Through an analysis of women's reform, domestic worker activism, and cultural values attached to public and private space, Vanessa May explains how and why domestic workers, the largest category of ...working women before 1940, were excluded from labor protections that formed the foundation of the welfare state. Looking at the debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide,Unprotected Laborassesses middle-class women's reform programs as well as household workers' efforts to determine their own working conditions.May argues that working-class women sought to define the middle-class home as a workplace even as employers and reformers regarded the home as private space. The result was that labor reformers left domestic workers out of labor protections that covered other women workers in New York between the late nineteenth century and the New Deal. By recovering the history of domestic workers as activists in the debate over labor legislation, May challenges depictions of domestics as passive workers and reformers as selfless advocates of working women.Unprotected Laborilluminates how the domestic-service debate turned the middle-class home inside out, making private problems public and bringing concerns like labor conflict and government regulation into the middle-class home.
Black Girls Marchetti, Sabrina
2014, Letnik:
16
eBook
Black Girls demonstrates the relevance of colonial legacies in the stories of the Afro-Surinamese and the Eritrean women who, in the 1960s and 70s, migrated to the Netherlands and Italy, ...respectively, and became domestic workers there.
As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed in white ...employers' homes, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture.Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives and to maintain spaces for their own families despite the demands of employers and the restrictions of segregation. Sharpless also shows how these women's employment served as a bridge from old labor arrangements to new ones. As opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions.Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, this book evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home. Sharpless looks beyond stereotypes to introduce the real women who left their own houses and families each morning to cook in other women's kitchens.
Domestic and caregiving work has been at the core of human existence throughout history. A team of international scholars addresses the issues of state, agency, and domestic service in colonizer ...frames globally in historical perspectives.
In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers ...in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families, documenting the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when reuniting with their mothers in Vancouver.
This groundbreaking study explores the recent dramatic changes brought about in Japan by the influx of a non-Japanese population, Filipina brides. Lieba Faier investigates how Filipina women who ...emigrated to rural Japan to work in hostess bars-where initially they were widely disparaged as prostitutes and foreigners-came to be identified by the local residents as "ideal, traditional Japanese brides."Intimate Encounters, an ethnography of cultural encounters, unravels this paradox by examining the everyday relational dynamics that drive these interactions. Faier remaps Japan, the Philippines, and the United States into what she terms a "zone of encounters," showing how the meanings of Filipino and Japanese culture and identity are transformed and how these changes are accomplished through ordinary interpersonal exchanges. Intimate Encounters provides an insightful new perspective from which to reconsider national subjectivities amid the increasing pressures of globalization, thereby broadening and deepening our understanding of the larger issues of migration and disapora.
Domestic and care work in private households is now the largest employment sector for migrant women. This book sheds light on these households through its focus on the interpersonal relationships ...between Latin American “undocumented migrant” domestic workers and employers in Austria, Germany, Spain and the UK. The personal experiences of these women form the basis for Gutiérrez-Rodríguez’s decolonial analysis of the feminization of labor in private households and cultural analysis of domestic work as affective labor. This book will be a necessary voice in the debates on citizenship, cosmopolitanism, and migrant workers’ rights.
Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez is Senior Lecturer in Transcultural Studies at the University of Manchester, UK.
Introduction: Sensing Domestic Work 1. Decolonizing Migration Studies: On Transcultural Translation 2. Coloniality of Labor: Migration Regimes and the Latin American Diaspora in Europe 3. Governing the Household: On the Underside of Governmentality 4. Biopolitics and Value: Complicating the Feminization of Labor 5. Symbolic Power and Difference: Racializing Inequality 6. Affective Value: Ontologies of Exploitation 7. Decolonial Ethics and the Politics of Affects: Talking Rights
"This book draws on rich empirical studies of domestic workers and their employers in four European countries to make a convincing argument that domestic work is affective labour that is both structured by and transcends the logic of rights. It introduces the reader to migrants and their employers to reveal the emotional and relational complexity within private households. Its insights and decolonial perspective shed new light on the struggles of migrant domestic workers, and what is at stake for both workers and employers."
- Dr. Bridget Anderson, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford, UK
"Using her own positioning as a child of guest workers as a starting point, Gutierrez-Rodriguez explores the precarious work lives and struggles for rights and respect of Latin American women employed as domestic workers in Europe. Her theorization of affective relations between housewives and domestic workers and the continuing coloniality of power within transculturation and translation processes make this book a pathbreaking contribution to migration research, and feminist studies."
- Nina Glick Schiller, Director Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Culture and Professor of Anthropology, University of Manchester, UK
‘This book will be useful to those engaged in the theory of sociological analysis and to historians of American communism.’
-Grover C. Furr, Monclair State University, USA
In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. Scholars and activists denounce ...compromised forms of citizenship that expose these women to at times shocking exploitation and abuse.
InFrom Servants to Workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's "miraculous" transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernize paid domestic work through state regulation. Instead of undergoing a dramatic transformation, servitude relations stubbornly resisted change. Ally locates an explanation for this in the tension between the forms of power deployed by the state in its efforts to protect workers, on the one hand, and the forms of power workers recover through the intimate nature of their work, on the other.
Listening attentively to workers' own narrations of their entry into democratic citizenship-rights, Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labor.From Servants to Workersintegrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialize.
The last available census estimated around 10 per cent of total urban working women in India are concentrated in the low paid domestic services such as cleaning, cooking, and taking care of the ...children and the elderly. This is found to be much higher in certain parts of India, emerging as the single most important avenue for urban females, surpassing males in the service since the 1980s.
By applying an imaginative and refreshing mix of disciplinary approaches ranging from economic models of the household, empirical analysis and literary conventions, this book analyses the changing labour economy in post-partition West Bengal. It explains how and why women and girl children have replaced this traditionally male bias in the gender segregated domestic service industry since the late 1940s, and addresses the question of whether this increase in vulnerable individuals working in domestic service, the growth of the urban professional middle class in the post liberalization period, and the increasing incidences of reported abuses of domestics, in urban middleclass homes in the recent years, are related.
Covering five decades of the history of gender and labour in India, this book will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of gender and labour relations, development studies, economics, history, and women and gender studies.
Despite their peaceful, bucolic appearance, the tree-lined streets of South African suburbia were no refuge from the racial tensions and indignities of apartheid's most repressive years. InAt Home ...with Apartheid,Rebecca Ginsburg provides an intimate examination of the cultural landscapes of Johannesburg's middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods during the height of apartheid (c. 1960-1975) and incorporates recent scholarship on gender, the home, and family.
More subtly but no less significantly than factory floors, squatter camps, prisons, and courtrooms, the homes of white South Africans were sites of important contests between white privilege and black aspiration. Subtle negotiations within the domestic sphere between white, mostly female, householders and their black domestic workers, also primarily women, played out over and around this space. These seemingly mundane, private conflicts were part of larger contemporary struggles between whites and blacks over territory and power.
Ginsburg gives special attention to the distinct social and racial geographies produced by the workers' detached living quarters, designed by builders and architects as landscape complements to the main houses. Ranch houses, Italianate villas, modernist cubes, and Victorian bungalows filled Johannesburg's suburbs. What distinguished these neighborhoods from their precedents in the United States or the United Kingdom was the presence of the ubiquitous back rooms and of the African women who inhabited them in these otherwise exclusively white areas.
The author conducted more than seventy-five personal interviews for this book, an approach that sets it apart from other architectural histories. In addition to these oral accounts, Ginsburg draws from plans, drawings, and onsite analysis of the physical properties themselves. While the issues addressed span the disciplines of South African and architectural history, feminist studies, material culture studies, and psychology, the book's strong narrative, powerful oral histories, and compelling subject matter bring the neighborhoods and residents it examines vividly to life.
