Household Servants and Slaves

Household Servants and Slaves PDF Author: Diane Wolfthal
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300234872
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
The first book-length study of household servants and slaves, exploring a visual history over 400 years and four continents The first book-length study of both images of ordinary household workers and their material culture, Household Servants and Slaves: A Visual History, 1300-1700 covers four hundred years and four continents, facilitating a better understanding of the changes in service that occurred as Europe developed a monetary economy, global trade, and colonialism. Diane Wolfthal presents new interpretations of artists including the Limbourg brothers, Albrecht Dürer, Paolo Veronese, and Diego Velázquez, but also explores numerous long-neglected objects, including independent portraits of ordinary servants, servant dolls and their miniature cleaning utensils, and dummy boards, candlesticks, and tablestands in the form of servants and slaves. Wolfthal analyzes the intersection of class, race, and gender while also interrogating the ideology of service, investigating both the material conditions of household workers' lives and the immaterial qualities with which they were associated. If images repeatedly relegated servants to the background, then this book does the reverse: it foregrounds these figures in order to better understand the ideological and aesthetic functions that they served.

Household Servants and Slaves

Household Servants and Slaves PDF Author: Diane Wolfthal
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300234872
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first book-length study of household servants and slaves, exploring a visual history over 400 years and four continents The first book-length study of both images of ordinary household workers and their material culture, Household Servants and Slaves: A Visual History, 1300-1700 covers four hundred years and four continents, facilitating a better understanding of the changes in service that occurred as Europe developed a monetary economy, global trade, and colonialism. Diane Wolfthal presents new interpretations of artists including the Limbourg brothers, Albrecht Dürer, Paolo Veronese, and Diego Velázquez, but also explores numerous long-neglected objects, including independent portraits of ordinary servants, servant dolls and their miniature cleaning utensils, and dummy boards, candlesticks, and tablestands in the form of servants and slaves. Wolfthal analyzes the intersection of class, race, and gender while also interrogating the ideology of service, investigating both the material conditions of household workers' lives and the immaterial qualities with which they were associated. If images repeatedly relegated servants to the background, then this book does the reverse: it foregrounds these figures in order to better understand the ideological and aesthetic functions that they served.

Contemporary Slavery

Contemporary Slavery PDF Author: C. Nana Derby
Publisher: Rlpg/Galleys
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
This book investigates child domestic servitude in Ghana, showing the process of the children's recruitment into domestic servitude, revealing their working conditions, and detailing the methods of compensation. It seeks to answer the question of whether child domestic servants are contemporary slaves.

Out of the House of Bondage

Out of the House of Bondage PDF Author: Thavolia Glymph
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107394279
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 571

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Book Description
The plantation household was, first and foremost, a site of production. This fundamental fact has generally been overshadowed by popular and scholarly images of the plantation household as the source of slavery's redeeming qualities, where 'gentle' mistresses ministered to 'loyal' slaves. This book recounts a very different story. The very notion of a private sphere, as divorced from the immoral excesses of chattel slavery as from the amoral logic of market laws, functioned to conceal from public scrutiny the day-to-day struggles between enslaved women and their mistresses, subsumed within a logic of patriarchy. One of emancipation's unsung consequences was precisely the exposure to public view of the unbridgeable social distance between the women on whose labor the plantation household relied and the women who employed them. This is a story of race and gender, nation and citizenship, freedom and bondage in the nineteenth century South; a big abstract story that is composed of equally big personal stories.

Love, Wages, Slavery

Love, Wages, Slavery PDF Author: Barbara Ryan
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252030710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
"With the home the sacred center of social life in the nineteenth-century United States, few social tensions carried more weight than "the servant problem." As slavery tore at the nation, tension about domestic dependency became a heated topic to which publishers responded by producing a steady stream of literature instructing homemakers how to hire, treat, and discipline staff. In Love, Wages, Slavery, Barbara Ryan surveys an expansive collection of these published materials to chart shifts in thinking about what made a servant "good" and how servitors felt about attending non-kin, as well as changing ideas about gender, waged and chattel labor, status, race, and family life." "Love, Wages, Slavery examines the nature of "free" servitude before and after Emancipation through an in-depth comparison of negotiations of attendance and household management. Paying particular attention to women servants, Ryan traces a complex discussion as it developed in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly, Godey's Lady's Book, and Harper's Bazar."--BOOK JACKET.

A Slave in the White House

A Slave in the White House PDF Author: Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0230108938
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Chronicles the life of a former slave to James and Dolley Madison, tracing his early years on their plantation, his service in the White House household staff and post-emancipation achievements as a memoirist.

Social Attitudes During the Slave Regime

Social Attitudes During the Slave Regime PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 4

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Book Description


Hierarchies at Home

Hierarchies at Home PDF Author: Anasa Hicks
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780355128178
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The labor performed by Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery in 1886 to the radical revolution of 1959 did not just sustain the comfort and well-being of countless families: it also sustained a social pyramid that held servants themselves close to the bottom. “Hierarchies at Home” historicizes the tension between the legacy of enslavement and free labor by focusing on the field of domestic service, which I define as the paid labor of such tasks as childcare, cleaning, cooking, and laundering for private homes. In colonial Cuba, a large contingent of domestic slaves was one of the most important markers of wealth and status among elites, and slavery’s specter hung over service long after full abolition. Well into the twentieth century, landed Cuban families could proudly trace the ancestry of their families’ domestic servants through their own ancestors’ purchase of enslaved people.

The Maid Narratives

The Maid Narratives PDF Author: Katherine Van Wormer
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807149705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
The Maid Narratives shares the memories of black domestic workers and the white families they served, uncovering the often intimate relationships between maid and mistress. Based on interviews with over fifty people -- both white and black -- these stories deliver a personal and powerful message about resilience and resistance in the face of oppression in the Jim Crow South. The housekeepers, caretakers, sharecroppers, and cooks who share their experiences in The Maid Narratives ultimately moved away during the Great Migration. Their perspectives as servants who left for better opportunities outside of the South offer an original telling of physical and psychological survival in a racially oppressive caste system: Vinella Byrd, for instance, from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, recalls how a farmer she worked for would not allow her to clean her hands in the family's wash pan. These narratives are complemented by the voices of white women, such as Flora Templeton Stuart, from New Orleans, who remembers her maid fondly but realizes that she knew little about her life. Like Stuart, many of the white narrators remain troubled by the racial norms of the time. Viewed as a whole, the book presents varied, rich, and detailed accounts, often tragic, and sometimes humorous. The Maid Narratives reveals, across racial lines, shared hardships, strong emotional ties, and inspiring strength.

Hierarchies at Home

Hierarchies at Home PDF Author: Anasa Hicks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009083899
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Hierarchies at Home traces the experiences of Cuban domestic workers from the abolition of slavery through the 1959 revolution. Domestic service – childcare, cleaning, chauffeuring for private homes – was both ubiquitous and ignored as formal labor in Cuba, a phenomenon made possible because of who supposedly performed it. In Cuban imagery, domestic workers were almost always black women and their supposed prevalence in domestic service perpetuated the myth of racial harmony. African-descended domestic workers were 'like one of the family', just as enslaved Cubans had supposedly been part of the families who owned them before slavery's abolition. This fascinating work challenges this myth, revealing how domestic workers consistently rejected their invisibility throughout the twentieth century. By following a group marginalized by racialized and gendered assumptions, Anasa Hicks destabilizes traditional analyses on Cuban history, instead offering a continuous narrative that connects pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba.

The House Servant's Directory

The House Servant's Directory PDF Author: Robert Roberts
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
ISBN: 144944766X
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
“In order to get through your work in proper time, you should make it your chief study to rise early in the morning; for an hour before the family rises is worth more to you than two after they are up.” These are Robert Roberts’s first words to his readers in this classic resource for those employed as domestic servants. More household-management manual than cookbook, the book does contain recipes for making beer and punch, salad sauce, mustard, currant jam, syrups, and fruit-flavored waters of all kinds. There are directions for carving, marketing, choosing meats, fish and poultry, and preserving, and how to complete household chores successfully, clean everything in the house, behave properly, and prepare and serve food for family dinners and parties of all sizes. The book has suggestions for employers on how to manage domestic help (very unusual for the time), but Roberts was more interested in teaching young black men how to succeed in their work and ensure their advancement. This edition of The House Servant’s Directory was reproduced by permission from the volume in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. Founded in 1812 by Isaiah Thomas, a Revolutionary War patriot and successful printer and publisher, the society is a research library documenting the lives of Americans from the colonial era through 1876. The society collects, preserves, and makes available as complete a record as possible of the printed materials from the early American experience. The cookbook collection comprises approximately 1,100 volumes.