Articel Content
Immigrant, female, poor.
Text: Christoph Dieffenbacher
The maid in the white apron has had her day in service. More and more people, however, are being employed to work in households – 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.
From 1900 at the latest, paid domestic service became, for the most part, women’s work. 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.
From housemaid to care giver
It was only from the 1980s 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 «care givers» from Eastern Europe: immigrants who took care of the old and the ill, and who often lived with those they were caring for. Yet, the idea that paid domestic work had somehow entirely ceased to exist in the meantime, from the end of the war until the 1980s, is mistaken, says Basel historian Jennifer Burri: «Jobs in domestic service continued to exist as before after 1945, but their nature changed slightly.»
Job descriptions changed, and there was an element of professionalization. For many years an attempt was made to create enthusiasm for home economics among Swiss women, but a large proportion of domestic workers still came from abroad, either as foreign residents with annual permits or as cross-border commuters. A new departure in the 1960s and 1970s was the employment of young women as au pairs.
For her doctoral dissertation, Jennifer Burri is currently reviewing 160 dossiers in the state archives of Basel-Stadt, dossiers created between 1930 and 1980 by the immigration authorities of the time (the Fremdenpolizei). In those days, almost one third of domestic workers came from abroad, initially from neighboring South Baden and Alsace. After 1945, the number of women coming from France, Italy and Spain then increased, followed by influxes from former Yugoslavia and from Turkey. Their work permits were administered by the Fremdenpolizei in the various cantons and these authorities also recorded any problems regarding wages or working conditions.
Friday was washday
These files also offer valuable material to the historian, giving her direct insights into the everyday working life of service staff. She has identified a rich variety in the forms of domestic service – from permanent employment to casual cleaning women who helped only occasionally. Employers were not only from wealthy, middle-class families but also increasingly from families with small businesses. One interesting little note: «Almost without exception, Friday was the day when paid women came in to do the washing.» Among the domestic helpers, there were also au pairs from home and abroad and trainees in their apprentice year of home economics courses. There was plenty to do for everyone, but there were also alternatives: service staff often moved from private households to work in hospitals, care facilities, hotels or canteen kitchens where wages were better and regular work was guaranteed. As before, their work remained mostly unnoticed and unremarked.
The Fremdenpolizei dossiers are stored by date only and not according to names or content, and this presents a considerable hurdle to Burri’s work. As she explains, «I have to go through the dossiers one box at a time until I happen to come across information about domestic staff.» Then she collates the personal data and work histories. This gives rise to research questions: Where did the domestic workers come from, where did they work, how much did they earn and how long did they remain in a particular job.
18 months – then change job
Ever since World War I, there has been a consistently high demand for domestic staff throughout Europe. From early on, there was talk of «foreign infiltration through domestic service». One of Burri’s research findings has revealed a very high level of fluctuation in domestic service: on average, domestic servants in Basel remained in a particular job for only 18 months. «Over the years, domestic service stopped being seen as appropriate to the times,» explains Burri.
Contemporary sources also attribute the frequent job changes to the, often unpleasant, close living quarters and to the lack of private space. Changing jobs was often the only way for employees to defend their rights or improve their situation.
Hidden employment biographies
Through her research, Burri wants to shed more light on the still widely hidden world of these female domestic workers, to rescue their biographies from obscurity. «It’s true that many of us can still tell stories and share anecdotes from our own families,» says Burri, «perhaps about our grandmothers or great aunts who came to Basel as cooks or nannies when they were young.» Yet, there is a lack of research regarding this occupational group: until now, migration research has concentrated principally on male guest workers.
What is the situation today for domestic workers? Their employment situation can still be described as «precarious, peripatetic and predominantly female,» says Burri, who has also conducted research into the history of prostitution in Basel while studying History and Gender Studies. Female care workers in domestic employment are still among the most poorly paid. Their legal protection has improved but it is still not as good as that of other employees. This is because a household is not legally recognized as a place of work in Switzerland.
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