From the wealth of textual material about female servants, The author has chosen four representative texts for inclusion in this volume. They have been chosen to illustrate how books addressed to female servants evolved and to show that women in service and the ordering of the household were integral to the way labour and gender structured early modern socio-economic ideals. Of the four texts reproduced here, two are manuals explaining the duties of female servants, while two are critical, in some respects, of such books addressed to servants..