Abstract
Growing public awareness of inequalities and impediments to social mobility make Susanna Rosenbaum’s Domestic Economies—focusing on disparities among women seeking the American Dream—especially timely. Rosenbaum’s ethnography examines two groups of women: Mexican and Central American domestic workers and middle-class, mostly white women who employ domestic help. Unsurprisingly, these two groups evince markedly different experiences in the Los Angeles labor market, and they struggle with different concerns and constraints in their efforts to achieve the American Dream. More surprising, perhaps, are their commonalities, revealed as their lives intersect on the field of reproductive labor.
Rosenbaum emphasizes not the economic disparities and profound social distance between these two groups of women but the gendered dilemmas of an American Dream defined principally by productive labor and material success. Both low-wage, immigrant women and middle-class, native-born women contended with the devaluation of domestic work. Women in both groups faced limited options for pursuing their goals. As workers, women in both groups navigated structural inequalities that shaped their opportunities. They differed, however, in their framing of success. Middle-class women sought careers, with advancement and professional status. For them, reproductive labor was a site of conflict, well documented in the literature on work-family dilemmas and the gendered dynamics of domestic life. In contrast, low-wage immigrant women sought inclusion in America, not only for themselves but also for the next generation. Focused necessarily on immediate needs, they nonetheless sustained hope for a future in which their struggles in the present might provide better lives for their children.
With her focus on reproductive labor, Rosenbaum explores its relationship to the American Dream and the social membership the dream implies. For immigrant women, reproductive labor was a source of accomplishment. For these workers, domestic employment provided not only a wage but also a path toward inclusion. Supporting their families, they invested in the prospect of upward mobility. Some sought education or citizenship, to position themselves more effectively as members of a society in which they remained largely invisible. For native-born women, however, employing domestic workers supported middle-class achievements, like a well-kept home and educational advantages for their children. Domestic help assisted middle-class women in meeting the often-competing demands of paid work and family life, even as the wages they paid for house work could provide little but marginal subsistence for their employees.
Aware of their relative privilege, middle-class, native-born women rationalized their decisions to hire domestic labor. Ambivalent, some emphasized the benefits of hard work or sought to create a kind of interactional equality by expressing their appreciation for services rendered. Nonetheless, these middle-class employers contributed to immigrants’ marginality, both economically and socially, even as many struggled for equality in gendered organizations. In contrast, domestic workers identified not as workers but as mothers. Vulnerable to abuse and always exploited, they might join a cooperative or advocacy group, but they sought principally to find the work they desperately needed to support their families. As they labored, they enacted an American Dream that demands hard work for the prospect of intergenerational mobility. They also pushed the boundaries of belonging, claiming “Americanness” through struggle and success through moral worth.
One strength of Rosenbaum’s research design is its reliance not only on interviews but also on settings for observation: a middle-class mothers’ group, a domestic workers’ co-op, and an organization advocating for domestic workers’ rights. Her analysis incorporates the accounts of women with whom she spent considerable time, and she presents some of their stories in detail. These sources of data raise many more questions. How, for example, could these two groups of women make common cause? How might their small-scale efforts at advocacy shift a culture that continues to devalue reproductive labor, whether paid or unpaid? How might the social organization of motherhood better support women in vastly different social locations? These questions are far from new. In a comparative context that renders group differences in bold relief, however, they assume new clarity. This book thus augments the scholarship on gender and work and would fit well in undergraduate or graduate courses.
Central to any effort for change, Rosenbaum argues, is recognition of processes that exclude. These immigrant and native-born women shared some forms of gendered exclusion, with each group encountering obstacles to success in the labor market. Yet each group’s concerns remained largely invisible to the other. Nonetheless, both domestic workers and their employers voiced faith in the promise of upward mobility, earned through self-sacrifice, hard work, and at times, political advocacy. These, they affirmed, were the keys to achieving the American Dream. Understanding its gendered foundation, Rosenbaum suggests, requires a lens broad enough to encompass class differences that inform reproductive labor.