maid-of-all-work

A female servant employed to do general housework.

Now this honest little fellow being a bachelor, keeps but one servant, which he calls a maid of all work. When he gets drunk, which doth not happen above seven times a week, he is never so happy as when he is expatiating on the virtues of this virgin of his, especially her sobriety.

The Irish maid Betty Flanagan’s bonnets and ribbons, her sauciness, her idleness, her reckless prodigality of kitchen candles, her consumption of tea and sugar, and so forth occupied and amused the old lady almost as much as the doings of her former household […] about which the good lady talked a hundred times a day. And besides Betty Flanagan, Mrs. Sedley had all the maids-of-all-work in the street to superintend.

Any person who does a wide range of jobs in a supportive role; a thing that serves a wide range of purposes.

These colossal changes necessitate an attempt to adapt the constitution of 1789 to an entirely different kind of civilization from the one for which it was planned. The only significant change made to meet this new civilization is the great American maid-of-all-work, the Inter-State Commerce Commission.

Sir GEORGE CAVE is the Ministerial maid-of-all-work. Whenever there is a disagreeable or awkward measure to introduce it falls to the Quite-at-Home Secretary, if I may borrow an expression coined by my friend, TOBY, M.P., for one of Sir GEORGE’S predecessors.