Efforts to encourage more women to enter domestic service soared during and between the wars, with courses and training programs catering to women as young as sixteen (and as old as thirty-five). 

Designed to encourage broad recruitment, there was no shortage of propaganda accompanying these initiatives. With wartime attrition shifting the gender composition of the workforce—and an enduring concern that as a result, women were coming for mens’ jobs—the rallying cry turned patriotic. (Do it for your country!) 

Might training be more than vocational—beneficial, for instance, to future wives and mothers? Would domestic labor not constitute a valuable asset to the nation? (Never mind that the laborers themselves still struggled, unsuccessfully, to unionize.) 

Underwritten by ministries of labor, and buffeted by evangelical editorials in newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, homemaker courses sought to boost the economy one domestic worker at a time. 

And along the way, it promised to make them better wives and mothers.