2026 Theses Doctoral

Au pairs in postwar Britain

Sharp, Lucy Rosalyn

This dissertation examines the history of au pairing in postwar Britain, using the figure of the au pair to explore the intersections of migration, domestic labor, gender, and youth mobility. From the late 1940s through the 1970s, thousands of young European women entered Britain as au pairs: living in private households, performing domestic and childcare work, and receiving pocket money rather than wages. Officially, they were not treated as workers, but as guests or temporary members of the family. This ambiguous status made au pairing both flexible and unstable, allowing it to function as a form of domestic labor while remaining outside the categories of employment, migration, and regulation that might otherwise have governed it.

The dissertation argues that au pairing exposes the selective and uneven character of postwar British governance. At a time when the British state was increasingly willing to restrict and regulate other forms of migration, especially from the Commonwealth, it remained reluctant to intervene in the movement of mostly white, European young women or in the private households where they lived and worked. Au pairs also reveal the unsettled status of domestic labor after the decline of residential service. They were expected to help with housework and childcare, yet their claim to equality within the family depended on not being treated as servants.

By following au pairs across government policy, private households, welfare organizations, and European debates over regulation, this dissertation shows how a minor and often overlooked category of migration illuminates broader tensions in postwar Britain. Au pairing made visible the persistence of domestic labor within the middle-class home, the conditional nature of young women’s mobility, and the difficulty of regulating intimate forms of work that took place across the boundary between family and employment.