire” and “mothers of the race”.37 In Australia, such import of domestics was crucial for the so-called white Australia policy. While immigration policies that involved domestic service and aimed at shaping the racial and social composition of population would continue, the economic crisis of the 1930s led to the end of sponsored emigration and assisted passages. The emigration of domestics from Britain ceased to play an important role (but the export of children from the charities continued). Conversely, in the 1930s, there was a peak in the number of foreign domestics migrating to Britain.38

  • 39 Horn 1975, p. 30-31, 152-153; Guiral – Thuillier 1978, p. 249.
  • 40 Cusenier 1912, p. 134-135, 305-307; König 2003, 2012; Béal 2016, p. 661-678.
  • 41 Head-König 2001. A high percentage were German and Austrian, see Althaus 2017, p. 11-12.
  • 42 Gubin 2001.
  • 43 Henkes 1998, 2001.
  • 44 Horn 1975, p. 152-153; Horn 2001, p. 169-175; Delap 2011, p. 78-79, 90.

15In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in most Western European countries the rural-urban migration was increasingly insufficient to cope with the “servant shortage”, and resorting to foreign servants started to be (controversially) seen as a possible solution.39 In France, foreigners (mainly Germans, Swiss, Belgians and Italians) made up 1.2 % of domestic workers in 1896, 6.9 % in 1901, according to population censuses (some domestics’ unions unsuccessfully campaigned to reduce the immigrants’ opportunities to work in the domestic sector).40 Available data shows a growing presence of international migrants among domestic staff in several European countries. The First World War would limit or stop these flows, but in the interwar period they often grew again, involving (unlike today) mainly West Europeans. In Switzerland, foreign domestics made up 17 % of the total in 1888, 25 % in 1900, 28 % in 1910 and 39 % in 1930;41 in Belgium, between 1910 and 1938, 7.6-7.8 %.42 In The Netherlands, only 9,100 foreign maids were registered in 1920, but in 1923 there were about 40,000 German maids alone. After fluctuating for some years, from 1934 onwards their number decreased rapidly for both economic and political reasons.43 In Britain, the servant-keeping classes also tried to alleviate the servant shortage by recruiting immigrants, yet in 1911 foreigners were less than 1 % of female indoor servants and less than 4 % of male ones. During World War One, many of them lost their jobs, left Britain or were interned. After the war, the Aliens Order (1920) established that overseas workers must have a permit from the Ministry of Labour. Permits for maids in private domestic service were abundant but in the early 1930s, because of the economic crisis, the Ministry tightened up the procedure in order to protect native workers.44

The dramatic history of the 1930s and 1940s and its consequences on domestics’ flows

  • 45 Sarti 2006.
  • 46 Hantzaroula 2005.
  • 47 Kalc 2015, p. 66; Hladnik 2015.
  • 48 Lüfter – Verdorfer – Wallnöfer 2006, 2007.
  • 49 Winkler 2000, p. 146-168; Sarti 2006, p. 225-226.
  • 50 Head-König 2001; Althaus 2017, p. 14, 81-84; Henkes 1998, p. 142-148, 173-190; Henkes 2001.

16The European political history of the 20th century deeply affected domestic service45 and the related international migrations. In the1920s, the war in Asia Minor led to an enormous reflow of refugees into Greece, partly employed as domestic workers.46 During Fascism, the forced Italianisation of the non-Italian-speaking population annexed to Italy after the First World War boosted the (already started) migration of Slovenian female domestics to Egypt,47 while the alliance between Germany and Italy created a new (paradoxical) demand, by Fascists in Rome, Milan and elsewhere, for Germanspeaking nannies from the territories where Fascism was trying to eradicate the German language.48 In the 1930s-40s, the Nazis tried to expand the supply of domestics: in their view, with more help, German mothers would be able to have more children, strengthening the nation and the army. Some measures implied international flows. German maids employed abroad were called back while numerous forced workers from the countries occupied by the Nazis were employed as servants in Germany (around 100,000 maids, mainly from Eastern Europe, in 1944).49 On the other hand, in Switzerland, German servants were often dismissed by their employers, fearful they could spread Nazi ideas. The Dutch were afraid, too, and this convinced many German girls to leave Holland.50

  • 51 Kushner 1988, 1989, 2017; Henkes 1998, p. 178-80; Horn 2001, p. 176-187; Bollauf 2004, 2011.

17At the same time, working as servants abroad might offer an escape route from the Nazis. In the 1930s, the British authorities issued permits to work as domestics or au pairs to several thousand Austrian and German Jews and people persecuted for political reasons (mainly women). These refugees could only work as domestics, which might be painful because employers were often not satisfied with them and native domestics saw them as competitors. Furthermore, with the outbreak of war, they were often paradoxically seen as enemies and dismissed; they all had to appear before tribunals to establish their loyalty to Britain, and some were interned.51 Nonetheless, these permits gave them an opportunity to flee and survive.

Towards the “modern” pattern of international migration

  • 52 Arat-Koc 1997; Harzig 2003; Mina 2013; Hoerder 2014. On displaced people and refugees’ policies see (...)

18Working as domestics would offer an opportunity also after the Second World War: Canada, for instance, accepted displaced people from the European camps only on condition that they worked for one year in occupations, such as domestic service, where workforce was scarce. They preferred white North Europeans from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, even though many had collaborated with the Nazis. Later Southern Europeans were accepted, too, mainly thanks to being white, and, from the 1950s, coloured people, too, were eventually admitted.52

  • 53 In medieval and early modern times, too, there were migrants who moved from poorer to richer and/or (...)

19Canada is a good example of the transformation of servants’ international and long distance migrations. For a long time (excluding the slave trade) such people probably mainly migrated from richer to poorer countries, from (allegedly) “more civilised” to “less civilised” ones, and were supposed to contribute to improve the “civility” of their masters and masters’ children, or to “civilise” the immigration country as a whole. Over time, this pattern became less common: international and long-distance migrants employed as servants increasingly came from poor, impoverished and allegedly “backward” countries and migrated to richer and/or more dynamic ones.53

  • 54 Katzman 1978, p. 44.
  • 55 Lintelman 1989.
  • 56 Dudden 1983, p. 60-63; Lynch-Brennan 2014.
  • 57 Katzman 1978, p. 49; Wehner-Franco 1994, p. 342. In 1920, when white foreign-born women had reduced (...)
  • 58 In 1900, foreign-born whites made up 23 % of female domestics, blacks 34 %; in 1930 they were 14.7  (...)
  • 59 Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, p. 49.

20Another example is offered by industrialising U.S., where domestic service increasingly “tended to be shunned by the nativeborn” and was “performed disproportionately by immigrants and blacks”.54 Significantly, the immigrants’ placement office opened in 1855 by the New York State authorities placed almost all women as servants (96 % in 1869). In 1890, nearly a third of the total female servant population was represented by white foreign-born women.55 The Irish were so numerous that the Irish ‘Biddy’ became the stereotypical maid,56 but also Scandinavian and German women were highly involved in domestic service.57 Working as domestics, European-born immigrants were accustomed to American culture and improved their chances to become part of the middle-class. This was not the case for black Americans and other coloured women who during the first half of the 20th century largely replaced the foreign-born whites. Significantly, the percentage of African Americans among domestic workers diminished when the civil rights movement led to greater job opportunities for Blacks. Today Latino women are associated with domestic work more than black ones,58 and such employment offers them limited upward-mobility chances.59

Modernisation and domestic work

  • 60 Harzig 2003, p. 24.

21While the Canadian case is a good example of the transformations of the long-distance flows of people destined to work as domestics, the fact that the Canadian authorities have “promoted easy access to inexpensive domestic servants or care givers” “rather than seeking some form of collective solution, such as crèches, day care, or flexible working hours and time-sharing for fathers and mothers alike”,60 distinguishes Canada from those countries where the development of the welfare state contributed to shrink the number of domestic workers.

  • 61 Sarti 2015, p. 138-154.
  • 62 Sarti 2005a.

22The belief that traditional servants would disappear thanks to “progress” had started to spread already in the late 18th century,61 and by the late 19th century was widespread. It was shared by people who noted that hiring a (good) servant was increasingly difficult; by people who thought that new domestic workers, more similar to factory workers, would replace traditional servants and by people who hoped that a society without servants would be established thanks to technological, social, and/or political modernisation: electrical appliances, externalisation of services, communal living etc.62

  • 63 Sarti 2005a; Sarti 2005d, appendix.
  • 64 Ibid.; Sarti 2006.

23According to census data, the percentage of servants in the economically active population of several countries declined after peaking in 1880-8163 and this supported the forecasts about the fading of domestic service. Yet, between the 1920s-30s, this trend stopped or reversed in many European countries, the US and even post-revolutionary Russia, because of the economic crisis and, in some countries, policies aiming at placing unemployed women in domestic service and/or at expanding the domestic-service sector. After the Second World War, the trend towards the demise of domestics (almost complete for live-ins) was common to most European countries. The decline was particularly rapid in the countries that developed a strong welfare system to support families, such as Sweden, where domestics shrunk from 2.9 % of the economically active population in 1950 to 0.05 % in 1980. Domestic service seemed to be really disappearing.64

  • 65 Coser 1973.
  • 66 McBride 1976, p. 116.
  • 67 Boserup 1970, p. 103-104.

24Scholars supported this interpretation: in 1973, Lewis A. Coser argued that domestic service was becoming obsolete and was definitely dying.65 Even those who stressed the importance of domestic service within urbanisation and modernisation argued that modernisation would led to servants’ marginalisation:66 Ester Boserup suggested that in countries in the first phases of economic development, domestic tasks were mainly performed by family members; in those in the intermediate phases, the personal services sector expanded because of the demand for personnel in bars, restaurants and private homes created by urbanisation while in fully industrialised countries many services were no longer performed at home and domestic workers were few.67

Global cities and the “resurgence” of domestic work

  • 68 Turrini 1977, p. 34.
  • 69 Chaplin 1978, p. 105-106, 123-124 considered domestic service a « declining occupation », arguing t (...)
  • 70 Morokvaśic 1984, p. 886-887.
  • 71 Sassen-Koob 1984a-b.
  • 72 Portes, Sassen-Koob 1987; Sassen 1991.

25In 1977, the Italian sociologist Olga Turrini noted that domestic workers were not disappearing, as many expected, and emphasised the growing presence of foreigners in the sector.68 In the 1980s-90s scholars increasingly questioned the idea that industrialisation and modernisation implied the disappearance of paid domestic work and started to focus on expanding international flows of domestics.69 In 1984, Mirjana Morokvaśic stressed the high number of migrant domestic workers70 and Saskia Sassen highlighted the expansion of services (domestic, too) and informal activities in the global cities of the U.S. and the growing migration of Third-World women who performed them.71 Later, she and Alejandro Portes questioned the idea that large informal economic sectors were typical of Third-World economies, showing that these activities continued or had a revival in the advanced economies (they spoke of an “apparent revival”).72

  • 73 Gregson, Lowe 1994, p. 4.
  • 74 Clarke 1991, p. 174; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Gorz 1994.
  • 75 Odierna 2000; Devetter, Rousseau 2011.

26In 1994, two geographers, Niki Gregson and Michelle Lowe, spoke of a “resurgence of paid domestic work” in Britain.73 They were neither the first nor the only ones who noticed the phenomenon,74 but their definition would be recalled especially frequently. In the following years similar statements multiplied.75

The household as hell: modern slaves

  • 76 Anderson 1993, 2000; Anderson – Ruhs 2010.
  • 77 Torrès 1996; Arlacchi 1999; Bales 1999; Connor 2001; Gaburro 2004; Zarembka 2003; Carchedi – Mottur (...)

27While working as domestics might offer a refuge, albeit often not a comfortable one, households might also be prisons: some domestics were modern slaves, the sociologist Bridget Anderson denounced in 1993.76 Since the 1990s reports, books and articles on the so-called modern slavery have been plentiful, confirming that migrant-domestics are numerous among such slaves.77

28The concept of “modern” or “new” slavery is not simple or unanimously accepted. According to most authors, however, such slavery differs from the “old” one, because it is illegal, whereas, in the past, masters generally had legal rights over their slaves. Yet exploitation and violence are common to both. Furthermore, while ancient slavery was often linked to the slave trade (a form of forced migration), modern slavery frequently implies the trafficking of domestic workers, prostitutes, etc.

29In short, at the beginning of the 20th century many, people expected domestic service to disappear thanks to modernisation, whereas by the end of the century not only a revival of paid domestic work but even new forms of domestic slavery have started to be denounced. And both often involve migrants.

Servants of globalization

  • 78 Hondagneu-Sotelo – Avila 1997.
  • 79 Parreñas 2000; the author has updated her views on the issues: see Parreñas 2012.
  • 80 Hochschild 2000; Parreñas 2001, 2015. For a review essay see Yeates 2012.
  • 81 Parreñas 2001, p. 150-196.
  • 82 Sassen 2000, 2002.
  • 83 Williams 2010.
  • 84 Andall 2000. Also Anderson 2000, encompasses a section on Italy, p. 66-68.
  • 85 On the first immigrants Andall 2000, p. 100; Einaudi 2007, p. 85-87; Sarti 2011, p. 70-85; Gissi 20 (...)
  • 86 Italian scholars began early to stress the growing presence of migrant domestic workers; some of th (...)

30The “revival” of paid domestic and care work has prompted social scientists to analyse it and to develop new concepts such as transnational motherhood,78 international division of reproductive labour,79 global care chains,80 contradictory class mobility,81 feminisation of survival82, in order to conceptualise its features and global dimension.83 One of the most influential books in this field is Rhacel Parreñas’ Servants of globalization, on Filipina domestic workers in Rome and Los Angeles. Parreñas’ book and another influential one, Jacqueline Andall’s, Gender, migration and domestic service: the politics of black women in Italy,84 have contributed to make the Italian case known among scholars all over the world. Between the 1960-70s and the 1990s, Italy rapidly changed from an emigration country to an immigration one (although many people emigrate today, too), and female domestic workers were often the forerunners of migration chains.85 Female but also male migrants to Italy have largely contributed to a booming growth of private domestic work, especially in elderly care, in a phase of rapid population ageing, limited welfare provisions, growing female employment, limited re-distribution of domestic tasks between men and women. The Italian case has become almost a paradigm of the possible consequences of new worldwide inequalities and new strategies of survival based on the exporting/importing of care.86

  • 87 Providing references would need many pages, for some information see Sarti 2014.

31The “new domestic work” has become the subject of hundreds of articles and books paying attention to its global dimension; its relationship with the problems of the welfare states, with different welfare regimes, with the economic and demographic inequalities between the North and the South of the world and with the crisis of former communist countries in Eastern Europe; its connection with international migrations, human trafficking and ‘modern’ slavery, and with sexual abuse and prostitution; the links between former colonies and coloniser countries; the division of care work at the global level; the development of global care chains; the migration policies and the rights of migrants employed in domestic work; the labour market segregation and the development of ethnic niches; the racialisation and ethnicisation processes; the unions, organisations of and campaigns by domestic workers; the policies to fight unemployment through the expansion of domestic and personal services; the connections between private and public services; the very identity of domestic workers as to gender, social background, age, marital status, presence of children, education, skills, health; their movements in and out of domestic work; their frequent role as breadwinners; the economic importance of their remittances; their chances of social (upward and downward) mobility; their agency; the features of the families resorting to domestic help; the domestic workers’ relationships both with their own families and with their employers; the cultural exchanges among domestic workers and their employers within private households; the emotions, desires, aspirations, loves, frustrations and conflicts of domestic workers, their relatives, partners, employers, etc.87 As this rather rough list shows, many of these issues have to do with migration and gender.

Past and present: feminisation of migration?

  • 88 Morokvaśic 1984.
  • 89 Hoerder 2015, p. 65. He adds: « What is new in the migrations since the 1990s is (1) that women lea (...)
  • 90 Donato – Gabaccia 2016 (summary of Donato – Gabaccia 2015).

32In her influential article Birds of passage are also women (1984), Mirjana Morokvasic prompted scholars’ attention to female migrations, at that time generally underestimated.88 Since then, a huge number of studies have focused on the issue, also encouraged by millions of women who in the last decades have migrated abroad: a phenomenon which has led to introduce the concept of “feminisation of migration”. In fact, whether a feminisation of migration has really been taking place is controversial. As Dirk Hoerder has stated, “the label does not fit the data”.89 “Between 1960 and 2015 – Katharine Donato and Donna Gabaccia explain – the number of female migrants doubled. But so did the number of male migrants and the size of the earth’s population. As a proportion of international migrants, by contrast, the female share increased only slightly from 46.6 percent in 1960 to 48 percent in 2015. Examination of global patterns of migration over the centuries leads to a more nuanced understanding of the meaning of feminization, and suggests that scholars failed to notice a substantial uptick in female migration that occurred well before 1960. Such analysis demonstrates that women have always migrated, often in substantial numbers”.90 Historical research has proved that women were likely to be numerous among migrants in the past, too, sometimes outnumbering men: to understand migrations in a gendered perspective, it is necessary to distinguish single cases rather than make potentially misleading generalisations.

  • 91 Out of the essays found by Google Scholar (accessed 20 August 2017) none mentions such a concept un (...)
  • 92 Lutz 2008a, p. 3. See also Labadie-Jackson 2008.
  • 93 Kofman – Raghuram 2006.

33While the phenomenon addressed by the concept of feminisation of migration is less striking than suggested by the concept, the increased use of such a notion reveals a radical change in perspective and an expanding interest in female migrants.91 On the other hand, “growing demand for labour power in the domestic work sector has contributed to the feminization of migration more than any other area of work”.92 Being numerous among migrant women, domestic workers have therefore attracted great attention. According to some scholars, they have monopolised the scene, while other female migrant workers have remained in the shadows, which may lead to potentially deceiving representations of migrant women.93 While I agree that other roles should attract more attention, as a scholar who has been stressing the importance of domestics for more than thirty years, I am pleased to see how they have turned from a rather marginal into a crucial subject of research.

Theoretical implications: the “open house” and the “glocal household”

34Research on migrant domestics has challenged the distinction between marginal and central; bringing domestics from the margins to the centre, it has challenged the alleged boundaries between the domestic and the extra-domestic spheres, demonstrating that the “domestic” one is crucial to understand phenomena long seen as “extra-domestic”, from colonisation and imperialism to the history of refugees, to mention but a few.

  • 94 Broom – Smith 1963.
  • 95 Sarti 2007a, 2016.

35While domestic service has been described as a “bridging occupation”,94 the history of migrant servants and domestic workers reveals that the “frontier” where people from different backgrounds were/are often likely to meet and clash is the domestic arena, i.e. a space for a long time described as a nest of intimate life quite closed to external influences. This contributes to making clear that the household, far from being a space separate from those where important events happen, is an open space, located at the crossroads of multiple issues, and can be the site of class struggles and racial and gender clashes, but also of cultural and emotional confrontations and exchanges.95

  • 96 Welfare regimes (besides many other factors) may be crucial in making a family decide whether to hi (...)

36The journey of migrant domestic workers leaving their homes to move to others’ puts more or less distant realities in contact: if inquired into all its aspects, it allows us to find in the apparently confined space of a private home the economic, social, political, familial, psychological reasons which have convinced or forced an individual to leave her/his village, city, country to go elsewhere to better her/his life, alongside the reasons which have convinced other individual (s) to hire her/him.96 The household thus becomes even more than usually a “glocal” space: global or distant events eventually have consequences affecting its members’ lives. And this is also true of the households of domestic workers, who thanks to their migration have some link with the ones where the domestics work. A complex network of (unequal) exchanges develops: a crucial aspect in the everyday life of globalisation.

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Lutz 2008a = H. Lutz, Introduction to Lutz 2008b, p. 1-10.

Lutz 2008b = H. Lutz (ed.), Migration and domestic work: A European perspective on a global theme, Aldershot, 2008.

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Sarti 2001 = R. Sarti, Posfácio: cronologias e tipologias, in R. Sarti, Casa e família. habitar, comer e vestir na Europa moderna, Lisbon, 2001, revised Port. trans. of Sarti 1999, p. 369-388.

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Sarti 2011 = R. Sarti (ed.), Lavoro domestico e di cura: quali diritti?, Rome, 2011.

Sarti 2014 = R. Sarti, Historians, social scientists, servants, and domestic workers: fifty years of research on domestic and care work, in International Review of Social History, 59-2, 2014, p. 279-314, also published in Hoerder – van Nederveen Meerkerk – Neunsinger 2015, p. 25-60.

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Notes

1 Perrot 1991, p. 460-468.

2 Ground-breaking studies are Morokvaśic 1984; Moch, 2003. Useful review essays are Donato et. al. 2006; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2011.

3 Sarti 2008, 2009, 2014, 2016.

4 For recent overviews see Moya 2007; Sarti 2014; Hoerder 2015; van Nederveen Meerkerk 2017.

5 Laslett 1969, p. 219.

6 Sarti 1997, 2014,

7 Sarti 2014.

8 Ariès 1960.

9 Laslett 1977a, p. 104, p. 110; Laslett 1977b, p. 12-49. For recent updates see Whittle 2017.

10 Doveri 1993; Viazzo – Aime – Allovio 2005; Sarti 2017b.

11 Sarti 2001; Hartman 2004; De Moor – van Zanden 2010; Foreman-Peck 2011; Zucca Micheletto 2011; Dennison – Ogilvie 2014; Carmichael et. al. 2016.

12 Chatelain 1969. For recent updates Moch 2009; Dubert – Gourdon 2017.

13 Alexander – Steidl 2012.

14 Walser 1986, p. 7-8.

15 McBride 1976, p. 117.

16 For cases where servants were generally not migrants see Dubert 1999, 2002, p. 273-319; Sarti 2005c.

17 Comparative data in Sarti 2005b.

18 Fauve-Chamoux 1998. See also Salinari 2004.

19 Arru 1995.

20 Perrot 1991, p. 461-462.

21 Roche 1978, 1981. In relation to the 20th century see Sarti 2004.

22 Hecht 1956, p. 220-228.

23 Davidoff 1974, p. 428, n. 81.

24 Ibid.

25 Banks 1968, p. 287.

26 Banks 1954, 1981; Banks – Banks 1964.

27 Woods 1987; Szreter 1996, p. 478-480.

28 Vanhaute – Matthys 2007; Matthys 2012, 2013.

29 Boccagni – Decimo 2013, editors’ Introduction; they quote Levitt 1998, p. 926.

30 Porceddu 2013.

31 Sarti 2008, 2009.

32 Sarti 2008, p. 78-79; Sarti 2009, p. 55-57. For examples of these servants see Hecht 1954; Hardach-Pinke 1993; Petzen 2002; Horn 2004, p. 73-93; Delpiano – Sarti 2007; Krampl 2015; Sarti 2017a.

33 Sarti 2008, p. 79-80; Sarti 2009, p. 57-59.

34 Haskins – Lowrie 2015; Lowrie 2016.

35 This is the title of Hamilton – Higman, 2003.

36 Horn 2001, p. 162. See also Barber 1991; Arat-Koc 199; Boucher 2014.

37 Arat-Koc 1997, p. 60, p. 55.

38 Hamilton – Higman 2003; Horn 2001, p. 163-169; Harzig 2003; Sarti 2008, p. 85; Sarti 2009, p. 64-65.

39 Horn 1975, p. 30-31, 152-153; Guiral – Thuillier 1978, p. 249.

40 Cusenier 1912, p. 134-135, 305-307; König 2003, 2012; Béal 2016, p. 661-678.

41 Head-König 2001. A high percentage were German and Austrian, see Althaus 2017, p. 11-12.

42 Gubin 2001.

43 Henkes 1998, 2001.

44 Horn 1975, p. 152-153; Horn 2001, p. 169-175; Delap 2011, p. 78-79, 90.

45 Sarti 2006.

46 Hantzaroula 2005.

47 Kalc 2015, p. 66; Hladnik 2015.

48 Lüfter – Verdorfer – Wallnöfer 2006, 2007.

49 Winkler 2000, p. 146-168; Sarti 2006, p. 225-226.

50 Head-König 2001; Althaus 2017, p. 14, 81-84; Henkes 1998, p. 142-148, 173-190; Henkes 2001.

51 Kushner 1988, 1989, 2017; Henkes 1998, p. 178-80; Horn 2001, p. 176-187; Bollauf 2004, 2011.

52 Arat-Koc 1997; Harzig 2003; Mina 2013; Hoerder 2014. On displaced people and refugees’ policies see Salvatici 2008, 2015 and her chapter here.

53 In medieval and early modern times, too, there were migrants who moved from poorer to richer and/or colonialist countries and regions to work as servants. In Renaissance Venice, servants from Albania and Dalmatia, then under Venetian influence, were common (Romano 1996, p. 124-129).

54 Katzman 1978, p. 44.

55 Lintelman 1989.

56 Dudden 1983, p. 60-63; Lynch-Brennan 2014.

57 Katzman 1978, p. 49; Wehner-Franco 1994, p. 342. In 1920, when white foreign-born women had reduced to 21 % of the servants (Lintelman 1989), 87 %, 86 % and 81 % respectively of Swedish, Norwegian and Irish-born working women were employed in domestic services, but only 8 % of the Italians (Gabaccia 1994, p. 47). Since domestic service was traditionally more common in Northern Europe than in the South, and in the West than in the East (Sarti 2007a) this difference may have been due not only to the employers’ preference but also to the immigrants’ culture. Certainly, some immigrants had already worked as domestics in their countries (Steidl 2004; Lintelman 1989).

58 In 1900, foreign-born whites made up 23 % of female domestics, blacks 34 %; in 1930 they were 14.7 and 47.4 % respectively. By 1944, Afro-Americans made up more than 60 % of domestic workers (Stigler 1946; Lynch-Brennan 2004). See also Katzman 1978, p. 48; Glenn 1992; Romero 1992; Ariza 2011.

59 Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, p. 49.

60 Harzig 2003, p. 24.

61 Sarti 2015, p. 138-154.

62 Sarti 2005a.

63 Sarti 2005a; Sarti 2005d, appendix.

64 Ibid.; Sarti 2006.

65 Coser 1973.

66 McBride 1976, p. 116.

67 Boserup 1970, p. 103-104.

68 Turrini 1977, p. 34.

69 Chaplin 1978, p. 105-106, 123-124 considered domestic service a « declining occupation », arguing that its incidence « is a prime indicator of the level and quality of industrialization and modernization ». Yet he also noted that « as it ‘casualizes’ (with more part-time, seasonal, and short-term incumbents), it appears to disappear faster than it is the case »: fewer workers « can still serve more households than ever before »; they are less likely to be enumerated in the census; in the US « a sizeable proportion of the illegal immigrants from Latin America and the West Indies hide out as unreported domestic servants » .

70 Morokvaśic 1984, p. 886-887.

71 Sassen-Koob 1984a-b.

72 Portes, Sassen-Koob 1987; Sassen 1991.

73 Gregson, Lowe 1994, p. 4.

74 Clarke 1991, p. 174; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Gorz 1994.

75 Odierna 2000; Devetter, Rousseau 2011.

76 Anderson 1993, 2000; Anderson – Ruhs 2010.

77 Torrès 1996; Arlacchi 1999; Bales 1999; Connor 2001; Gaburro 2004; Zarembka 2003; Carchedi – Mottura – Pugliese 2003; Bales – Trodd – Williamson 2009; Casalini 2010: Carchedi 2010; O’Connell Davidson 2015.

78 Hondagneu-Sotelo – Avila 1997.

79 Parreñas 2000; the author has updated her views on the issues: see Parreñas 2012.

80 Hochschild 2000; Parreñas 2001, 2015. For a review essay see Yeates 2012.

81 Parreñas 2001, p. 150-196.

82 Sassen 2000, 2002.

83 Williams 2010.

84 Andall 2000. Also Anderson 2000, encompasses a section on Italy, p. 66-68.

85 On the first immigrants Andall 2000, p. 100; Einaudi 2007, p. 85-87; Sarti 2011, p. 70-85; Gissi 2018.

86 Italian scholars began early to stress the growing presence of migrant domestic workers; some of their contributions had some impact outside Italy, too; others didn’t, being written in Italian. See for instance Turrini 1977; Crippa 1979; Campani 1989; Alemani – Fasoli 1994; Ambrosini 1998. Further volumes (articles are too numerous to be listed) by Italian scholars, sometimes in collaboration with non-Italian, include Andall, Sarti 2004; Decimo 2005; Pasquinelli – Rusmini 2008; Bonizzoni 2009; Catanzaro – Colombo 2009; Vianello 2009; Da Roit – Facchini 2010; Sarti – Scrinzi 2010; Vietti 2010; Zontini 2010; Marchetti 2011; Sarti 2011; Boccagni – Ambrosini 2012; Piperno – Tognetti Bordogna 2012; Pasquinelli – Rusmini 2013; Ambrosini 2013; Scrinzi 2013; Marchetti 2014; Sciurba 2015; Gallo – Scrinzi 2016; Maioni – Zucca 2016; Cvajner 2018.

87 Providing references would need many pages, for some information see Sarti 2014.

88 Morokvaśic 1984.

89 Hoerder 2015, p. 65. He adds: « What is new in the migrations since the 1990s is (1) that women leave first and (2) that, compared to past migrations, a larger share leaves children behind ». I agree with the second point, while I would nuance the first (also before the 1990s there were women who left first).

90 Donato – Gabaccia 2016 (summary of Donato – Gabaccia 2015).

91 Out of the essays found by Google Scholar (accessed 20 August 2017) none mentions such a concept until the 1970s, one in the 1980s, about 80 in the 1990s, almost 1200 in the 2000s and more than 1600 in the 2010s. Although rough, these figures reveal a booming interest in female migration.

92 Lutz 2008a, p. 3. See also Labadie-Jackson 2008.

93 Kofman – Raghuram 2006.

94 Broom – Smith 1963.

95 Sarti 2007a, 2016.

96 Welfare regimes (besides many other factors) may be crucial in making a family decide whether to hire a domestic worker, also affecting the strategies of the migrants and their’ work opportunities in the destination country, see Sciortino 2004; Bettio – Simonazzi Villa 2006; Sarti 2006; Williams – Gavanas 2008; Kofman 2008, chap. 3; De Marchi – Sarti 2010; Kilkey – Lutz – Palenga-Möllenbeck 2010; van Hooren 2012; Sciortino – Finotelli 2015.

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