Between women : domestics and their employers / Judith Rollins.
This book is the result of forty in-depth interviews, interviews enhanced by the author's own experience as a domestic worker for ten employers in the greater Boston area. The reader is quickly drawn into the world of domestic workers as the author allows the women to speak for themselves whene...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Philadelphia :
Temple University Press,
1985.
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| Series: | Labor and social change.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | This book is the result of forty in-depth interviews, interviews enhanced by the author's own experience as a domestic worker for ten employers in the greater Boston area. The reader is quickly drawn into the world of domestic workers as the author allows the women to speak for themselves whenever possible. At its essence this book is a study of the social psychology of relationships of domination. Yet, while focusing on these relationships, the author never loses sight of the larger social structure and how it affects and is affected by employer-domestic dyads. The opening chapter provides an overview of domestic service in the Western tradition, most notably a detailed history of servitude in the South and northeastern United States, with brief attention to a few non-Western locales. Then, what follows is a description of the conditions of the work--the physical labor, hours, compensation, and problems--with the focus on the women and the major dynamics of their relationships. Unlike many works on domination, this book gives as much attention to the effects on the minds and lives of the employers as it does to the effects on the domestics. And it is this exploration, in particular--of the demands, reactions, preferences and perceptions of employers--that reveals how this labor arrangement functions ideologically as well as materially to support the class, gender and racial hierarchies of this country. |
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| Physical Description: | viii, 261 pages ; 22 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-255) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0877223831 9780877223832 9780877224914 0877224919 |