Maids for everything

Until recently, no better-off household could do without them. The maids were in charge of heating, fetching water, cooking, shopping, laundry - all this and much more every day. Their hard work was invisible. No one thought to question the subordinate position of poor women. Perhaps your great-grandmother, like hundreds of other girls, left her large family in the village to relieve it and went to the city to try her luck. For her, working as a maid meant at least a small opportunity to improve her life. Learning how to take care of the household, but also how to behave and move around in the city. Along the way, she dreamed of finding a groom, and maybe then she would be the lady of the house. But the reality was often much harsher. Already at the station, the inexperienced girls were met by pimps who offered them a quite different "service". But they were not without risks in their homes, where they were at risk of sexual harassment and, in the case of pregnancy, being thrown out on the street. Prague, Cracow or Vienna - in all Central European cities the situation of maids for everything was similar. In the household, they were the first to get up and the last to go to bed, and most of the time they did not even have a place to sleep comfortably and with dignity, wash or leave their personal belongings. On top of that, hard work with no free time, low earnings and dependence on the mood of the lady of the house. It was only gradually that societies began to emerge which sought to educate servants or protect them from the pitfalls of the cities. To this day, little is known about these hidden histories of forgotten maids. The Polish reporter Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak has managed to find gems in public and family archives, period press and various publications that give us a much better idea of what life was really like for maids. She recorded some anecdotal advice on how a maid should behave and dress, complaints from housekeepers, authentic advertisements or articles from the Black Chronicle. The letters are touching and show that there were also instances where a close and cordial relationship developed between the maid and the family in which she worked. Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak's historical reports, Maids for Everything and Rural Women, which focus on the harsh lives of women in the countryside, have become bestsellers in Poland and sparked a debate about whether we know the fate of our own great-grandmothers. In the luxurious Bankowiec in Gdynia, an apartment building for employees of the Land Bank, built in 1938, the service rooms were very small, regardless of the living space. In a 60.65 square meter apartment, the maid's room is 4.25 square meters, while in a 98 square meter apartment, the maid's room is 5.65 square meters. But they all have windows and built-in wardrobes. A maid working in a bank apartment building doesn't have to keep her two dresses in her briefcase. Maria Dąbrowska, a leftist writer committed to social issues, writes in Dziennik (Diaries) on 9 August 1918 during a trip: "Who would have thought that without a maid, alone or alone in an apartment, without any services of people from the so-called the lower layers, it's so nice. The servants bring a strangely alien element into the house." The maids complain about the stone floor, which causes rheumatism, the dusty pavements, where they have to climb a ladder and often hit their heads. The young maid writes that she sleeps in the damp and has great pain in her hands. He's calling desperately: "I'm twenty-two. What will become of me in my old age?" - excerpts from the text