Maid in the USA

Mary Romero is Professor of Justice Studies at Arizona State University, and is the co-editor of Women's UntoldStories and Challenging Feminisms (both available from Routledge).

"This book highlights the issues facing workers in domestic work, including low wages, long hours, poor working conditions and lack of control over working conditions. Everyone interested in these issues should read the Tenth Anniversary edition of Mary Romero's classic work Maid in the USA." -- Linda Chavez-Thompson, Executive Vice-President, AFL-CIO"An extremely effective look at the structural dynamics that shape domestic labor...Drawing on the domestic servant's searing descriptions of their low pay and long hours, their insensitive or defensive employers, their worries about their own children and their personal strategies for survival, Maid in the USA offers a critically important corrective to the popular perception of domestic servants." -- Mimi Abramovitz, author of Under Attack, Fighting Back: Women and Welfare in theUnited States"Pathbreaking in its emphasis on understanding domestic work through the lens of employment, this classic text is as relevant as ever. It continues to reaffirm the importance of questioning both the way our society organizes cleaning and caring work, and the relations of race, class, and gender on which domestic work relies." -- Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, author of Domestica:Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows ofAffluence"This is exactly the moment to read or re-read Mary Romero's classic ethnography...It is wonderful to have Maid in the USA freshly available again." -- Cynthia Enloe, author of Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: MakingFeminist Sense of International Politics

• Indroduction1. Intersection of Biography and History: My Intellectual Journey2. Women's Work Is Never Done3. Gender and Class in Domestic Work4. Domestic Service and Women of Color in the United States5. Bonds of Sisterhood - Bonds of Oppression6. The Struggle to Transform Domestic Labor7. The Housework DilemmaAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex