Resource

 For years, visitors to 1905 Street’s Rutherford House used to comment that the maid's quarters on the second floor were extremely comfortable, even "luxurious.” They were judging by the physical setup of the maid’s bedroom space, just up the back stairs from the kitchen. It was spacious, light, and had its own door to the family bathroom.

 We don’t know how the Rutherfords originally set the space up. Nor do we know the name of their maid in 1905, where she came from, how long she worked for them, or anything else. 

 In fact, very little is known about the many young women who came to western Canada – an estimated quarter of a million between 1885 and 1930 – as domestic servants. The reasons for this vary: traditional historians have only recently begun to explore women's history, domestic servants left few written records (many were uneducated), they were not organized in unions, and there was quick turnover in their jobs. Often domestic service was only a stop on the way to marriage and a home of one’s own – in fact, being a maid wasn’t a bad way to meet a potential husband.

 While working, these young women were not protected or guided by any labour standards or regulations on living conditions. There was no recourse for a woman who’d received unfavourable treatment, except to quit and go elsewhere. 

Boom Town

In the boom town of Edwardian Edmonton, mind you, the threat of going elsewhere was no small one, and may have wrung a few concessions from the employing households. Gertrude Balmer Watt, an Edmonton newspaper woman (she and her husband, Arthur, started their own weekly, The Saturday News, in 1904) wrote some interesting things about servant girls, or “Mary Janes” as she called them.  She spoke in one instance of a maid having to be let go – finally – after coming home from her nightly excursion to “church” at one o’clock in the morning.   Balmer Watt also suspected that the beautiful cut steel belt worn by one “Lady Slavey” was in fact the property of her employer, and that she had simply helped herself to it, confident she wouldn’t be fired for the infraction. Yet Balmer Watt pointed out these incidents as exceptions to the rules.

 Which rules the Rutherfords followed is hard to say. As Alberta’s first premier, Alexander Rutherford believed in women’s education enough to found a university that admitted them as students. In his later house, which still stands on the University of Alberta campus, the maid had her own bedroom (complete with door), a private sitting room, and her own toilet facilities. 

 Nevertheless, we decided that the much smaller Rutherford House at Fort Edmonton Park was an ideal place to reflect what was typical for most maids at the time. So, a few years back, we shrank the maid's space by turning over part of the room to storage, as was common, and the bathroom door was kept closed, since most maids would not have free access to a bathroom.