In her wonderfully readable survey of the social and cultural history of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain, Lucy Delap strives to restore agency to workers sometimes depicted as completely exploited and marginalized. Employing large numbers of oral histories and memoirs, Delap crafts an intriguing interpretation that encompasses not only live-in servants but also neglected charwomen, nannies, au pairs, and daily cleaners, from the Edwardian period to the present, and in working- and middle-class homes as well as large country houses.

Delap writes to counter interpretations of domestic servants that portray them as oppressed working-class women deluded by false consciousness into a sense of identification with their employing families. She argues that domestic servants’ experiences were too diverse to be shoehorned into any single interpretation. Many servants, for example, did not see themselves primarily as servants. Such work was only a stage in the life cycle, with other periods spent doing other jobs, caring for family members, or marrying and raising their own families. While girls raised in institutions almost automatically became domestic servants, others had their own reasons for pursuing service jobs. Some women were pushed into such jobs by tyrannical mothers or through lack of ambition, but others took cleaning jobs willingly because they saw them as opportunities for self-making.

The oral histories Delap mines emphasize that servants could experience happiness on the job, cultivate close relationships with other servants or sometimes with employing families, or feel a sense of accomplishment about a well-cooked meal or a gleaming staircase. Unfortunately, the reader does not learn much about the nature of a servant’s daily routine. This tends to minimize the physicality of servants’ tasks: hard labor over long hours, much of it performed on hands and knees in ways that took an enormous toll on the body. The chores that a domestic servant or cleaner performed were arbitrary, repetitive, and not structured by her own desires.

Although Delap seems unenthusiastic about class as a structuring concept, she does show that domestic servants experienced a relationship of unequal power with their employers. Servants were subject to surveillance; they had no right to a “private sphere.” Right through the 1930s, they depended on employer references for obtaining subsequent jobs in ways that limited their autonomy on the job. Female domestic workers were usually ignored by the male-dominated trade unions and failed to organize successfully even when the Trades Union Council attempted to do so. But they were not ciphers, either. They sought to assert their autonomy in ways that will be familiar to historians of American slave resistance: working slowly, pretending not to understand orders, and practicing small acts of sabotage.

While the aristocracy and gentry had been bred in the ways of servant-keeping in the nineteenth century, many twentieth-century middle-class women presided over single-servant households. Such women were very unsure about how to interact in a domestic employment relationship, but they were also unwilling to discard the defining role of household manager or to take on domestic drudgery rather than a public role. Accommodating these new realities, interwar housing stock was constructed with “servantlessness” in mind. Families received help from a patchwork of sources, including legally unprotected au pairs from elsewhere in Europe, cleaners who came once or twice a week, nannies, and mother’s helpers. While this transformation of the domestic workplace is discussed from the perspective of the employer, Delap could have said more about the way cleaners’ experiences of their jobs changed after the Second World War, when laborsaving devices were widely available.

After this excellent and in-depth social history, Delap abruptly shifts her focus to consider the discourses of domestic service in comedy and sexuality. She shows that music-hall servant characters, newspaper cartoons, and radio and television characters aimed at an employer-class audience portrayed servants and cleaners as risibly socially aspirant or as humorously naive. Humor was a site for working out uncomfortable relationships between servants and employers, but mostly at the servants’ expense. The sexual discourse about servants was even more culturally dominating than the comedic discourse. As they had in the nineteenth century, employers of servants projected their fantasies on their household help, voyeuristically monitored their romantic activities, or portrayed them as animalistic and close to nature (Lady Chatterley’s gamekeeper springs to mind). Domestic servants may have disliked being objectified, but their relative lack of power, the very factor that made them such popular objects of sexual objectification, prevented them from encoding themselves differently.

Finally, with a nod to the growing importance of memory studies, Delap explores the way in which the heritage industry has reshaped the public memory of domestic service. Shows like Upstairs, Downstairs and Edwardian Country House (Manor House in the United States) have overwritten the cultural meanings of domestic service, replacing the real experiences of individuals with scripted story lines. Living history programs at country houses give visitors the chance to handle artifacts and form their own impressions, but such imaginative acts hide the links between past experiences and those of current-day house cleaners and nannies.

Knowing Their Place relies to a great extent on oral histories and memoirs written by older people about their younger years. Although she touches on this issue very briefly, Delap might have considered to a greater extent the way in which nostalgia and self-justification shape personal narrative and the implications this might have for her interpretation. Delap also could have said more about race and domestic service since, while servants of color were common throughout the Empire, they appear to have been resented and discriminated against within Britain itself. Neither of these small caveats should be taken to dilute the overall message: Knowing Their Place is that rare historical monograph that is a pleasure to read from beginning to end. It has the potential to be valuable in different ways at many levels of scholarship: to researchers in the fields of labor history and of women’s history, in graduate seminars, and in the undergraduate classroom.