Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-90-04-29329-8
Verlag: Brill

Buch, Englisch, 580 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 799 g

Domestic and caregiving work has been at the core of human existence throughout history. Poorly paid or even unpaid, this work has been assigned to women in most societes and occasionally to men often as enslaved, indentures, "adopted" workers. While some use domestic service as training for their own future independent households, others are confined to it for life and try to avoid damage to their identities (Part One). Employment conditions are even worse in colonizer-colonized dichotomies, in which the subalternized have to run the households of administrators who believe they are running an empire (Part Two). Societies and states set the discriminatory rules, those employed develop strategies of resistance or self-protection (Part Three). A team of international scholars addresses these issues globally with a deep historical background.

Contributors are: Ally Shireen, Eileen Boris, Dana Cooper, Jennifer Fish, David R. Goodman, Mary Gene De Guzman, Jaira Harrington, Victoria Haskins, Dirk Hoerder, Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman, Majda Hrženjak, Elizabeth Hutchison, Dimitris Kalantzopoulos, Bela Kashyap, Marta Kindler, Anna Kordasiewicz, Ms Lokesh, Sabrina Marchetti, Robyn Pariser, Jessica Richter, Magaly Rodríguez García, Raffaella Sarti, Adéla Souralová, Yukari Takai, and Andrew Urban.

Zielgruppe

All interested in history, women studies, gender studies, labor studies, economics, sociology, anthropology; at universities and possibly at international labor institutions.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Weitere Mitwirkende

Hoerder, Dirk

Nederveen Meerkerk, Elise van

Neunsinger, Silke

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations and Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors

1. Domestic Workers of the World: Histories of Domestic Work as Global Labor History
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, Silke Neunsinger and Dirk Hoerder
2. Historians, Servants and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work
Raffaella Sarti
3. Historical Perspectives on Domestic and Care-Giving Workers’ Migrations: A Global Approach
Dirk Hoerder

Section 1 – Combining Work and Emotions: Strategies, Agency, Self-Assertion

4. Introduction: Combining Work and Emotions: Strategies, Agency, Self-Assertion
Dirk Hoerder
5. Slovenian Domestic Workers in Italy: A Borderlands Care Chain over Time
Majda Hrženjak
6. Ties that Bind: Localizing the Occupational Motivations that Drive Non-Union Affiliated Domestic Workers in Salvador, Brazil
Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman and Jaira Harrington
7. Maid-of-all-Work or Professional Nanny? The Changing Character of Domestic Work in Polish Households, Eighteenth Century to the Present
Marta Kindler and Anna Kordasiewicz
8. Mutual Emotional Relations in Caregiving Work at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century: Vietnamese Families and Czech Nannies-Grandmothers
Adéla Souralová
9. Making the Personal Political: The First Domestic Workers’ Strike in Pune, Maharashtra
Lokesh
10. Ambivalence of Return Home: Revaluating Transnational Trajectories of Filipina Live-In Domestic Workers and Caregivers in Toronto from 1970 to 2010
Yukari Takai with Mary Gene De Guzman

Section 2 – Domestic Work in the Colonial Context: Race, Color, and Power in the Household

11. Introduction: Domestic Work in the Colonial Context: Race, Color, and Power in the Household
Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk
12. Slavery, Servility, Service: the Cape of Good Hope, the Natal Colony, and the Witwatersrand, 1652–1914
Shireen Ally
13. The Servant Problem: African Servants and the Making of European Domesticity in Colonial Tanganyika
Robyn Allyce Pariser
14. Imperial Divisions of Labor: Chinese Servants and Racial Reproduction in the White Settler Societies of California and the Anglophone Pacific, 1870–1907
Andrew Urban
15. “The Matter of Wages Does not Seem to be Material”: Native American Domestic Workers’ Wages under the Outing System in the United States, 1880s–1930s
Victoria K. Haskins
16. Who’s in Charge, The Government, the Mistress, or the Maid? Tracing the History of Domestic Workers in Southeast Asia
Bela Kashyap
17. Migrant Domestic Work through the Lens of “Coloniality”: Narratives from Eritrean and Afro-Surinamese Women

Section 3 – From Servitude to Domestic Service: The Role of International Bodies, States and Elites for the Changing Conditions in Domestic Work between the 19th and 20th Century

18. Introduction: From Servitude to Domestic Service: The Role of International Bodies, States and Elites for the Changing Conditions in Domestic Work between the 19th and 20th Century.
Silke Neunsinger
19. Reconfiguring Household Slavery in Twentieth Century Fes, Morocco
R. David Goodman
20. Child Slavery, Sex Trafficking or Domestic Work? The League of Nations and its Analysis of the Mui Tsai System
Magaly Rodríguez García
21. Domestic work in Cyprus, 1925–1955: Motivations, Working Conditions and the Colonial Legal Framework
Dimitris Kalantzopoulos
22. Employing Migrant Domestic Workers in Urban Yemen: A New Form of Social Distinction
Marina de Regt
23. What is “Domestic Service” Anyway? Producing Household Laborers in Austria (1918–1938)
Jessica Richter
24. “The Problem” of Domestic Service in Chile, 1924–1952
Elizabeth Quay Hutchison
25. Decent Work for Domestics: Feminist Organizing, Worker Empowerment, and the ILO
Eileen Boris and Jennifer N. Fish

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Dirk Hoerder is professor emeritus of global history. He has taught in Germany, France, Canada and the United States. His main interests are global migration and human agency in translocal, transregional and transstate settings using a transcultural approach.

Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk is associate professor in labor and economic history at Wageningen University. Her publications include articles in the Economic History Review and Feminist Economics. She has co-edited volumes on the global history of textile workers and child labor.

Silke Neunsinger is associate professor in economic history and director of research at the Labour Movement Archives and Library in Stockholm. Her research has been concerned with feminist labor history and the history of social movements. She is currently working on the global history of equal pay.