Through an analysis of women's reform, domestic worker activism, and cultural values attached to public and private space, this book explains how and why domestic workers, the largest category of working women before 1940, were excluded from labor protections that formed the foundation of the welfare state. Looking at the debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide, it assesses middle-class women's reform programs as well as household workers' efforts to determine their own working conditions. The author argues that working-class women sought to define the middle-class hom ... More

Through an analysis of women's reform, domestic worker activism, and cultural values attached to public and private space, this book explains how and why domestic workers, the largest category of working women before 1940, were excluded from labor protections that formed the foundation of the welfare state. Looking at the debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide, it assesses middle-class women's reform programs as well as household workers' efforts to determine their own working conditions. The author argues that working-class women sought to define the middle-class home as a workplace even as employers and reformers regarded the home as private space. The result was that labor reformers left domestic workers out of labor protections that covered other women workers in New York between the late nineteenth century and the New Deal. By recovering the history of domestic workers as activists in the debate over labor legislation, the author challenges depictions of domestics as passive workers and reformers as selfless advocates of working women. The book illuminates how the domestic-service debate turned the middle-class home inside out, making private problems public and bringing concerns such as labor conflict and government regulation into the middle-class home.