Female children and youth have engaged in domestic service in Zambia throughout the post-colonial period, exchanging domestic and care labour for cash wages and various payments in-kind. These young workers are largely excluded from existing historical scholarship on labour in Africa, mirroring a broader neglect of child labour in African historiography. By contrast, girl domestic workers have received a lot of attention in international development circles since the 1980s as part of a broader surge of interest in child labour in Africa. Although the approaches taken by development practitioners and organizations towards child labour have become increasingly sophisticated over time, tendency to perceive complex labour practices in often universalizing and essentially Western terms remains problematic. Influenced by local and international initiatives, recent public discourses on children and work in Zambia have largely centred on victimhood, with girls thought to be particularly vulnerable to exploitation. While such perceptions of child labour draw attention to the exploitation that many young workers have experienced, they limit our understanding of the complexity of working children’s lives. In this paper, I offer an historical interpretation of girls’ experiences of working in domestic service. I challenge the narrow construction of girl domestic workers as victims and illustrate how girls could exercise agency even in limited circumstances. Using oral testimonies and a range of documentary sources, I show that girls used employment in domestic service to support themselves and their dependents and made significant contributions to household and local economies in the process.