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The history of capitalism could be written through the lenses of paid care and domestic workers in private households. Constituting one of the largest sections of the workforce in most western countries from the outset of capitalism, care and domestic workers—or domestic servants as they were called in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—have been nonetheless widely neglected from historical accounts of free and unfree labour.
John Locke used the image of a servant in Two Treatises of Government (1690) to demonstrate how labour was, at the dawn of English bourgeois society, beginning to emerge as a special type of private property. By the early 1800s, some ten percent of the English and Welsh populations were employed as domestic servants—90 percent of them were women—according to Carolyne Steedman in Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England. Today, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that there are almost 55 million domestic workers worldwide, though some experts say the number could be as high as 100 million. Around 200,000 are employed in the UK, although the true number is likely higher.
