What is it about?
Eliza Oldham (c.1820–92) worked as a general maid in Rochdale and Halifax from the 1840s to the 1870s. A set of her letters to a wealthy relation of two of her employers, Helen Priestman Bright Clark (1840–1927), has been preserved, indicating their close friendship. This article asks what kind of friendship was possible in such a socially and economically unequal relationship, and what it might tell us about class identities and class contest. It locates the basis of this friendship in the emotional labour involved in domestic service, alongside the complex intersection of work, family and community life with larger arenas of radical and gender politics.
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Why is it important?
It is rare to find such a set of letters from a servant, and especially ones addressed to someone of a different social standing and closely related to each of her employers. The basis of the friendship is revealed in a shared love for particular people, a shared involvement in and care for a larger community, a shared family history in local radical movements, and a contemporaneous shared activism for social reforming women's rights.
Perspectives
So much of social history necessarily deals in aggregates of one sort or another for it is generally not possible to find out much about particular individuals among 'the common people', their thoughts, beliefs, motivations and actions. Letters are often intensely personal and may provide a window onto the more intimate aspects of a life. Eliza Oldham lived at a time when the exchange of letters became far more accessible for people with her scarce resources. The picture gained through such sources may then be further elaborated through following the new kinds of records that began to be kept in this same period: registration of birth, marriage and death; the censuses taken ever decade with place each individual with a household, and reveal something of their family relationships and the neighbours they lived among. By such methods it is possible occasionally to recover something of the lives of those who might otherwise remain 'Hidden from History', and how they related to the larger issues of their times.
Sandra Stanley Holton
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Friendship and Domestic Service: the letters of Eliza Oldham, general maid (c.1820–1892), Women s History Review, December 2014, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2014.975498.
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