Out Port Girls (Girls in Service)

 

                                          Out Port Girls (Bonavista Light), oil on canvas, 24" x 36', Steven Rhude

 

 'I can't think of anything the [maids] didn't do They got the coal, cleaned and washed and got the big copper pot boiling to wash the sheets with lye . . . . They had a regular routine for the housekeeping and cooking . . . . I was 5, 6, 7, 8; they were probably 17, 18, 19 but they seemed adult. They stayed for years, some of them, and usually left to get married.” So recalled Janet Story, a St. John’s nurse and nursing archivist, of her childhood years during the interwar era. Janet Kelly, a prominent city businesswoman, remembered that “almost everybody had maids. We did when I was a young kid. My father worked in St. Mary’s Bay, so we had a source, people who knew the family and would trust us with a young girl coming to St. John’s. It was not just the well-off had maids,” Kelly continued. “The middle class, if they could manage it at all, had a maid, because they weren’t paid much . . . . It was an opportunity for a young woman to get into St. John’s. It was one less mouth for a mother and father to feed.”1 While it was more difficult to find maids during and after the Second World War, as more opportunities for women’s paid labour emerged, a smaller stream of young women migrating from the outports for domestic work continued into the second half of the century.

- Out Port "Girls in Service": Newfoundland in the 1920's and 1930's

Linda Kealey, University of New Brunswick