The Indispensible Services of Sisters: Considering Domestic Service in United States and Latin American Studies

The Indjspensible Services of Sisters: Considering Domestic Service in United States and Latin American Studies Heidi Tinsman "Until domestic service ends, there wiU be no possibiUty of soUdarity among women."1 —Pamphlet of Hogar de Servidores Domésticos, a Mexican shelter for domestic employees In 1897, the North American feminist and sociologist Lucy Salmon argued in what was to be the first history of U.S. domestic service that paid housework represented a "most pecuUar democratic institution."2 Viewing domestic service as an authoritative arrangement for working girls and as a compromising situation for middle-class housewives, Salmon predicted that its practice would diminish and ultimately disappear as industrial development enabled North Americans to realize their unique values of efficiency and self-reUance. Seventy years later, the poUtical scientist EmUy Nett offered a sirrdlar analysis of domestic service in Latin America. Arguing that paid housework represented a precapitalist residue of Iberian culture that reinforced backwardness and hampered productivity, Nett contended it would necessarily become obsolete as Latin American countries developed modern economies and democratic governments .3 Both Salmon's and Netfs projections have proven dramaticaUy incorrect . The employment of domestic workers continued to expand in the United States during the early twentieth century and in Latin America throughout the 1960s and 1970s. To the present day, paid household service remains a major source of employment for women throughout the Western Hemisphere. In 1986, between 30 to 70 percent of nonagricultural female workers labored as paid domestics in various Latin American countries,4 whüe throughout the 1980s in the United States paid domestic service constituted the fastest-expanding employment sector for immigrant women.5 Nannies, cleaning ladies, babysitters, nurses, laundresses, and caterers have become crucial to the maintenance of countless middle-class households. Although domestic service has changed in form, it has hardly withered with modernization. This essay examines a variety of the existing scholarship on domestic service in Latin America and the United States. I have chosen a comparative approach, first, because of my desire to de-emphasize the chasm thought © 1992 Journal of Women's History, Vol 4 No. ι (Spring) 38 Journal of Women's History Spring to separate "developing" and "developed" societies, whüe stiU recognizing the specificity of Latin American and U.S. historical experiences. Second , I wish to highlight what I see as the distinct orientations of the two bodies of scholarship. GeneraUy speaking, Latin American studies have been more sociological, and those of the U.S. more historical: Latin American scholars have had an overriding concern with explaining Latin America's historic marginaUty within a world system/history and, therefore , have sought to explain local experience with an eye to the global economic and poUtical arrangements assumed to condition it. In contrast, U.S. scholars have tended to be more parochial and somewhat dismissive of "global interconnections" but have produced numerous textured case studies and excellent historical narratives that more successfuUy demonstrate how social relationships develop locaUy and change over time. This essay seeks to draw on the different strengths of these two bodies of scholarship in order to develop a theoretical framework for studying paid housework as weU as to suggest direct relationships between Latin American and North American women's Uves. I have divided this essay into two parts. The first section begins with a brief discussion of the theoretical debates on housework and material production that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s and examines the impact of these theories on the respective U.S. and Latin American studies on domestic service.6 The second section addresses how scholars have considered domestic employment as constituting different class and ethnic /racial categories and how they have addressed the relationship between female service and male privUege. This essay does not represent an exhaustive analysis of the existing work on domestic service in either U.S. or Latin American studies. Rather, it is based on works that best exemplify attributes and tendencies within the two bodies of scholarship. Housework as Real Work: The Domestic Labor Debate and Paid Service Inspired by the energy of the Second Women's Movement, feminist scholars made the 1970s a decade of debate on housework. Marxist scholars seeking a materiaUst...