Migration and Domestic Service: Past and Present Trends in Quebec and Ireland (MUSSI Working Paper Series no. 8)

During the nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, middle and upper-class households extensively employed servants, maids and nannies. Domestic service was an institution of considerable cultural significance and a vital element of middle-class domesticity, including in Quebec and in Ireland. Bradbury and Myers argued that in the 1830s in Montreal, for instance: “Bourgeois understandings of gender and marriage, in which a leisured wife was supported by her husband and freed from hard labour through the work of domestics, were spreading.”2 Irish middle class households were no different. Domestic servants were an integral part of the social fabric of Irish history