̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Lucy Delap

Give more people with learning disabilities the chance to work, historian argues

ta385 — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 06:00:00 +0000

A new study by historian Professor Lucy Delap (Murray Edwards College) argues that loud voices in the 20th-century eugenics movement have hidden a much bigger picture of inclusion in British workplaces that puts today’s low rates to shame.

Professor Delap found that in some parts of Britain, up to 70% of people variously labelled ‘defective’, ‘slow’ and ‘odd’ at the time had paid jobs when demand for labour was high, including during and after the First World War. This proportion fell during recessions, but even then, 30% remained in work. By contrast, in the UK today less than 5% of adults with intellectual disabilities are employed.

“A recession now couldn’t make levels of employment of people with learning disabilities much worse, they are on the floor already,” Professor Delap says. Her study, published in the journal Social History of Medicine follows a decade of painstakingly piecing together evidence of people with learning disabilities in the British workforce in the first half of the 20th century.

Delap found no trace in employers’ records or in state archives which focused on segregation and detaining people. But she struck gold in ̽��ֱ��National Archives in Kew with a survey of ‘employment exchanges’ undertaken in 1955 to investigate how people then termed ‘subnormal’ or ‘mentally handicapped’ were being employed. She found further evidence in the inspection records of Trade Boards now held at Warwick ̽��ֱ��’s Modern Records Centre. In 1909, a complex system of rates and inspection emerged as part of an effort to set minimum wages. This led to the development of ‘exemption permits’ for a range of employees not considered to be worth ‘full’ payment.

Delap says: “Once I found these workers, they appeared everywhere and not just in stereotypical trades like shoe repair and basket-weaving. They were working in domestic service, all kinds of manufacturing, shops, coal mining, agriculture, and local authority jobs.”

Delap’s research goes against most previous writing about people with intellectual disabilities which has focused on eugenics and the idea that preindustrial community inclusion gave way to segregation and asylums in the nineteenth century. “We've been too ready to accept that narrative and haven’t gone looking for people in the archive,” Delap says. “Many weren’t swept up into institutions, they lived relatively independent lives, precarious lives, but often with the support of families, friends and co-workers.”

‘Wage age’ versus IQ

Previous studies have focused on the rise of IQ testing in this period, but the employment records that Delap studied showed something very different: a more positive sense of ability couched in terms of the wages someone was worth. This involved imagining a person’s ‘wage age’, meaning that an adult worker could begin with a starting age of 14 and advance in wage age through their working life. Not everyone did advance though.

Delap says “ ̽��ֱ��idea of ‘wage age’ was harsh in many ways but it was far less stigmatising than IQ which emphasised divisions between ‘normal’ and ‘defective’ and suggested people couldn’t advance beyond a certain point. By contrast, ideas of fairness, productivity and ‘the going rate’ were deployed to evaluate workers. When labour was in demand, workers had leverage to negotiate their wage age up. IQ didn't give people that power.”

Appeal to employers

Under the exemption system, employers saw the business case for employing – usually at a significantly lower rate of pay – loyal workers who could be trusted to carry out routine tasks.

Tailoring Trade Board application for permit of exemption relating to a 19-year-old 'unintelligent' woman employed to do various errands in Peterborough (1915). Courtesy of Modern Records Centre, Warwick ̽��ֱ��.

Delap says: “If anything, governments gave signals that these people shouldn't be employed, that they were better off under the care and control of the mental deficiency boards. But employers understood that they could be good workers.”

In 1918, an ‘odd job’ worker employed for 20 years at a London tin works was described as suffering from ‘mental deficiency’ and didn’t know the time of the year or who Britain was fighting. Nevertheless, in the inspector’s opinion, he was ‘little if at all inferior to an ordinary worker of full capacity’ on the hand press and ‘His speed at cutting out on an unguarded fly machine was noticeable.’ His employer agreed to a raise from 18 to 24 shillings a week, just below what a carter could earn.

Employer calculations, Delap emphasises, fluctuated with the state of the labour market. When workers were in short supply, those with learning disabilities became more attractive. When demand for labour fell these workers might be the first to lose their jobs.

Were employers just exploiting vulnerable workers?

Delap found clear evidence of some workers being exploited, being stuck on the same very low wage and the same monotonous task for years.

“We shouldn’t feel nostalgic, this wasn’t a ‘golden age’ of disability-friendly employment,” Delap says. And yet, the archive reveals a strong reciprocal sense of real work being done and wages being paid in exchange. “Many of these people would have considered themselves valued workers and not charity cases. Some were able to negotiate better conditions and many resisted being told to do boring, repetitive work.”

Delap repeatedly encountered families policing the treatment of their relative. In 1922, the owner of a laundry in Lincolnshire considered sacking a 25-year-old ‘mentally deficient’ woman who starched collars because ‘trade is so bad’ but kept her on ‘at request of her parents’. “Workers who had families looking out for them were more able to ask for wage rises, refuse to do certain jobs and limit exploitation,” Delap says. “I found lots of evidence of love and you don't often see that in archives of intellectual disability.”

Parents or siblings sometimes worked on the same premises which, Delap argues, strengthened the bonds of moral obligation that existed between employers and families. In 1918, for instance, a 16-year-old who attached the bottoms of tin cans in Glamorgan was hired ‘for the sake of her sisters who are employed by the firm and are satisfactory workers’.

Lessons for today

Delap sees concerning similarities between the 1920s and the 2020s in terms of how British institutions manage, care for and educate people with learning disabilities.

Historically, Delap argues, institutions were just stop-gaps, places where people could be kept without onward pathways. People were often not trained at all or trained to do work that didn't really exist like basket-weaving. “This remains a problem today,” Delap says. “We have a fast-changing labour market and our special schools and other institutions aren’t equipping people well enough for viable paid opportunities.”

Delap argues that evidence of people with learning disabilities successfully working in many different roles and environments in the past undermines today’s focus on a very narrow range of job types and sectors. She highlights the fact that many workers with learning disabilities used to be involved in the service sector, including public facing roles, and not just working in factories. “They were doing roles which brought them into contact with the general public and being a service sector economy today, we have lots of those jobs.”

Delap also believes that structural factors continue to prevent people from accessing jobs. “Credentialism has made it very difficult for people don’t have qualifications to get jobs which they might actually be very good at,” she says. “We need to think much harder about how we make the system work for people with a range of abilities. I also think the rise of IT is a factor, we haven’t been training people with learning disabilities well enough in computer skills so it has become an obstacle.”

Delap believes that Britain’s ageing population and struggle to fill unskilled jobs means there is a growing economic as well as a moral case for employing more people with learning disabilities.

She points out that many people with intellectual disabilities used to work in agriculture, a sector now facing chronic labour shortages. Delap acknowledges that exploitation remains a problem in agriculture, so safeguarding would be paramount, as it would be in every sector.

“I think employers are recognising that they need active inclusion strategies to fill vacancies and that they need to cultivate loyalty,” Delap says. “Work remains a place where we find meaning in our lives and where we make social connections and that's why so many people with disabilities really want to work and why it deprives them of so much when they are excluded. We need to have more bold ambition and stop being content with really marginal forms of inclusion.”

Reference

L Delap, ‘Slow Workers: Labelling and Labouring in Britain, c. 1909–1955’, Social History of Medicine (2023). DOI: 10.1093/shm/hkad043

Employment levels for people with learning disabilities in the UK are 5 to 10 times lower than they were a hundred years ago. And the experiences of workers from the 1910s–50s offer inspiration as well as lessons about safeguarding.

We need to have more bold ambition and stop being content with really marginal forms of inclusion

Lucy Delap

Andrew Tanglao via Unsplash

A barista pouring milk into a coffee

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Celebrating Cambridge Women: Part II

jek67 — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 22:06:40 +0000

Read the second part of our series marking Women's History Month, as we shine a light on even more of the inspiring women living and working here at Cambridge.

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library unveils the rich histories, struggles and hidden labours of Women at Cambridge

sjr81 — Thu, 05 Sep 2019 10:27:39 +0000

Opening to the public on Monday 14 October, and curated by Dr Lucy Delap and Dr Ben Griffin, the exhibition will focus on the lived experiences of women at the ̽��ֱ��, the ongoing fight for equal educational rights, recognition, and inclusion in university activities, and the careers of some of the women who shaped the institution – from leading academics to extraordinary domestic staff and influential fellows’ wives.

̽��ֱ��exhibition will showcase the history of women at the ̽��ֱ��, the persistent marginalisation they were subject to, and the ongoing campaigns for gender justice and change since the establishment of Girton College in Cambridge in 1869, the first residential university establishment for women in the UK. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore rarely seen collections from across the ̽��ֱ�� and colleges. Through a mix of costume, letters and audio-visual material, the fascinating and little-known stories of individual women will be illustrated.

Dr Lucy Delap, exhibition co-curator and Fellow of Murray Edwards College, said: “From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

"Though Girton College was established especially to give women the opportunity to study at the ̽��ֱ��, there were still many barriers that women faced – the first female students were required to ask permission to attend lectures, were not allowed to take exams without special permission, and usually had to be accompanied by chaperones in public until after the First World War. It was still not until 1948 that Cambridge began to offer degrees to women – the last of the big institutions in the UK to do so.

“Through ̽��ֱ��Rising Tide we hope to illustrate an all-encompassing picture of the incredible fight for gender equality within the ̽��ֱ��, while portraying the fascinating journeys of some of the militant, cussed and determined women of our institution too.”

Visitors to the exhibition will learn of the deep opposition and oppression women faced, including the efforts made to keep women out of student societies, the organised campaigns to stop women getting degrees, and the hostility faced by women trying to establish careers as academics. Surviving fragments of eggshells and fireworks illustrate the violent opposition to giving women degrees during the vote on the subject in 1897, as does the note written by undergraduates apologising for the damage that had been done to Newnham College during the riot of 1921.

̽��ֱ��exhibition will also reveal the creativity and courage of the women who defiantly resisted such opposition to establish lives and careers within the ̽��ֱ��. Resistance included: the signing of the 400 page petition demanding women’s degrees in 1880, which will be displayed over the walls of the exhibition; setting up new student societies for women; and finding opportunities for women to lecture.

Sometimes, resistance meant finding ways of avoiding the rules that discriminated against women – between 1904 and 1907, Trinity College Dublin offered women from Newnham and Girton the opportunity to travel to Dublin to graduate officially and receive a full degree. ̽��ֱ��robes of one of the graduates, which have been stored for many decades, will be displayed in the Women at Cambridge exhibition.

Dr Ben Griffin, exhibition co-curator and Lecturer in Modern British History at Girton College, added: “By telling the story of women at Cambridge, this exhibition also tells the story of how a nineteenth-century institution, which served mainly to educate young men for careers in the church, transformed itself into a recognisably modern university devoted to teaching and research.”

̽��ֱ��Rising Tide is a culmination of exhibitions, events and displays exploring the past, present and future of women at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Curated by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library in collaboration with students and staff, the events programme, pop-up exhibitions and displays will run at the Library and across the city. Women at Cambridge is the centre-piece of the programme and will launch on Monday 14 October, and run until March 2020. Entry is free.

One hundred and fifty years since the first women were allowed to study at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library will be sharing the unique stories of women who have studied, taught, worked and lived at the ̽��ֱ��, in its new exhibition ̽��ֱ��Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge.

From the founding of the first women’s college to the present day, the experience of women at Cambridge has differed greatly from their male counterparts.

Lucy Delap

Girton College

Domestic staff of Girton College, 1908

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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History shows abuse of children in custody will remain an ‘inherent risk’ – report

fpjl2 — Thu, 18 Oct 2018 00:54:38 +0000

A new report on the history of safeguarding children detained for criminal offences in the UK has concluded that it is impossible to remove the potential for abuse in secure institutions, and that the use of custody for children should only be a “last resort”.

A team of criminologists and historians from the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh were asked by HM Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) to build a “collective memory” of the abuse cases and preventative policies that emerged in the youth wing of the UK’s secure estate between 1960 and 2016.

̽��ֱ��research was commissioned to help prepare HMPPS to give evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. It covers physical and sexual abuse in secure children’s homes and training centres, young offender institutions such as Deerbolt and Feltham, and their predecessors: detention centres and borstals.

Drawing on often limited archival records – as well as inspection reports and previous findings – the research reveals how past safeguards broke down, failing to recognise children in custody as vulnerable.

Researchers found abuse was especially likely at times of overcrowding and budgetary constraint, and occurred despite contemporary beliefs that protective policies were working.

̽��ֱ��historical overview goes beyond individual misconduct to show how whole institutions become “detached from their purpose”, with undertrained staff collectively drifting into “morally compromised” cultures where abusive acts appear acceptable even as procedure is followed.

̽��ֱ��researchers say this “acculturation” at times extended to inspectorates and monitors overfamiliar with failing systems. They argue that it is vital to ensure effective complaints processes and protect whistle-blowers.

̽��ֱ��report has been produced by Cambridge criminologists and Dr Lucy Delap and Professor Louise Jackson from the History and Policy network, and is published online today alongside a policy paper summarising the findings.

“History tells us that it is impossible to ‘manage out’ the risk of abuse through improved policies alone,” said report co-author Dr Caroline Lanskey, from Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology (IoC).

“ ̽��ֱ��steep power imbalance between staff and children means there is a need to focus on staff culture, rather than only on detailed policy, in order to establish greater trust between staff and young people in a secure institution,” she said.

Until the 1990s safeguards against abuse were weak, and ineffective in many institutions, say researchers. Children were often left to “fend for themselves” in detention centres such as Medomsley, where reports of sexual abuse during the 1970s and 1980s have since come to light.

̽��ֱ��research reveals major rifts in the mid-1970s between the external Board of Visitors – Medomsley’s main monitoring body – and the centre’s management over disciplinary approaches. Inspections of the time recorded that neither staff nor children “seem to know what the purpose of the centre really is…”

Inspectors were concerned with basic functions such as kitchen cleanliness. That the kitchen manager worked unsupervised, and hand-picked his team of children and young people, was not perceived as risky. This Medomsley manager was subsequently convicted of sexual offences.

“Inspectors and Boards of Visitors checked procedure, but they lacked the concepts and language to recognise that certain situations were potentially abusive. These blind spots persisted until at least the 1990s,” said Ben Jarman, a researcher at Cambridge’s IoC, who carried out the archival research.

̽��ֱ��turn of the millennium saw a “new orthodoxy” in protective policies, combined with a spike in custodial sentences for children that wouldn’t decline again until 2010.

Part of this policy shift included the questioning of long-standing practices such as strip-searching and forms of restraint, and whether they amounted to abuse.

“Strip-searching before the 1990s seems to have been so routine and unremarkable that it’s hardly mentioned in the documentary record,” said Jarman. “As late as 1995, inspectors at Deerbolt reported without comment that staff believed more routine strip searches were required.”

However, by 2002 inspectors were expressing serious concerns about untargeted strip-searching. A 2005 inspection of Feltham described strip-searches as “degrading”, and an independent inquiry the following year argued that, in any other circumstances, such practices would “trigger a child protection investigation”.

̽��ֱ��use of pain-inducing restraint has also become the subject of fierce debate and some policy change, following the deaths of two children in secure training centres in 2004.

Strip-searching and restraint are still used but much more carefully regulated. New monitoring systems attempt to take account of the ‘voice’ of children, who the report suggests have been recast as ‘users’ of custodial ‘services’.

Yet improved safeguards can inspire false confidence and mask the “corruption of care”, say researchers. ̽��ֱ��exposure by the BBC of violence and bullying by staff in Medway Secure Training Centre in 2016 came shortly after an inspection declaring safety there to be “good”.

“Investigations at Medway concluded that child protection failed despite the apparent compliance with safeguarding policies,” said Jarman. “Inadequately trained and under pressure to achieve contractual targets, some of the staff did not appear to understand what they were doing was wrong.”

“We wouldn’t argue for fewer safeguards, but without a focus on staff culture, even the best policies can be circumvented when an abusive climate develops,” he added.

“ ̽��ֱ��ever-present potential for abuse means that custody should be used for children only as a last resort, where there is no alternative,” the report concludes.

̽��ֱ��full report, Safeguarding children in the secure estate: 1960 -2016, available here.

New research conducted for the current independent inquiry suggests that – despite recent policy improvements – cultures of child abuse are liable to emerge while youth custody exists, and keeping children in secure institutions should be limited as far as possible.

History tells us that it is impossible to ‘manage out’ the risk of abuse through improved policies alone

Caroline Lanskey

Catholic Church England

A room in a young offenders institute

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“Our weapon is public opinion”

fpjl2 — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 10:23:59 +0000

This month, a selection will go on display for the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act – the parliamentary act that finally gave some women the vote.

READ THE STORY HERE.

One of the largest surviving collections of suffrage posters from the early twentieth century are housed in Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library’s famous tower.

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Shipwrecked: women and children first?

amb206 — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:30:46 +0000

Barely three months short of the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, which went down on 15 April 1912, another shipwreck has galvanised the world’s attention. With tragic stories of loss, chaos and fear, shipwrecks have always fascinated onlookers, and been used to convey moral lessons. ̽��ֱ��Costa Concordia has reignited the potent debates over how one should behave in an emergency shipwreck situation. It is clear from the media response that the old question of whether ‘women and children’ should go first remains just as significant in 2012 as it seemed in 1912.

̽��ֱ��world’s press has dwelt on the lack of precedence of women and children aboard the 21st century sinking ship, with particular emphasis on the failures of professionalism and chivalry shown by the Italian captain, and his crew. Tales are circulating of burly crew members pushing pregnant women and children out of the way, and the failure of captain and crew to ensure that all were rescued before departing from the ship themselves. This, it is widely assumed, runs counter to all the traditions of international – and certainly British - codes of masculine honour which, in more dignified times past, put the vulnerable ahead of the chivalrous male.

̽��ֱ��Titanic is often conjured up in support of this historical assumption, as a shipwreck in which men bravely put women and children into the lifeboats, and met a freezing death as a result. There was indeed self-sacrifice aboard the Titanic, but ‘women and children first’ was much more contested in the past than today’s news coverage would have us believe. In 1912, plenty of people – and especially women and working class men - were forceful in their critiques of ‘women and children first’, and recognised that what seemed at first sight to be a humane impulse to help those whose youth, heavy dress or physical frailty made them vulnerable in a shipwreck actually acted as a heavy-handed method of diminishing certain men, and enforcing a particular role for women.

̽��ֱ��wreck of the British troop ship, the Birkenhead, in 1852 has often been seen as the paradigmatic example of ‘women and children first’. However, a survey of 19th century shipwreck narratives uncovers a relative lack of concern with the survival of the more vulnerable. A survivor from the emigrant ship the Northfleet, sunk in 1873, described meeting clusters of women as the ship went down, but ‘did not stop to speak to them for I was looking towards the boats, thinking that I might get hold of one of them yet’. When asked by a mother to save her baby, he records: ‘I could not do anything. For I felt the last had come.’ In the end, only one woman and two children were saved, while 83 men were rescued. A survivor of the Pegasus wreck in 1843 wrote: ‘… the stewardess attempted to get hold of me, but I extricated myself from her in order to save my own life.’ It turned out that not all women were equally deserving of protection at sea. Lower class women – wives of sailors or soldiers, or poor emigrant women – were frequently excluded from the rule, and women of colour were equally marginalised.

In many famous shipwrecks, women had to be removed by force. Their own choices were often to remain with their male relatives, or in the perceived safety of the ship. In some cases they were simply locked up in their cabins, as their hysteria was perceived to be dangerous. According to a survivor from the Evening Star, sunk in 1866, ‘… women rushed on deck, and sobbed and wept, ceaselessly demanding if there was no hope of safety. ̽��ֱ��captain was compelled, as a measure of precaution, to send them below again, and fasten the doors of their cabins’. Victorian women, then, were to be contained; the rule giving them precedence was partly for the relief and safety of the men on board ship. As it was practiced, ‘women and children first’ often resulted in women being treated as objects rather than being given special protection.

̽��ֱ��Victorians believed that only certain men were capable of putting women first. Men of colour or working class men were often described as failing to observe ‘women and children first’. In the sinking of the Northfleet, a survivor noted ‘there was a terrible panic … among the strong, rough men, when it became apparent that the vessel was sinking. ̽��ֱ��wild rush for the boats, and the mad confusion which took place, were like the trampling of a herd of buffaloes.’ This language of animality was common within shipwreck narratives – the panicked men were frequently compared to wild animals (‘rabid tigers’, ‘hornets’, ‘wild-cats’) and pictured as stampeding, trampling, or baying. Within these narratives, the ship’s captain or commanding officers typically played the role of proposing or enforcing ‘women and children first’, by appealing to the moral sensibility of the men or, more commonly, by violence.

̽��ֱ��focus of shipwreck narratives was on men controlling other men, rather than on the role or fate of women at sea. As more ‘ordinary’ working men such as stokers came to replace the skilled sailors of older maritime traditions in the late 19th century, there was growing concern over the lack of purchase chivalry would have at sea. When the Titanic sank in 1912, there was no certainty that men would put women first. If ‘women and children first’ was insisted on and celebrated at that moment, this was because no one was sure that it would persist.

̽��ֱ��survivor reports of the Titanic sinking, which saw the loss of more than 1,500 lives, were variable: some stressed calm and women’s precedence, others talked of masculine selfishness and loss of control, particularly among immigrant or working class men. It was only after a few days that a consensus emerged; in the Titanic disaster, the papers began to argue, all men had put women first, whatever their class and ethnicity. This was a new departure in shipwreck narratives, and was an emphasis that was intended to counter the troubling feminist activism of this period.

̽��ֱ��Edwardians were confronting a new idea – that women might not want to be put first in shipwrecks; they might prefer equality, not only in rescues, but also in politics and labour markets. In the early 20th century, feminist and suffragist women were well aware that the myth of male chivalry during shipwrecks was used to exclude them from positions of power in politics and society. They responded to the Titanic disaster with the memorable slogan, ‘Votes for Women, Boats for Men’, stressing that women voters would put human lives above corporate profit in regulating the ocean liner companies. They emphasised the irony of putting women first in shipwrecks, only to exploit or exclude them systematically in other realms. And some suggested that the vulnerable – the weak, the elderly, the very young - should precede the strong, whatever their sex.

̽��ֱ��Edwardian media were forced to acknowledge that women might make their own choices. ̽��ֱ��choice of Mrs Isidor Strauss to remain with her husband on the Titanic was widely reported and respected – Edwardian women at sea were not just objects, but had some potential for making choices themselves. ̽��ֱ��more radical Edwardians noticed that there was a class bias against working class passengers surviving the wreck – the widespread celebration that women and children had gone first aboard the Titanic evaporated in the realisation that ‘women first’ might actually mean ‘ladies first’.

̽��ֱ��celebrations of the so-called ‘law of the sea’, ‘women and children first’ did not last very long after 1912. In the years after the Titanic’s sinking, the initial emphasis on universal male chivalry was replaced by a tendency to stress Italian or Southern European failures of chivalry among the Titanic passengers. ̽��ֱ��Daily Mail had reported just after the wreck in 1912 that: ‘There are only a few exceptions to the unvarying tales of heroism, and the exceptions are due to the excitement at the last moments in the steerage … three Italians who disobeyed the rule of the sea, ‘women and children first’, were shot down.’ This became a more prominent part of the story.

̽��ֱ��Costa Concordia is eerily echoing this emphasis in the media frenzy over the culpability of the Italian captain, who was reported to be flirting rather than at his post in the hours before the shipwreck. Whatever the investigation reveals, it is clear that shipwrecks have long been used as a jumping off point for asserting hierarchies of ethnic or gender difference; we must be careful not to allow ethnic stereotypes to be used uncritically. Nor should we take the past as a period in which values of chivalry and women’s precedence were widely agreed upon or practiced.

Lucy Delap is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Her paper “Thus does man prove his fitness to be the master of things”: Shipwrecks, Chivalry and Masculinities in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain’, appeared in Cultural and Social History, volume 3, 2006. Lucy’s book Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain was published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press in 2011.

Romantic notions of heroism - the captain refusing to leave his sinking ship, women and children being ushered to safety - have been shattered by reports emerging from the Costa Concordia. Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� academic Dr Lucy Delap sets last week’s tragic events within a historical context of shipwreck that encompasses changing perceptions of class and gender.

‘Women and children first’ was much more contested in the past than today’s news coverage would have us believe.

Sir Cam

Dr Lucy Delap

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Who mops the floor now? How domestic service shaped 20th-century Britain

amb206 — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:51:18 +0000

Throughout the 20th century, domestic service had a compelling presence in British economic, social and cultural life. For the first half of the century, it employed the largest numbers of women of any labour market sector in Britain. Predominantly female, these servants worked in other people’s homes, where they did not only the dirty work but also formed deep attachments to those they worked for, and lived out their lives under the same roof as their employers.

In Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� historian Dr Lucy Delap suggests that domestic service has not only survived the profound changes of two World Wars and the social revolution of the 1960s – but remains right at the heart of everyday British life, as increasing numbers of households juggle full-time work and demanding dual careers with parenting. Domestic service was no feudal or Victorian institution, but should be seen as thoroughly modern, constantly reinvented and remodelled as an integral feature of 20^th-century Britain.

̽��ֱ��upheavals of the First World War, combined with alternative work such as retail and clerical employment for women, saw a dramatic fall in numbers of residential servants. However, the interwar depression, state welfare policies and media pressure combined to push many women back into the domestic service sector in the 1930s. Nonetheless, many felt that the end was in sight and servants were increasingly unwilling to ‘live in’. Domestic service, J B Priestly had declared with breath-taking bluntness in 1927, was “as obsolete as the horse” in an era of motor cars.

After the Second World War, the popular press became preoccupied with a new concept for middle-class living: the servant-less home. This was a home in which labour-saving devices took the place of the people who had once cooked, mopped and scrubbed – and uncluttered furnishing styles promised to make cleaning quick and easy. Servants – whether imagined in rosy hues, or distrusted and demeaned– were apparently no longer needed. Far fewer working women chose this occupation, and it became dominated by informal cleaners, refugees and migrants, occupying new roles such as the ‘au pair’.

But middle class households were still permeated by talk of servants and how to live without them, while an unseen and largely unsung army of cleaners, nannies and au pairs continued to perform housework and childcare. And in the 1980s, as unemployment rose and the gap between rich and poor widened, numbers of domestic workers rose sharply again. As Margaret Thatcher advised an audience of professional women in 1990: “You have to seek reliable help—a relative or what my mother would have called ‘a treasure’.”

With the nomenclature used for those who served changing – from maid or the more colloquial Mary Ann to the more neutral ‘help’, and from mistress to ‘hostesses’ or ‘housemistresses’, ‘knowing their place’ became increasingly uncertain for all concerned. Nonetheless, the same negotiations of power, status and deference can be seen through the generations– for example, through the revealing issue of toilet paper. What quality of paper should one provide for staff? And what do they do with all that toilet paper anyway? These concerns caused as much angst in a 2005 thread discussing au pairs on the internet forum ‘mumsnet’ as in interwar households.

̽��ֱ��housewife identity which developed after the Second World War was accompanied by a rebranding of domestic work as ‘scientific’ or ‘household engineering’, as houses began to gain plumbing, and move to gas or electricity for heat and light. But the old practices (sweeping rugs with tea leaves, jugs of water for personal washing, the dolly and mangle for laundry) remained common well past the 1940s, and the modern devices purchased were often marketed as for use by servants, or evoked their haunting presence. It is no co-incidence that many of the appliances launched to fill these gaps had carefully chosen female names: the ‘Our Susan Mop’, the ‘Sheila’ Clothes Airer (still available), the Marigold rubber gloves that kept middle class hands soft and free of the smell of dirty dish water.

Countless British homes still featured dark basement kitchens and labour-intensive furnishings throughout the last century. Even avowedly modernist visions of the home were slow to evolve away from the idea of service, and depicted maids bedrooms and staff quarters. In 1930, Good Housekeeping presented the telephone as making domestic service more efficient: “the voice of the mistress can be clearly heard by the maid, who transmits her reply by telephone.” ‘Modern’ and ‘up-to-date’ inventions of the 1960s such as take-away food were marketed as aiming to “fill the gap left by the vanished race of servants”. ̽��ֱ��absent servants - who maintained a level of comfort and stability that allowed for professional careers and elaborate social schedules among middle class women - left holes behind them akin to ghosts.

Delap charts the encounters of servant-keeper and servant, seen from both points of view, by looking at three generations of women: those born in the late Victorian period, those entering adulthood after the First World War, and those coming of age after the Second World War. As the century unfolded, bringing with it the rise of the suburbs and new intimacies of family life, the home was the setting for an intimate drama, the housewife (a hotly debated term across the entire 20th century) negotiated the physical labour of running a house, and the symbolic meaning of such work. Delap argues that our relationship with domestic labour has never been just practical: “ ̽��ֱ��discomforts and encounters of domestic service have been taken to stand in for the ‘spirit of the times’. Domestic service has served as a foundational narrative among the stories British people tell about the last century and its changes.”

These households represented a huge diversity of environments and workplaces. Knowing Their Place describes the Edwardian Barnsley coal merchant who required his maid to take off his dirty boots and place his slippers on his feet; the dead infant found in the trunk of a servant of a working-class Hull family; the Birmingham bungalow in which a Second World War mistress attempted to impose an ‘upstairs, downstairs’ regime, despite the intimacy of her confined domestic space; the 1950s London Jewish home where master, mistress and servant all cooked and laughed together in the basement kitchen; the 1940s Rochdale suburban house where another Jewish family were ostracised by their neighbours for daring to take on a cleaner; the Hendon au pair forbidden from taking a biscuit from the plate she passed round to guests in the 1960s.

Fascinating for the contemporary reader is Delap’s detailed analysis of the shock and loss (and this is not to overdramatise the case) that middle class families felt at the absence, or much curtailed presence, of domestic service in the post-war years, when those brought up by nanny became expected to look after their own households . ̽��ֱ��necessity of “doing for oneself” had far-reaching social consequences that were reflected in the marketing of domestic gadgets and revised social conventions to disguise the lack of help, new models of child raising, new styles of cooking - the simple recipes ̽��ֱ��Times still referred to as ‘servantless dishes’ in 1970. And this also went with an intensifying frustration among middle class women, who rarely identified wholeheartedly with the housewife identity, and began to demand changes in the behaviour of their husbands.

Many women were not easily persuaded that housework was ‘scientific’ and satisfying. One mother of a large family, employing a ‘daily girl’ commented in the 1950s: “My own life at the moment seems a dull waste, a vale of (unshed) tears, an empty vessel, a froth of frustration… I am bored, bored, BORED.” It was partly this frustration that led to the rise of feminism in the 1970s. Nonetheless, the feminist movement rarely produced much fresh thinking on alternatives to domestic service. One servant wrote furiously to an Edwardian feminist advocate of cooperative living that “Methinks that this common ownership of domestic drudges would not be quite so satisfactory from the domestic drudge’s point of view.” Late in the 20^th century, Germaine Greer famously advocated in the Female Eunuch that feminists should live collectively in an Italian farmhouse, assisted by a live-in “local family”.

Being servantless was never embraced among the middle classes as a sign of modernity, but was something to be masked by elaborate subterfuge, clever interior design (serving hatches, lobbies and passages all acted as devices for separation and buffers to the odours of cooking), and a pretence that there was a cook in the kitchen and a maid to wait at table. In one example of the charade played out to disguise the absence of a maid, on hearing the door bell, the lady of the house would pick up her hat and gloves and appear to be going out just at that very moment, in which case propriety allowed her to greet her visitor herself.

Our enduring fascination for domestic service runs through literature, film, comedy pornography and popular history in contemporary Britain. Delap is intrigued by the rise of the domestic service costume dramas, reality TV series and heritage attractions, starting with Upstairs, Downstairs in 1971. Why did domestic service suddenly come to feature so prominently in our broadcasting and heritage houses? ̽��ֱ��erotic appeal of service – the imagined seduction, sexual vulnerability – is clearly part of this, and Delap charts the strong presence of domestic servants in pornography and erotica – from the Edwardian ‘what the Butler saw’ machine, to the 1970s Carry On Emmanuelle and more recently, Servants. Upstairs, Downstairs was originally written to show class inequalities, but the production company marketed it as revealing “a preponderance of frustrated females below stairs... love affairs of every sort were unrestrained”. Others wanted to see a nostalgic vision of a servant-keeping society where all ‘knew their place’. This meshed well with the 1980s conservative political mood.

More recent depictions of domestic service – Gosford Park, ̽��ֱ��Remains of the Day, ̽��ֱ��1900 House – have been less rose-tinted, and more interested in the emotional and physical demands of the job. ̽��ֱ��Remains of the Day depicted both servants and employers as scarred and stunted by their experiences of domestic service. But viewers have sometimes retained their nostalgia. With an apparent absence of irony, a London hotel took its employees to see the film in 1994, hoping to inculcate more deferential behaviour. One of the staff commented “It was so gracious the way the staff worked together… ̽��ֱ��butler was so at ease with himself, so professional. It does make you think you want to be like that.”

Lucy Delap is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain is published by Oxford ̽��ֱ�� Press, 2011.

From the fictional Downton Abbey to the modest suburban semi, domestic service has had a prominent role in the story, whether real or imagined, of British society over the past 100 years. In Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century Britain, Cambridge historian Dr Lucy Delap navigates the shifting drama played out in that most intimate and domestic workplace: the home.

̽��ֱ��discomforts and encounters of domestic service have been taken to stand in for the ‘spirit of the times’. Domestic service has served as a foundational narrative among the stories British people tell about the last century and its changes.

Dr Lucy Delap

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