Courses

Domestic work - including food preparation, caring for children, and cleaning and maintaining a home - is essential to sustaining human life. Yet this work is often socially invisible. When paid workers undertake domestic labor, it has historically been one of the lowest-paid, most vulnerable and exploited forms of labor. In this course, we will explore how household labor itself and the people who do it have evolved over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on Britain and the United States as case studies. The course pays particular attention to the gender, class, and racial inequalities that have characterized this work and examples of how both paid and unpaid domestic workers have challenged their exploitation and invisibility in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.