El servicio doméstico en Colombia a principios del siglo XX bajo la mirada de una mujer protestante

Abstract

The paper describes the domestic service at the dawn of the XXth Century, based on a particular historical source –the book 

 The Least of These in Colombia , published in 1918 and written by Maude Newell Williams, the wife of a protestant U.S. missionary who was an evangelist in these lands. Drawing from the book –which is a text without any significant literary nor scientific pose, written with tender feeling toward those who were their own servants– the paper delves into one of the characteristics that seems to define this type of social relationship: the peculiar combination of closeness and distance that allows the subordinate to make way into the most intimate corners of their masters’ existence, and to come out entangled in a domestic universe and in a world of affects, although framed within a social relationship that day and night reproduces domination.