Women's Domestic Labor Research Articles

Ghar ki tension: domesticity and distress in India's aspiring middle class

AbstractTensionis a polysemic term used across South Asia to describe the strains and scrapes of life, like ‘worry’ or ‘stress’ in Euro‐American discourse. Yet in the formerly agro‐pastoralist and upwardly mobile Gaddi community of Himalayan India, it is used by women with the qualifyingghar ki – ‘household’ – to indicate a deeper disruption to bodily humours, intimate relations, and household materiality. This article takesghar ki tension, with a particular focus on the layered qualifierghar, as a window into the precarity of middle‐class domestic life as it is experienced in the bodies of the women who pursue it. Rather than focusing on the communicative functions of women's distress within the household, this article looks to the relational, affective, and material ways in which women see their bodies and houses as mutually constituted and disrupted. This approach reveals how women's domestic labour is both a source of dignity and a burden. This burden is experienced inghar ki tension, in bodily symptoms of overheating, and visits from supernatural beings. This article suggests thatghar ki tensionmight offer a novel way of looking at distress as the psychic and embodied cost of upward social mobility beyond the Gaddi context.

An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade

In An Intimate Economy: Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade, Alexandra J. Finley reconstructs the connections between the domestic, economic, and sexual labor that enslaved women performed in the making of the domestic slave trade in the antebellum American South. Finley uncovers the experiences of a small group of enslaved women to explore how bondswomen's work propelled the economy of slavery at the height of the internal slave trade. In a journey that starts in Richmond, Virginia, and weaves through the cotton South to New Orleans, Louisiana, Finley delves into the ineluctable relationship between the domestic slave trade and enslaved women's labor, illuminating the complexities of Black women's lives as concubines, seamstresses, housekeepers, and maids. She argues that it was enslaved women who completed the essential work that kept slave traders wealthy and kept the slave trade functioning through the antebellum and Civil War eras. Through deploying the concepts of the sexual, domestic, and reproductive economies of slavery, Finley unpacks how enslaved women's domestic labor was hidden in plain sight and how their work enriched the men who owned and partnered with them.One of Finley's strengths in An Intimate Economy is her adeptness at uniting the personal stories of women who have historically been difficult to locate in the archive. Utilizing feminist and legal theories of the sexual economy, Finley traces the tethers of enslaved women's lives and does so without losing sight of their extraordinary and difficult circumstances. In each chapter, Finley shows that enslaved women experiences were entangled with white men who became rich during the spree for enslaved labor in the nineteenth century. These women made difficult choices about their survival—and the survival of their children—within slaveholding societies where enslavers valued them based on their gender, skills, color, and contributions to the domestic economy.Finley begins with Corinna Hinton, or Corinna Omohundro, an enslaved woman who lived in Richmond, Virginia, as the enslaved mistress, housekeeper, and partner of Richmond slave trader Silas Omohundro. To understand Hinton's proximity to Omohundro, Finley poses a provocative question: Is it possible to understand the relationship between Silas Omohundro and Corinna Hinton “in the absence of legal consent and personhood?” (p. 31). In other words, can we understand Corinna Hinton on her own terms, outside of her relationship with Omohundro? According to Finley, we can. Corinna Hinton made strategic choices for herself and her children, while living and working with Omohundro as his wife and the manager of his domestic affairs. Even if enslaved women such as Hinton were trafficked in the “fancy trade” and sold into sexual slavery, they found ways to carve out spaces for themselves to survive the traumas of slavery and the challenges of concubinage.Moreover, Finley explores how the domestic economy of slavery shaped enslaved women's lives in important ways. Drawing attention to the enslaved seamstresses who worked for Richmond slave trader Hector Davis, Finley shows how enslaved women sewed the clothing that enslaved people wore on the auction block. The enslavers that Finley highlights increasingly relied on enslaved women to make the clothing for the enslaved people being sold to support their profits from slavery.Throughout An Intimate Economy, Finley tracks the connections between enslaved women, their enslavers, and the legality of enslavers’ property rights over their enslaved concubines and partners. She approaches the intersections of sexual violence, agency, and resistance with a nuance that underlies her understanding of the complexities of enslaved women's lives. Sarah Ann Conner and Lucy Ann Cheatham are examples. Conner was the enslaved concubine of Theophilus Freeman, the New Orleans slave trader who sold Solomon Northup into slavery in Louisiana. In examining Conner's life, Finley stays attuned to the ways in which enslaved women made choices about how to survive the violence and unpredictability of slavery. Lucy Ann Cheatham was enslaved in Richmond and New Orleans, serving as a housekeeper and the partner for her enslaver. For Conner and Cheatham, their roles within the domestic sphere of their enslavers reveal the convergence of the sexual and domestic economies of slavery in antebellum America.Ultimately, Finley shows how enslaved women's sexual labor was both visible and veiled. In an analysis that shows the increased contributions of enslaved women to the economy of slavery in the antebellum era, Finley deftly restores enslaved women to the center of the domestic slave trade in America. She reminds us of the value of women's work in nineteenth-century America, never losing sight of the extractive nature of American slavery and American capitalism. Although the contributions of enslaved women were often hidden, Finley convincingly shows that the sexual economy of slavery for enslaved women was subsumed under the umbrella of domestic labor.

Black Women's Domestic Labor at Angola (Louisiana State Penitentiary) during Jim Crow

On September 19, 1922, Beulah M., a thirty-year-old cook, saved a “small child from a vicious cow on Angola.” This event occurred only a few months after her admission to the Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), where she was serving a life sentence for alleged murder. The infant was one of the many of the white prison staff's children raised on the penitentiary plantation nestled in a large meander of the Mississippi river. This happy-ending drama featuring a Black woman prisoner and a free white child arose from the “cohabitation” of free white households within the incarcerated population. The incident, quite unexpected in a carceral setting, prompted the penitentiary general manager to place Beulah M. on the “eligibility list” for parole and to grant her “full single good time for meritorious service,” which meant the possibility of an earlier release by a few months. Beulah's action might also have motivated authorities to assign her to be “servant” in the Camp D Captain's house in July 1923, and later to be a nurse in the nine-bedroom “Big House,” occupied by one of the penitentiary staff of higher rank. The peculiar nature of her alleged crime, the beating to death of her seven-year-old Black step-daughter, was apparently not perceived as a deterrent to entrust her to care for white children. Her courageous action toward a white child at Angola might even have been a compelling argument for her early pardon and discharge, which she received only after nine years at Angola, although her plea for a pardon had been rejected at least once before. Beulah M.'s story is the story of a coerced African American domestic laborer in white homes, rewarded for her perceived subservience to the Jim Crow order. It exemplifies one aspect of Black women's experiences of hard labor for the state of Louisiana during the first half of the twentieth century.

COVID-19 Pandemic: Problems Of Ensuring Gender Equality

This article analyzes the issues of ensuring gender equality during the Covid19 pandemic in Uzbekistan and foreign countries. The author examines the reasons for the increasing digital gender inequality, the problem of women's access to work, women's domestic labor issues, and the global increase in domestic violence during the quarantine period. The author developed proposals for solving the above problems in order to solve the problem of increasing gender inequality during the period of a pandemic in the world and in Uzbekistan.

Unsettling Feminist Philosophy: An Encounter with Tracey Moffatt'sNight Cries

AbstractThis essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between (older) white women and (younger) Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring.

Against Ordentlikheid: Disobedient Femininities in Selected Embroideries by Hannalie Taute

ABSTRACTThis article explores the art practice of Hannalie Taute vis-à-vis the discourses of ordentlikheid (respectability) and the volksmoeder (mother of the nation). I begin by offering theoretical frameworks for these discursive structures, as well as a selective historical trajectory of their development, with major emphasis on Afrikaner femininity and Afrikaner women's domestic labour. Through a reading of selected embroidered works by Taute, I speculate on the degree to which the artist revisits and subverts particular narratives of Afrikaner ethnic identity and “women's work” to imagine new modes of feminine expression that challenge the rigid conventions of ordentlikheid and the volksmoeder. My analysis of Taute's embroidery is informed by the concept of radical decadence, which provides a theoretical paradigm for making sense of the strategic use of excess, pleasure, and the taboo in the practices of contemporary women artists working with craft materials. The works were thus selected for their materiality and thematics, which I argue appropriate archaic signifiers of Afrikaner femininity to produce irreverent counter-narratives that resist the policing of female sexuality and other forms of patriarchal subjugation.

Travel, drama, and domesticity: colonial huswifery in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Sea Voyage

This essay re-evaluates John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Sea Voyage (1622) by investigating the often elided role of huswifery (women's domestic labour) in early modern English colonial discourse. First-hand accounts of travel and plantation conventionally present a homo-social world, in which the role of women is either deemphasised or occluded altogether. The potential for fiction to reimagine the conditions necessary for the long-term survival of European colonies overseas was realised in The Sea Voyage, a play which dramatises the crucial and equal role women play in the success of either country estate or plantation.

Outsourcing women's domestic labour: the Chèque Emploi-Service Universel in France

In France, the Chèque Emploi-Service Universel is the current policy tool with which the state subsidizes and supports the use of paid domestic services by households. Evaluations of this scheme and of its forerunners, the Chèque Emploi-Service and the Titre Emploi-Service , have been very positive both within France and at European Union level. This article questions this conclusion by assessing the extent to which the state-supported outsourcing of women's unpaid domestic labour helps to reduce the work—life conflict and time famine which they face. It demonstrates that the impact of these schemes is marginal both in terms of the range of households which benefit from them and in terms of the amount of relief gained by the women who purchase paid domestic services. Indeed, such schemes are shown to exacerbate the problem of the unequal gender division of domestic labour. This is because they reinforce the gender stereotyping surrounding domestic work by transferring it from more well-off to less well-off women. Consequently, the question of the redistribution of domestic tasks between men and women is side-stepped.

Bringing It Back Home: Perspectives on Gender and Family History in Modern Mexico

AbstractLately, study of the family as a special set of historical questions has fallen out of fashion in modern Latin American history. Yet in increasing numbers, gender historians are examining courtship and sexual behavior, marital conflict, reproductive health, women's domestic labor, institutions that intersect with families, like education, medicine, and welfare, and political deployment of family‐based ideologies. Has gender history replaced family history? This essay argues that it has not, but explores some of the ways that gender history has changed not only what we know about past families but also what we ask. Examining recent studies of the working classes in late‐nineteenth‐ and early‐twentieth‐century Mexico, the era punctuated by the revolution of 1910–1917, this essay finds that scholarly assessments of the impact on the gender order of the economic and political restructuring that preceded and followed that upheaval have expanded the frame of how we think about families while at the same time affirmed the centrality of family in the dynamics of social and ideological change.

Parenthood Without Penalty: Time Use And Public Policy In Australia And Finland

Housework and child care continue to be assigned on the basis of gender. Women are significantly disadvantaged by their unequal share of unpaid work. Three remedies for this situation have been advanced: (1) renegotiation of domestic division of labor, (2) substitution of market provision for unpaid labor, and (3) public provision of key services. Using time use and expenditure data from Australia this paper shows that most changes in the domestic division of labor have come from women's, rather than men's, adaptations. Furthermore, much of the change is attributable to increased reliance on market substitutes for women's domestic labor. A comparison of social policy and time use in Australia and Finland shows how entitlement to generous parental leave and public provision of child care can significantly reduce the economic and social penalties faced by mothers.

Flexible Work and Housework: Work and Family Constraints on Women's Domestic Labor

We examine whether jobs with greater flexibility allow women greater time for housework. With data from the National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS) for young women and mature women employees, we find that part-week, part-year, and shift schedules increase the hours spent on domestic chores, and that unlike on-site employment, hours of home-based work do not significantly reduce time spent on domestic chores. We also find that younger women are more likely to adjust domestic time to job-related conditions than older women.

Flexible Work and Housework: Work and Family Constraints on Women's Domestic Labor

Flexible Work and Housework: Work and Family Constraints on Women's Domestic Labor

THE IMPACT OF FAMILY STATUS ON BLACK, WHITE, AND HISPANIC WOMEN'S COMMUTING

The relationship between women's domestic labor and employment in the paid labor force is central to current debates about gender inequities in occupations and incomes. Recent studies of gender differences in commuting argue that women reduce the journey to work to accommodate the demands of family responsibilities. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. Equal numbers of studies have reported significant andinsignificant relationships between average commuting times and various measures of domestic responsibilities. Few of these studies have examined the implications of parenthood and, particularly, single parenthood, for the commuting patterns of women from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. Women who are single parents may work closer to home than other women because of their substantial domestic responsibilities. On the other hand, as sole wage earners, single parents may travel long times to obtain better paid employment. Using information about a sample of women in the New York Consolidated M...

AUSTRALIAN LIVING STANDARDS: SOME GENDER CONSIDERATIONS

This paper is an exploration of the contemporary definitions in use of the idea of a standard of living as it has been developed in social policy and economic research both in Australia and overseas. It is suggested that the assumptions underpinning the idea of a standard of living in areas such as poverty research or the analysis of redistributive policies and their effects are neither tenable nor useful. The concept is flawed because it makes unreasonable assumptions about the household and the nature of women's domestic labour. Consideration of the gender blindness of much economics suggests the need for a major revision in our approach to the idea of a standard of living.

Home and work: housework, wages, and the ideology of labor in the early republic

Over the course of a two hundred year period, women's domestic labor gradually lost its footing as a recognized aspect of economic life in America. The image of the colonial goodwife, valued for her contribution to household prosperity, had been replaced by the image of a and a non-producer. This book is a history of housework in the United States prior to the Civil War. More particularly, it is a history of women's unpaid domestic labor in the context of the emergence of an industrialized society in the northern United States. Boydston argues that just as a capitalist economic order had first to teach that wages were the measure of a man's worth, it had at the same time, implicitly or explicitly, to teach that those who did not draw wages were dependent and not essential to the real economy. Developing a striking account of the gender and labor systems that characterized industrializing America, Boydston explains how this effected the devaluation of women's unpaid labor.

Time, space, and the occupational segregation of women: a critique of human capital theory

Human capital theory is one frequently invoked explanation for women's position in the paid labor force. This explanation sees the occupational segregation of women largely as the outcome of women's long-range rational decisions to choose jobs that will accommodate their absences from the labor force for child bearing and rearing. We agree with the human capital theory's emphasis on women's domestic labor as a major source of occupational segregation. We believe, however, that the human capital argument highlights the wrong set of variables (those related to women's labor force discontinuity) and overlooks those more immediate geographic factors that contribute forcefully to occupational segregation. Using detailed interview data from a representative sample of households living in the Worcester, Massachusetts urban area, we show that occupational segregation is related to the day-to-day space-time constraints women face rather than to time out of the labor force.

SELLING THE MECHANIZED HOUSEHOLD:

This article reports a content analysis of advertisements for household goods appearing in Ladies Home Journal between 1909-1910 and 1980, with the aim of understanding the ideological campaign that characterized the years in which households were mechanized and women's domestic labor transformed in the United States. More Journal ads featured directives about housework than descriptions of the product; they emphasized work performance far more frequently than liberation from housework, and they also promoted service to family. These findings supplement other evidence that advertisers' efforts to create a market for household appliances and other means of domestic labor involved promotion of an ideology about housework that reinforced women's dedication to it.

Book Review: Love and Wages: The Impact of Imperialist, State Intervention and Women's Domestic Labour on Workers Control in Algeria: 1962-1972

Book Review: Love and Wages: The Impact of Imperialist, State Intervention and Women's Domestic Labour on Workers Control in Algeria: 1962-1972

Welfare Cuts and the Ascendance of Market Patriarchy

Recent welfare cuts have revealed that the patriarchal control of women's domestic labor has been significantly relocated from the home and the governmental bureaucracy to the marketplace. Through the sale of domestic and reproductive labor, many low income women have come to occupy a class position in relation to middle and upper income families which parallels the position occupied by the traditional wife in relation to her husband.

Hidden in the Household: Women's Domestic Labour under Capitalism

Hidden in the Household: Women's Domestic Labour under Capitalism