How is class subordination produced? This book attempts to answer this question by unraveling the thread of paid domestic work in the first half of the twentieth century and examining it through the lens of the relationship between employers and domestic workers.
This is a history of domestic work that places at its center the voices and narratives of domestic workers and, therefore, is a story that will be told from their own perspective. The study utilizes oral history methodology and is based on interviews with internal migrants from different regions of Greece and refugees.
The book confronts silence - the silence of historiography regarding domestic work as well as that of the subjects who had this experience. How and for what reasons has a work experience that was so significant for Greek society throughout the twentieth century been marginalized both by historical narratives and by the subjects themselves?
The first part of the book focuses on the feeling of shame, considering it the background to the subjects' inability to speak about the experience of domestic work. The second part explores the various reasons - labor legislation, social policy, feminist discourse - that utilized the form of the domestic worker as a means to promote the abolition of child labor and to instill a new morality in the bourgeoisie.
The third part centers on the discourse of domestic workers and traces the process through which a "servile subjectivity" is produced. It focuses on the technologies employed by employers to create a subject in their service and the workers' awareness of the mechanisms through which they were constituted as subordinates.
The final part of the book investigates the performance of this subjectivity in their later lives.
Number of pages
650
Cover
Soft
Year of publication
2012
Publisher
Ekdoseis Papazisi
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