Ambika Natarajan discusses her new book, Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914, which provides an account of Habsburg servant law since the eighteenth century and uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions and anxieties which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies.
Servants of Culture is about how poor, working-class women in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire underwent mass migrations from the countryside to urban centers for menial or unskilled labor jobs. It attempts to understand why the servant occupation during this period transformed from a previously gender-neutral career to one predominated by female rural migrants. It uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies. By doing so, it puts forth a neglected history of the state of domestic service discourse at the turn of the nineteenth century and how it shaped and continues to shape the surveillance of women.
For me, this book captures a moment of transition from the hard sciences to the humanities. Before I became a student of history, I was pursuing a PhD in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Michigan. It was in a bookstore in Ann Arbor one cold October afternoon that I found a book on a woman’s migration from India to a foreign land. It detailed how women in the past felt the experience of migration through their senses. The story captivated me so much that by May 2012, I withdrew from my doctoral studies in biomedical sciences eager to pursue history instead. I joined the doctoral program in the history of science at Oregon State University in 2014. There, I embarked on my own journey of self-discovery.
What got me interested in servants in the Habsburg Empire, in particular, was Jean-Étienne Liotard’s 1743 painting Das Schokoladenmädchen (The Chocolate Girl). The painting had an interesting American connection. In 1862, the American chocolate company Walter Baker purchased the rights from the Dresden Gallery to reproduce this painting. They ran an advertising campaign that featured the story of the chocolate girl. The girl in the painting, Anna, was a chamber maid. She caught the attention of a certain prince Dietrichstein and eventually the two married. The painting led me to many images, writings, stories, and criminal cases about Viennese maidservants. What intrigued me was that I had seen similar images, writings, commentaries, and cases growing up in Mumbai, India, where servants were ubiquitous in middle-class households. I had come across countless articles in newspapers and magazines that highlighted the treacherous, lazy, and gossipy nature of maidservants. My own experience with the women who worked in my family’s household was that they were hardworking, honest, and they simply did not have the time to gossip.
The extraordinary similarities in the language used to describe maidservants in two vastly disparate places and periods drew me into the world of Viennese servants. I discovered that by the late 1800s, there was hardly a piece of writing from Vienna in which the maidservant is not mentioned. I wondered why there was such a vibrant discussion on maidservants in nineteenth-century Vienna. The answer, it turned out, had to do with the 1810 Servant Codes. This set of laws, instituted by Francis I, remained unchanged for over a 100 years and governed master-servant relationships in the Habsburg Empire. These Codes incorporated many stereotypes about servants that had existed since medieval times. Stereotypes that suggested that servants were gossipy and wicked, and, like children, needed constant supervision.
Given the intensity of the debate about migrant servant women in nineteenth-century Vienna and the obvious parallels with present-day debates over immigration, I was surprised by the lack of scholarship on servants in the Habsburg realm. Domestic service was the principal driver of internal migration in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire and the single largest employer of migrant women in big cities. Recent scholarship in sociology and anthropology has demonstrated the crucial link between domestic service and migration. Yet, apart from a few works in the German language, there was hardly any scholarship in English on servants in the Habsburg Empire. I was particularly startled to find that what scholarship did exist gave little importance to women’s agency. Maidservants were always painted as victims of their circumstances. While many maidservants indeed worked in crippling economic and social situations, I wanted to highlight their capacity for self-determination. The victim narrative, as I termed it, did not empower these women. Rather they devalued the validity of their choices, ultimately infantilizing female adults. I provide this perspective on migrant women’s work and choice while recalling another experience of migration—my own.
About the Author:
Ambika Natarajan is a Research Associate at the University of Mumbai-Department of Atomic Energy Centre for Excellence in Basic Sciences, Mumbai, India. She has a PhD in history of science from Oregon State University and graduate degrees in biotechnology and English. She has taught courses in the history and philosophy of science, ethics, American religious history, and bio-statistics internationally.
SERVANTS OF CULTURE
Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914
Ambika Natarajan
Volume 34, Austrian and Habsburg Studies
366 pages, May 2023
Hb ISBN 978-1-80073-993-2 $145.00/£107.00
eBook 978-1-80073-994-9 $39.95/£31.95
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