Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Labor and Social Change) - Hardcover

Judith Rollins

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877223831 ISBN 13: 9780877223832

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1985

Synopsis

Between Women is the result of forty in-depth interviews, interviews enhanced by the author's own experience as a domestic worker for ten employers in the greater Boston area. The reader is quickly drawn into the world of domestic workers as the author allows the women to speak for themselves whenever possible. Clearly relevant to labor studies, women's studies and black studies, at its essence this book is a study of the social psychology of relationships of domination. Yet, while focusing on these relationships, the author never loses sight of the larger social structure and how it affects and is affected by employer-domestic dyads.

The opening chapter provides an overview of domestic service in the Western tradition, most notably a detailed history of servitude in the South and northeastern United States, with brief attention to a few non-Western locales. Then, what follows is a description of the conditions of work—the physical labor, hours, compensation, and problems—with the focus on the women and the major dynamics of their relationships. Unlike many works on domination, this book gives as much attention to the effects on the minds and lives of the employers as it does to the effects on the domestics. And it is this exploration, in particular—of the demands, reactions, preferences and perceptions of employers—that reveals how this labor arrangement functions ideologically as well as materially to support the class, gender and racial hierarchies of this country.

About this title

From the Publisher:

A study of the unique relationship between women employers and employees

Jessie Bernard Book Award, American Sociological Association

About the Author:

Judith Rollins is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simmons College in Boston.

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1985
• ISBN 10: 0877223831
• ISBN 13: 9780877223832
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 261