At the Intersection of Home and Work: Domesticity, Labor, and the Contradictions of Modernity in Ecuador, 1890–1950

Abstract

This essay uses gender analysis to interrogate the modernization of labor organizations in Ecuador from 1890-1950, with a focus on why domestic servants were excluded in this process. Although labor organizers challenged other forms of paternalism in labor relations, they remained silent on domestic service even though it was the main source of female labor in Ecuador's growing cities. Using publications by labor organizations, laws, and social welfare records, this essay seeks to understand not what life was like for domestic servants, but to explore the contours and contradictions in the relationships between workers, labor organizers, and the state during a critical period of modernization and state formation in Ecuador. I argue that the absence of domestic servants from labor discourses defined and reinforced specific forms of masculine dignity as the core of the modern worker identity. This masculine worker identity made possible the inclusion of indigenous hacienda workers in the labor movement, but women could be incorporated only if they worked in public settings (mainly factories). Domestic servants belonged symbolically to the realm of traditional labor, and their ties to the home placed them beyond the paradigm of class exploitation.

As historian Juan Maiguashca has shown, the modern labor movement in 1930s Ecuador rejected traditional forms of paternalism in worker-employer relations.² This challenge included not only urban workers but also indigenous laborers on rural estates. Similarly, Guillermo Bustos indicated that by 1938 labor organizers’ definition of the worker was expansive enough to (partially) include women and Indigenous peoples.³ Ecuadorian labor leaders’ willingness to incorporate rural indigenous workers resulted from the rise of indigenous activism on large estates, whereas the inclusion of women focused specifically on those who worked in factories or other places of public employment. The expanding definition of the worker intersected with several other forms of modernization in the 1930s; despite ongoing challenges to economic and political stability, industrialization and urbanization were underway, and a solid middle class was emerging. Politics too had modernized: Although liberal notions of citizenship upheld the state, by the 1930s, both socialist and communist parties had formed and were challenging the government. All these changes impacted the scope of the modern Ecuadorian labor movement.

Labor organizers who challenged paternalism, however, remained silent on domestic service even though it was a common form of labor among poor women. This absence is not entirely surprising. Anthropologist Eduardo Kingman Garcés discussed the home as an enclosed space in which domestic work reproduced patriarchal relations, noting that relationships of servitude and patronage in elite homes were among the last social relations to change in the process of modernization.⁴ Labor leaders and leftists often ignored domestic servants on the assumption that housework, whether paid or unpaid, was “women's work” and therefore outside of the labor sector; it was inherently social rather than economic.⁵ Instead of questioning these assumptions, twentieth-century labor movements in Latin America sidelined domestic workers, reinforcing the idea that class struggle was inherently masculine.⁶ The absence of domestic servants from labor discourses has had significant repercussions in contemporary Ecuador. Sociologist Erynn Masi de Casanova's work demonstrates that contemporary domestic workers struggle to improve their work conditions because, unlike other workers, they experience feminized and personalized (as well as economic) forms of oppression. Moreover, they find it difficult to forge alliances with male-dominated labor unions.⁷

Ecuadorian labor historians have not closely considered domestic work in the history of the modern labor movement.⁸ The absence is striking because paternalism and servitude were central to a wide range of labor relations and discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: although historians typically treat domestic servants and conciertos (debt peons on large estates) as separate groups, the dividing line between agricultural and domestic labor was not always clear in practice.⁹ Most conciertos and their wives had to take turns serving as huasicamas (household servants for hacienda owners).¹⁰ Moreover, nineteenth-century elites justified their power over both groups through familial discourses, and both types of workers employed discourses of paternalism in labor conflicts.¹¹ Paternalism and domesticity permeated artisan workshops as well, and early mutual aid societies were based on a long history of patriarchal hierarchy in which workers and apprentices were subject to the personal authority of the master craftsman. Apprentices often had to perform household chores such as fetching water, cooking, or even changing diapers in order that they “learned humility.”¹² All three groups were identified as child-like in their status and need for protection, regardless of whether they were minors.¹³ Given that servitude and paternalism were deeply embedded in labor relations, why is it that indigenous and labor activists’ challenges to paternalism have produced historical curiosity, but not the absence of domestic workers in these processes?

I approach the silence on domestic workers as neither natural nor incidental, but as a problem that can reveal new dimensions of Ecuadorian labor history. My work builds upon the scholarship and activism on domestic workers that links the economic and the personal, the public and the private. Rubbo and Taussig noted that domestic service “reproduce[es] some of the basic patterns of oppression that make societies what they are today,” while Brazilian activist Lenira Carvalho proclaimed that “The one who brings the class struggle into the house is the domestic worker.”¹⁴ In recent years, scholars have brought attention to domestic labor as “both a distinct area of inquiry and as a field with links to labor, economic, family, cultural, women's, gender, and political history.”¹⁵ Elizabeth Quay Hutchinson's recent monograph on Chilean domestic workers has been a particularly important contribution that highlights domestic workers’ views and methods of organization.¹⁶ Whereas Hutchinson's work focuses on making domestic workers visible in labor history, I am interested in historicizing the attempts to render domestic workers invisible.

To explore the relationship between labor history and domestic work in Ecuador, I reviewed existing labor histories, legal documents, social work records, and publications by labor organizations or political parties. I seek not to understand what life was like for domestic servants, but to explore the contours and contradictions in the relationships between workers, labor organizers, and the state in a critical period of economic, social, and political change. I argue that the marginalization of domestic servants defined and reinforced specific forms of masculine dignity and modernity as the core of worker identity. Domestic servants belonged symbolically to the realm of traditional labor, and their ties to the home placed them beyond the paradigm of class exploitation that concerned labor and leftist leaders.¹⁷ Therefore, unlike Kingman, I approach the domestic sphere not as a closed space, but as a point where the tensions of modernization played out in Ecuador.

Labor Organization and the Emergence of a Worker Identity

Ecuadorian labor movements began with artisan-based mutual-aid societies in the late nineteenth century. Though not entirely unconcerned with workers’ wellbeing, these organizations were focused primarily on encouraging morality, brotherhood, and a “spirit of family” among workers. Within this general structure, Quito organizations tended to be more conservative, while Guayaquil societies began to emphasize workers’ rights in the early twentieth century.¹⁸ Early labor congresses reflected this division: the 1909 Quito conference emphasized hierarchical labor obligations, while the 1920 Guayaquil meeting emphasized workers’ rights.¹⁹

Even liberal labor organizers were ambivalent about whether women and Indigenous peoples could be included as workers. At the 1920 labor congress, Agustín Freyre proposed minimum wages in agriculture, but delegates contended that indigenous agricultural workers first needed to be redeemed (i.e., civilized) via primary education.²⁰ Women were similarly marginalized at the 1920 labor congress: two women attended the meeting, but they were not allowed to vote on proposals because they were from the Centro Feminista “La Aurora” rather than workers.²¹ Delegates in 1920 seemed torn over how to discuss gender and worker identity. Señor Váscones proclaimed that “The modern woman…has sufficiently proved that she is capable of working just like man.”²² Señor Drouet, however, claimed that men found fulfillment and dignity in work, while women did so through their noble mission as mothers.²³ By the time of the 1938 labor congress, there were a few indigenous and women representatives, and the definition of the worker was changing from the artisan model toward factory wage work. Importantly, the modern worker identity expanded to include indigenous estate workers.²⁴ This shift resulted from several changes that occurred after 1920, including the rise of indigenous activism, the establishment of the Ecuadorian socialist and communist parties, and the development of a more sophisticated social welfare system following the Revolución Juliana in 1925.²⁵ Industrialization likewise played a crucial role, especially in the aftermath of factory strikes in the mid-1930s.²⁶

Women accounted for a considerable minority of early industrial workers, especially in textile production.²⁷ Factory owners expected women workers to be docile and paid them less than men assuming that women's work was supplemental to household income. Both assumptions were wrong: women workers’ incomes were crucial to family subsistence, and women proved willing to agitate for better pay and treatment. In 1934, women workers made up the majority of the 350 strikers at the “La Industrial” textile factory in Quito, where three out of the eight leaders were women.²⁸ Sometimes workers’ petitions specifically recognized women workers: for example, workers at “La Industrial Algodonera” in Ambato sought better pay and treatment as well as protections for women.²⁹ Workers at “La Internacional” in Quito even demanded equal pay for women.³⁰ Women's inclusion at the 1938 congress thus resulted not from labor leaders’ enlightenment but from women workers’ actions and demands.

The 1938 Labor Code reflected changes in the labor force since the 1920s.³¹ The code upheld all previous labor legislation, including the right to an eight-hour workday and a six-day work week, accident compensation, the rights to organize and strike, and protective restrictions on female and child labor.³² The new code also made assumptions that identified the worker as male. For example, it stipulated that “minimum salary wages should be enough to satisfy the normal needs of the worker's life considering him as head of the family.”³³ This article, combined with laws regulating female labor and prohibiting night work for women, suggested that the worker was male and reinforced his status as the head of household. Historian Eileen Boris noted that although protective laws appeared to pertain to work, they had more to do with male concerns about upholding gendered family norms and morality that constrained women without limiting working men. In fact, banning women from night work could allow them more time to labor at home for their families.³⁴ Women were similarly sidelined in the development of indigenous labor rights.

Indigenous Workers, Gender, and Rights

Early foundations for Ecuadorian indigenous movements can be found in liberal policies from 1895–1918. Although liberals upheld the equality and individual rights of all citizens, they reinforced interethnic paternalism by classifying Indigenous peoples as miserable and in need of protections, especially from large estate owners and priests.³⁵ However, the 1918 abolition of concertaje (debt peonage) only eliminated imprisonment for debt rather than restructuring labor on large estates.³⁶ Other important laws were the 1904 Ley de Cultas, which confiscated Church-owned lands, and the 1908 Ley de Beneficencia, which created welfare boards to administer state-owned properties, including oversight of relations between indigenous workers and elite renters.³⁷ Although these laws fell short of liberating Indigenous peoples, they provided estate workers with new tools for addressing labor conditions.

Collective action, once rare among hacienda workers, became more common in the liberal period.³⁸ Beginning in the 1910s, indigenous workers on state-owned haciendas in Ecuador's north-central highlands drew on liberal laws and rhetoric to lodge complaints against the elite renters of estates.³⁹ An important turning point came in the 1920s, when indigenous activists forged relationships with leftist leaders. Though this relationship was at first fraught with interethnic paternalism, over time leftist leaders—especially communist Ricardo Paredes—held indigenous activists in high regard and forged horizontal relationships with them.⁴⁰ By the 1930s, estate workers presented their demands in terms of labor rights.⁴¹ They appealed to state officials for equal rights as citizens while simultaneously demanding protection as exploited peoples of a miserable race. In essence, indigenous activists used the inherent contradictions of liberal laws to their own advantage.

A critical moment in the history of hacienda worker protests came in December 1930, when workers on the Pesillo hacienda in Cayambe (Pichincha province) went on strike to demand improved working conditions and pay. Strikers made seventeen central demands, including the abolition of cruel punishments, the elimination of unpaid labor, a five-day work week for huasipungueros (indebted workers who had access to small plots of land) with a 40-centavo wage for each day's work, an eight-hour workday, the establishment of a school on the hacienda, and free medical care for sick workers.⁴² Two of their demands related directly to women: first, strikers requested that “Milkmaids who work from early in the morning will earn twenty centavos every day, and after finishing their milking and cheese making chores will be free, without obligation to do other jobs.” Second, they insisted that “Women employed in labors less difficult than the men shall earn thirty centavos a day.”⁴³ On the one hand, the strikers—many of whom were women themselves—were fighting against hacienda practices in which huasipungueros’ wives were forced to work for little or no pay. On the other hand, the demands implied that women's labor was less valuable than men's.⁴⁴ Petitions on other state-owned haciendas contained a similar tension over women's status as workers, particularly when men complained that women's obligations on the hacienda forced them to neglect their responsibilities toward their husbands and homes.⁴⁵ Protestors on the Moyurco hacienda even asserted that managers should not make women work five days per week because “Indian women's work is occasional and one should not think of it as constant.”⁴⁶

Domestic service turns (as huasicamas) were an especially sensitive issue for indigenous protestors. Although male estate workers agreed to take turns working in the hacienda house with their wives, they maintained that the work had to be remunerated and flatly refused to provide domestic service in managers’ or overseers’ houses. Some laborers opposed women's service for estate renters more generally: In 1945, huasipunguero Miguel Alba lodged a complaint with the Public Welfare director claiming that his wife was wrongfully being forced to provide huasicama services.⁴⁷

Indigenous labor activism on large estates had a clear impact on the 1938 labor code, in which jornaleros (day laborers) were guaranteed the legal minimum wage, with no more than 25 percent of their wages being deducted for any food provided. Huasipungueros could not be paid less than half of a jornalero's daily wages, nor could they be forced to work more than four days per week. They were further guaranteed the right to hunt and fish on estate property, and they could not be forced to sell their own animals or tend to the employer's animals without compensation.⁴⁸ The code set specific requirements and limits to domestic labor on haciendas:

When a peón provides domestic services as a huasicama…he, his wife, and children will be entitled, in cases where they accompany him in the service, to the cost of moving, food and housing, and the peón will receive monetary wages corresponding to every day of domestic work provided. Any of the peón's family members over 12 years of age, who provide the indicated services, will receive separate wages.⁴⁹

In effect, the 1938 labor code addressed many demands that indigenous activists made in their conflicts with hacienda owners. Although estate workers could legally be paid lower wages than other workers, they also worked fewer hours and enjoyed access to estate resources. As with other sections of the labor code, the indigenous worker was gendered male, and work performed by his family members was deemed supplemental. This classification was simultaneously traditional and modern: it rested on centuries-old practices of referencing only male workers in hacienda record books, but it also reflected an essentially masculine definition of the modern worker. Indigenous activists’ concern with huasicama requirements is not surprising when one considers that these duties were among the most difficult to align with a worker identity that was free from associations with servitude and interethnic paternalism. Indigenous activists’ successful challenge to huasicama practices suggests that when domestic servants were male, they were more likely to gain rights and pay than in circumstances when domestic servants were predominantly female.⁵⁰

The gradual change in labor leaders’ views of indigenous workers is evident in the Guayquil labor magazine La Aurora. Articles rarely mentioned indigenous workers the 1910s, and any references to them reinforced dominant racial discourses that identified Indians as miserable peoples in need of redemption and civilization.⁵¹ By the 1920s, columns in La Aurora occasionally recognized the indigenous workers’ problems as a matter of concern for workers’ movements.⁵² In 1940, Julio Senador Gómez wrote a column claiming that elites had unjustly wrested land from many rural communities.⁵³ However, in that same year, Gilberto Clarijo y Guerrero insisted that rural workers required civic education before being incorporated on equal footing, so that they would avoid becoming “unthinking instruments of audacious people.”⁵⁴ Similarly, the Ambato Labor Congress of 1938 was the first to include indigenous representatives, but there were only three indigenous delegates even though Indigenous peoples accounted for a significant percentage of the nation's workers. Some non-indigenous delegates also perpetuated stereotypes of Indigenous peoples as defenseless and vulnerable to manipulation.⁵⁵

Despite the strong association of hacienda work with men, indigenous women were actively involved in conflicts with hacienda renters. About one-third of the 1931 Pesillo protestors were women, and some indigenous women (most notably Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña) emerged as important activist leaders. Both women were involved in the 1931 strike, both had ties with the Ecuadorian Communist Party, and both helped to found the Federation of Ecuadorian Indians in 1944. Yet neither Cacuango nor Amaguaña focused on women's rights per se, choosing instead to concentrate on concerns that they shared with indigenous men. Although Cacuango and Amaguaña opened possibilities for other indigenous women's political activism, it remained difficult for indigenous women to address gender inequalities.⁵⁶

Domestic Servants: Everywhere and Nowhere

Domestic service was a constant in the history of Ecuadorian labor and key factor in urban growth in the early- to mid-twentieth century. By the mid-twentieth century, most domestic servants were young women who had migrated from the countryside, and not all of them lived in the households where they worked.⁵⁷ The expansion of state bureaucracies, public schools and services, and industrialization led to the growth of middle classes by the 1930s, and most of these families hired at least one or two domestic servants. In fact, middle-class women were only able to take advantage of new opportunities in the public sphere because they had access to readily available and affordable domestic help.⁵⁸

The 1906 police code offers clues about how state officials sought to maintain control of so-called servile classes in early stages of modernization. Police had the right to regulate the lives of the poor, presuming them to be inclined toward drunkenness, vagrancy, and disorder. Like other poor urban workers, domestic workers (laundresses, cooks, wetnurses, etc.) had to register with the local police, and those who worked for more than three months were supposed to obtain documentation from a local judge.⁵⁹ Though the police could ostensibly protect the rights of workers as well as employers, the code only referred to contracts as a means to capture minors or domestic servants who fled their employers or guardians.⁶⁰

One of the reasons that domestic servants were seen as a class apart, rather than as part of the working class, was that most of them were female and many were minors. Police and government officials facilitated adoptions in which elites brought children into their homes with the specific purpose of using them as domestic laborers. Public Assistance records from 1900–1945 offer evidence of elites who went to orphanages to adopt children, some of them as young as four or five years old.⁶¹ Orphanages trained girls for work in domestic service, both to help the girls find work and to address what elites saw as “the deteriorating quality of domestic service.”⁶² Though few elites specified that they would put adopted children to work, a case from 1910 makes clear that elites viewed these children as servants, not family members. Angel Porras complained to the president of the Social Welfare Board that the Mother Superior in charge of an orphanage had refused to let him take home two girls, claiming that none were available.⁶³ Irate, Porras asserted that no one should stop a civilized man from helping the nation out by feeding and educating orphan girls.⁶⁴ Porras, like other elites, saw this arrangement as work for care, rather than work for pay.⁶⁵ Girls as young as two and a half or three years old were adopted out to elite families, with any actual payment for their services delayed until they were of age.⁶⁶ As the twentieth century wore on, it appears that fewer children entered domestic service through adoption, and by the 1940s, couples adopting children had to promise that they would treat them as legitimate heirs with full inheritance rights.⁶⁷

Child labor, however, was prominent in domestic service well into the twentieth century. Article 83 of the 1938 labor code stated that “Minors under the age of 14 are prohibited from doing any kind of work, with the exception of the provisions in the Domestic Service Chapter [of the labor code].”⁶⁸ It further stipulated that employers of domestic servants under age twelve did not have to pay them wages but instead had to provide them with food, shelter, and education.⁶⁹ Social workers often facilitated the placement of poor children into service in elite households. For example, when the widow Blanca Guerra Gavila asked to have her daughter placed in an orphanage because she was too old for state-run daycare, social service workers rejected her request.⁷⁰ They explained that “The Secretary of the Council thinks that the girl is not eligible for the orphanage, because she has a mother and is of an age where she could render her services in someone's home and study at a night school.”⁷¹ The girl was eight years old.

Children working in elite homes had no guarantee of security or stability. In 1947, Zoila Rendón de Mosquera went to the social services office to have her eight-year-old servant, Beatriz Georgina Sánchez, put into an orphanage. Rendón claimed that although she had raised the longuita—a derogatory reference to the girl's indigenous ancestry—and treated her like family, she could no longer keep her in the household. The girl, she said, stole household items and sold them, spent time on the street rather than going to school, and fought so much with the cooks that they could no longer tolerate her. Only Sr. Mosquera defended the child, stating that his wife and children often punished the girl too harshly, while he claimed to look upon her with paternal caring. Social Services placed Sánchez in an orphanage.⁷² The case highlights both the plight of child workers in elite homes and the racism that frequently underscored domestic labor. It further confirms that children under twelve worked as servants in private households well into the 1940s, despite rising political concern with the practice.⁷³

Information from the 1938 labor code highlights domestic servants’ limited ability to call upon rights or protections as workers. Some differences were explicit—whereas the labor code guaranteed Saturday afternoon as well as Sunday off for most workers, domestic workers only had the right to one day off per week.⁷⁴ Other rights were not specifically denied to domestic servants but were unenforceable, such as an eight-hour workday, regular breaks during the workday, the right to time off on national holidays, and women and children's protection from night labor.⁷⁵ Embedded within the labor code is a key to understanding implicit distinctions between domestic servants and other workers: the phrase “in all work establishments.”⁷⁶ The code presumed that work was public in nature, whereas domestic labor was private, indicating a hardening of the division between home and work in official discourses by the 1930s.⁷⁷ It was for this reason that wet nurses, cooks, and others “who provide their services in hotels, bars, inns, hospitals or similar establishments are not [considered] domestics, but as workers subject to the general rules of this Code.”⁷⁸

Although laws identified domestic servants with the private sphere of the families they served, domestic workers’ own family lives were often in disarray. Daycare centers were first established in Quito during the 1910s for children whose mothers were “poor and honorable” servants, many of whom previously had no choice but to separate from their children.⁷⁹ Decades later, domestic servants still could not have their children with them at work and struggled to find care for them. Several women who sought social service assistance in 1947 petitioned to have their children placed in daycare centers, deposited in orphanages, or provided with scholarships to go to state-run schools.⁸⁰ Gaining access to state support, however, did not necessarily solve domestic servants’ familial problems. Margarita Cachumba's children went to school or daycare while their mother worked for an elite family, but “her patrona is bothered by the trips she has to make to drop the children off in the morning…which makes her lose work time.”⁸¹ Employers’ convenience continued to prevail over domestic workers’ family cohesion.

Domestic workers’ difficulty obtaining rights resulted not just from elite and middle-class interest in maintaining access to cheap domestic labor, but also from labor organizations that ignored or obfuscated their experiences and needs. Only once did the labor monthly La Aurora address domestic workers, in a column titled “The Cook's Speech.” Purportedly written by an anonymous member of a cook's union, the piece discussed elites’ lack of appreciation for cooks (“all mouths open at mealtime, but they eat and shut; none opens to praise us as we deserve”) and proclaimed an era of emancipation. The author demanded Sundays and holidays off; permission to let cooks’ boyfriends visit them in the kitchen; and an end to the custom of having to account for all food purchases. If these demands were not met, cooks would engage in acts of sabotage with their employers’ food and goods; the author even made passing mention to going on strike.⁸² “The Cook's Speech” appeared in the “Sección Amena” (Pleasant Section), suggesting that it was meant to be a light-hearted discussion of a cook's view of elite households. The playful language of the piece reinforced its humorous nature: the author referred to cooks as “tasty, exquisite, and succulent compañeras,” and proclaimed they were “as indispensable as oil in mayonnaise” in the households where they served.⁸³ The article sometimes discussed real problems that domestic servants faced, but its lighthearted tone, and the lack of any other columns on domestic work, indicate that the editors of La Aurora did not include domestic servants under the mantle of worker.

Women's marginalization in labor movements was a problem across the political spectrum. Although a 1934 Quito assembly of workers, leftists, and students called for regulations of domestic servants’ work conditions, most labor and leftist leaders paid little attention to women workers and even less to domestics.⁸⁴ At first, leftist politics seemed concerned with gender inequalities: When the Partido Socialista Ecuatoriana was established in 1926, its members called for gender equality in the economy, politics, and society; they even critiqued inequalities in the family.⁸⁵ However, by the 1930s, it was rare for socialist or communist party leaders to mention women except to uphold indigenous strikers’ demands or call for the enforcement of pre-existing protective labor laws. The 1932 Communist Party program did not even mention gender inequalities.⁸⁶ Leftist politicians’ disinterest in women or domestic service was especially important because leftists exercised a strong influence on the 1938 labor code.⁸⁷ Domestic workers’ marginalization thus resulted from labor leaders who identified workers as masculine, making an exception for women industrial workers only because of their association with the most modern and public forms of work and protest.⁸⁸

Occasionally, working-class feminists tried to help domestic workers. In 1920, women from the Centro Feminista “La Aurora” in Guayaquil championed the cause of Teodosia Lajes, an eight-year-old domestic worker who fled her employer's home. They sought custody of the child, whom they claimed had been cruelly punished, and wanted to provide training to help her to avoid a life of servitude. Much to their dismay, Lajas was instead handed over to the police commissioner, who sent her to work in a new household.⁸⁹ Working-class women were powerless to change the girl's fate because neither elites nor police officials were concerned with child domestic labor. However, the center continued to offer classes to other young girls with the hope of helping them to avoid lifelong domestic service.

Domestic Servants Working Within the System

Despite the limitations of the emerging welfare system, poor women learned which arguments were most likely to help them access assistance. When new educational institutions and scholarships became available in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, poor individuals—especially widows or abandoned mothers—wrote to the Social Welfare Board to try to get their children admitted into the schools.⁹⁰ Supplicants tried to convince government officials that they were members of the so-called “deserving poor,” who struggled due to circumstances beyond their control rather than because of their own moral failings. By the 1930s and 1940s, poor petitioners also played upon elite fears of juvenile delinquency. Mothers who brought cases before social workers often declared that without government assistance their children were destined to spend “all day in the street,” where they would learn bad habits and get into trouble.⁹¹ Their statements reflected elite presumptions that children without parental supervision would be

left to the disastrous influences of the street. They grow up in the stream of vice and carelessness. Hunger, necessity, and freedom fatally lead them to certain crimes: theft, aggressiveness, attacks on modesty. In abandonment they find the [slippery] slope that leads them to moral degradation and crime. The habit of laziness, lying, and disobedience is born in them. Abandonment is, therefore one of the social causes of delinquency.⁹²

Officials fearful of juvenile delinquency, and especially young girls’ immorality, were more likely to aid poor mothers. Although social workers often blamed mothers (rather than poverty) for families’ unhealthy living conditions, many did the best that they could to help their clients, who were often female domestic workers. When children were not eligible to go to a daycare or an orphanage, social workers sent women to other agencies for assistance or provided supplemental income for families. They also tried to get absent fathers to support the families that they abandoned.⁹³ It was for this reason that poor women, including domestic servants, sought state assistance despite its many limitations.

There is little evidence of collective organization among domestic workers in the early twentieth century, even among state-hired domestics. One reason for this was that most domestic workers were isolated from each other in the homes of elite families. It is therefore not surprising that one of the only groups of domestic workers to act collectively were washerwomen.⁹⁴ In 1919, a group of about twenty washerwomen in Quito petitioned the director of the subdivision of Public Health for the right to access water sources that a new city policy prohibited them from using.⁹⁵ Unlike other domestic workers, washerwomen interacted with each other on a daily basis at locations where they went to wash clothes, and most of them did not live with their employers. These details of daily existence allowed the women to work together to resolve their shared problem. I contend, however, that it was not simply their isolation from each other that made most domestic servants unlikely to develop stronger patterns of protest and negotiation. Instead, it resulted from intersecting and traceable processes of modernization: first, urbanization and middle-class women's entrance into the workforce required cheap domestic labor. Second, labor leaders, socialist leaders, and the state increasingly identified the worker as male and emphasized that work occurred outside of the home. Labor (and leftist) leaders challenged patriarchalism that indigenous estate workers experienced, but their silence on domestic work reinforced the paternalism under which domestic servants labored.

Conclusion

Ecuadorian domestic workers’ marginalization in labor laws and movements was not unique, but it had lasting implications for both labor organization and domestic work in twentieth-century Ecuador. Labor discourses identifying work with a masculine public sphere made it difficult for domestic workers to address the problems they faced.⁹⁶ Many domestic servants began working in elite and middle-class homes when they were girls, and even those who were adults were separated from each other and often from their own families. They also held contradictory roles vis-à-vis modernization: On the one hand, a supply of cheap domestic labor was necessary for urbanization, the expansion of the middle classes, and middle-class women's new professional opportunities. On the other hand, domestic workers symbolized a traditional, familial form of labor. This made them the concern of the emerging welfare system, not the labor movement.⁹⁷ Domestic workers’ marginalized position not only gave coherence to the modern worker's identity, but it resolved tensions in the process of modernization and justified the inclusion of indigenous rural workers under the mantle of the modern worker.

By the 1930s, Ecuadorian modernization brought with it uncertainties and threats to long-standing hierarchies. The rise of socialist and communist parties influenced both workers’ and indigenous movements. Labor organizations and indigenous activists rejected the paternalism that undergirded traditional labor relations, and indigenous workers confronted deeply embedded racism. Middle-class women entered the workforce as teachers, nurses, and social workers, while working-class women worked in factories. In 1929, literate women gained voting rights. These socio-economic and political changes all occurred during a decade of tremendous political upheaval.⁹⁸ Gender discourses were essential to easing male anxieties over the changes wrought by modernization.⁹⁹ These discourses identified the workplace as public and masculine, and the home as private and under male control. Women could be included as workers if they labored in the public sphere, but they were set apart, along with minors, via protective laws that disallowed them from working at night or doing dangerous jobs.¹⁰⁰ Domestic labor was not “work” in such an equation, and the fact that most domestic servants were women and girls reinforced the idea that the home was not a place of productive work.

Masculine labor discourses opened space for indigenous men within the labor movement. Indigenous hacienda workers struggled against paternalism on estates that they found emasculating, which dovetailed nicely with labor leaders’ emphasis on workers’ patriarchal dignity. Shared masculinity among workers across ethnic lines was reinforced not simply by divisions between home and work, but by the subordination of domestic work. Not all indigenous men could avoid serving as huasicamas in elite homes, but their struggle to limit such work often reinforced their masculine rights as heads of families. In contrast with indigenous estate workers, liberal (and seemingly even leftist) politicians had no incentive to advocate for domestic workers’ rights: It would not give them an advantage over their political opponents, and they relied on low-paid domestic labor to keep their households running.¹⁰¹

Domestic servants’ work did not change from earlier periods, but nor did most of the work done by indigenous workers on large estates. Yet the ideas about the work done by female household servants versus male indigenous workers diverged significantly by the 1930s. Attending to the widening gap between male hacienda workers and domestic servants reclaims the history of domestic service as valuable and its continuity as telling. It reveals ways that gender norms softened the class and racial contradictions of modernization. It also helps to explain why, even in the twenty-first century, domestic workers are often forgotten by both feminist and labor organizations.¹⁰²