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Step off the lush carpet and push through the swinging door of the butler’s pantry to enter the
bustling realm of domestic workers at Maymont House from 1893 to 1925.
In From Morning to Night, Elizabeth O’Leary takes the reader behind the scenes in the
opulent mansion of the Richmond multimillionaire James H. Dooley and his wife, Sallie. Drawing upon
personal letters, business and government documents, and numerous oral histories of older
Richmonders—both black and white—O’Leary examines the parallel and divergent
viewpoints of server and served in this Virginia version of “Upstairs/Downstairs.” Raised in slave-owning households before the Civil War, the Dooleys experienced the
transformation of the master/mistress-slave relationship to that of employer-employee. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they relied on a full complement of domestic servants to
maintain their lavish residences and lifestyle. In turn, numerous men and women—predominantly
African American—labored to meet the day-to-day challenges of running an elaborate household.
At the same time, they negotiated the era’s increasing Jim Crow restrictions and, during
precious hours off-duty, helped support families, churches, and the larger black community. By examining the formalities and practices of the Dooleys at home and by giving a presence and voice
to their “help,” From Morning to Night offers insights into domestic and social
systems at work within and beyond the upper-class household in the Gilded Age South. Elizabeth L. O’Leary, Guest Curator at Maymont Foundation and Associate Curator of American Arts at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, is the author of At Beck and Call: The Representation of Domestic Servants in Nineteenth-Century Painting and coauthor of American Dreams: Paintings and Decorative Arts from the Warner Collection. |
The University of
Virginia Press