domestic servant

"If you were a young girl of five, with blond hair and blue eyes, you usually got a good family. If you were a kid of 17, and your nose is a little bit crooked, someone would take you in as a cheap domestic servant."

So the women who might have gone out to be a domestic servant, not so many of them did.

Lives Lived: As a domestic servant in South Africa, Myrtle Witbooi experienced the inequities of servitude firsthand.

A former domestic servant, she had experienced the inequities of servitude firsthand, and she propelled herself to prominence by speaking out against them.

Ms. Witbooi became a domestic servant in Cape Town at the age of 17 and launched her campaign a few years later.