VI - Amah in Paid Domestic Service

Summary

Prior to the 1930s, paid domestic service was almost exclusively dominated by Hainanese men. In fact, paid domestic service was virtually synonymous with the Hainanese “cookboy” or “houseboy” who served European and local wealthy Chinese households. The other form of domestic service was unpaid domestic servitude by mui tsai. The massive entry of women into paid domestic service began in the 1930s with the large-scale immigration of single women from China into Malaya and coincided with the abolition of the mui tsai system. By 1947, an overwhelming 85 per cent of the total female labour force in the “personal services” sector were engaged in paid domestic service alone. Women quickly displaced men at paid domestic service, making up as much as 68 per cent of the total workforce in this form of employment in the same year, and domestic service become strongly identified as women's work.

The women largely responsible for the identification of paid domestic service as women's work were the Cantonese immigrants, many of whom were formerly anti-marriage resistance movement women in China. In Malaya, many of these women found work as domestic servants in wealthy Chinese and European colonial hosueholds, and became commonly known as the Cantonese amah. They made up a sizeable proportion if not the majority of women domestic servants and, for many, domestic service was their only form of employment throughout their working lives. A study of women in the clan associations and vegetarian halls of Singapore in the mid-1950s (Topley 1958) confirmed that a large number of single women who entered paid domestic service were from the anti-marriage resistance area in China. (While there is little documented evidence, it is known that Cantonese women from the same background and employed in paid domestic service were also found in the major towns of Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh and Penang where they worked for wealthy Chinese and European colonial households. Their organizations were similar to those studied by Topley.