According to the China Encyclopedia. Sociologically speaking, the word housekeeping has multiple meanings: first, it refers to things related to the lives of all or part of family members in this small family group. Secondly, it refers to the principles and codes of conduct in family life. The third refers to the management of family affairs. The "housekeeping" in this article mainly refers to the first explanation, supplemented by the third explanation. Domestic service is a new industry in China's current market economy, and it is the product of the socialization of housework, that is, the housework originally completed by family members to meet their own survival and maintain family functions has gradually changed into socialized services provided by social organizations, mainly including the commodity socialization service of household consumer goods and the labor socialization service of family services. Cooking, laundry, housework, caring for the elderly, caring for babies, caring for patients, caring for pregnant women and parturients, making family meals, housework management, family education, family recreation, etc. All belong to the content of domestic service. Domestic service brings unpaid housework, which originally belonged to the private sphere, into the public sphere. As a social occupation, it participates in the market economy and has the characteristics of sociality, convenience and paid service.

Second, the development status of domestic service. Since the reform and opening up, domestic service has emerged as a new industry with the prosperity of urban economy, the rapid development of urban construction, the rise of urban communities and the continuous expansion of residents' living needs. A systematic survey conducted by the Training and Employment Department of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security in nine cities including Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenyang, Nanjing, Xiamen, Nanchang, Qingdao and Wuhan shows that there are 239,600 full-time, part-time and hourly workers engaged in domestic service in nine cities, of which urban employees account for 56. 1%. There are many forms of domestic service organizations, such as social organizations, enterprises, collectives and individuals, which are divided into domestic service intermediaries and domestic service companies. Domestic service projects are different or biased due to different service areas and different service objects, but they basically cover family cleaning, domestic management, family nursing, family education and family entertainment. The development of domestic service is different in cities with different levels of development. Fundamentally speaking, domestic service is closely related to the development level of the city. Shanghai, which developed earlier, took domestic service as an important aspect of re-employment project from 65438 to 0995, and developed domestic service in a planned and standardized way. Shanghai also relies on administrative agencies to set up domestic labor service agencies and public welfare service agencies in the streets. In addition, there are many well-developed domestic service companies in Shanghai, such as Shanghai Jialilai Domestic Service Co., Ltd., which not only regulates low-grade domestic service, but also actively develops high-grade domestic service; It not only consolidated the domestic service market of Chinese people, but also developed the foreign domestic service market. Generally speaking, domestic service has a high degree of marketization and standardization in big cities with rapid development, high development speed, high grade and high public acceptance, but it has a low degree of marketization and standardization, slow development, narrow service items and low public acceptance in small and medium-sized cities, but it has great market potential.