True Confessions

I began the research that became The Comforts of Home in Nairobi in the mid-1970s. That was the golden age of academic Marxism in African history—a movement that held sway in the field for quite some time —when everybody looked for that greatest ill of colonial capitalism, proletarianization, and, if they had read their E.P. Thompson, resistance to proletarianization. So I arrived in Kenya knowing full well that prostitution was labor. Indeed, I had first started to think prostitution was a possible dissertation topic when I noticed how early colonialists (before World War I) considered it part and parcel of vagrancy, but it never occurred to me to think about what kind of labor it was.

Although the first interviews I conducted were with the prostitutes who had seen their work as providing fictions of matrimonial bliss, providing a worker with a fraction of the home life he could not afford, and even though former prostitutes were telling me they provided food and bathwater for the men who visited them, I do not think I ever articulated that prostitution was domestic labor. At the time, and following the earlier work of a sociologist who had done an exemplary study of one of the slums in which I was working, I was really interested in how prostitution was family labor: why did some women set themselves up as independent heads of households, and why did other women return every cent they earned to their families in recently impoverished rural Africa? Looking back, it is tempting to think that I had read too much Thompson, but whoever I was reading, it was clear that prostitutes in Nairobi, particularly streetwalkers and women who sat outside their rooms calling out their prices to men, were subsidizing their fathers' and brothers' farms, enabling their resistance to proletarianization. These are the patterns that encouraged me to look at prostitution according to what women did with their earnings, but still I never really got a handle on prostitution as domestic labor until I started to write up the material. I wish I could remember the exact process: a 1974 dissertation about prostitution in Addas Ababa makes this point, but I suspect my own ideas grew up in opposition to Selma James' and others' writings on wages for housework. I was troubled by the idea that unwaged work was simply a super-exploited kind of labor; I wanted to give unwaged work its own specificity, and to give it some autonomy as a category. Certainly some of the things I am proudest of in The Comforts of Home are women's own accounts of labor discipline, of time discipline, and of disciplining men through prostitution. Some of the most aggressively accumulating women never argued with men or even insisted on payment if a man refused: their success as prostitutes, they assured me, depended on their access to secure housing in a tight and expensive housing market and this depended on the good will of their neighbors. Women who shared rooms with employed women, such as domestic servants, refused to meet men in their rooms so as not to jeopardize their friend's job; women who shared rooms with other prostitutes had clearly defined ways to make sure no one brought a customer home while the other woman was entertaining one. Women spoke of telling the men they met at dances and in the street that they were married and they would have to be discreet: they were not married, but this was the only way they could be sure their customers would be behave well when visiting them.

Why I did not really understand—as I was listening to all this pride in self-employment and forms of labor—that this was domestic labor has ceased to worry me. I have come to believe that good oral history is takes time, that every reading of fifty or sixty interviews is informed by previous readings of the material, so a historian brings the insights...