This article poses the question: What explains variation in the proportion of the labor force employed in paid domestic labor? In contrast to an older, modernization-theory-based literature that argued that paid domestic labor declines and ultimately disappears in the course of economic development, the authors note the occupation's recent expansion in southern California and the wide variations among rich, developed countries in the proportion of the female workforce employed in it. The authors argue that a crucial, neglected factor in explaining such geographic variations is the extent of economic inequality. This factor is overlooked not only in the modernization-theory-based literature but also in recent microsociological studies of paid domestic labor, which highlight the ways in which race, ethnicity, and citizenship status are implicated in interactions between employers of domestics and the workers themselves, while ignoring the enduring significance of class in the employer/domestic relationship. By analyzing 1990 census data for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States, the authors show that income inequality (as well as, but independent of, the proportion of the female labor force made up of African Americans and Latinas, the proportion of the female labor force that is foreign born, and maternal labor force participation), is a significant predictor of the proportion of the female labor force employed in domestic labor.

This chapter examines the importance of growing class inequality as a driver of employment growth in paid domestic labor by drawing on macrosociological, rather than microsociological, literature. More specifically, it considers what explains variation in the proportion of the labor force employed in paid domestic labor over time and space. After comparing the microsociology of paid domestic labor with the modernization theory and the macrosociology of domestic labor, the chapter analyzes the 1990 census data for the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the United States. It shows that income inequality is a significant predictor of the proportion of women workers employed in domestic labor, as was the case in the 1980s in southern California. It also attributes the expansion of employment in paid domestic work in the late twentieth century to widening class inequality, including inequality among women.

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In this article, I chart the origins of the Indivisible movement in the United States, which began online as a response to the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in November of 2016. The Indivisible movement’s founders explicitly modeled their countermovement structurally after the Republican Tea Party that arose to obstruct Obama’s agenda, consciously using the Tea Party’s combination of decentralized organizing made possible by the Internet, its focus on local political races, and its general willingness to work with an established political party. I consider what the case of Indivisible has to tell us about some of the dynamics that movements in the Internet age will likely encounter, namely, the importance of virality and branding for mobilization and social media’s capacity for aggregating the like-minded. I conclude that while it is hard to predict whether Indivisible will be successful in obstructing the conservative Trump agenda, the movement bears watching as an example of movement mobilization in the Internet age.

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