Servants of Culture

Using a wide range of material including legal, criminal, literary, and political sources, Servants of Culture brings forward the previously neglected history of a mass migration of women from the Habsburg Empire's countryside to work as servants for bourgeois households, inns and hotels during the second half of the 19th century. At the time, socio-political players claimed to want to improve the living and working conditions of these migrants but as Natarajan demonstrates these efforts resulted in an increase in surveillance and a restriction of freedoms for women and servants in Viennese history.