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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
In 1993, Nannygate, one of the many predicaments of the Clinton administration, highlighted a trend that has been many years in the making. Nannygate captured the nation's attention not only because it represented another example of the misuse of economic and political privilege but also because in recent years so many Americans have had first-hand experience employing private household workers.
1. When women's employment as domestic servants peaked in 1870, more than 52 percent of working women were household workers. Until 1940, domestic service was the most common women's occupation. See Palmer, Phyllis, “Housewife and Household Worker: Employer-Employee Relationships in the Home, 1928–1941,” in To Toil the Livelong Day, ed. Groneman, Carol and Norton, Mary Beth (Ithaca, 1987), 179–81.Google Scholar For a historical overview, see Katzman, David, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Chicago, 1981);Google Scholar and Dudden, Faye E., Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, Conn., 1983).Google Scholar
2. Romero, Mary, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York and London, 1993);Google ScholarHondagneu-Sotelo, Peirette, “Regulating the Unregulated?: Domestic Workers and Their Social Networks,” Social Problems 4 (02 1994):50–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3. For a discussion of related trends in Third World countries where women from rural areas fill the needs of the emerging middle class for domestic servants, see Wrigley, Julia, “Feminists and Domestic Workers” (Review Essay), Feminist Studies 17 (Summer 1991): 317–29;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Tilly, Louise, “Does Waged Domestic Labor Have a Future?” International Labor and Working-Class History 39 (Spring 1991):61–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The majority of domestic workers, as PhyllisPalmer put it, are “working-class, immigrants, and women of color, and often, but not always, all three “ “Housewife and Household Worker,” 182–83.
4. Turbin, Carole, Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class, and Community in Troy, 1864–86 (Urbana, 1992), 215–17.Google Scholar
5. Rollins, Judith, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia, 1985).Google Scholar
6. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women and Domestic Service, 1905–1970 (Philadelphia, 1986), chap. 6;Google Scholar Rollins, Between Women, chap. 4; Palmer, “Housewife and Household Worker,” 184–86; Elizabeth Clark Lewis, “‘This Work had an End’: African-American Domestic Workers in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940,” in Groneman and Norton, To Toil the Livelong Day, chap. 4.
7. Rollins, Between Women, 179. Theda Skocpol introduced another definition of maternalism that is parallel to paternalism. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Rollins notes that employers use interpersonal strategies to control servants partly because they are unfamiliar with more direct supervisory methods that require distance between those in authority and subordinates. Between Women, 181.Google Scholar
8. Wrigley, “Feminists and Domestic Workers,” 317–29.
9. Rollins, Between Women, 184.
10. See Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride. Some servants, who for their own reasons are needy of caring relationships, may find this difficult. For example, Rollins describes a woman who admits that she participated in the fiction that she was part of the family because at the time she needed to feel loved. Between Women, 173–78.
11. Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 88–94; Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride.
12. During the Great Depression, Ella Baker wrote reports for the Amsterdam News that described street-corner employment markets, termed slave markets, for Black day workers in New York City. Baker described deplorable conditions of employment, but noted that some employees had the opportunity to make some choices about the number of jobs they took, and to negotiate with employers. “The Bronx Slave Market,” Amsterdam News, November 1935, 330, cited in Clegg, Brenda Faye, “Black Female Domestics During the Great Depression in New York City, 1930–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1983).Google Scholar
13. Romero, Mary, “Sisterhood and Domestic Service: Race, Class and Gender in the Mistress-Maid Relationship,” Humanity and Society 12 (1988):322, 335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14. Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride, 102–03.
15. Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 12–13.
16. Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Regulating the Unregulated?”
17. Ibid.
18. Rollins, Between Women, 202, quotes Fanon, Franz, Black Skin, White Masks (New York, 1967), 93.Google Scholar
19. Wrigley, “Feminists and Domestic Workers,” 317–29.
20. Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride, chap. 6.
21. Cleaning services, like the fast-food industry, represent another sort of development, the commodification of some aspects of household work.
22. A recent article in the real-estate section of the New York Times asserts that “an ever increasing number of homes currently up for sale—even expensive homes—are being offered in a condition that is almost an embarrassment.” July 24, 5. It may be that real-estate brokers see a disproportionate number of homes that are dirty or in disarray; many people selling homes are unable to pay attention to the condition of their home because they are in the throes of separation or divorce. Nevertheless, other observers also have noted that the decline in household standards is widespread.
23. This change is documented in Schorr, Juliet, The Overworked American (New York, 1991).Google Scholar
24. Wrigley, “Feminists and Domestic Workers,” 320.
25. Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 15.
26. The women's liberation movement has motivated many women to seek satisfying work; some of these changes may benefit some domestic servants and some women who have satisfying careers.
27. Sacks, Karen Brodkin, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (Chicago, 1988).Google Scholar
28. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano discusses the benefits and disadvantages of formal service work in “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18 (Autumn 1992):l–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar