Intimate Divisions: The Maid’s Room in Revolutionary Portugal

Madalena Botto [e-mail]

The socioeconomic inequalities between the rural and urban during the fascist regime in Portugal led to the mass migration of rural young women to the capital for employment as live-in domestic workers. Although the overturn of the fascist regime in 1974 allowed for major sociocultural and political shifts, the impact of these improvements on domestic workers themselves was complicated by the ambiguous relationships between these workers and their employing families. I suggest this ambiguity stems from the intimacy of the home as an architectural space and its implication in the formation and experience of the family unit. This article explores the simultaneous sense of dependency and exclusion between these live-in workers and their employers, using Paulo Rocha’s film Os Verdes Anos (1963) as a lens. Bringing together theoretical perspectives on gender, migration, and the built environment, as well as first-hand accounts from individuals who experienced close relations with domestic workers, I argue that the domestic space allows for a particular set of rules of socialisation that normalise the marginalisation of the figure of the domestic worker.  

Paulo Rocha’s Os Verdes Anos (1963) is one of the few examples of Portuguese cultural representation that brings the prominent, yet marginal, figure of the domestic worker to the foreground. The film frames the love story between two working class migrants of rural origin, adapting to life in Lisbon. Through its focus on architectural form, the film demonstrates how their ability to see and engage with each other is shaped within the social and physical boundaries enforced upon them. Through its panning exterior scenes that contrast shots of the street with expansive rural areas, Os Verdes Anos reflects the urbanisation and regional polarisation of the time, in conjunction with scenes of the domestic interior that linger on the boundaries and movement between one room and another.

Many of the encounters between characters take place in doorways, windows, or near walls, that appear to visually restrict the characters in concrete terms. This architectural sense of division allows us to share central character Ilda’s perspective as she travels through her built environment - that of the space offered by the city as it unfolds before her, simultaneously embracing her and keeping her physically on the outskirts of society.

Crucially, we never see Ilda’s own room. Rocha allows us to discover bourgeois spaces through the eyes of a live-in maid, both in the wider city and within the intimacy of her employer’s home, but, by omitting images of the character in a comfortable space intended for her, we get the sense of discomfort, or displacement, in Ilda’s interaction with the city. Moreover, the invisibility of this room- its physical, representational, social, and discursive hiddenness- is crucial to an understanding of the historical erasure of these figures. The material and the social unite in a particular set of learned behaviours that shaped Portuguese collective memory in a manner that cemented these women’s lack of space in wealthy urban society, echoing the everyday invisibility they were asked to adopt at a bodily level from an early age. Moving discretely through the house and living behind a divisive boundary between one section of the house and the other, a polarisation of class is established which echoes the wider divisions between urban wealth and rural poverty that the women are acutely aware of. Hence, through Bourdieu’s notion of Habitus, we can see how a narrative of normalisation allowed these particular dichotomies to become engrained in Portuguese society- they were both architecturally and politically set in stone.

Despite feminist critiques of structuralism due to masculinised notions of objective, individual authorship, Bourdieu’s theory can be appropriated for the purposes of contemporary feminism. The theoretical perspectives are united by a focus on ideological construction of categorisation and social relations using bodily performativity and routine. As argued by Lovell, habitus becomes a useful tool for feminism when, “insistence upon the significance of social class in the formation of the individual’s habitus,” is utilised to ground poststructuralist feminism’s fluid subjectivity in the realities of hegemonic wealth distribution (Lovell 2000:15). This notion of fluidity is particularly important due to the complexities inherent in self-identification in the home- the level of comfort and time spent in the home unveils a multifaceted exteriority, and nuanced relations. Notions of the fluidity of the categorised body within the home, when put into conversation with an understanding of the rigidity of tradition, gender roles, and the stratified class system in Portugal, can shed light on the invisible subject position of the Portuguese live-in maid figure, despite her prominence in wealthy homes.

I use this case study to uncover the impact of the intersection of gender and class distinctions on the relational use of the physical domestic space, and vice versa, asking: how does the materiality of the space, in this instance, help to naturalise particular narratives, and how are these ideologies then physically encountered within the private sphere? Through the notion of ‘the maid’s room’ not just as an individual space but as a symbol for the wider set of architectural, physical and social divisions and restrictions that shaped the lives of these young women, I argue that the relational and spatial role of the maid in the modern  Portuguese home, in its tension between separation and unity, enforced narratives of marginalisation that were normalised through a sense of permanency in social classification that was being pushed from within the intimacy of the home and assumed family unit, and therefore went unquestioned.

Domestic Work, Illiteracy, and Womanhood in Changing Political Spheres

I focus on the figure of the live-in maid as part of the wealthy Portuguese family unit during the latter half of the twentieth century, a period split in half by the Carnation revolution, which abolished the fascist regime that allowed for such extreme polarities of wealth to be established. At the same time, my discussion also exists within the wider context of global understandings of ‘the maid’s room’ and domestic work as a sector.  This case study allows us to follow the lag between political and social change that occurred due to a social and material naturalisation of the subtle everyday isolation experienced by these women at the hands of necessity, and to the tendency to dismiss that which occurs in the private sphere. Social structures within the private sphere can shift and echo wider hegemonies, but the personal, intimate, and implicitly feminine element of domestic work leads to common neglect of issues occurring within the household in social theory.

In discussing the foundations that sustain the underpaid nature of domestic work, Cynthia Enloe identifies eleven pillars. Amongst them, some especially relevant to my purposes in that they echo attitudes towards the ‘intimate’ as apolitical, included “treat domestic work as stereotypically women’s work”, “treat domestic workers’ work sites as private spheres’,  and ‘imagine that a woman doing domestic work in someone else’s home is “just like family”’ (Enloe 2014:341). Enloe points to the historical erasure of these figures’ individual subjectivities, claiming that “the domestic workers most likely to be treated with the least respect and to be most vulnerable …are hired to live full time in their employer’s home. They are likely to be socially cut off from other domestic workers and from people in their ethnic or national community… [and] have to leave behind their own families in order to take these live-in jobs” (Enloe 2014:325). The dismissal of domestic work on the basis of feminisation and the neglect of  low-paid workers is therefore amplified by the complicated relations that occur when simultaneously tied to and separated from the family unit, and the material and social divisions founded in the domestic space have a long-term effect on an everyday basis of learned behaviour. Thus, the maid’s room is a key phenomenon in the global context of attitudes towards domestic work. Gürel has recognised this in discussing the architectural legacy of the maid’s room in Istanbul, and its double function of maintaining and mirroring the dominant social order (Gürel 2012). Gürel points to the fact that the service positions of domestic workers “both crystallize and accommodate the gap between social strata and between the physical space of the modern apartment and squatter housing” (Gürel 2012:124) - something  echoed by the simultaneous sense of autonomy and dependence inherent in the negotiation of space around the maid’s room.

The lack of democratic choice in Portugal before 1974 allowed for particular stratifications of class and definitions of womanhood that put young girls in rural areas in a position of forced migration by their parents due to complete rigidity in social boundaries. The maid’s room echoes this ideology, architecturally cementing it into the homes of a growing capital city. In the 1940s, illiteracy rates in rural areas were as high as 41.2 % for men, and exceeded this at 51.6% for women (Maria, Afonso 2012: 11).As highlighted by Alice Maria and Tomas Afonso, “in a country where illiteracy persists and predominantly falls on the female sex, it is to be supposed that a socially discredited class like that of these ‘maids’ would normally have little to no schooling and no professional training” (Maria, Afonso 2012:49, translation mine). Moreover, perceptions of womanhood and domesticity propagated by the far-right government were linked to notions of nationalism, tradition and religion. Within this ideology, the social structure of the nuclear family was perceived as the base of the nation (Maria, Afonso 2012:7). Hence, radical regional wealth inequality sustained through a flawed educational system that resists social mobility in a manner that  disproportionately affects girls, in conjunction with a nationalistic interpretation of womanhood as fundamentally linked to the home, laid the foundations for the growing expendable wealth in the upper classes to become the only hope for these young girls.

The 1974 revolution brought along major changes to education, wherein an illiteracy rate of almost 40 percent in the 1960s dropped to about 8 percent (Barreto 2002:14). Moreover, the work force rose from a 20 percent female proportion to 50 percent (Barreto 2002:10). Antonio Barreto argues that this echoes a wider change in attitude afforded by democracy with a focus on heterogeneity and the advocation of rights, echoed in a step from a patriarchal society towards gender equality (Barreto 2002:10, translation mine).  However, it has been highlighted that this shift in employment does not necessarily recognise the subsectors of employment, which still hugely place women predominantly in jobs associated with care (Coelho, Ferreira 2018:82). Lina Coelho and Virginia Ferreira highlight these statistics and associate them with the continued feminisation of domesticity and pushing of women into low-paid jobs associated with the feminine sex, due to a supposed instinctive caring nature (Coelho, Ferreira 2018). Despite the progress enabled by democratic choice, it is key to consider that this change didn’t necessarily materialise itself within these women’s lifetimes. My own interviews of individuals who grew up with maids have revealed that it was a common occurrence for these women to stay in their employer’s household after the revolution if they didn’t marry, due to the sense of rootlessness and displacement from their own homes and families that had been established at this point in time. Hence, within this wider context, I would argue that the permanence established in this tradition, both architecturally and through the everyday socialisation of the maids themselves over decades of serving, as well as of the upper classes to depend on help, allowed for there to be a lag in social change wherein live-in, underpaid domestic work was normalised into the 21st century, and shifts within the private sphere did not necessarily echo political progress.

Theoretical Framework

I use a feminist re-appropriation of Habitus as it shapes collective memory and the normalisation of the status quo as a base due to the notion of rigid learned behaviours, utilising debates revolving around the anthropology of gender, migration, and the built environment. By bringing the three together, I explore both the domestic space itself and the ways in which it echoes wider patterns of urbanisation and regional polarisation of wealth. I draw on debates centring around the socio-political and cultural construction of the rigid boundaries of the feminine that enclose women in a domestic role.

The dichotomisation of gender boundaries can be analysed through an understanding of the negotiation of space within the home. However, this notion is complicated by the diversion from the basic nuclear family model. As argued by Baydar, it is crucial to bring debates surrounding gender and the domestic space into a more fluid view of the family unit and the roles within it, wherein particular masculinities and femininities are established and the level of agency afforded to the women in constructing a feminine role varies from household to household (Baydar 2005). The single-family unit is not universal, and therefore cannot be considered without the intersectional perspective of the consideration of figures such as domestic workers (Baydar 2005: 33).

Although the beginning of the postcolonial period in the 1960s marked a shift in migration patterns in Portugal, wherein an increased number of migrants from Brazil and Cabo Verde entered the country (Barreto 2002:2), many of them women looking for work in the domestic service sector, this is a separate issue, involving a completely different pattern of choice and autonomy than that of regional migration, the most common background of the domestic worker before the revolution. The reasons behind and implications of regional migration during this period are defined by urbanisation and ‘spatial injustice’. It has been highlighted that spatial injustice is cyclical, fluid and affected by the “communicative peripheralization” of certain regions, wherein stigmatisation hinders hope for regeneration (Görmar ,Lang, Nagy, Raagmaa 2019:6). Hence, the establishment of regional polarity of the Portuguese class system under fascist regime has long-term discursive effects which can have a real impact on social perceptions of regional difference. This is crucial to understand in order to unpack the importance of establishing difference in the home.

Lastly, the importance of the study of the built environment is to understand how categorisations such as class and gender, and the constructed dichotomisation within them, can be understood as permanent. As argued by Munro and Madigan, the ideal of the bourgeois family lived on into the twentieth century “as a model of domestic respectability….and as a set of design conventions”, and the reorganisation of space in conventional housing is assumed to reflect the shift towards a democratic family ideal (Munro, Madigan 1999:107). Therefore, the rigidity of boundaries in the domestic space must be repurposed in order to overcome social hierarchies in the home, something which takes time, as it necessitates unlearning ideologies passed down through socialisation.

By bringing the notions of fluidity and rigidity in social boundaries within the classifications of gender and class, and framing them within the idea of constructed space as it echoes constructed roles and passes down generationally through learned behaviour, I unpack the processes of erasure of the domestic worker in the 20th century and their long term impacts.  I will be breaking this down into three branches of research that follow the maid’s lifespan, from the establishment of hopelessness at a young age, to the everyday socialisation established at moving into the employer’s home, and finally the sense of rootlessness that leads to the inescapability of the situation, with research using interviews with individuals who were once children with close relations to their maids to get a better understanding of the realities of this.

The Maid’s Lifetime- Socialisation Towards Dependence

Within the conditions of rural poverty fostered by the far right, young girls had a lack of agency or choice. Francisco, now 62, who largely grew up in the presence of live-in maids, recalls going to visit his grandfather’s farm as a child, recalling how local parents “would beg to send their 14 and 15 year old daughters to my (his) grandparents’ house in Lisbon….their brothers would migrate to the colonies, have a bit of an adventure, but the parents were desperate to protect the girls” (translation mine). He continues, speaking of Adilia, a live-in maid who stayed in his mother’s house for almost sixty years- “I remember her telling me sometimes she was so hungry she would eat grass, or that back at her mother’s house it was one sardine to divide between all the siblings” (translation mine). As highlighted by Lieve Meersschaert, “the priority given to labour over study was established from childhood” (Meersschaert 1985: translation mine) - a differing sense of domesticity was being enforced on these girls than on those growing up in the capital. Where wealthy women were shaped from a young age to take on a role central to the family, this role, due to their privilege, never involved physical labour but emotional and corporeal care. Parallel to this, young girls in the countryside were being taught invisible labour. Rather than being the moral or emotional backbone of the family, they were to be involved in consistent physical labour which occurred exclusively in the background, the outskirts of the home. This marginal role, and the sense of invisibility it establishes, is enforced later in life, but becomes established from birth through physical location outside of the growing metropolis. Both physically and in terms of actual opportunity, real social mobility is essentially established as an impossibility. Therefore, the period of transition from living with the family involves the shock of dichotomy between physical spaces- the urban and the rural.

The relational processes that occur in the employer’s home are complicated by the closeness of the figure to the family that develops over the years due to the physical incorporation of an employed figure in the home, which is assumed to represent the family unit. This relation is therefore defined by a tension between unity and separation. The sense of separation is predominantly identified in the notion of invisibility, or discreteness. The basic layout of the home varies, but the maid’s room and bathroom is generally hidden away from most guests, directly next to the kitchen. Hence, the basic premise of discretion in everyday life is established immediately in physical form. This material expression of separation has direct consequences on routine and relational rules in the home. An interviewee explained some of the implied rules of interaction established in his home, and others:

“Certain things varied- for example, at my grandmother’s house, they never ate the same thing as us. At my mother’s home, they did, but they always ate in the kitchen, separate to my family. But there were codes, they were only supposed to use their own bathroom,they usually had uniforms… they weren’t supposed to sit in the living room with everyone when the adults were in- they would stand and chat for a bit in the evening, then go to their room.” (translation mine)

Moreover, at arrival in the city, the sense of difference established between themselves and those used to urban life was visually, materially, and bodily tangible. Meersschaer explains “it’s the houses, the names of things […] the household appliances, the food […] hat is different, the entire workspace that is foreign to them” (Meersschaert 1985: 637, translation mine). This solidified an identification with an ‘othering’ category. Rita, who lived with multiple maids in the home as a young girl in Lisbon, remembers how “when they arrived they were so scared they would hide in the corners of the kitchen […] it was so foreign to them, they didn’t even know how to use a knife and fork- I remember my mother teaching them” (translation mine). Hence, not only were they being taught invisibility as professional discretion, but every detail of their daily bodily conduct was shifting in order not to stand out, and to parallel the bourgeois family unit in the margins. This training of bodily behaviour in order to promote discretion and docility in Portuguese domestic work has been highlighted by a few scholars, such as Nuno Dias, who links it to the later attempted whitewashing of maids who migrated from former colonies (Dias 2013), or Maria and Afonso, who see this as propagated in the media by the Catholic church due to an ideology linked to femininity as submissive (Maria and Afonso 2012). Either way, it is intrinsically linked to the establishment of an ‘other’ based on different learned bodily behaviours, and the anxiety that this difference creates within the space of the home. Identifying with ‘other’-ness becomes established in the young woman’s mind, and she then encounters bodily training that does not necessarily remove her from the margins of society but rather hides her there, locking her in place.

The intimacy of the family unit means that relationships are almost inevitably created, which can vary between members of the family, but typically are characterized by the maid forming her closest bonds with the children. In discussing the prevalence of similar modern traditions in Brazil, Jurema Brites points to this relationship as key to the dynamics established in the home, arguing that, “if, in discussing cleaning, adult patrons are seen as becoming impermeable to the cultural universe of domestic workers, the same can’t be said of the children.  They converse with the maids, hear their story, listen to music together in the kitchen….in this intimacy, maids can take on the role of transmitters of knowledge” (Brites 2007:99, translation mine). A child does not understand difference and categorisation, therefore the relationship cultivated here exists separately to class polarisation, contributing to a dynamic of home that complicates discussions of the workspace. Rita, whose mother worked, explains that the majority of her days as a child were spent with her maids, who were in charge of looking after her and her siblings. At these points, space became differently negotiated- rules of behaviour that centred around the living room lost all relevance because they would spend their day playing in the children’s rooms or outside. Hence, separation is put aside in favour of nurturing. Corporeal boundaries shift, complicating the socialisation of bodily difference.

Relations also shifted depending on who was in the home on a gendered basis. Rita explains that her mother was close to the maids - she trained and protected them, and they would occasionally confide in her - but their relation to her father was founded on “respect- or fear, I’m not sure which one” (translation mine).

However, it is both through the children and through these fluctuations in intimacy that the generational transmission of the normalisation of underpaid, long-term domestic labour occurs, creating a sense of dependence on the employer and therefore limits real autonomy for maids. The narrative fed to the children of the wealthy patron, framing the employing family as a saviour towards the underprivileged girls, the everyday sense of family established in their own close relation to the maid as a part of the family unit, and the children’s’ naivety concerning the realities of feeling displaced in a space that functions as your long-term home, brushes a rosy tint over this tradition. Hence, the attempt to strictly dichotomise and place regulations on the family home is slippery and materialises into a complicated entanglement of emotional closeness and professional employment.

At the end of Os Verdes Anos, Ilda’s character is killed by her lover, and dies not only in her employer’s living room (this is one of the few times we have seen her not standing) but in her arms. She never returns to her home and remains symbolically tied to her employer and her home until death. What is crucial in understanding this particular tradition of domestic work is that, although practices have since advanced and shifted in manners that give the workers more autonomy, this did not necessarily change the situations of women working as maids at the time of the revolution. The sense of rootlessness experienced by these women is crucial to consider in order to understand why some stayed for so long, even after more scope for autonomy was possible for people in their position.

Francisco explained that Adilia, who stayed in his mother’s house until her death after he left, “loved me (himself) and my brother very much […] she loved my brother’s first son, Joao, so much that when she passed away about ten years ago she left everything she had to him” (translation mine). He explains that “after the revolution, things got better […] but many of them stayed in their employers’ homes […] from the beginning they were very disconnected from their upbringing […] some asked us to help them write home occasionally, but they hardly visited” (translation mine). The drastic transition that followed a difficult childhood led to a letting go of the past. Therefore, the established sense of intimacy in the workspace throughout the maid’s lifetime, in its relation to the home itself that she resides in for much of her life, has long-term impacts on her own identification with family that can stretch across several generations. Rita also points to the fact that, when she recently got in touch with Maria do Carmo, one of her childhood maids, not having seen her in fifty years, “she just cried and cried and told me how much she misses me and my mother” (translation mine).

This creates a bittersweet narrative. On the one hand, the emotional connections forged matter, but on the other, a life is lived where intimacy is associated only with a family with inherent divisions. Hence, Enloe’s point concerning assumptions that the worker becomes part of the employer’s family as a pillar which upholds the underpaid nature of live-in domestic work is absolutely correct, but, in this context, this issue is complicated by its roots in a nuanced set of intimate relations that create a family unit which, despite its obvious separations, generate a dependence on the ‘new home’ and complete disjointedness from the original home.  

In conclusion, I argue that the normalisation of underpaid, long-term, live-in domestic work and discursive erasure of the figure of the maid, within the context of the legacy of dichotomised class and gender boundaries under fascist regime, hinges on the everyday interactions with the material environment that constitute habitus as it overlaps with a more fluid, subjective sense of intimacies in the home. The political overlaps with smaller, subjective histories created in the private sphere, causing a fundamental difference in national and social or personal progression. To draw on Pei-Chia Lan’s discussion of Filipina migrant workers, “to explore women's agency in facing the complex organization of domestic labour, we need new ways of conceptualizing domestic labour that ‘transcend the constructed oppositions of public-private and labour-love’ (Nakano Glenn 1994, 16)” (Lan 2003:188). The rigidity of boundaries established in domestic employment can only be properly analysed through an understanding of the fluidity and multifaceted nature of identity and relations that the intimacy of the home establishes, materially and relationally, creating in this context the tension between invisibility and visibility, or separation and unity.

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