A maid, housemaid, or maidservant is a female domestic worker. In the Victorian era, domestic service was the second-largest category of employment in England and Wales, after agricultural work. In developed Western nations, full-time maids are now typically only found in the wealthiest households. In other parts of the world (mainly in Asia), maids remain common in urban middle-class households.
Maid in Middle English meant an unmarried woman, especially a young one, or specifically a virgin. These meanings remained persistent in the English language until recent times (and remain familiar in literature and folk music), alongside word's sense as a type of servant.
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Description
Maids perform typical domestic chores such as laundry, ironing, cleaning the house, grocery shopping, cooking, and caring for household pets. They may also take care of children, although there are more specific occupations for this, such as nanny. In some poor countries, maids take care of the elderly and people with disabilities. Many maids are required by their employers to wear a uniform.
In the contemporary Western world, comparatively few households can afford live-in domestic help, usually relying on cleaners, employed directly or through an agency (maid service).
Many services historically provided by maids have been substituted with home appliances.
In less developed nations, various factors ensure a labour source for domestic work: very large differences in the income of urban and rural households, widespread poverty, fewer educated women, and limited opportunities for the employment of less educated women.
Legislation in many countries makes certain living conditions, working hours, or minimum wage a requirement of domestic service. Nonetheless, the work of a maid has always been hard, involving a full day and extensive duties. Maids would be familiar with hard work and typically worked long hours in a week.
By location
Europe
Maids were once part of an elaborate hierarchy in great houses, where the retinue of servants stretched up to the housekeeper and butler, responsible for female and male employees respectively. It was the most common way that women could earn money, especially lower-class women. Domestic workers, particularly those low in the hierarchy, such as maids and footmen, were expected to remain unmarried while in service. They sometimes had their own section of rooms in the house, though they were often far away from the other rooms and more simply furnished than the rest of the house.
In Victorian England, all middle-class families would have employed staff, but for most small households, this would be only one employee, the maid of all work. Some households employed maids-of-all-work as young as twelve in 19th-century England. They often worked from five in the morning until late in the evening on a wage of £6 to £9 per year. They typically only had one or two days off in a month.
Historically, many maids suffered from prepatellar bursitis, an inflammation of the prepatellar bursa caused by long periods spent on the knees for purposes of scrubbing and fire-lighting, leading to the condition attracting the colloquial name of "housemaid's knee".
As the end of the 19th century neared, the relationship between employer and servant changed. By the end of the nineteenth century, there was a decline in the demand for domestic staff entirely.
Maids traditionally have a fixed position in the hierarchy of the large households, and although there is overlap between definitions (dependent on the size of the household), the positions themselves would typically be rigidly adhered to. The usual classifications of maid in a large household are:
Lady's maid: a senior servant who reported directly to the lady of the house, but ranked beneath the housekeeper, and accompanied her lady on travel. She took care of her mistress's clothes and hair, and sometimes served as confidante.
House-maid: a generic term for maids whose function was chiefly "above stairs", and were usually a little older, and better paid. Where a household included multiple housemaids, the roles were often subdivided as below.
Asia
An ayi (aunt in Mandarin) works as a domestic helper in China, and occasionally provides personalized childcare.
Middle East
In the history of slavery in the Muslim world, domestic servitude was one of the driving forces behind the slave trade.
The ideal of Islamic sex segregation made it difficult for free Muslim women to work as servants, at the same time, the sex segregation made it difficult for male servants to access the harem women's quarter of the house, resulting in difficulty in Muslim women to have access to domestic servants.
This dilemma resulted in the Muslim world using house slaves for domestic servants rather than free servants. By Islamic law, slaves owned by Muslims were to be foreign non-Muslims (kafirs) who were by definition legitimate targets for enslavement, since the Muslim world of dar al-islam was by definition at war with the non-Muslim world of dar al-harb ("House of War").
Female slaves were thus not subjected to the same Islamic customs. It also made it possible for male slaves to be made eunuchs. This solved both the dilemma of female servants being able to work in the household of a family as well as for a male servant to enter the women's quarter of a home.
The slave trade to the Muslim world prioritized women and children, though men were also trafficked.
In bigger households there were typically a mix of male and female house slaves.
In the Islamic world, female slaves were normally purchased for one of two reasons: for the purpose of sexual slavery as concubines or as domestic servants, and used for service in the harems.
Women domestic slaves were purchased to perform chores for the sex segregated women in the harem.
Women domestic slaves were used for all sorts of household chores normally performed by women, and could also be sent outside of the harem to perform tasks for the harem women in the city outside of the home.
Southern Africa
In some areas in the region, the word "maid" is avoided and is often referred to as a "helper" instead. This is most likely due to the fact that it sounds like a racially derogatory term in Afrikaans. The Afrikaans word for a mite (small arachnid) has been used demeaningly to refer to women of colour. The English word for a friend, "mate", is also avoided for this reason. Maids in South Africa were referred to as domestic servants and they included men, women, and children. They were subject to low wages, lack of a social life, unfavorable working conditions, and unaccommodating work hours.
In popular culture
One of the most in-depth and enduring representations of the lives of several types of maid was seen in the 1970s television drama Upstairs, Downstairs, set in England between 1903 and 1936. The lives of maids were well represented in the Downton Abbey series, set in England between 1912 and 1926 and shown from 2010 onward.
The American television drama The Gilded Age, set in the 1880s in New York City, depicts the lives of maids living and working in the great houses of the era.
The main characters in the NAMIC Vision Award-nominated television series Devious Maids are four housemaids.
