Service Industry
In Working, the character of Kate Rushton performs the duties of what must surely is one of the world’s oldest service jobs: Housewife. Kate can thank the Industrial Revolution for creating this unpaid and unheralded position, usually but not always, filled by women. Before that, all members of an extended family were expected to do all things necessary to keep that household functioning.
The household was even its own schoolhouse and factory, producing both goods for its own use and goods to sell outside the home. But once men and unmarried women went off to work in real factories in the cities, married women became the family enablers and facilitators, expected to perform a variety of ‘jobs’ necessary to keep all family members prepared for work and school, jobs that haven’t changed all that much today.
