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“Our Serving Sisters”: Swedish-American Domestic Servants and Their Ethnic Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Joy K. Lintelman
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Extract

I have observed, heard, read, and believed that the respectable American girls who work will cheerfully slave and suffocate in a mill, factory, or big department store, or live almost any other kind of life, rather than grow healthy, fat, and opulent in domestic service. . . . How can my countrywomen, with their own living to make, be so blind to the butter side of their bread?

[Pettengill 1903: v]

American women’s disdain of employment in domestic service was common knowledge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the logic behind this disdain was not. Lillian Pettengill investigated why American women viewed domestic service so negatively. In her research, based upon actual experience as a servant, Pettengill found that a major complaint about domestic employment was the “social stigma” attached to it (ibid.: 366). More recent research on domestic service supports her findings. Katzman (1978: I4ff.) found that most American women viewed household employment negatively in large part because of its lack of prestige in American society. Young native-born white women refused opportunities for domestic work for fear that they would be looked down upon by friends, lose their social position, and be less attractive on the marriage market.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Science History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Fall 1991 , pp. 381 - 395
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1991 

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