Illegitimacy, Infanticide, and Child Abuse Maidservants and Motherhood in Nineteenth Century Vienna

Abstract The servant occupation includes an extraordinarily diverse range of working-class people (diverse with respect to gender, ethnicity, geography, legal recognition, and even class). However, a servant is often described as a monolithic entity: poor, migrant, female, and at the mercy of her master. To understand the exact nature of the problems confronted by members of this occupational category historically, the narratives about this occupational group require analysis. This article uses the example of one such narrative that connected such complex social phenomena as illegitimacy and infanticide with employer-perpetrated abuse of maidservants in fin-de-siècle Vienna to highlight the problems with presenting servants solely as objects of their masters’ actions. The core argument of this article is that presenting servants as objects of their master’s actions rather than subjects in their own right not only masks the socio-economic conditions faced by poor, working-class people who compose the servant class but also fails to acknowledge and address factors that contribute to issues as serious as infanticide and child abuse.