Does Waged Domestic Labor Have a Future?

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Loosely linked by their subject?the institution of domestic service?these four volumes are very different in substance and approach. Chronologically, they span a period from the mid-nineteenth century to the present; geographically, they examine the institution in Latin America, the United States, and Africa; concep tually, they draw on Freudian and object-relations theory, Marxist theory, cultural anthropology, and social history. Nevertheless, all four books share some common concerns. Among these are attention to patterns of continuity and change in forms of inequality by race, gender, and class; an effort to focus as much as possible on real people and their everyday lives by incorporating personal documents (letters, diaries, and oral history) and institutional records; emphasis on variation and difference (sometimes to the point of indeterminacy) rather than on typical cases; reflection on the complexity of employer-servant social relations; and, finally, the possibility of servants' organizing, their resistance to oppression, and collective action in support of their interests. House and street sums up the setting of Sandra Lauderdale Graham's case study of dirty, unhealthy Rio de Janeiro's socially mixed, hierarchically organized civil society from about 1850 to 1910. The contrast here is between the security and privacy of the middleor upper-class house and its household, and the teeming streets of slaves and the poor. Graham considers only women servants (an increasingly large majority during this period), an occupational category that included both slaves and free workers, until the completion of emancipation in 1889; live-in chambermaids, wet nurses, and cooks; and live-out water carriers, laundresses, and seamstresses. Servants were the largest single female occupation al group, accounting for well over half the women workers throughout the period.