domestic slave
Unpaid house servant
A domestic slave is an enslaved person forced to work within a household rather than in fields, mines, or other labor.
Duties typically included cooking, cleaning, childcare, and personal attendance on the enslaver's family.
The term appears in historical contexts: The household maintained several domestic slaves.
Domestic slaves often lived in closer proximity to enslavers than field workers, a circumstance that could mean marginally better material conditions but also greater surveillance and vulnerability to abuse.
- servantOne employed to serve
- bondageInvoluntary subjugation to another
- householdDomestic unit of residents
- chattelMovable personal property
- indenturedContracted to serve
plantation · field hand · cotton picking · labor · captive · forced labor · servitude · live-in maid · chains · subjugation · quarters · oppression · unpaid · property · auction block · housework · unpaid work · forced
- Roman servantsfreedman, household manager, doorkeeper, cupbearer, chambermaid
- Islamic slaveryconcubine, manumission, captives, trans-Saharan trade, amah
- unfree laborersbondsman, bondswoman, bondservant, bondman, bondwoman
domestic slavefreedman
Released former slave
freedwoman · housekeeper · maid · butler · au pair
domestic slavemaster
Authority or controller
slaveholder · head of household · patriarch · householder · matriarch
domestic, slave, domestics, domestically, domesticate, domesticated, domestication, domesticity, domicile