The development of female servants’ work in Copenhagen 1852—1862
The purpose of the dataset is to investigate the development of female servants’ working habits. The data originates from Copenhagen newspapers in the middle of the nineteenth century, when 80,1% of servants were women.1 Women either sought out “fæstemænd” to act as middlemen or submitted personal advertisements to the newspapers.2 Our data is collected from the oldest advertisements-newspaper in Copenhagen in the respective years of 1852, 1857 and 1862. During this period, the newspaper changed its name from “Kiøbenhavns Kongelig alene priviligerede Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger” to “Kjøbenhavns Adressecomptoirs Efterretninger”, however the content remained the same. The data is collected from Mediestream’s online archives of scanned newspapers. Therefore the dataset builds upon non-digital records that have been converted to digital formats. The project is based on the women’s own job-seeking advertisements in the newspaper, and not the advertisements from households, individuals or shops, who, as employers, were seeking servants. We have used the first newspaper of every month in the chosen years, which led us to 36 samples. The advertisements were then transcribed manually and transferred to Excel. The dataset containts 1959 entries. In Excel it was organised in a table with 13 columns. The columns are “ID”, “Avis” (Newspaper), “Text” (full text of the advertisement), “Dato” (date), “År” (year), “Køn” (sex), “Hvad_de_søger” (what they are seeking), “kompetencer” (skills), “egen_beskrivelse” (description of self), “def_som” (defined as), “Anbefales” (recommened), “Erfaring” (experience) and “Mdr” (month). In case an advertisement does not contain the information for one of the columns, it is labelled as N/A.
The full dataset is available in the .csv. The preview below only displays the columns Text, Dato, År.
Download
Below you can download the data as a csv.
Search the data
Below you can browse the full texts of the advertisements.
Full reference
Det Kongelige Bibliotek; Mediestream; Kiøbenhavns Kongelig alene priviligerede Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger (1759-1854)
Det Kongelige Bibliotek; Mediestream; Kjøbenhavns Adressecomptoirs Efterretninger (1855-1891)
Reference to digital version
Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Johan Heinsen for his invaluable insights and expertise regarding both his guidance in the digitalisation process and his knowledge of servants and labour in the nineteenth century.