Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940 by Vanessa H. May
History | Americas

Title:
Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940
Author:
Vanessa H. May
ISBN:
0807871931
ISBN13:
978-0807871935
Size PDF:
1361 kb
Size epub:
1709 kb
Publisher:
The University of North Carolina Press; New edition edition (June 1, 2011)
Language:
English
Other formats:
pdf, odf, mobi, cb7, azw, lit, ibooks
Rating:
3.6
Votes:
458
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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.