Domestic Economies

Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles

Susanna Rosenbaum

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780822370024, 9780822369974
• eBook ISBN: 9780822372264
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Domestic Economies, Susanna Rosenbaum examines how two groups of women—Mexican and Central American domestic workers and the predominantly white, middle-class women who employ them—seek to achieve the "American Dream." By juxtaposing their understandings and experiences, she illustrates how immigrant and native-born women strive to reach that ideal, how each group is indispensable to the other's quest, and what a vital role reproductive labor plays in this pursuit. Through in-depth ethnographic research with these women at work, at home, and in the urban spaces of Los Angeles, Rosenbaum positions domestic service as an intimate relationship that reveals two versions of female personhood. Throughout, Rosenbaum underscores the extent to which the ideology of the American Dream is racialized and gendered, exposing how the struggle for personal worth and social recognition is shaped at the intersection of motherhood and paid employment.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Producing In/Visibility in Los Angeles
• Chapter 2: Middle-Class Dreaming and the Limits of “Americanness”
• Chapter 3: Making Mothers Count
• Chapter 4: Organizing, Motherhood, and the Meanings of (Domestic) Work
• Chapter 5: Dreaming American
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index