The New Maids

Transnational Women and the Care Economy

Professor Helma Lutz

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781780322377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The New Maids is a pioneering book, grounded on rich, empirical evidence, which examines the relationship between globalization, transnationalism, gender and the care economy. Expertly addressing the thorny questions that surround the increasing number of migrant domestic workers and cleaners, child-carers and caregivers who maintain modern Western households, the author argues that domestic work plays the defining role in global ethnic and gender hierarchies. Using a central ethnographic study of immigrant domestic workers and their German employees as its starting point, The New Maids uses the voices of such women themselves to provide unique conceptual and evidential support for this vital new approach argument. This exciting book will not only enhance the reader's understanding of the new care-economy, it also sets standards for feminist global methodology.

1 | The new division of domestic labour

A woman mopping the globe. The picture on the cover of this book evokes associations with the feminine ideal of the Western housewife of the 1950s, in a trim dress and high heels, striking a mildly sexualized pose. At first glance it seems to bear little relation to the women who are the subjects of this book. The migrant women whose narratives fill these pages would scarcely draw attention to themselves with such attire or such a posture in the domestic households in which they work. Indeed, whether they are searching for employment or doing a day’s work, they must be permanently on their guard against sexualized imaginations.

Nevertheless, one connection at least can be established between the fantasy figure on the book jacket and the real people and work-settings that will be its main focus: the onus for keeping the world ‘spick and span’ rests with the same people now as in that era; it is women who do the job.

In Western industrialized countries, in spite of all emancipatory rhetoric, the domestic tasks of cleaning, caring and cooking are persistently viewed as women’s work. Even in the twenty-first century, the demand first voiced by the women’s movement of the 1970s for equal distribution of domestic work between the genders remains unsatisfied. Instead, redistribution processes within the same gender-category are now afoot, with the result that this work is now outsourced by one woman to another – to a migrant woman from an economically disadvantaged country. In other words, the work remains feminine-gendered. The vision of the first- and second-wave women’s movement, that a balance could be struck between gainful employment and domestic work if men and women shared both forms of work, never came to fruition – either in periods of economic prosperity or in times of economic crisis. This study not only enquires into the causes of this persistent absence of distributive equality, but also shows which tasks are outsourced and in what ways, how the process of outsourcing is organized between female employers and female migrants, what problems arise, particularly from the viewpoint of the ‘new maids’, and what legitimization discourse has arisen in relation to this outsourcing process.

Calling this group of female migrant domestic workers ‘the new maids of Europe’ evokes questions about changes and continuities between the old maids, female servants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and those of our age of globalization. What exactly is the difference between the life of an eighteen-year-old servant working in a bourgeois Berlin household in 1900 and that of a Polish woman cleaning a multitude of Berlin middle-class houses in the year 2000?

In order to find answers, I focused not only on the detailed description of the employment relationships today, but also on the question of how this relationship influences communication and identity models between the people involved. What is the resultant work-identity for the migrant women, whose educational level is not infrequently on a par with their employers’ (i.e. they, too, are members of the middle class in their country of origin)? What are the operative recruitment mechanisms and networks of the newly emerged (informal) labour market? Does the commodification of domestic work make any difference to the setting that is defined as the household? What changes take place in transnational migrant women’s relationships with their families, and possibly also in their definitions of the family? What does it mean to them to live and work in conditions of illegality, and what are their prospects for the future?

This book, which adopts the idiom of a lifeworld description but keeps one eye constantly on global framework conditions and can therefore be understood as a contribution to ‘global ethnography’ (Burawoy et. al. 2000), is an attempt to document the many facets of migrant domestic labour as it is perceived from the perspective of transnational female migrants and their employers. Key questions are whether and how domestic/care work changes when it becomes commodified; whether gender transformations take place in the employers’ households as a result of the ‘new maids’ working there, and if so, in what direction; and finally, what consequences this transnational service employment has for family and gender relationships in the countries of origin. Contrary to other scholarship in which relations between the female employers and employees are frequently characterized as a genuine ‘exploitative relationship’ between the global North and South, this book puts forward the thesis that in fact these relations are far more complex. The case is built up by describing the mutual dependencies, which are anything but symmetrical, and refraining from drawing hasty conclusions. The aim is thus to trace both continuities and changes in domestic/care work in the twenty-first century, so as to arrive at a better analysis of shifts and re-formations of care work.

All in all, it can be said that ‘maids’ represent an important link between the bourgeois lifestyle of the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries, and that multiple axes of social inequality continue to be relevant in the sphere of domestic/care work, albeit in new forms.

In order to contextualize the historic specificity of the new maids, this chapter begins by taking stock of the changes in models of work and family life that have taken place in many Western industrial countries.

1.1 The male breadwinner: labour of love – love as labour

In their well-known essay ‘Labour of love – love as labour’ (‘Arbeit aus Liebe – Liebe als Arbeit’, 1977), Gisela Bock and Barbara Duden refer to the unspoken and unremunerated work that housewives and mothers are required to perform, by virtue of their womanly purpose, as a ‘labour of love’, which takes the form of ‘love as labour’. The authors challenge central aspects of the ‘labour of love’ by calling it ‘serving background work’. One key target of their criticism is the division of society into private and public spheres which are simultaneously gendered and socially contextualized, while another is the consolidation of this division in an implicit contract between the genders whereby the public (= paid labour = male) and private (= reproductive labour = female) spheres are specifically differentiated by gender. Within this division, professional employment enjoys high social esteem, whereas the work of caring for the family is regarded as trivial. Thus the gender-specific differentiation also constitutes a hierarchical distinction.

In their essay, Bock and Duden dissect the so-called bourgeois family ideal, which they refer to as the ‘single breadwinner model’ or the ‘housewife marriage’.

The fact that millions of wives were willing (voluntarily) to contribute serving background work drew the following comment from the American economist Kenneth Galbraith (1973: 33): ‘The conversion of women into a crypto-servant class was an economic accomplishment of the first importance. Menially employed servants were available only to a minority of the pre-industrial population; the servant-wife is available, democratically, to almost the entire present male population.’

The ideal of the male breadwinner has retained its validity as a normative construct in many Western countries to this day, but is coming under increasing legitimization pressure. The debate on family forms and the gender-specific division of labour has developed into a central theme in gender studies since the 1970s. Regina Becker-Schmidt (1987), for instance, has analysed the ‘double socialization’ of women as one aspect of the gender-specific reproduction of social inequality; by this, she means the dual orientation of women to family and work, which under existing conditions leads to a situation where the responsibility for housekeeping and for minding, caring for and bringing up children, as well as caring for older family members, results in them being seen as women’s tasks, to be performed in addition to women’s professional employment if necessary. This does not mean that men’s socialization is ‘singular’, but rather that their orientation is directed more towards a breadwinner model in which their part in providing for the family is contributed by pursuing a career and thereby earning an income.

The persistent influence of this gender code is confirmed, in more recent German studies, by the fact that young fathers react to the birth of their first child by intensifying their commitment to their careers rather than taking on a greater share of family duties (Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend 2006: 183).

The women’s movement of the early 1970s took up cudgels against this ‘implicit contract between the sexes’, for instance by launching the ‘wages for housework campaign’. In demanding payment for domestic labour, their intention was to test out ‘forms of struggle which immediately break the whole structure of domestic work, rejecting it absolutely, rejecting our role as housewives and the home as the ghetto of our existence, since the problem is not only to stop doing this work, but to smash the entire role of housewife’ (Dalla Costa and James 1972). The demand for ‘wages for housework’ was in no way linked to actual wage demands, but was understood as a contribution to the reshaping of society; the goal was the ‘abolition of patriarchy’ as a fundamental step towards the transformation of the capitalist system. At the time, the radical nature of this fundamental rejection of the housewife’s role garnered too little support to become a broad-based movement. No one could have imagined that in the twenty-first century the ‘wages for housework’ slogan would shed its metaphorical meaning and, in a wayward turn of events, don the mantle of a very realistic phenomenon. It can only be assumed that the present-day developments charted in this book were not at all what feminist activists in the 1970s had in mind.

Although today, in the year 2010, rising numbers of women in all Western countries are entering gainful employment, in some countries – Germany among them – a conservative breadwinner model is being perpetuated (see Pfau-Effinger 2000). Indicators of this are tax rules such as allowance-splitting between spouses, the mini-job regulations on part-time work, or the free extension of health insurance coverage to spouses.¹ Nor is any equal distribution of housework and family duties on the principle of partnership in sight: according to time-budget studies (Statistisches Bundesamt 2003: 14ff.), German women continue to perform twice as much housework as men. Admittedly, the modernization discourse has altered the demands made upon fathers. De facto, however, these are honoured only after work and at the weekend (see Grunow 2007).

Another observation on the second half of the twentieth century is that, despite evident alleviation of some of the burden of domestic work by rationalization and technological mechanization, no overall reduction was seen in the total time devoted to work in the household. Modern daily family life is making new demands upon parents, who are expected to have extensive knowledge pertaining to health, child-rearing, education, recreation and time-management, for instance, plus a raft of new social competencies required for dealing with institutions (school, kindergarten, etc.). Accordingly, good parenthood and partnership call for a higher commitment of time and emotional work (Kettschau and Methfessel 2003: 4).

The increased demands of ‘family duties’ correspond to changes in the labour market: many sectors nowadays require levels of mobility and flexibility that are very hard to combine with reliable care arrangements. ‘More than half of high-status employees in a firm work longer than 40 hours (52%), and the actual working time for one-fifth of them is over 48 hours’ (Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend 2006: 390). Overall, paid employment remains the most powerful pace-setter for families and the inherent logic of care work has to take a back seat to the demands of working life (Jurczyk et al. 2009).

1.2 The adult-worker society

Bearing in mind the rising educational status of women, their departure from the labour market the moment that they become mothers is branded, by economists especially, as resource-destruction of female human capital; in scenarios on the future of paid work in the OECD countries, this was underscored in the following terms: ‘The main policy addressed is that of encouraging a higher participation by mothers in paid employment. This is important to maintain their labour market skills, to ensure adequate resources for families and women living by themselves, and to make further progress towards gender equity [my emphasis] … the skills of mothers will be increasingly needed in the labour market as the population of working age in most OECD countries begins to shrink’ (OECD 2001b: 129).

The primary strategy for the realization of gender equality, to paraphrase the view of the OECD, is via the entry of women into paid employment. This means that paid employment and not care work is deemed to be the central mode of social participation. What is advocated is the universalization of labour market participation in an ‘adult-worker society’ (Lewis 2004), in which all adults capable of working – men and women – are considered to be individualized market subjects, as ‘autonomous worker-citizens’ (Manske 2005). This scenario of full-time work for all employable adults is already being pushed at EU level and, following the model of the Scandinavian countries, successively integrated into social systems throughout the EU.

Nevertheless, the ideal of women’s integration into the labour market, which indeed coincides with the demands of the women’s movement, cannot be realized in the absence of clarification as to who will take charge of the care work that was previously performed on an unpaid basis. Resolving this issue tends not to be accepted as a public task in many countries but is left as a problem to be solved individually; that much is apparent from the debate conducted in the EU under the heading of work–life balance (European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions 2006; OECD 2007; Gregory and Milner 2009). This debate, however, is proceeding on thin ice, for in the majority of EU member states, such an emphasis on the economic necessity of women’s employment is at odds with the tenacious hold of conservative cultural codings, which consider care to be a primarily female activity and take a dim view of the desirability of associating care with masculinity (Plomien 2009). To all appearances, the ‘new’ gender script of the EU is at loggerheads with reality.

1.3 The multiple facets of care work

The first new aspect of the current debate about ‘care work’ is that caring is now understood as work, and has ceased to be treated as a characteristic that is peculiar to women and synonymous with their female nature. Care, however, is not just an activity (taking care of) but encompasses an emotional component (caring about). Arlie Hochschild (1995) and Joan Tronto (2008) understand care work in its full breadth as consisting of caring ‘knowledge, action and feelings’ and thus comprisi...