[close] How does housework differ when it is paid labor? In what ways does the role of the housewife change when part of her work is allocated to another woman?

Studies of household labor have rarely considered the employment of domestic workers. Accordingly, studies of domestic workers have not drawn sufficiently from the literature on unpaid housework. Focusing on both paid and unpaid domestic work, Maid in the USA expands our theoretical understanding of reproductive labor to explain the dynamics of race, class, and gender in housework.

Through interviewing and analyzing the daily activities of twenty-five Chicana private household workers, Mary Romero provides a unique exploration of their working conditions, and the social constraints which shape their personal lives. As working women and mothers, Chicana private household workers face the "second shift"-- the result of housework as paid and unpaid labor. Romero argues that private household workers are struggling to control the work process and alter the employee-employer relationship to a client-tradesperson relationship in which labor services, rather than labor power, are sold._This struggle is aimed at developing new interactions with employers that eliminate aspects of hierarchy along the lines of gender, race, and class.

Maid in the USA will be an important book for students of sociology, anthropology, gender studies, and issues of race and ethnicity. [close]