Female Household Servants in the Seventeenth-Century Town of Turku in South-West Finland

This chapter is based on the results of research concentrating on the agency of seventeenth-century female domestic servants in Turku, south-west Finland, between 1639 and 1700. There are about 2000 Magistrates’ court cases concerning the position and life of female domestic servants in the town. Indeed, female servants made up 15 per cent of the whole population of Turku annually. They are thought to have been under the power of their masters and mistresses without any rights to show their own opinion or will. The state and the Lutheran church gave orders regarding the servants’ position in the master’s family, and these orders rarely mentioned any rights—only duties. However, as I show in this chapter, servants’ voices can be heard through these court documents, which describe their life more widely and reveal their own choices and motives. I deal with these specific features in this chapter and reveal how the stories in the Magistrates’ court records describe the ideas of female servants and their employers about work, and the status and aspirations of servants.