Les femmes jouent un rôle essentiel dans le cadre domestique. Elles sont les épouses, mères et servantes qui existent dans toutes les familles et dans toutes les classes. Le proverbe médiéval proclame qu’être occupée est la raison d’être de la femme : « les mains des femmes, comme les dents des chevaux, ne peuvent être en repos ». Elles rendent tout le temps service pour le bien-être de leurs maîtres, maîtresses et enfants : toilette, repas, repos, déplacement, naissance et mort. Leurs occupations domestiques sont intenses mais considérées comme banales et répétitives. Les femmes sont toujours occupées autour d’autrui, mais leurs travaux n’ont pas uniquement une dimension physique ou mécanique. L’attachement mutuel est visible dans les scènes. Elles laissent peu de traces dans l’histoire. Cependant les illustrations marquent fréquemment leurs figures occupées, même si souvent au plan secondaire. Il est intéressant de mettre en lumière leurs représentations, d’étudier leurs tâches. À travers plus de trois cents enluminures extraites de manuscrits franco-flamand du XVe siècle, enrichies d’autres documents picturaux et sources archivistiques, littéraires ou archéologiques, cette thèse propose une image des femmes dans le cadre domestique à la fin du Moyen Âge, ainsi que la vie quotidienne des personnes de l’époque. / Women play an essential role in the domestic setting. They are the wives, mothers and servants existing in every family and in every class. As the medieval proverb : « les mains des femmes, comme les dents des chevaux, ne peuvent être en repos » which means « Women’s hands, like horses’s teeth, can never rest ». They are always busy, always acting for the wellbeing of their masters, mistresses and children : grooming, meals, nursing, travels, birth and death. Their domestic occupations are intense but considered trite and repetitive. Women continuously take care of others, and their work isn’t always just physical or mechanical. Mutual devotion is obvious in those scenes. They do not leave a lot of mark on history, but the illustrations still show their busy silhouettes, often relegated to secondary importance. It is worth high lighting their representations and studying their chores.Through more than three hundred illuminations from French and Flemish manuscripts of the XVth century, enriched by other pictorial documents, and archival, literary or archeological sources, this thesis offers a picture of women in the domestic setting, as well as everyday life of the people living in that time period.

In the reading of the servants in examples from the period 1920-1950, the servant question is invoked to expose the workings of class. The servants in these narratives of Bowen, Green, Taylor, Waugh, Mansfield and Panter-Downes, lady’s maids, housekeepers, nannies, a butler and a chauffeur, are in thrall to the collective structures of societal ordering, and reluctant with respect to social mobility. Class was not fully being negotiated in this period, in fact little change was visible. Fer example intimacy, such as that between the lady’s maid and her mistress, meant that class confrontation was unlikely. The nanny showed that culturally constructed mechanisms such as nostalgia could be employed to discourage the desire for change. In terms of the socio-historical context any transformation in the make-up of domestic life – that is, the move towards homes without servants - was a fairly gradual business. But, there was a widespread belief in a change that had not really taken place – and that certainly had not taken place within domestic service. Any transformation of society was superficial; the governing ranks would not permit their disempowerment through genuine class change. I contend that the literature supports this perspective. Servants desire subservience; they find comfort in the familiarity of the system of household ranking-by-status. In the process, authority itself is portrayed as being less immutable, more malleable and thereby equipped for the future. In this sense the narratives read in this thesis go to make up a literature of resistance, in refutation of the overwhelming narrative of the time, progressing instead the notion that class must persist with its boundaries intact, as its hegemony is desirable and necessary for the smooth, successful operation of society.