The separation of the workplace and the home that marked the shift to industrial society led to a new ideology, one that sentimentalized the home and women’s role in it. The cultural idea that dictated a woman’s place was in the home, where she would create a haven for her family, began to develop in the early 1800s. It has been called the cult of domesticity, a phrase used to prescribe an ideal of middle-class, white womanhood that dominated the period from 1820 to the end of the nineteenth century.

The cult of domesticity and the elaboration of the middle-class home led to a major change in patterns of hiring household help. The live-in servant, or domestic, became a fixture in the North, replacing the hired girl of the previous century. In American cities by 1870, 15 to 30 percent of all households included live-in domestic servants, more than 90 percent of them women. Earlier in the mid-nineteenth century, native-born women increasingly took up other work and left domestic service to immigrants. In the East, the maid was so often Irish that “Bridget” became a generic term for female domestics. The South continued to rely on poorly paid black female “help.”

Servants by all accounts resented the long hours and lack of privacy. “She is liable to be rung up at all hours,” one study of domestics reported. “Her very meals are not secure from interruption, and even her sleep is not sacred.” Domestic service became the occupation of last resort, a “hard and lonely life” in the words of one female servant.

For women of the white middle class, domestics were a boon, freeing them from household drudgery and giving them more time to spend with their children, to pursue club work, or to work for reforms. Thus, while domestic service supported the cult of domesticity, it created for those women who could afford it opportunities that expanded their horizons outside the home. They became involved in women’s clubs as well as the temperance and suffrage movements.