Ambika Natarajan. Servants of Culture: Paternalism, Policing, and Identity Politics in Vienna, 1700-1914. (Berghahn Books)
In nineteenth century Cisleithanian Austria, poor, working-class women underwent mass migrations from the countryside to urban centers for menial or unskilled labor jobs.
Through legal provisions on women’s work in the Habsburg Empire, there was an increase in the policing and surveillance of what was previously a gender-neutral career, turning it into one dominated by thousands of female rural migrants. Servants of Culture provides an account of Habsburg servant law since the eighteenth century and uncovers the paternalistic and maternalistic assumptions and anxieties which turned the interest of socio-political players in improving poor living and working conditions into practices that created restrictive gender and class hierarchies. Through pioneering analysis of the agendas of medical experts, police, socialists, feminists, legal reformers, and even serial killers, this volume puts forth a neglected history of the state of domestic service discourse at the turn of the 19th century and how it shaped and continues to shape the surveillance of women. (Description from Berghahn Books).
Q&A with Ambika Natarajan
If your readers take away only one idea from your book, what would you want that idea to be?
The main idea I want the readers to take away from the book is that although history is the study of change, it is also the study of persistence. In the book, I take the example of maidservants and discourses about them to show how various cultural constructs persist over centuries. In the case of maidservants in Vienna and more broadly the Habsburg Empire, the idea of the itinerant maid with a dissolute lifestyle that evolved in the early seventeenth century persisted well into the twentieth century and informed the identity politics that surrounded debates concerning maidservants in the Habsburg realm. What I want to say in this book is that just the process of seeking newness or claims that something is new does not make that thing new in and of itself. Neither does it abolish what came before it, that is, what happened in the past. The past remains in our individual and collective lives irrespective. All we can do is to understand the past. And that is precisely the aim of studying history. But it does raise the question why must we understand the past at all? The answer to that question is answered best, in my view, by James Baldwin who stated that “history is literally present in all that we do.” In other words, history is not about the past. It’s about the present. Even sociologists like the eminent scholar Orlando Patterson, for instance, have asserted time and again that it is important to look at cultural persistence to understand current sociological problems. And if we are to understand cultural persistence, we must look at the past or history. In my book, I use the case of maidservants in Habsburg Vienna to make this very point. What we know about servant-class people, for example, what we know about their agency or lack of it, comes from history. And not only must we look at the past; we must also look at the way we write about the past. So, by presenting the case of maidservants in Vienna from 1700-1914, I show that modernism was not about making things new, it was actually about trying to deal with—or rather an attempt to render harmless the past. And what was that past that people—especially the liberal bourgeoisie—were trying to grapple with? The fact that a certain class of people—represented by the image of a female servant—could be autonomous, could have their own thoughts, their own mind, their own views of the world that were independent of those who were in a position of power over them.
What work or idea or thinker influenced you the most in the writing of this book?
It was undoubtedly the Harvard historical sociologist Professor Orlando Patterson who influenced the writing of the book. He has written several works on slavery, but two of his books Freedom in the Making of Western Culture and The Cultural Matrix had the most profound impact on me. In both these books, Professor Patterson explores the persistence of certain cultural values and their impact on society. In Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, for instance, he looks at why freedom has become such an essential cultural value in the West, and he argues that it has to do with the emergence of the idea of slavery and slave society. The Cultural Matrix which is a collection of essays that he has edited with Ethan Fosse seeks to understand why social isolation and segregation of disadvantaged American black youth exists on one hand while at the same time there is extraordinary integration and prominence in popular culture of the same youth on the other hand.
Books answer questions, but they also raise new questions. What questions does your book raise?
The fundamental question this book raises is how do we understand, talk about, and write about culture? For a long time, as Professor Patterson points out in his work, talking about culture and its impact on a community has been shrouded with taboos. It has been difficult for scholars to entertain certain hypotheses about culture because invariably it deteriorates into a blame game. However, if we look at culture as being influenced by social structures and in turn influencing social structures then we can have a decent conversation about it. The second question this book raises is how do we understand the collapse of the Habsburg Empire? Understanding culture of a particular society, I believe, is key to understanding what went wrong in that society. Therefore, this question relates to the first question. Historians have looked at the collapse of the Habsburg Empire from a variety of different perspectives. However, they have always taken for granted a certain break from the past when they study the modern period. Modernism in the simplest terms is a movement in the arts and philosophy that takes place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Western society. It is generally described as a movement that was new—new forms in art, in philosophy, and social structures. Something new, in other words, to represent the emerging industrial world and its features—urbanization, technology, and so on. So, it’s all about newness—a clean break from the past. The underlying idea is that we are not going to do and think of things the way we thought about them in the past. This does raise the question then about things that are continuous with the past. What of them? How do we study continuity and persistence?
What got you interested in the topic of your book?
Initially when I started this project, I intended it to be a book on food and sex. However, as I delved deeper into the topic, maidservants kept popping up everywhere. So many sociopolitical players in Vienna—physicians, the police, women’s organizations, Catholic organizations, and even serial killers—seemed to have profound interest in discussing maidservants. I wanted to know why these players were so interested in maidservants and that got me into the domain of laws governing servant conditions in the Habsburg realm. Once I started studying the legal aspects of servant conditions, it didn’t take long before I began delving into its social impacts.
For those interested in learning more about your topic, what should they turn to next (after having read your book, of course)?
First and foremost, I would recommend Orlando Patterson’s two volumes Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. However, these two books encompass the topic of slavery. More specifically, concerning servants in Vienna, I would recommend Jessica Richter’s recent book Die Produktion besonderer Arbeitskräfte published in 2024. Raffaella Sarti has written a lot on servants in Europe as well as how historians and social scientists have thought about this topic and how writing about servants has evolved. So, I would definitely recommend that a curious reader consult her body of scholarship. To know more about the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, I would recommend Maureen Healy’s seminal work Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire. My book deals a lot with sex work and sexual knowledge and their relationship to maidservants as well. In this regard, I would recommend Nancy Wingfield’s The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Vienna and Britta McEwen’s Sexual Knowledge. More generally, a curious reader would find it interesting to read Carl E. Schorske’s landmark work on fin-de-siècle Vienna and the authors who respond to it including John Boyer, Deborah Coen, Gary Cohen, Alys X. George, Scott Spector, Pieter Judson, Daniel Vyleta, to name a few.