The Evolution of Housework and Women's Labor Roles

“No matter how hard you work or how capable you are, you can't do it all yourself. You have to seek reliable help.” Those were Margaret Thatcher’s words in 1990. Who are the ‘help’? How did they enable women to have successful careers? 

Ros Taylor talks to Lucy Delap and Emma Casey about how the servant died out after the two world wars – but domestic help never went away.

Lucy Delap is Professor in Modern British and Gender History at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Knowing Their Place: Domestic Service in Twentieth Century Britain.

Emma Casey is the author of The Return of the Housewife: Why Women are Still Cleaning Up. She is a reader in sociology at the University of York.

Voiceovers were by Seth Thévoz.

The Hoover ad (1987) is at The Laundry Lab YouTube channel.

The Findus Crispy Pancakes ad is part of a YouTube compilation.

I drew on Lucy Delap’s ‘Yes ma’am: domestic workers and employment rights’, Mistress and Maid at the Wiener Holocaust Library, Helen McCarthy’s chapter on feminism, family and work in The Neoliberal Age: Britain since the 1970s (UCL Press, 2021), Margaret Thatcher’s Pankhurst Lecture (1990), Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework (1974), and the University of Aberystwyth’s Domestics - Refugees from National Socialism in Germany.