Female Servants in 18th Century England

With the enlightenment period, the status of women started to be discussed among the philosophical circle. In most of the articles, the term “women” is generic to a middle class housewife which constituted the majority of the female population. At the same time, other significant fraction of females who were working in lower status occupation like working for other’s household by being a scullion or domestic servant are hardly mentioned. In order to achieve a complete picture of conditions of women in those days, it is necessary that all the significant portions of females in that era be represented.
Situation
In order to understand the significance of learning the situation of female servants in 18th century England, we can look at some of the figures from the contemporary era. Between 1574 and 1821, it is estimated that servants of all type made up 13.4 percent of the English population. We can also get more accurate data from 1851 Occupational Census, according to which, there were about 905,000 women servant and the occupation accounted as the most important for women.

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