Household Workers Unite by Premilla Nadasen

The heart of the book is the movement that emerged in inspiration to the Montgomery bus boycott, in which domestic workers across the country organized with the specific aim of transforming the occupation of domestic work. Nadasen was interviewed for Jacobin by editor Megan Erickson. Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Built a Movement holds important lessons for our current politics.

Historian Premilla Nadasen has written an important history of domestic workers in the mid-century, who, despite spending their days in separate households, won big collective victories for workers. The social upheaval caused by the entrance of large numbers of women into the workforce in the 1970s has never really been reckoned with in the United States - the contradictory demands of modern family life (sell your labor on the market, while taking care of kids at home!) have simply been absorbed by mothers taking on a “second shift,” or a third or a fourth and by working-class women in low-paid service jobs as maids, day care workers, and home health care aides.ĭemands for “work-life balance” are more of a whimper than a bang in accepting the idea that “work” is what you do in the office and “life” is what you have in your off hours, we are already far from radical Second Wave demands to envision a new way to define and divide labor.Īt a time when having a woman in the board room or the White House is proposed as if it is the height and full realization of the feminist project, it is critical to remember and learn from the struggles of women who not only refused to consider a feminism that would lift up wealthier women while marginalizing everyone else, but built a movement based on redefining household work. Today, middle-class women are urged to “ lean in” to waged labor and break the glass ceiling, with the expectation that working-class women can be relied on to care for the children and wash the kitchen floor.

Household Workers Unite by Premilla Nadasen