著者

佐野 敏行

出版者

奈良女子大学大学院人間文化研究科

雑誌

人間文化研究科年報 = Annual reports of Graduate School of Humanities and Sciences (ISSN:09132201)

巻号頁・発行日

no.32, pp.147-166, 2016

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This article delineates the changes in demographic and ethnic profiles of womenengaged in servant-like work during a formative era in a middle-sized city and its surroundingagricultural areas of the Midwestern United States. It draws on the database that Iconstructed from U.S. Census original enumerations of Riverfront City and three townshipsfrom 1850 to 1930, except 1890, as well as on the ethnographic information of the area, which Iobtained from my fieldwork in the 1980s. During the last half of the 19th century and the firstdecades of the 20th century, there were a number of households that included non-kinhabitants. Among them were women who were working as servant or domestic workers.These women had different cultural backgrounds, which changed over the period from namelyScandinavian to German to Polish. They worked for families with younger parents who hadchildren. This feature changed around 1930 as the local population became older, when thewomen went from working for young families to working for both young and old families.That is, as the first and second generation of the immigrants aged. The role of women engagedin servant-like work was not only to earn wages for their families but to observe the Americanlifestyle and incorporate new ideas to their own immigrant families.