The maid in the white apron has had her day in service. More and more people, however, are being employed to work in households β mostly women paid a small wage. A Basel historian is investigating how paid domestic work developed during the 20th century.
Cleaning, washing, cooking, making fires, lugging boxes, looking after children, caring for the sick: Hard, exhausting work, and long days with little time off was once the lot of domestic servants. Ready to serve from morning until night under strict observation and at the mercy of the whims of their employers, their masters.
Support staff were employed not only in the homes of the middle classes but also in commercial settings or on farms. In Basel alone there were, at times, thousands of women employed to wash, iron, cook, clean, or employed as nannies, nurses or carers. After World War II, however, they were hardly to be seen openly: Thanks to new devices such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners, it seemed that housemaids were now superfluous.
At the same time, more and more women were starting to work outside the home. It was only from the s on that society started to really see the presence of service personnel again, this time in the form of immigrants.
Increasingly, media and social science studies also reported on what were now referred to as Β«care giversΒ» from Eastern Europe: immigrants who took care of the old and the ill, and who often lived with those they were caring for.
