domestic slaves
Enslaved house workers
Domestic slaves are enslaved people who work in a household rather than in fields, mines, or other labor.
Their duties typically include cooking, cleaning, childcare, and personal service to the enslaving family.
The term distinguishes household workers from agricultural or industrial slaves: The plantation owner kept six domestic slaves in the main house.
Throughout history, domestic slaves often lived in closer proximity to their enslavers, which could mean both slightly better material conditions and greater vulnerability to abuse and sexual exploitation.
- housekeeperDomestic cleaning professional
- cookHeat food for eating
- laundressWoman who washes clothes
- antebellum SouthPre-1861 slave states
- manumissionFormal freeing of enslaved
Uncle Tom's Cabin · freedom papers · serfdom · scullery maid · feudal Japan · nanny · butler · seamstress · valet · Ottoman Empire · gardener · human bondage · caretaker · wet nurse · indentured servitude · bound labor · plantation economy · field hand
- slaverybondage, chattel, thrall, Middle Passage, slaveholders
- slave tradeleg irons, human cargo, triangle trade, auction block, chattel
- Caribbean Slaveryplantation, sugar plantations, abolitionists, Jamaica, Barbados
- colonial slaveryplantation system, bondage, servitude, manumission, plantation labor
- Guiana slaverySuriname, French Guiana, Demerara, maroons, plantation economy
- Abolitionabolitionists, Frederick Douglass, abolitionist movement, Underground Railroad, Emancipation Proclamation
domestic slavesfreedmen
People released from slavery
freedwomen · homeowners · masters · free blacks · enslavers
domestic slavesdomestic servants
Paid home workers
hired help · household staff · domestic workers · butlers · maids
domestic, slave, domestics, domestically, domesticate, domesticated, domestication, domesticity, slaves