Writer and reformer, feminist, unionist (and Marxist) Clementina Black wrote pointedly during her lifetime about the class inequities of domestic service, believing that subservience, as a state of being, was both degrading and intolerable.

The servant is despised,
she wrote, not because she cooks, or scrubs, or nurses a baby, still less because she has to yell obedience to orders—every factory worker has to do that in working hours—but because she consents to put herself at some other person’s beck and call.

A century ago, Black, along with others (including the social historian and statistician Lucy Salmon Maynard) was a harsh critic of the dehumanizing conditions within which domstic workers were obliged to work. The popular literature of the day, meanwhile, emphasized only the employer's needs, which trumped everything.

One such volume—The Servant's Practical Guide (1880) makes this value proposition overwhelmingly clear. The nameless author, referred to only as "a member of the artistocracy" and who would go on to write Manners and Rules of Good Society (1916) explains:

Without the constant co-operation of well-trained servants, domestic machinery is completely thrown out of gear, and the best breed of hostesses placed at a disadvantage.