Analysis Of The Crawley's 'Downton Abbey'

In March of 2016, millions of people tuned in to the series finale of the esteemed television program Downton Abbey. What captured the audience, myself included, was not only the story of the Crawley family, aristocrats who owned the sprawling Downton estate, but the men and women who served them. The narratives of Daisy the cook’s assistant and Anne, the lady’s maid weaved their way through the many tragedies and changes of the Crawley’s, a traditional family trying to adapt to the massive changes of the twentieth century. The public’s fascination with creeping down the stairs to the servant’s quarters has not been reflected in the study of domestic servants, according to Selina Todd in her article, “Domestic Service and Class Relations in
Women demanded the right to vote and for greater participation in society in the beginning and well into the twentieth century. However, one in four women in the interwar period worked in domestic service, and fifty percent of those women were under the age of twenty-five. Half of the young women of Britain did not work in unionized professions and instead faced the low wages of domestic work. These women could not vote and were unable to demand fair pay. As men, who returned to the jobs women filled during World War One, protested for better pay with the backing of politicians, young women were silently forced to work to the demands of their employer. As laws were created to protect workers who could organize, domestic servants often only had one day off a week and could not protest the same way. Though Todd notes that women often stayed detached and even defiant towards their mistresses as a way to claim independence, there were no ways to demand the regulation of domestic work. Women in domestic service were unable to assert themselves in the protests surrounding unfair hours and wages that other laborers could participate. As women continued to work in domestic servitude, the profession was written out of many labor narratives as well as shaped how the population saw domestic work: as a woman’s
As more middle-class households emerged, these wives believed that having a domestic servant was a symbol of their family’s wealth. Often though, these middle to upper-class women would be at odds with their domestic servant. Virginia Woolf battled with Nellie, her longtime servant, for decades often longing for a one-woman household with all the modern technologies. Often women did not know if they should treat domestic servants, unused to a position as employer. These blurred lines created frustration and anxiety for middle-class women, especially when similarities between themselves and their staff cropped up. Virginia Woolf was extremely disturbed to discover Nellie support the labor party as Woolf did. Woolf thought of herself as so different from her maid that the idea that the support the same political party was off putting. Woolf had no need to be concerned, Nellie was old and uneducated, but it opened the idea that young domestic servants could climb the social ladder into Woolf’s and other middle-class women’s positions. It was this anxiety as well as new domestic inventions that increased the frequency of part-time labor and ended most live-in staff positions. By limiting the amount of interaction they had with domestic servants, middle-class women worked to solidify their status in the