The Miserable Condition of Domestic Workers (1939)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1939 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following letter from a domestic worker. It needs no comment.

“Highgate, N.6.

"To The Socialist Standard.

"I am a domestic worker, a reader of your paper, and a Socialist, as far as one can live to an ideal.

“As such a worker I consider middle class employers to be part of the make up of the master class.

“After twenty-one years, working under this rotten system, I find people who employ one, two or three maids as much in fault for the tragic hell of the workers as Church, mill and factory owners.

“Domestic service is one of the vilest systems in existence, with its filthy snobbery and low-down meanness.

“The Labour and Communist parties shield the middle class, being part and parcel of it.

“The Socialist Standard writes of the exploited lives of the factory, mill, and shop worker. Yet one reads nothing of the tragic suffering and mental torture of the domestic worker. Although a body of workers not needed in a Socialist state, yet truly so in a capitalist one, where laziness and snobbery, especially in the female sex, thrive.

“Why should a seemingly decent paper forget the existence of a rotten system, namely, Domestic Service ?

                                                                                                               “Yours fraternally,

                                                                                                                                       “E. J.”