Through an analysis of women's reform, domestic worker activism,
and cultural values attached to public and private space, Vanessa
May explains how and why domestic workers, the largest category of
working women before 1940, were excluded from labor protections
that formed the foundation of the welfare state. Looking at the
debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide,
Unprotected Labor assesses middle-class women's reform
programs as well as household workers' efforts to determine their
own working conditions.
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.