Ambika Natarajan's book is fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. The documentation on which Natarajan bases her examination of the cultural construction of the female domestic servant in and beyond Vienna across two centuries is massive and varied. The author draws upon police records, municipal council debates, and other official sources. She also relies heavily on political tracts and newspapers—both the staid and the sensationalistic varieties—as well as novels and plays and other literary sources. Departing from histories that emphasize Vienna's fin-de-siècle cultural modernity, the book emphasizes an arena of cultural persistence across social and political realms and across these varied sources: namely, understandings and representations of the itinerant maidservant that were rooted in laws and stereotypes dating from a century earlier. In short, her argument is that widely circulating cultural narratives of the servant—in particular, the young female servant who had migrated from the countryside to work in the city—persisted relatively unchanged between the eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries. The book documents this persistence, but its aim is larger: the servant narrative is a lens through which it examines how remnants of a premodern social, political, and gender order continued to plague and constrain both the circles of Vienna's liberal bourgeoisie and the state itself throughout the long nineteenth century. In other words, the weight of the past, and especially the continuing cultural and legal frameworks that shaped servants’ experiences and dominant portrayals of them, contradicts more typical contemporary and historical representations of Vienna as a center of cultural modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Natarajan introduces her argument in the introductory chapter by posing the question of “what it would mean for Viennese culture when the paternalism … that sustained the master-servant relationship was sacrificed for the individual autonomy of servants.” (2) Each chapter examines this tension through a different problematic, but the overall argument stresses that a focus on the female servant belies claims to the modernity claimed by the Viennese dominant classes and demonstrates their inability to let loose of the past, or at least some aspects of the past. The servant girl is the literal focus of the study, but she also serves as a lens through which to inspect the broader culture and its understandings of the individual and choices that individuals make. It should also be noted, however, that the book is not an effort to reconstruct the lives of servants but rather “the rhetoric attached to servanthood and instances of choice.” (15) This is decidedly an analysis of ideas in circulation; it is not a social history. And even though the author is interested in the servants’ perspectives and tries to read between the lines to understand them, she is fully reliant on sources produced by others to explain, count, contain, or express concerns about servants.

The chapters are organized chronologically and thematically. In each chapter, various sources are called upon the document the author's claims. Chapter 1 on “The Itinerant Maidservant,” introduces the book's argument that the establishment of an understanding of itinerant servants in the legal codes and cultural tropes established between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries formulated a relationship between master and servant which persisted into the early twentieth century. Compared with more local and varied statuses of migrant people of prior periods, the newer legal codes focused on more uniform policies and methods of policing. This chapter introduces the 1810 Servant Codes, to which the author refers frequently throughout the book, although the Codes’ specific provisions are never adequately summarized or analyzed. Natarajan offers intriguing introductions to and discussions of other kinds of early sources, such as Johann Rautenstrauch's 1781 satirical pamphlet Ueber die Stubenmädchen in Wien. This source first appears in Chapter 1 and comes up in later chapters as evidence of the recurrent stereotype of the migrant maidservant as overdressed, ambitious, and morally threatening.

The next chapter demonstrates the pattern of “cultural feminization” of the Viennese servant over the course of the nineteenth century as documented through a variety of sources. The author begins with the 1810 Codes and the new measures created to implement them, such as increased policing of the now legally free but always suspect itinerant servants upon which the Viennese bourgeoisie relied. Epitomizing the efforts to tame the necessary but suspect servants was the Dienstbotenbuch introduced in 1851, which was meant to track servants’ movements to and across the city and record their work experience. This discussion is followed by brief accounts of the activities of middle-class women's organizations, newspaper caricatures of servants, and exposés of mistreatment of servants. There is a brief analysis of Social Democratic journalism that highlighted servants in “victim stories.” The author introduces various dimensions of the feminization process—cultural, legal, institutional, and demographic—but, in the absence of a clear framing discussion of her methodological approach, it is often difficult to follow the analysis and discern an argument that consistently connects these various dimensions and sources.

Chapter 3 focuses on “demographic feminization” and the disappearance of male servants resulting from changing patterns of rural-to-urban migration and increasing numbers of female household servants, but also from the re-categorization of some types of male labor that removed them from the servant category. The author documents these shifts through (unfortunately, nearly unreadable) graphs based on a 1902 report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics as well as other sources such as complaints of organizations of male employees of cafés and restaurants, who were threatened by the influx of cheaper female labor, and also of business owners who wanted to simplify procedures for hiring immigrant women. The issues raised here are interesting and important, calling attention to the gendered resentments raised by the increasing female labor force in both household employment and in public spaces such as the cafés so often associated with Viennese modernism.

Chapter 4 focuses on another dimension of policing of servants—that undertaken by the medical profession in association with the state. Out of fear of disease, especially sexually transmitted diseases, medical professionals were recruited into the wide efforts to stigmatize, track, and monitor the itinerant servants closely associated in the public mind with prostitution. Here a whole new set of sources are introduced, ranging from records of the Imperial General Hospital to an 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play “Der Reigen” that centered on the spread of syphilis among its various characters.

Chapter 5 has a very broad title—“The Servant Question”—which suggests a move toward general findings to be drawn from the preceding chapters. However, Natarajan instead introduces another frame for examining political-cultural representation of servants and another set of sources. The chapter begins with a discussion of the concern over trafficking (“Mädchenhandel”) that circulated in various media and then moves on to argue that political organizations strategically adopted (indeed “weaponized”) the servant question by the late nineteenth century. She lumps together as “populists” far-right groups, Christian reformists, and Socialists, in one of the most confusing sections of the book. Her claim that all of these “populist” groups relied on common victim narratives ignores, for example, the language of agency that was so central to socialist and socialist-feminist rhetoric (if more problematic in practice) in Austria and across Central Europe.

The final chapter again takes up the question of the victim narrative so common in accounts of servants, in order to challenge it. As in other chapters, the author presents a series of fascinating case studies, although without articulating clearly how or why these cases were selected. More surprisingly, she relies heavily on cases that involved criminal actions by servants—including swindling and murder—to prove that servants could indeed exercise choice and agency. This may be an interesting twist on more typical use of evidence about political activism or other types of action to document agency, but it is a peculiar focus here, especially considering Natarajan's aim to contradict the stereotypes that associated servants with moral threat.

Throughout the book, the author presents intriguing new evidence about servants. Despite her aim to include servants’ perspectives, she is of course limited by available sources that mainly document the ideas and activities of those who sought to describe, interpret, control, or employ servants, rather than servants themselves. The book is based on vast and impressive research, but the author's efforts to use these sources to build a consistent and persuasive new interpretation of female servants—a social group that has long held special interest among historians of European women, families, and labor—are less successful. The author's overriding concern with pinning down and documenting a recurrent and persistent cultural narrative makes it hard for readers to connect the fascinating details she has uncovered with larger arguments about the history of class and gender relations or political developments in the Empire. The paradigm of the supposedly unchanging “cultural narrative” of the itinerant servant that, Natarajan argues, blinded Viennese to other ways of seeing servants, seems ironically to have limited the author's historical argument as well.