Female Domestic Work Research Articles

Female domestic work and social changes in a Brazilian fiction film: insights about the reflective dividend

ABSTRACT This article aims to examine the reflexivity of the audience for the film The Second Mother, focusing on the social and gender relations constituted, in Brazil, around paid female domestic work. The methodology of this study articulates both filmic and audience discourses. It is based in a reception analysis and considers some films as part of what might be called “the reflective dividend,” a sector of leisure experience which enhances personal and social consciousness about society as an object, and politics as a means to achieve social change. The results of this audience study show the oppressions, either veiled or explicit, that are still practiced today by employers against domestic workers, and by men against women. This article can motivate scholars from different areas to deepen knowledge about the potential of leisure to provide learning, especially in the context of entertainment media. The article contributes more broadly to feminist media studies by examining how class and gender are problematized in a film about social relations and paid domestic work, highlighting the daily implications of this issue for power relations in unequal societies like Brazil.

Clichés that remain: the consideration of female domestic work in recent audiovisual production in Spain

Clichés that remain: the consideration of female domestic work in recent audiovisual production in Spain

New Arab Maids: Female Domestic Work, “New Arab Women,” and National Memory in British Mandate Palestine – Corrigendum

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New Arab Maids: Female Domestic Work, “New Arab Women,” and National Memory in British Mandate Palestine

AbstractThe “new Arab woman” of the early 20th century has received much recent scholarly attention. According to the middle- and upper-class ideal, this woman was expected to strengthen the nation by efficiently managing her household, educating her children, and contributing to social causes. Yet, we cannot fully understand the “new Arab woman” without studying the domestic workers who allowed this class to exist. Domestic workers carried out much of the physical labor that let their mistresses pursue new standards of domesticity, social engagement, and participation in nationalist organizations. This article examines relationships between Arab housewives and female domestic workers in British Mandate Palestine (1920–1948) through an analysis of domestic reform articles and memoirs. Arab domestic reformers argued that elite housewives, in order to become truly modern women, had to treat maids with greater respect and adjust to the major socioeconomic changes that peasants were experiencing, yet still maintain a clear hierarchy in the home. Palestinian memoirists, meanwhile, often imagine their pre-1948 homes as a site of Palestinian national solidarity. Their memories of intimate relationships that developed between elite families and peasant maids have crucially shaped nationalist narratives that celebrate the Palestinian peasantry.

Modernizándonos en casa. Productos modernos para el hogar y tecnificación del trabajo doméstico en Bogotá, 1940-1959

En este artículo trataremos el proceso de modernización del hogar bogotano a mediados del siglo XX, que se dio con la tecnificación del trabajo doméstico femenino tras la llegada de los productos modernos para la casa —como los electrodomésticos—, que buscaban la eficiencia y el confort en la ejecución de las tareas del hogar. Hablaremos sobre un estado incipiente de este proceso de modernización debido a las limitantes propias de las promesas de estos productos y a un uso relativo y primario de estos bienes. Lo anterior es válido si se tiene en cuenta que la llegada de dichos objetos tenía lugar en una ciudad y sociedad diferenciadas socialmente, y que se debatía entre el uso de energías tradicionales para la realización del trabajo doméstico —como la del carbón—, y la fuerza humana, representada en las amas de casa y las empleadas domésticas. Para la elaboración de este escrito se hizo uso de una diversidad de fuentes primarias y secundarias, especialmente del discurso publicitario de los productos modernos para el hogar, de artículos en publicaciones seriadas y de archivos de empresas públicas.

Awi Migration, Adaptation, and Integration to Addis Ababa

In this article, I investigate the Awi ethnic group’s migration and integration into Addis Ababa. Through qualitative techniques of data collection both at places of migrant origin and destination, I explore migration and its causes through time, mechanisms of economic and social integration, and accompanying challenges. The findings show that the Awi are a relatively young migrant group in Addis Ababa. Their significant presence in the city started only after 1991, and their presence before this time was incidental. Economic, political, and social factors triggered their migration. Their economic adaptation mechanisms in Addis Ababa include church services, street hawking and cassette peddling, female domestic work, and other works in emerging sectors, such as construction. They use E dd ers, or community associations, churches, and intermarriage as social integration strategies within their own ethnic group and with other residents of Addis Ababa. The Awi, since 1991, still rely on the same livelihood strategies, and only few of them have succeeded in transforming their lives for the better. Livelihood and social integration challenges and the migrant responses to these challenges are discussed in this article. The Awi homeland is currently the Awi Nationality Administration Zone (ANAZ), which is geographically located in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The population of ANAZ in 2015 was 1,198,756, of which the Awi are 60% and the remaining 40% are predominantly Amhara.

Care Chains in Eastern and Central Europe: Male and Female Domestic Work at the Intersections of Gender, Class, and Ethnicity

The migration of domestic workers has become a significant part of the movement from and inside of eastern European countries. Using the example of Poland as both a sending and a receiving country, two overlapping cases of care circulation and European care chains (from Ukraine to Poland and from Poland to Germany) will be analyzed. I will argue that migrant domestic work dynamics result from and recreate social inequalities based on gender, class, and ethnicity/citizenship, which will be analyzed on the level of policies and actors, the latter using the example of Polish handymen working in German households.

Gendered Divisions in Domestic Work Time

Drawing on quantitative analysis of three data sets — the Worker Registration Scheme, the Labour Force Survey, and the UK2000 Time Use Survey — and through an analysis of gendered use of time, this article provides an investigation of the small but growing phenomenon of male (migrant) domestic workers, and more specifically, of what we term the ‘(migrant) handyman phenomenon’, in the UK. The article provides some preliminary documentation and discussion of the scale, characteristics, and drivers of the supply of and demand for these workers. By handymen we are referring to men doing traditionally ‘masculine’ domestic jobs such as home maintenance and gardening. We explore the gender-differentiated character of household work, including care, the implications for the gendered forms and quality of time experienced by women and men, and the ensuing feasibility of and demand for outsourcing these stereotypically masculine activities. In so doing we acknowledge the potential of current expectations of men to be both breadwinners and hands-on fathers to generate new time pressures for households . We also document the supply of migrant handymen coming from the accession countries of the European Union. By focusing on stereotypically masculinized forms of domestic work the article seeks to make a modest contribution to the literature on globalization, migration and social reproduction, which to date has largely focused on the more prevalent phenomenon of migrants engaged in traditionally female domestic work such as cleaning and caring.

Recovering Love’s Fugitive: Elizabeth Wilmot and the Oscillations between the Sexual and Textual Body in a Libertine Woman’s Manuscript Poetry

Recovering Love’s Fugitive: Elizabeth Wilmot and the Oscillations between the Sexual and Textual Body in a Libertine Woman’s Manuscript Poetry

SERVANTS, SLAVES, AND THE DOMESTIC ORDER IN THE OTTOMAN MIDDLE EAST

AbstractTo an appreciable degree, female domestic work in the Ottoman Middle East was shaped by organizational and valuative premises that were also common to women outside the Ottoman and Islamic worlds. Ambiguity such as between women's duties and socially recognized "work", or between kin and servant—was a keynote of women's condition regardless of cultural setting. However, in the Middle East, the persistence of slavery into the late nineteenth century as a predominantly female and domestic-labor institution added a distinctive element to the nature of domestic labor and women's role within it.