Domestic Service

Madam Strachan's maids, 1885

Men employed in skilled trades were the main group to gain from the Eight Hours Movement. Women's working hours remained much longer than men's and their wages were much lower. Women workers were generally employed as domestic servants, in clothing factories and as piece-workers at home.

Domestic servants were poorly paid and worked long hours. Even by the 1890s most servants were still working around 14 hours a day. Sarah Harrison, an immigrant servant writing home in 1884, described her working day:

I rise at half past five and they have breakfast by half past six and some at seven. . I generally finish about eight o'clock except when the boys clothes want mending.

In 1885, the author of a book on household management advocated a shorter working day for domestic servants. Men and How to Manage Them: A Book for Australian Wives and Mothers recommended a ten hour working day for servants, starting at half-past six (or five o'clock on washing days) and going to bed at half-past ten, with a six-hour break:

Melbourne Punch cartoon, 1859

Now by these arrangements you will get an average of ten hours steady work every weekday out of a servant . . . Have you the slightest right to any more? If your husband has to work ten hours a day does he not make all Australia ring with his hardships? . . . You get by this arrangement ten hours work everyday, and, say, five or six on Sunday. Do you pay so much, so very much, if you give a girl 12 or 14 shillings a week and plain food for this amount of labour.

But this was a controversial view, and many letters were sent to newspapers opposing such laxity. The author responded:

I see that the journeymen bakers have decided not to allow two hours extra work now exacted on Fridays - '8 hours should be the limit of a day's work, as 8 hours' work was considered quite enough for any man.' If it is enough for any man, it is enough for any woman.