Labors Appropriate to Their Sex

Hutchison, Elizabeth Quay; Levenson, Deborah; Silverblatt, Irene; Saldívar-Hull, Sonia

doi:10.1215/9780822381310

Cited by 118 publications

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“…Hutchison offers a quote from a Chilean health inspector in 1922 suggesting it might go undone: 'She [a laundress] spends the whole day washing to help pay for the room and has not been able to tend to herself or her little room'. 61 The workplace for domestic laborers, unpaid and on the market, in nineteenth-and early twentieth-century urban centers continued to be the courtyards of cramped cortiços (in Brazil), conventillos (in Chile and Argentina), and casas de vecindad. Photographs of women working over cook pots and laundering clothes in patios are reproduced in a number of studies.…”

Section: Periodizing the 'Economy Of Appearance' And Inconspicuous Comentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While liberalism emphasized female roles of wife and mother and by the end of the nineteenth century promoted acquiring 'technical knowledge' to best fulfill those roles, women in emergent middle classes continued to turn to human technology to meet their responsibilities, just as the elite always had, relying on servants-of-all-trades as well as specialized servants such as cooks, laundresses, and valets when they could afford it. 66 The gender and ethnicity of those in the statistics on the serving class show great diversity in Latin America after 1850, reflecting phenomena such as abolition, urbanization, and immigration. Judging by aggregate census data, in postcolonial Lima the domestic staffs became more male than female, 58 percent male by 1876.…”

Section: Men and Women Served: Demography Of Late Nineteenth-century mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In 1907, 73 percent of all employed females in Santiago were laundresses, seamstresses, or domestic servants. 78 In stark contrast to other Latin American cities, Buenos Aires' domestic labor force was increasingly European. Judging by Alfredo E. Talles and Raúl Poczter's analysis of a sample of the 1855 census, the 'doméstico' population was very female (83 percent) and largely native to Argentina (66 percent), though a full third were foreign-born.…”

Section: Men and Women Served: Demography Of Late Nineteenth-century mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Products of Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures

Francois

2008

History Compass

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Exploring links between housework and larger political economies and cultures, this article surveys discussions of paid and unpaid domestic labor in mostly urban settings in Latin American historiography. The focus is on inter‐related questions: Who does housekeeping work? What is the nature of the work? What do those who do housework produce? Age, class, ethnicity, and gender intersect in housework, as it constructs identities drawn on specific cultural landscapes in diverse colonial and postcolonial settings. Bridging literature on unpaid work done in the home by wives, other female family members, and male and female slaves and literature on the paid work of domestic male and female servants of multiple ethnicities, this article argues that housework is not ‘naturally’ women's work, but has been constructed as such unevenly over time. The simultaneous legal, economic, and cultural subordination of women and non‐whites under patriarchal colonial and liberal regimes that devalued housework – despite depending on it – left arduous, labor‐intensive, skilled, and creative consumption work to these subordinated groups. This article also argues that while housework is part of social reproduction, it must also be understood as a productive process in multiple ways. While who did paid housework changed over time, wives and mothers did unpaid work continuously. The nature of the work changed with different contexts. Consumption work produced tangibles such as tortillas, clean clothes, elegantly served tables, and well‐turned‐out individuals, as well as intangibles such as status, prejudice, gendered labor markets, and gendered politics.

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Section: Periodizing the 'Economy Of Appearance' And Inconspicuous Comentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Men and Women Served: Demography Of Late Nineteenth-century mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Men and Women Served: Demography Of Late Nineteenth-century mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Products of Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures

Francois

2008

History Compass

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“…In the tradition of social history, class struggle has been undergoing profound revisions, with new meanings and senses being proposed for the struggles of subordinate workers. At the same time, social history with a gender perspective focuses on how to address the complex processes leading to the establishment of the working class, by discarding masculinizing discourses and highlighting the heterogeneity of experience in the process of class formation (Francois, ; Hutchison, ; Scott, ; Taylor, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Working mothers: Seamstresses' labor struggles in Argentina, 1936-1942

Ullivarri

2018

Journal of Labor and Society

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This article studies the local dimension of women's collective action during the 1930s in Tucumán, a city in northern Argentina. It follows multiple simultaneous trajectories: seamstresses belonging to two different unions, state agents, Catholic militants, and male union leaders. The wide range of components in the experience of female workers prevents them from being treated as a homogeneous group. The aim of this article is to reconstruct the meanings given by all these actors, but especially the women, to their work and their rights as workers and how social, policical, and religious factors influenced a gendered labor conflict. To find these meanings, I shall describe and analyze two strikes (1936 and 1942) declared by seamstresses who worked at home or sewed for third parties. Those conflicts were led by women and shaped by class disputes, tensions between gender representations, exploitation, religion, and also the State, the Catholic Church, the experience of the law, and the consolidation of a culture of rights. I am interested in exploring how these factors shaped the experience of these women and I intend to read the evidence as a function of patterns of social and economic relations within the universe of labor and the changes that took place in the regulation of home‐based work in Argentina.

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Feminist Historiography

Rotramel¹

2020

Companion to Feminist Studies

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Labors Appropriate to Their Sex

Cited by 118 publications

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The Products of Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures

The Products of Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures

Working mothers: Seamstresses' labor struggles in Argentina, 1936-1942

Feminist Historiography

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