Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue by Knight Lynn

Author:Knight, Lynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Published: 2011-06-11T16:00:00+00:00

The best domestic servants were supposed to be a hidden current running through the house, making its smooth running possible in all manner of unseen ways. At worst, you were ‘a menial, a nobody’. Even a cook, at the top end of the female scale, was part of that separate species, not reckoned to have thoughts or desires of her own. Unwritten rules governing boundaries and behaviour were understood by both sides; published guidance was also available. Domestic manuals included chapters on servants, mainly directed at employers, but, in Waiting at Table: A Practical Guide, Mrs C. S. Peel produced a whole volume of advice for the young women themselves: ‘Do not speak unless necessary… Do not breathe heavily. Move quietly but quickly… Do not rattle knives and forks.’ In other words: make yourself invisible. Jessie Mee could not to do that. She brought her own life and feelings into the house. In 1929, she was pregnant.

A pregnant young servant was hardly a rarity; this was the fate of many naïve young women, and domestic service, with its circumscribed hours and strict routine, is thought to have ensured that servants remained naïve longer than most. They were also desperate to get away and live their own lives instead of underpinning someone else’s. There was nothing unique about Jessie’s plight, but that did not make it any less real.

In 1929, a time when ‘immoral conduct’ usually secured instant dismissal, a woman of Jessie’s age and circumstances had few options. The NCAA wrote of finding live-in work for some of the young women who came to them, in households willing to take a mother and child, but there were very few of these jobs available. Few employers wanted a woman with a child, let alone a single woman with a baby. And think of the practicalities and the questions, the constant suspicion and pursed lips. The NCAA also suggested that, ‘when possible’, a young woman could stay in its hostel with her child, while engaged in domestic work elsewhere, but this would obviously provide only a temporary solution and ‘when possible’ manages to convey how infrequent a solution this was. Some welfare hostels took on unmarried mothers, but these placements usually came with a large dose of moral medicine.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.