Maid

These meanings lived on in English until recent times (and are still familiar from literature and folk music), alongside the sense of the word as a type of servant.

[2][3] Maids perform typical domestic chores such as laundry, ironing, cleaning the house, grocery shopping, cooking, and caring for household pets.

In the contemporary Western world, comparatively few households can afford live-in domestic help, usually relying on cleaners, employed directly or through an agency (maid service).

Legislation in many countries makes certain living conditions, working hours, or minimum wage a requirement of domestic service.

[4] Maids were once part of an elaborate hierarchy in great houses, where the retinue of servants stretched up to the housekeeper and butler, responsible for female and male employees respectively.

[8] Some households employed maids-of-all-work as young as twelve in the 19th century in England and they often worked from five in the morning until late in the evening on a wage of £6 to £9 per year.

[12] Today, foreign women are employed in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and United Arab Emirates in large numbers to work as maids or other roles of domestic service, and are often vulnerable to multiple forms of abuse.

One of the most in-depth and enduring representations of the lives of several types of maid was seen in the 1970s television drama Upstairs, Downstairs, set in England between 1903 and 1936.