Preface Maids

When I told a friend that I was writing and illustrating a graphic novel about maids, her first question to me was whether my interest in maids was tied to a maid or a nanny I might have had growing up.

It had never occurred to me that my own childhood memories of the women who worked in domestic service in my family’s home would explain why I was embarking on such a project. I had taught a college level course on the topic, in a comparative literature class.

Before that, I had taken an interest in a French comics heroine named Bécassine. I had read the bound volumes of that comics series as a child, and, upon rereading them as an adult, I realized that the maid from Brittany was a rich subject for research (she was the only woman to “fly” a plane during World War I, for instance). That was the beginning of my scholarly interest in the genre of the Francophone graphic novel, as well as the topic of maids.

Before all that, when I was still in graduate school, I delivered my first ever paper on the topic of women’s work in the paintings of Chardin and the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, thus underlining the importance of domestic labor in eighteenth-century France.

Circling back to the autobiographical question, growing up with nannies and maids in Europe and New York City seemed normal to me as a child, but has morphed into a realization as an adult that I had in fact grown up in an upper middle class, privileged household. When I became an adult, and more precisely, when I became a working mother, I realized more acutely that my professional and emotional needs were tied to a reliance on paid domestic labor (in truth, my children went to an at home daycare, which is something quite different from hiring a live-in nanny). As a feminist, I found that one woman’s reliance on another woman to be troubling, problematic and fundamentally unfeminist. Why unfeminist? Because I have become aware that it is the employer who controls the quality and depth of that relationship, a relationship which remains private, outside of public view, and that reaches beyond the limits of the professional with its necessary intimacy.

Hence my interest in maids is more closely tied to my interest in the ongoing discrimination against women – as lower-wage workers, as caregivers for their own families while caring for the families of others, as victims of physical and sexual violence, and, with the more recent events, as victims of politicians who think embryos are more important than they (we) are.

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At the beginning of the French film “The Women of the Sixth Floor,” the housekeeper quits after being in service to the same family for her entire adult life. She goes back to her family in Brittany – a region known for sending many a young woman to Paris in search of employment – and is never heard from again. What is true in fiction reflects a certain truth in real life. The closeness a family experiences with their domestic employee is usually temporary and, ultimately, the relationship turns out to have been merely transactional.

The relationship between a domestic worker and their employer can also become alarmingly close, as in the case of nannies who end up replacing the wives and marrying the dads. Then there is the rare case of maids rebelling against their masters and committing the greatest act of transgression by hurting them or sometimes even killing them. The former seems to happen most often among the very rich and the very famous; the latter happens very incidentally. What these extreme examples do reveal, however, is that the master/servant relationship of the past (or the employer/domestic employee relationship of the present) is fragile, problematic, and sometimes devastating. Could it be that the modern iteration of a very ancient power dynamic is at odds with a semblance of the idea that we are all created equal?

This graphic history attempts to make some sense of the interdependence of families and domestic workers, as well as the question of modernity and the role of domestic labor in it. As for my friend’s question, I hope that, by the end of this graphic history, I will have begun to answer it. Maybe I already have.