21007 - Alpha Kappa Delta Distinguished Lecture

Description

Beginning with W. E. B. Du Bois survey of Black women employed as domestics in Philadelphia between 1896-1897 to Lucy Maynard Salmon survey of domestics published in 1923, research on women’s paid labor outside the home resemble the same unpaid labor they did at home, cleaning, cooking, laundry, child and elderly care, and other household tasks. However, the labor was transformed by the social relations surrounding the work when done outside family relationships. As an occupation evolving from servitude, sometimes as indentured, enslaved, and as poorly paid employee, race, class and gender became dominant themes in the ethnographic studies of Black Japanese American and Chicana domestics conducted in the late 1970s to the 1980s. Sociologists were drawn to social relations between employee and employer reflecting class, race/ethnic and gender hierarchies produced in the intimacy of the employers’ homes, away from public view. By the late 80s and into the 90s, sociological research on domestics largely turned their attention away from race and highlighted the immigrant status of the new wave of workers dominating domestic service, which largely included Latina immigrants in the West and Caribbean Black immigrants in New York, and later many Asian immigrant women. Over the last two decades, most sociologists have turned their attention to domestic workers leaving their families behind and taking employment outside their countries and going abroad to work for several years at time, sending remittances home to care for their children, parents and other family members.

Intersectionality has been vital to examining how different families, communities, and countries’ hierarchies impact the social relationships between domestics and employers, as well as their families. These social relationships are further shaped by different types of national and international employment agencies and countries legislation mandate working conditions, pay, length of employment and terms of the contracts that are shaped by gender, race/ethnicity, educational level, religion, citizenship status, age, sexuality, nationality and other factors that influence one’s social position in the hierarchy.

Understanding the power relations resented in an intersectionality analysis offers a strategy to identify the ways that domestics and employers have attempted to reimagine the future of domestic service, and the challenges domestic organizations and campaigns have faced in fighting for dignity, better working conditions, and a living wage.

Sub Unit

• Affiliated Groups

Presider

• Bethany Titus, Alpha Kappa Delta

Individual Presentations

• Reimagining Domestic Work Through an Intersectional Lens - Mary Romero, Arizona State University

Session Organizer

• Bethany Titus, Alpha Kappa Delta