domestic work

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community

mandy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

When Tamara Mose Brown had her first child in 2004, she began going to different Brooklyn, New York parks on sunny afternoons. In each, she found dozens of West Indian nannies caring for the babies and toddlers of the largely White middle- and upper-income denizens who lived nearby. Questions about both the nannies' work and the race, class, and gender dynamics of their lives prompted Brown—the Canadian-born daughter of Trinidadian immigrants—to begin spending time with these women. Their conversations were eye-opening. For one, Brown came to realize the centrality of paid childcare to U.S. economic life. For another, she was shocked to find that employers who labor at home often require nannies to work outdoors, or in libraries or community centers, for upwards of ten hours a day.

What’s more, Brown quickly recognized that childcare workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, are routinely exploited—underpaid, and required to do household chores far outside their job description, from picking up dry cleaning, to cooking, to going to the pharmacy or market. Nonetheless, she also discovered that domestic workers have found ways to create social networks to make their work lives easier and more enjoyable. Often predicated on a common ethnic heritage, these networks enable childcare workers to share everything from food to gossip. By pre-arranging meetings in public spaces, they can watch the kids in their care while also socializing and breaking the monotony of their jobs.

But, Brown writes in Raising Brooklyn, as wonderful as these networks can be, there’s a down side. To wit, nannies in public spaces are easily observed. Take the website I Saw Your Nanny. In one incident, Brown reports that people with limited information logged onto the site and reported that a toddler had been lured away by a suspicious man while his caretaker—who was eventually identified as the child’s mother and not a nanny—was obliviously chatting. Turns out that the man was the child’s father, but, of course, the notice was posted before this fact was ascertained.

That said, Brown chronicles the ways nannies support one another, whether meeting on a particular park bench at a particular time each day or gathering for story hour at the local library. Cell phones have been a tremendous boon, she continues, giving otherwise isolated workers a way to connect with one another, an easy way to share news from home or strategize about ways to deal with a difficult child or a demanding employer. They’ve also enabled them to organize, and many of the workers Brown interviews are active participants in Domestic Workers United, an organization that successfully pushed the New York state legislature to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.

Brown has done a masterful job—as a participant observer—of reflecting the everyday world of female domestic laborers. While she, herself, straddles two worlds—belonging to an Afro Caribbean community that is victimized by racism while simultaneously having the financial resources to hire a part-time nanny to care for her two children—her ethnic identity allowed her access to an insular community. The result is both fascinating and compelling. Although Brown occasionally lapses into sociological jargon, Raising Brooklyn is generally accessible and insightful. Her own insider-outsider status is clearly presented; at the same time, her compassion for the twenty-five nannies she interviewed makes Raising Brooklyn a wonderful testament to the valuable contribution working class women of color make to life in the U.S. of A.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, March 7th 2011

Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France

tina — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Christine Adams

University of Illinois Press

The women-run organization The Society for Maternal Charity survived more than a hundred years of wars, revolutions, and government changes. Initially the group began because of the number of children being abandoned due to poverty. Not only were these foundlings expensive for the state, but they also had a very high mortality rate. Women’s societies were viewed as more ideal than orphanages and seen as an extension of the women’s domestic sphere.

In following the growth and demise of the Society, Poverty, Charity, and Motherhood: Maternal Societies in Nineteenth-Century France covers the themes of rich/poor, government/private, national/local, stay at home v. working mothers, male v. female-run, and the resentment by the poor/blindness of the rich. The author, Christine Adams, also outlines hot button issues that existed in the nineteenth century: the worthy poor versus the lazy hordes; married women versus single tarts; breast feeding versus wet nurses; and the question of whether or not women were positive influences in society, there to “clean up messes.”

Even after the French revolution women remained barred from politics and civic affairs, but through participation in these organizations they gained valuable skills and leadership training. Many of the societies had large budgets and staff, giving the women executive experience. The Society raised money, lobbied politicians, and ran formidable businesses. Women from the elite classes proved that they could make a difference by going into rough neighborhoods and aiding in situations they had never imagined, let alone encountered.

As Adams illustrates in Poverty, Charity and Motherhood, these maternal societies created many business principles, such as accountability, transparency, and sustainability. The societies understood that a husband’s interests often didn’t align with the wife’s, so aid must be given directly to women.

The Society was eventually brought down because it was believed they were enforcing religious doctrine; the Society insisted women have religious marriages and it required them to act as “proper women.” As a whole the Society was faulted for relying on these religious precepts, though less than fifty percent of the organizations held these beliefs.

As France became more secular and organized, they recognized the potential power of civic organizations and tried to rein them in. They created model statutes and bylaws and required the Society to adopt them. When the Society refused, the funding stopped and the Society died.

Prior to the welfare state, all assistance was charity. By demanding money from the state, the Society made it clear that the State had a responsibility to care for the poor. Adams claims that these societies are the reason that France and other European countries have a much better welfare state, with specific provisions for pregnant women and families, more generous vacations, health care, paternity leave, etc. The women’s Societies should be given due credit.

While the Societies signaled many of the issues that remain today, as Adams points out, they were not strong enough to consider the implications of inequality in their own lives; a different brand of woman had to do that. As with the “club women” of today, they do offer a valuable service: they are training grounds for women’s leadership and they should be given credit for the work they do.

Written by: , October 30th 2010

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

admin — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn

Harvard University Press

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, July 10th 2010

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Aífe Murray

University of New Hampshire Press

The popular image of Emily Dickinson is that of an almost ghostly woman in white, secluding herself in an upstairs bedroom alone, but Maid as Muse's innovative approach shows her frequently in the kitchen. There, she is found stirring puddings, baking her famous gingerbread, and living on familiar terms with the household help. She shared her dreams and gossiped with her favorite maid, the Irish-born Margaret Maher, who Dickinson referred to as her dear Maggie.

Murray uses a wide range of documents, including maps, advertisements, letters, photographs, and oral history interviews with descendants of the Dickinson's domestic staff to recreate the material and intellectual milieu in which the poet wrote her celebrated works. Murray demonstrates that the quantity and quality of Emily's writing output—in letters and poems—varies with the presence and absence of reliable servants in the household. Only when there are competent people to help with the heavy load of housework that a nineteenth-century homestead requires is Emily able to find the time, the energy, and, most significant, the concentration to write at her best.

Furthermore, Murray shows that the servants' vernacular speech—often quite different from the staid Yankee rhythms of the poet's family and neighbors—influenced Emily's compositions. The poet herself quotes sayings in her letters by the Irish immigrant Mrs. Mack, for example, and notes how differently her maids pronounce certain English words. Emily's famous slant rhymes and staccato lines of poetry also have startling parallels to the reported conversations and personal letters of her staff.

Murray traces the contributions of Black, American Indian, and British-born servants to the life and work of Emily Dickinson. She points out the places where Emily revealed the prejudices of her times, the classism and racism, yet she also acknowledges how Emily managed to rise above those prejudices and see poor people and other outcasts as sympathetic human beings. This is an enormously rich book, impossible to summarize briefly, well worth exploring, not only by the many fans of Emily Dickinson's poetry, but anyone interested in cultural history and the development of American society.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 21st 2010