Fall 2007, Volume 100 Number 2

Our thinking about the history of domestic service in Newfoundland tends to focus on those contexts where young women were "shipped" to provide housekeeping, childcare, and other services to rural fishing families, often from within or very close by the communities in which they served. Less attention has been paid to domestic service in larger industrial centres to which women migrated from more distant communities. At the same time, consideration of issues like work and labour force recruitment in such centres is often limited to the industrial workplace itself and to the male workers employed there. The central Newfoundland town of Grand Falls during the first half of the 20th century presents a context in which other forms of domestic service and labour recruitment emerged and an opportunity to examine a relatively neglected aspect of Newfoundland history and the role of domestic service and female workers in that history.

Prior to the opening of a massive pulp and paper mill and construction of a company controlled town by the British-owned Anglo- Newfoundland Development Company (ANDCo) in 1909, Grand Falls was little more than a site on the Newfoundland wilderness. By the 1930s, the Company had established control over large portions of the island's central and eastern regions, creating what it described as a "country within a country" and transforming wilderness into "hives of industrial activity."

The effect on the area's communities and people was rapid and far-reaching. Several communities emerged or were radically altered as a result of the Grand Falls operation. Drawn by the prospect of a "Grand Falls Job," a term that came to be applied to any desirable job — in Grand Falls or elsewhere — many men came to Grand Falls to work in the mill, in logging or in construction. One resident of the northeast coast town of Lewisporte observed in 1933 that the mill at Grand Falls "took our people away from the fishery." Grand Falls was a closed town, meaning that one had to have a company house to live there and to get a company house one needed a permanent job in the mill. During the interwar years, however, there was surplus labour on the island; barriers to outmigration (the usual strategy) meant that many of the traditional routes of labour migration were being drastically altered. The migration of labour to Grand Falls was part of this shift in orientation.

Internal Migration

Of those men and their families that moved to Grand Falls during this period, many were part of the core permanent workforce that arrived before 1921. Some of these were from places that had been experiencing a drastic decline in their fisheries (such as Placentia Bay and the northern shore of Conception Bay). Others came from areas that had relied partly on mining and small-scale sawmilling, sectors also generally in decline around the time the Grand Falls mill was built. For example, former mining communities in Notre Dame Bay, such as Tilt Cove, Little Bay, and Pilley's Island, supplied a substantial number of migrants to Grand Falls in the first decade of the mill's operation. The communities that continued to supply most migrants to Grand Falls into the 1920s and throughout the 1930s were generally close to the town, such as those in Bonavista and Trinity Bays. These communities had also begun to experience a decline in a number of traditional economic activities at this time such as small-scale agriculture, fishing, and small-scale sawmilling. Few migrants came from the Burin Peninsula, the South Coast and the West Coast, or the Northern Peninsula.

The town also drew women from around Newfoundland to work as domestics in the homes of Grand Falls. Just a decade or so after the mill opened, there were over 100 women occupied in this capacity, and twenty per cent of Grand Falls' nearly 600 households employed a domestic servant. By 1935 there were about 150 domestics in Grand Falls, but that had fallen to under 100 by 1945.

Two characteristics that remained constant throughout this period were that the vast majority of these women were young (78 per cent were between 16 and 22 years old) and single. Most of them earned cash wages, although some of them worked for payment in kind. All of the domestics working in Grand Falls during the interwar years were in-migrants from elsewhere and lived-in the households for which they worked (through the late 40s and 50s, live-out arrangements became more common). Unlike daughters of mill workers who could find work in offices or retail outlets, teaching positions, and as tailoresses or as post office clerks (while living at home), female inmigrants were usually restricted to domestic service.

Employers of Domestics

At Grand Falls, domestics were employed by families from all social groups, including management, business owners, professionals, and skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. Others were employed in accommodations for groups of workers or at the company's Staff House. It is noteworthy that only a very small portion (less than five percent) of domestics worked in the homes of the highest socioeconomic strata; most were employed in the homes of mill workers — skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled. In most cases the family for which they worked was from Newfoundland, though highly skilled workers such as paper makers, machinists and others tended to be from elsewhere (at least in the early decades of production).

Those domestics employed by mill workers usually learned of employment opportunities in Grand Falls or were recruited there through informal means, such as word of mouth and personal interaction. Birthplace information on domestics in 1921 and 1945 shows similar patterns. Former domestics and their employers stress the role that family and community links played in this process. One mill worker recalled how his mother found household help: "We belong to Gambo and if we were looking for a servant girl we went to Gambo. (If) somebody out in Gambo had a daughter of working age they sent them in and they'd rather send them into someone they knew. In a lot of cases we used to get our own relatives." One woman described how connections through mill workers also played a key part in recruitment and migration:

Many men came from Fortune Harbour to work in the mill in the beginning. If they had relatives they would come in and leave their families home and a lot of their daughters came and they could stay in the workmen’s hotel and go back. I have a lot of friends who came from Fortune Harbour. The same was true for Placentia, a lot of their nieces would come here from Placentia and they would tell their sisters. They got to know, too, you see, and it spread that way.

However, the recruitment process differed among the town's more elite households. In these cases the female head of the household often recruited domestics through more formal means, such as newspaper ads. For example, in 1937 the wife of a mill engineer with one child advertised for a "girl for general housework," while the wife of the general manager expressed a need for a "girl" who could "sew, knit and who was fond of children."

Domestic's Perceptions of Grand Falls

While women had a number of motivations for going to Grand Falls including a sense of adventure, searching for a marriage partner, or out of economic necessity to their families, their doing so must be viewed a part of a tradition that was deeply embedded in patterns of work and integral to the survival of the rural household. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was common for young women to leave home at a young age to perform domestic and fishery-related tasks in households near their parents. After working near their parents' house, many of these women would then go to work in houses in St. John's, or they would leave the island to work as domestics in places like New York, Boston, and Montreal. The decisions of individuals to leave home for work in another place (whether temporary or permanent) were not made in isolation from their families' needs and dynamics. Where they went, for how long, and if they returned, depended on the economy of where they lived at a specific time, and other factors, such as their age, marital status, and skills. The economic pressures in their home regions that prompted men to move to Grand Falls for work also came to bear on women and influenced their
decisions about going to Grand Falls. For the most part they had gained a number of soughtafter housework skills in their rural homes; as one Grand Falls employer remembered, "They were girls who knew all about everything in a house."

The stories former domestics told about arriving in Grand Falls highlights these patterns of migration and the confidence that many of them had in their ability to do housework. At the age of 22, Marissa L. reached the company town by freight train in the winter of 1929; she had made previous arrangements for a situation through her uncle:

I knew no one in there [Grand Falls] only my uncles. But that didn't bother me much. I knew where I was going to work…And my work was there for me…and I knew what I had to do…I did the work before…when I did it I did it right.

Marissa L. had already worked in three rural households other than her own when she moved to Grand Falls. Similarly, when Margaret C. (born in Winterton) arrived in Grand Falls she had worked as a domestic in St. John's and had similar first impressions upon arrival:

I didn't know anything about it [Grand Falls] but I come, must have been me nerve I guess. The friend who invited me down, I knew her, that's all. But Grand Falls was only a small place then, Beaumont Ave. was only rocks. I had it [the job] when I come. I came in from the Station on horse and sleigh the 6th of January [1929] and I've been here ever since.

Despite their confidence in the work and the connections that many of them had to each other and to relatives living in the town, former domestics noted the isolation that sometimes came with the job: "A child going in or anybody like me, a servant girl, would have to sit in the kitchen and other people would go in the kitchen and other people would go in the living room."

After Service

After working as domestics in Grand Falls, most women went back home and married their boyfriends from childhood, sometimes even after working in service for 10 or 15 years. For example, Stella B. left her situation in Grand Falls to get married at the age of 24. One Fall in early 1930, after making her annual visit home, she told the family for whom she worked that she was getting married to her boyfriend from home: “I knew my husband for years before I went in there [Grand Falls]. I couldn’t have another boyfriend, I liked him too well. I didn’t want nobody after I got in with him.”ix A large number of domestics met their future husband in Grand Falls. Depending on the status of their new husbands within the town, many of them followed their husbands elsewhere. Another common pattern was for domestics to marry mill workers and stay in Grand Falls. These women became long-time residents of the town; many of them hired domestics after they married. One woman spoke of how her experience as a domestic influenced her approach as an employer: “I had to treat them like I’d like to be treated…I knew what it was like. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt their feelings or put obstacles in their way, I wouldn’t do that.”x

Conclusion

Several communities were transformed very quickly by the construction of mill towns like Grand Falls, and the migration of domestic servants in and out of these towns was a more hidden impact. The migration of domestic servants to Grand Falls in the interwar years was stimulated by a combination of factors, including the pull of the town, push factors within the rural economy, family dynamics within the rural household, and chain migration. This story also highlights a pattern of thousands of women who grew up in coastal communities during the interwar period and worked as domestic servants, and many of those young women who did not themselves work as domestics but lived in households that hired them. Who can pay for domestic labour and who provides it has divided women all over the globe. In cases where domestics worked for Newfoundland families, they had much in common with those who hired them. By the 1930s many domestics shared common backgrounds, religious and ethnic origins, and even family ties with their employers. In this their situation was different from that in many larger urban centers, where domestics and their employers were often distinguished by ethnic and racial factors and certainly along family lines. The Grand Falls case underlines the importance of paying attention to the specific historical circumstances, including economic and social forces that shaped these arrangements. Situations such as Grand Falls also underscore the fact that concepts such as exploitation and power are neither simple nor static and remind us of the complexity of women's experiences as domestics and employers of domestics, and in some cases as both.

Ingrid Botting is a researcher with the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and Associate Professor in Community Health Services at the University of Manitoba.