Unprotected Labor
Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940
Vanessa H. May
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 06/2011
Pages: 264
Subject: Social Science, Political Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9780807877906
DESCRIPTION
May argues that working-class women sought to define the middle-class home as a workplace even as employers and reformers regarded the home as private space. The result was that labor reformers left domestic workers out of labor protections that covered other women workers in New York between the late nineteenth century and the New Deal. By recovering the history of domestic workers as activists in the debate over labor legislation, May challenges depictions of domestics as passive workers and reformers as selfless advocates of working women. Unprotected Labor illuminates how the domestic-service debate turned the middle-class home inside out, making private problems public and bringing concerns like labor conflict and government regulation into the middle-class home.