Domestic Occupations

This feminist rhetorical history explores women's complex and changing relationship to the home and how that affected their entry into the workplace. Author Jessica Enoch examines the spatial rhetorics that defined the home in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers how its construction and reconstruction--from discursive description to physical composition--has greatly shaped women's efforts at taking on new kinds of work. In doing so, Enoch exposes the ways dominant discourses regarding women's home life and work life--rhetorics that often assumed a white middle-class status--were complicated when differently raced, cultured, and classed women encountered them. Enoch explores how three different groups of women workers--teachers, domestic scientists, and World War II factory employees--contended with the physical and ideological space of the home, examining how this everyday yet powerful space thwarted or enabled their financial and familial security as well as their intellectual engagements and work-related opportunities. Domestic Occupations demonstrates a multimodal and multigenre research method for conducting spatio-rhetorical analysis that serves as a model for new kinds of thinking and new kinds of scholarship. This study adds historical depth and exigency to an important contemporary conversation in the public sphere about how women's ties to the home inflect their access to work and professional advancement.

Domestic Architecture, Ethnicity, and Complementarity in the South-Central Andes is a comprehensive and challenging look at the burgeoning field of Andean domestic architecture. Aldenderfer and fourteen contributors use domestic architecture to explore two major topics in the prehistory of the south-central Andes: the development of different forms of complementary relationships between highland and lowland peoples and the definition of the ethnic affiliations of these peoples.

Before the Servant Project began its activities, on the initiative of the editor of this book, the long term history of domestic service was still in its beginning stage. This volume is the first wide-ranging attempt to determine the role of domestic workers both in past and present times. Domestic service was of major importance in the multi-secular process of urbanization and socio-economic development of European societies. Today, domestic workers (mainly women) represent an important component of international labour migrations to Western countries. Instead of disappearing, as expected for a long time, paid domestic work is currently experiencing a kind of «resurgence». The contributions assembled in this volume analyze the situation of domestic workers, and contribute to improve knowledge concerning their individual characteristics (gender, ethnic group, religion), origin, motivation and cultural identity, relationship with their own families and those of the employers. Further topics are connections with the home country and place of destination, legal status, rights and duties, in order to understand the current globalization of domestic work.