Domestic Economies: Women, Work, and the American Dream in Los Angeles

ISBN-13: 9780822370024 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 248 str.

Susanna Rosenbaum

Opis

In Domestic Economies, Susanna Rosenbaum examines how two groups of women--Mexican and Central American domestic workers and the predominantly white, middle-class women who employ them--seek to achieve the "American Dream." By juxtaposing their understandings and experiences, she illustrates how immigrant and native-born women strive to achieve that ideal, how each is indispensable to the other's quest, and the importance of reproductive labor to this pursuit. Through in-depth ethnographic research with both groups of women at work, at home, and in the urban spaces of Los Angeles, Rosenbaum positions domestic service as an intimate relationship that reveals two versions of female personhood. Throughout, Rosenbaum underscores the extent to which the ideology of the American Dream is racialized and gendered, exposing how the struggle for personal worth and social recognition is shaped at the intersection of motherhood and paid employment.