Introduction: Researching and Rethinking

the Labors of Love

Jocelyn Olcott

F or decades, feminist scholarship in fields ranging from philosophy and legal

theory to political science and sociology has challenged conceptual divisions
between the public and the private, production and reproduction, and labor and
affect.1 These distinctions persist in scholarly literature, public policy, and the
popular imaginary: domestic violence and domestic labor are considered apart
from violence and labor more generally, “working mothers” still refers to women
who work in the labor market and put in a “second shift” of motherhood, and
the popular press has made a hand-­wringing Mothers Day ritual of calculating
the value of unpaid household labor, thereby both marking it as women’s labor
(or at least mothers’) and reducing its consideration to a semi-­ironic editorial
wink.2 Twenty years of pragmatic and intellectual developments — ­including a
critical mass of full-­time academics who also assume reproductive-­labor respon-
sibilities, and a particularly dynamic period in feminist theorizing — ­have revi-

In addition to receiving insightful commentary from the contributors to this issue, this essay
has benefited tremendously from comments and criticism by readers who demonstrated
remarkable generosity with their time and labor: Carolyn Eastman, Julie Greene, Temma
Kaplan, Rebecca Plant, Lara Putnam, David Sartorius, Pete Sigal, Heidi Tinsman, and two
anonymous readers for the HAHR.
1. See for example Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989); Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of
Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003); Heidi I.
Hartmann, ed., Gendering Politics and Policy: Recent Developments in Europe, Latin America,
and the United States (New York: Haworth Political Press, 2005); Catharine A. MacKinnon,
Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard Univ. Press, 2006).
2. “A Mother’s Pay? $117,000,” Wall Street Journal, 12 May 2008. The Web site salary
.com offers an estimate every Mother’s Day. On the sex-­based division of household labor,
see Makiko Fuwa, “Macro-­level Gender Inequality and the Division of Household Labor in
22 Countries,” American Sociological Review 69, no. 6 (2004): 751 – 67.

Hispanic American Historical Review 91:1

doi 10.1215/00182168-2010-085
Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press
2 HAHR / February / Olcott

talized this field, generating studies with both materialist and poststructuralist
DNA. Recently reissued classic texts on reproductive labor — ­the unpaid “car-
ing” work of child care, housekeeping, food provision, and the maintenance
of critical community networks — ­and a new crop of both scholarly and trade
books consider not only the structural conditions of this labor but also the cul-
tural influences that cast certain tasks as “women’s work.”3 The articles included
in this special issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review historicize the
interplay between public and private in shaping Latin America’s uneven and
often ambivalent experience of commodifying reproductive labor.
Latin Americanists will appreciate that several recent interventions draw
lessons from dependency theory. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, for
example, introduce their volume about nannies, domestic workers, and sex work-
ers in the global economy with an argument about the “care deficit” between
the industrialized and developing worlds. Inverting the expectation of poorer
economies depending on richer ones, they “explore . . . a dependency that works
in the other direction, and it is a dependency of a particularly intimate kind.
Increasingly often, as affluent and middle-­class families in the First World come
to depend on migrants from poorer regions to provide child care, homemaking,
and sexual services, a global relationship arises that in some ways mirrors the
traditional relationship between the sexes.”4 Just as Latin American dependency
theory demystified the discourse of comparative advantage, revealing its ideo-
logical underpinnings and material implications, studies of reproductive labor
explore the historical contingencies of its naturalized and biologized practices.

3. Republished texts include Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (1992; New York:
Routledge, 2002); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982;
New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own
Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (1978: New York: Anchor Books, 2005);
Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (1983;
Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2003); Arlie Russell Hochschild with Anne Machung,
The Second Shift (1989; New York: Penguin Books, 2003). The Association for Research on
Motherhood, founded at York University in 1998, launched a journal the following year.
Recent trade books include Joan Blades and Kristin Rowe-­Finkbeiner, The Motherhood
Manifesto: What America’s Moms Want and What to Do about It (New York: Nation Books,
2006); and Ann Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World
Is Still the Least Valued (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), reissued in paperback in
November 2010. The divide between “work” and “motherhood” is reinscribed in the
best-­selling (in May 2010) Kristin Van Ogtrop, Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for
the Half-­Insane Working Mom (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010).
4. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds., Global Woman: Nannies,
Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002), 11.
Introduction 3

The articles included here, and the larger projects from which they draw,
enter into this arena of debate and exemplify analytical approaches that ani-
mate the study of reproductive labor both as a distinct area of inquiry and as a
field with links to labor, economic, family, cultural, women’s, gender, and politi-
cal history. Focusing on Santiago’s Casa de Huérfanos, Nara Milanich dem-
onstrates how the Chilean state mediated domestic employment relationships
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, informing the allocation
of reproductive labor not only within households and between individuals but
also across social groups. Ann Blum’s investigation, like Milanich’s, decisively
brings children into our understanding, showing how concepts of alimentos and
reciprocity shaped family and labor relationships in postrevolutionary Mexican
household economies. Rebekah Pite examines a similarly complex and ambigu-
ous relationship in her study of Doña Petrona and her assistant Juanita in the
1960s Argentine television program, Buenas Tardes, Mucho Gusto. Finally, Eliza-
beth Hutchison considers the 1960s and ’70s, reexamining conventional politi-
cal periodizations to demonstrate how the mobilization of paid Chilean domes-
tic workers reflected changing attitudes within the Catholic Church as much
as the dramatic political events of that era, galvanizing empleadas to challenge
traditional notions of servitude and labor rights.
These articles address the conceptual and methodological challenges of
historicizing reproductive labor, beginning with the problem of defining their
subject. As Milanich discusses, the terms “domestic labor” and “reproduc-
tive labor” often appear interchangeably in the literature, although they have
somewhat different connotations. While domestic labor centers on household
tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and child rearing (as well as supervising those
tasks, ama de llaves Juanita Bordoy’s “real” work, as we learn from Pite’s essay),
reproductive labor includes a more heterogeneous array of duties connected
with socializing and maintaining the workforce, including biological reproduc-
tion (such as childbearing, surrogacy, wet nursing), social reproduction (such
as socialization and education), and maintaining forms of public respectability
within communities (such as hospitality, charitable work, and performance of
rites). Sexuality and sex work fall somewhere in the interstices of these practices
articulating love and labor and certainly merit greater consideration as part of
reproductive-­labor history. The research in this issue reveals that even this dis-
tinction between domestic and reproductive labor requires further elaboration
as they often spill over into one another.
These articles have a long and diverse intellectual genealogy. Readers will
notice the influence of feminist scholars, from Gayle Rubin and Heidi Hart-
mann to Joan Scott and Judith Butler. In addition to drawing on feminist his-
4 HAHR / February / Olcott

torians’ long-­standing insights about language and periodization, these articles

taken together engage two important bodies of literature: the scholarship on
labor history and studies exploring fragmented subjectivities.5 In the former
field, we see the particularly powerful influences of the new labor history in
Latin America.6 Just as including slavery studies under the rubric of labor his-
tory fostered fruitful reconsiderations in both fields, placing reproductive-­labor
studies in dialogue with labor historians promises to generate a fuller under-
standing of the factors that animate historical experience. By considering not
only the more transparently worklike tasks of changing diapers, preparing
meals, and tending illnesses but also the more leisurelike, but nonetheless criti-

5. For the classic feminist intervention on the reconsideration of periodization

and other historical analytics, see Joan Kelly-­Gadol, “The Social Relation of the Sexes:
Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 809 – 23. On the
critical role of language, see Joan Wallach Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical
Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773 – 97. For a reconsideration of feminism’s impact on historical
analysis, see Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism
(Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
6. See especially Sylvia M. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790 – 1857 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1985); Susan K. Besse, Restructuring Patriarchy: The Modernization
of Gender Inequality in Brazil, 1914 – 1940 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
1996); Ann Farnsworth-­A lvear, Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in
Colombia’s Industrial Experiment (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2000); John D. French
and Daniel James, eds., The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers: From
Household and Factory to the Union Hall and Ballot Box (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press,
1997); Asunción Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989); Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Introducción a la historia de la vida
cotidiana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2006); Thomas Miller Klubock, Contested
Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904 – 1951
(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1998); Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Household Economy and
Urban Development: São Paulo, 1765 to 1836 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1986); Susie S. Porter,
Working Women in Mexico City: Public Discourses and Material Conditions, 1879 – 1931 (Tucson:
Univ. of Arizona Press, 2003); Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the
Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870 – 1960 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 2002); Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working
Women in Nineteenth-­Century Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1995);
Barbara Weinstein, For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working
Class in São Paulo, 1920 – 1964 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996); Heidi
Tinsman, Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean
Agrarian Reform, 1950 – 1973 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2002); Elizabeth Quay
Hutchison, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile,
1900 – 1930 (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2001); Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, Gendered
Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920 – 1950 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North
Carolina Press, 2000).
Introduction 5

cal, tasks of paying attention, offering affection, and cultivating socialization,

the articles here contribute to a more complete understanding of both waged
and unwaged labor.7 In the latter field, regarding fragmented subjectivities,
we see most prominently the influences of borderlands theorists, particularly
those influenced by queer-­studies critiques.8 As debates within feminist theory
have questioned the “commonsense” ideologies about women’s roles and public-
­private divides, queer-­studies scholarship has reexamined assumptions about
normative behavior, particularly with regard to family structures and practices.9
These insights have drawn the authors included here to investigate how his-
torical actors develop multiple subjectivities and harbor contradictions between
how they imagine their lives (for example, conforming to bourgeois domestic
ideals) and how they experience them (often by the seats of their pants, with ad
hoc solutions to daily challenges).
The contributors here weave threads from these two fields to explore the
hybridities and ambiguities within reproductive labor. Historians Eileen Boris
and S. J. Kleinberg have pointed out that scholars have tended to categorize
many aspects of reproductive labor as “love rather than labor.”10 The presump-
tion that we must choose between seeing reproductive labor as either love or
labor forces us either to ignore vast amounts of quotidian labor performed or to
commodify every aspect of reproductive labor to shoehorn it into conventional
conceptions of labor.11 “The specter of women’s labor haunts capitalism,” muses

7. On the importance of these latter tasks in producing the “human capital”

that sustains economies and societies, see Hochschild and Machung, The Second Shift;
Crittenden, The Price of Motherhood.
8. For a review of this literature, see José David Saldívar, “Border Thinking,
Minoritized Studies, and Realist Interpellations: The Coloniality of Power from Gloria
Anzaldúa to Arundhati Roy,” in Identity Politics Reconsidered, ed. Linda Martín Alcoff
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 152 – 70.
9. See for example Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the
Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999). Lee Edelman critiques the “politics of
reproductive futurity” that rests on a “cult of the Child” and deflects a presentist politics in
favor of a constantly deferred politics to benefit — ­t hrough mystified reproductive labor — ­an
imagined future generation. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004).
10. Eileen Boris and S. J. Kleinberg, “Mothers and Other Workers: (Re)Conceiving
Labor, Maternalism, and the State,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (2003): 90.
11. For a review of these debates by a political theorist, see Kathi Weeks, “Life Within
and Against Work: Affective Labor, Feminist Critique, and Post-­Fordist Politics,” Ephemera
7, no. 1 (2007): 233 – 49. For a more historical perspective, see Reva B. Siegel, “Valuing
Housework: Nineteenth-­Century Anxieties about the Commodification of Domestic
Labor,” American Behavioral Scientist 41, no. 10 (1998): 1437 – 51.
6 HAHR / February / Olcott

David Staples in an essay considering reproductive labor as affective labor.12

New studies of reproductive labor illuminate a vast and understudied realm of
human experience to investigate the intermingling of occupational and social
lives, those areas in which gender roles or cultural mores create expectations
that obfuscate the lines between love and labor.
The articles here highlight the importance of continuing to interrogate
such dichotomies. Milanich and Blum, for example, explore how children both
produced and consumed reproductive labor within working-­class households.
Pite closely examines both a relationship that intertwined love and labor and
viewers’ response to the relationship’s public manifestation. The activities that
historical actors associated with both love and labor varied widely, depending
on factors including economic structures, political climates, migratory patterns,
racial ideologies, labor and management cultures, market integration, union
militancy, trends in popular culture, and the strength of Catholic organiza-
tions. Ultimately, as the following studies demonstrate, we gain the greatest
understanding about human experience not by separating out love from labor,
or life from work, but rather by understanding them as a dyad. This introduc-
tion begins by tracing the intellectual genealogy of this special issue and pro-
ceeds to consider three areas of inquiry that have particular salience for Latin
American historians of reproductive labor: the contingency of its social rela-
tions, the impact of modernization and industrialization, and the role of policy
makers and state agencies. The introduction concludes with a brief delineation
of the articles’ methodological contributions and some of the most conspicuous
lacunae in the study of reproductive-­labor history.

Redefining Reproduction

This special issue emerged from discussions during the meetings of the Con-
ference on Latin American History / American Historical Association, the
Berkshires Conference on Women’s History, the Latin American Studies
Association, and the Duke University Latin American Labor History Confer-
ence. These conversations across disciplines and subfields revealed the need for
further research to historicize reproductive labor in Latin America, given its
immense importance not only to everyday life but also to contemporary debates
about neoliberalism. As the sociologist Esther Ngan-­ling Chow explains in her

12. David Staples, “Women’s Work and the Ambivalent Gift of Entropy” in The
Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough with Jean O’Malley Halley
(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2007), 119.
Introduction 7

introduction to a special issue addressing gender and globalization, “The ten-

dency to convert public issues (e.g. public responsibility for the care of young
and old) into private ones transfers the costs of globalization into a burden
for individuals. The austerity of [structural adjustment programs], originally
designed to aid countries’ economic growth, produces similar privatized effects,
shifting the public responsibilities of the state to the domestic sphere in which
women shoulder disproportional costs and burdens of care for the young and
old.”13 This trajectory toward privatization and commodification, combined
with labor history’s conspicuous impact on Latin Americanist historiography,
has led the contributors here to engage with more conventional labor history
questions — ­such as defining shifts, expertise, what marks labor as “skilled,”
and the impact of migration and technological changes — ­as well as those aris-
ing from family, urban, and cultural history that have informed recent labor
histories, including questions of honor and respectability, social relations of
labor, and the roles of institutions we do not conventionally associate with labor,
such as orphanages and church groups. The authors here push even further to
investigate the interconnectedness of productive (mostly paid) and reproductive
(mostly subsistence) labors.
Although several Latin America – based scholars participated in the con-
versations that generated this issue, all the authors included here trained and
currently teach at US universities. For this reason, our primary historiographi-
cal comparison outside of Latin America lies with scholarship on the United
States, and this introduction draws on both US and Latin American histori-
ographies to elaborate some of the critical conceptual questions surrounding
reproductive-­labor history: defining its terms, establishing its central actors and
institutions, and describing its parameters.14 Both the US and Latin American
literatures have important debts to social science disciplines other than his-
tory, and both have focused either on women’s efforts to balance wage labor
with domestic demands or on the intersections between households and wage

13. Esther Ngan-­ling Chow, “Gender Matters: Studying Globalization and Social
Change in the 21st Century,” International Sociology 18, no. 3 (2003): 443 – 60. For a review
of the relationship between neoliberal policies and reproductive labor, see Sylvia Chant,
“Researching Gender, Families and Households in Latin America: From the 20th into the
21st Century,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 21, no. 4 (2002): 545 – 75.
14. For reviews of the historiography, see Marie Eileen Francois, “The Products of
Consumption: Housework in Latin American Political Economies and Cultures,” History
Compass 6, no. 1 (2008): 207 – 42; Boris and Kleinberg, “Mothers and Other Workers”;
Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women
(New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 389 – 92.
8 HAHR / February / Olcott

labor through industrial homework or through paid domestic work.15 The US

and Latin American literatures have followed somewhat different trajectories,
however. As the historian Marie Francois notes, although US historiography
includes a small handful of books that concentrate solely on domestic labor, the
Latin American historiography has tended to integrate these discussions into
larger studies of labor history and women’s history.16
The first generation of reproductive-­labor studies emerged amid the hey-
day of 1970s feminism. Confronting those who viewed reproductive labor as
at best a distraction and at worst an impediment to class consciousness, these
scholars wove Marxist perspectives about reproductive labor’s role in capital
accumulation together with feminist observations that patriarchal ideologies
naturalized the distribution and mystification of reproductive labor.17 Navigat-

15. For Latin America, see for example Lourdes Benería and Martha Roldán, The
Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics
in Mexico City (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987); June C. Nash and Helen Icken Safa,
eds., Sex and Class in Latin America: Women’s Perspectives on Politics, Economics, and the Family
in the Third World (Brooklyn: J. F. Bergin Publishers, 1980); June Nash, Helen Safa, et al.,
Women and Change in Latin America (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers,
1986); David E. Hojman, “Land Reform, Female Migration and the Market for Domestic
Service in Chile,” Journal of Latin American Studies 21, no. 1 (1989): 105 – 32; Elizabeth Jelin,
Family, Household and Gender Relations in Latin America (London: Kegan Paul International /
Paris: UNESCO, 1991); Orlandina de Oliveira, ed., Trabajo, poder y sexualidad (Mexico City:
El Colegio de México, 1989). On the United States, see Sarah Fenstermaker Berk, The
Gender Factory: The Apportionment of Work in American Households (New York: Plenum Press,
1985); Nancy Folbre and Michael Bittman, eds., Family Time: The Social Organization of Care
(New York: Routledge, 2004); Jane Lou Collins and Martha Gimenez, eds., Work without
Wages: Comparative Studies of Domestic Labor and Self-­Employment (Albany: State Univ. of
New York Press, 1990); Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life; Hochschild,
The Managed Heart; Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston, and Cindi Katz, “Life’s Work:
An Introduction, Review and Critique,” in Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction,
ed. Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston, and Cindi Katz (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2004), 1 – 26; Harriet Fraad, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, Bringing It All
Back Home: Class, Gender, and Power in the Modern Household (London: Pluto Press, 1994);
Pierrette Hondagneu-­Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the
Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2001); Cindi Katz, “Vagabond
Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction,” Antipode 33, no. 1 (2001): 709 – 28.
16. Francois, “The Products of Consumption,” 208.
17. The socialist-­feminist literature is substantial, but see especially Sheila
Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973); Heidi I.
Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The
Example of Housework,” Signs 6, no. 3 (1981): 366 – 94; Christine Delphy, Close to Home: A
Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression, ed. and trans. Diana Leonard (Amherst: Univ. of
Introduction 9

ing between feminist assumptions about the liberatory promise of paid labor
and Marxist views of wage labor as fundamentally exploitative, feminist social
scientists formulated structural analyses to explain the social and economic
functions of reproductive labor across time and cultures. The following arti-
cles bear the imprint of this scholarship and its attention to the relationship
between structures and ideologies. By juxtaposing, for example, 1870s Santiago
and 1960s Buenos Aires, this special issue demonstrates the contingencies not
only of the interplay between structures and ideologies but also of reproductive
labor’s conceptions and practices.
Historians have recently begun to examine consumption as one of repro-
ductive labor’s contingent aspects. Using an impressive combination of social
historians’ quantitative tools and cultural historians’ interpretive approaches,
Marie Francois’s meticulous study of private pawnbrokers and Mexico City’s
Monte de Piedad has demonstrated the central role of women’s consumption
strategies for maintaining and advancing class status.18 Pite takes up a simi-
lar question in a very different context, showing us a public and mediated rep-
resentation in which an emergent consumer culture informs an idealized and
contingent domesticity. As Milanich notes, the ambiguous etymology of the
term criado, meaning both “servant” and “reared” or “raised,” highlights the
fluidity of the relationship between a patrón, also ambiguously both protector
and employer, and the children often performing and consuming household
labor.19
Considering consumption as household labor contests the use of the gross
national product (GNP) as the metric of usefulness, relegating unpaid repro-
ductive labor to the realm of consumption or, by some estimates, “leisure.”

Massachusetts Press, 1984); Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, The Power of Women
and the Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1973); Leopoldina
Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital, trans.
Hilary Creek (1981; Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1995).
18. Marie Eileen Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and
Governance in Mexico City, 1750 – 1920 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2006).
19. As Milanich and Blum both point out, the history of childhood in Latin America
has also burgeoned as a field. See for example Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo, eds.,
Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque:
Univ. of New Mexico Press, 2007); Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth,
Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press,
2005); Kathryn A. Sloan, “Disobedient Daughters and the Liberal State: Generational
Conflicts over Marriage Choice in Working Class Families in Nineteenth-­Century Oaxaca,
Mexico,” The Americas 63, no. 4 (2007): 615 – 50.
10 HAHR / February / Olcott

Debates within economic development literature have shown that, in most of

the world’s economies, including those of Latin America, the production/con-
sumption distinction ignores common practice.20 Blum documents the ways
that consumption and reciprocity figured into a working-­class moral economy
based around families rather than the individuals. Reminding us of the indis-
soluble connection between labor and love, she concludes, “In families subsist-
ing on the economic margins of Mexico’s capital, every member contributed to
the work of social reproduction out of necessity. But parents and children also
worked to express their intimate relationships, which in turn gave meaning to
their work. When confronting public authorities, parents and children invoked
those meanings to assert that they were respectable and responsible and that
even in the face of separation they sustained meaningful family ties.” The his-
torian Susan Porter Benson’s recent study of working-­class families in interwar
United States demonstrates that the consumption/production dichotomy did
not necessarily hold in industrialized economies either.21

Relationships of Reproduction

As such findings underscore, the social relations of reproductive labor — ­t he

practices and ideologies informing who performs what types of reproductive
labor and under what conditions — ­t urn out to be as complicated and contin-
gent as its definitions.22 Women’s history has provided the intellectual home for
most histories of reproductive labor, and the field originally blossomed amid the
growth of women’s studies programs and mounting feminist challenges to dis-
ciplines across the humanities and social sciences. As a result, most early studies
of reproductive labor have examined it as women’s work, if only to unmask the
sexism that often essentializes it as such.
Recent scholarship challenges this conflation, however, by offering a

20. For a review of this literature, see María Josefina Saldaña-­Portillo, The
Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development (Durham, NC: Duke
Univ. Press, 2003); Catherine V. Scott, Gender and Development: Rethinking Modernization
and Dependency Theory (Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 1995); Suzanne Bergeron, Fragments
of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan
Press, 2004).
21. Susan Porter Benson, Household Accounts: Working-­Class Family Economies in the
Interwar United States (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2007).
22. For the Marxist formulation of the “social relations maintained towards one
another by the individuals in the process of producing life’s requirements,” see Karl Marx,
Capital, vol. 3, pt. 2 (1867; New York: Cosimo Books, 2007), 953.
Introduction 11

broader and longer historical perspective. The anthropologist Richard Trexler

offers evidence that the “third sex” berdache figure performed domestic labor
in indigenous American cultures.23 Just as Blum and Milanich show us the criti-
cal role children have played in reproductive labor, Francois has demonstrated
that, during Latin America’s colonial period and early nineteenth century, male
servants and slaves often performed a considerable portion of the domestic labor
that by the twentieth century would fall almost exclusively to women.24 This
trend squares not only with Elizabeth Dore’s observations about the more gen-
eral narrowing of women’s opportunities during the nineteenth century but also
with José Moya’s argument that while Latin America witnessed the earliest and
most complete feminization of domestic labor, there is a long history of male-
­dominated household service that changed in conjunction with (although not
necessarily as a result of) industrialization.25 While Matthew Gutmann’s eth-
nography of Mexican men’s participation in reproductive labor in 1980s Mexico
City indicates that men remain nearly absent from domestic service but do per-
form some child-­rearing duties in their own households, Brígida García and
Orlandina de Oliveira’s research demonstrates that Mexico City men remain
conspicuously resistant to undertaking domestic tasks such as cleaning.26 These
observations underscore the need for historical rather than biological or ahis-
torically cultural explanations of how commodified and uncommodified repro-
ductive labor came to be performed almost exclusively by women over the late

23. Richard C. Trexler, Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the
European Conquest of the Americas (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1995), chap. 4.
24. Francois, “The Products of Consumption,” 209.
25. Elizabeth Dore, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Gender and the State in the
Long Nineteenth Century,” in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed.
Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), 3 – 32; José
Moya, “Domestic Service in a Global Perspective: Gender, Migration and Ethnic Niches,”
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007): 562. In the US historiography,
Jeanne Boydston’s exemplary study of reproductive labor from the early colonial period
links the gendering of reproductive labor with the emergence of commodification and
markets. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in
the Early Republic (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), xix. Susan Porter Benson’s study
of the Depression-­era United States found a “much less intense gendering” of reproductive
labor than we have assumed, demonstrating working-­class families’ “gender transgressions”
in household roles, with families devising survival strategies with apparent disregard for
bourgeois conventions. Benson, Household Accounts, 17.
26. Matthew C. Gutmann, The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996). Brigida García and Orlandina de Oliveira,
“Fatherhood in Urban Mexico,” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 36, no. 2 (2005):
305 – 27.
12 HAHR / February / Olcott

nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even as patterns in female employment

changed, especially among the emerging middle class, over the second half of
the twentieth century.
Reproductive labor became not only more noticeably sex-­specific but also
reflected other social inequalities, fostering accusations that middle-­class femi-
nists achieved their liberation at the expense of poorer, often darker women who
performed “their” work under exploitative conditions.27 Latin American schol-
ars have argued that the region’s widespread employment of domestic servants
has meant that feminists, who generally hailed from the more educated middle
classes, did not prioritize domestic-­labor issues because they performed little
such labor themselves.28 The paid domestic workers that Hutchison studies,
who often performed the same tasks for their employers as they performed for
free at home, took careful notice of labeling domestic labor as “women’s work.”
A feminist addressing an early 1980s conference on Chilean domestic service

27. For a particularly cogent review of the arguments surrounding this question, see
Heidi Tinsman, “The Indispensable Services of Sisters: Considering Domestic Service
in the United States and Latin American Studies,” Journal of Women’s History 4, no. 1
(1992): 37 – 59. The US historiography makes similar charges. David Katzman concludes
that middle-­class US women secured their liberty at the expense of working-­class women,
stressing not the extent to which men benefited by women’s unpaid and underpaid labors
but rather the “woman to woman relationship” that was a “peculiar characteristic of
domestic work.” David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in
Industrializing America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 270. Ruth Schwartz Cowan
offers historical explanations for allocating housework to women, she observes, “It is a
convention so deeply embedded in our individual and collective consciousnesses that even
the profound changes wrought by the twentieth century have not yet shaken it.” Ruth
Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open
Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 150. Deploying Freudian notions
of taboo and Mary Douglas’s study of cultural associations between moral and sanitary
impurity, the US historian Phyllis Palmer shows how white, middle-­class housewives during
the interwar years presented themselves as cleaner and purer than those women who sullied
themselves with the muck of wage labor by “restricting themselves to housework and to
marital sex and distinguishing themselves from women of color and working-­class women.”
For the women they employed, meanwhile, “the halo around the words home and domestic
seemed ironic.” Phyllis M. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in
the United States, 1920 – 1945 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1989), 150, 87.
28. Ana Lau, “El nuevo movimiento feminista mexicano a fines del milenio,” in
Feminismo en México, ayer y hoy, ed. Eli Bartra, Anna M. Fernández Poncela, and Ana Lau
(Mexico: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2000), 15; H. Pereira de Melo, “Feminists
and Domestic Workers in Rio de Janiero,” in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin
America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia: Temple
Univ. Press, 1989), 363 – 72.
Introduction 13

queried pointedly, “Could this be the liberation of some women at the price of
the greater oppression of others?”29 By the 1970s, as Pite indicates, middle-­class
Argentine women became increasingly concerned about the nature of their rela-
tionships with domestic employees, and that anxiety manifested itself in their
response to the on-­screen relationship between Doña Petrona and Juanita.30
Compared to the US literature, the Latin Americanist scholarship on
domestic labor focuses overwhelmingly on class rather than race.31 That pattern
continues with the articles included here, although not without misgivings. The
authors all have considered race but have confronted the limitations of extant
sources, which generally offer insights into the racial dynamics of reproductive
labor through elision and implication rather than through direct address. Blum
notes the common conflation of race and class in postrevolutionary Mexico,
and Milanich encountered a striking silence regarding race in her sources. Pite
observes that in focus groups and interviews Argentines “seemed genuinely
confused about how they might respond to [Pite’s] questions about their under-
standing of the racial or ethnic identities of Doña Petrona and Juanita Bordoy,”
preferring instead to focus on the women’s provincial backgrounds. While all
the contributors acknowledge racialized labor hierarchies, determining the
practice, meanings, and historical processes behind these racial ideologies has
remained somewhat elusive.
The authors’ attention to class, however, yields striking results. Milanich
finds, for example, that while US and European women, particularly immi-
grants, often used domestic service as a stopping-­off point on the way to form-
ing their own families, for poorer Latin American women, domestic service was
“more a life station than a life stage.” Milanich uncovers in Santiago not only
a vibrant secondary market in domestic service, whereby wet nurses left their
suckling infants with even poorer women, but also a widespread practice of mul-

29. Archivo Siglo XX, Fondo Organizaciones Sociales, Rosalba Todaro, “El trabajo
doméstico: Tarea de mujeres?” Boletín no. 7, Círculo de Estudios de la Mujer (Dec. 1981): 3.
30. Ehrenreich and Hochshild highlight the irony of feminist aspirations to bring the
“ambitious and independent women of the world together,” although not “in the way that
second-­wave feminists in affluent countries once liked to imagine — ­as sisters and allies
struggling to achieve common goals. Instead, they come together as mistress and maid,
employer and employee, across a great divide of privilege and opportunity.” Ehrenreich and
Hochschild, Global Woman, 11.
31. David Katzman found that “status, race and ethnicity, and sex are more salient
features in household labor than are economic factors.” Katzman, Seven Days a Week,
vii. For a review of the US literature on race and domestic employment, see Dorothea
Schneider, “The Work That Never Ends: New Literature on Paid Domestic Work and
Women of Color,” Journal of American Ethnic History 17, no. 2 (1998): 61 – 66.
14 HAHR / February / Olcott

tigenerational servitude, in which children were considered an asset rather than

a liability for women’s employment prospects. Poorer households, meanwhile,
often employed children as their own servants to replace women and children
who had gone to work in wealthier households. Further, state agencies and char-
itable institutions, including Catholic organizations, steered plebeian women
away from marriage and motherhood and toward domestic service. “Domestic
and reproductive labor was a resource allocated at the level of the individual
household between men and women, adults and children, and mistresses and
maids,” she explains. “But there was also a societal allocation of domestic labor
across social groups.”
Understanding of the social relations of reproductive labor has benefited
from the turn toward cultural history and a growing interest in subjectivity,
psychoanalysis, and affect, exploring the “love” side of the love/labor dyad.32
The articles here build on recent scholarship attending to questions of house-
hold honor, respectability, and dignity and the labors required to sustain them.33
Milanich shows how depictions of honorable domestic servants changed mark-
edly over time, as employers shifted from employing mothers and their children
(for example, as a cook and a table server) to preferring childless workers who
would work long hours and not compromise the household’s honor. Hutchi-
son’s study of organizing efforts among Chilean domestic employees builds on
the Latin Americanist attention to working-­class respectability and honor by
underscoring persistent demands for “dignity,” professional licensing, and rec-
ognition of a Día Nacional de Empleadas. Pite reads the very public relationship
between Doña Petrona and her assistant Juanita to reveal expectations and anxi-
eties about domestic employment relationships in contemporary Argentina.
By the early twentieth century, an emergent culture of working-­class
domesticity both celebrated reproductive labors and reinscribed gender norms
and hierarchies around them. In Mexico, Blum shows, working-­class respect-
ability hinged on sustaining a moral economy of reciprocity and generational
respect. Pite demonstrates how recipes and cooking techniques offered working-­
and middle-­class households a gauge of modernization and cultural assimilation.
In Chile, Milanich explains, this phenomenon “implied a shift in the deploy-

32. In a telling intervention from this body of scholarship, the literary critic Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak provides the introduction to a decidedly Marxist-­feminist analysis of
household labor. Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff, Bringing It All Back Home.
33. See for example Sueann Caulfield, Sarah C. Chambers, and Lara Putnam, eds.
Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005);
Farnsworth-­A lvear, Dulcinea in the Factory; Dain Borges, The Family in Bahia, Brazil:
1870 – 1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992).
Introduction 15

ment of poor women’s domestic labor away from better-­off households toward
‘modernized’ working-­class ones, over which plebeian women would henceforth
preside as wives and mothers.”
As Milanich’s findings indicate, the influence of cultural geography has
drawn historians to attend to the diverse social spaces of reproductive labor.34
Historians of domestic service as well as of homework (trabajo a domicilio) have
stressed the porous nature of the divide between public and private spaces.35
The essays here explore the fluidity between these two spheres even further.
Blum investigates the mediation of intimate family relationships through juridi-
cal and welfare institutions. Pite’s engaging discussion of a popular Argentine
television program examines not physical spaces but rather the social space cre-
ated by the motley audience connected by airwaves, as well as the domestic space
imagined by the fictional kitchen of Buenas Tardes, Mucho Gusto. The televised
representation of reproductive labor thus became another means by which the
social relations of reproduction were themselves both reproduced and, as Pite
demonstrates, reconsidered.

Modernizing Motherhood

Exploring the practices, spaces, and social relations of reproductive labor, this
special issue offers new insights into Latin America’s ambivalent and irregular
process of modernization. In the articles here, we see precapitalist and neolib-
eral labor practices and social relations intermingled in ways that defy a progres-
sive, linear narrative. Scholars have debated the impact of industrialization and
commodification on reproductive labor.36 These arguments centered largely on
economic questions such as whether employers should pay a “family wage” and
why household labor did not factor into the GNP when it remained unpaid, but
did when it was paid.37 The process of commodification, like industrialization,
remained uneven and incomplete. Blum reminds us that although “the physical

34. See in particular Weeks, “Life Within and Against Work”; Katz, “Vagabond
Capitalism.”
35. On homework, see Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of
Industrial Homework in the United States (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994); Benería
and Roldán, The Crossroads of Class and Gender.
36. For a summary of the argument that industrialization feminized and devalued
reproductive labor, see Freedman, No Turning Back, chap. 6. For a challenge to this
assertion, albeit focused on domestic service, see Moya, “Domestic Service in a Global
Perspective.” For a summary of these debates, see Weeks, “Life Within and Against Work.”
37. See in particular Delphy, Close to Home, and Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction.
16 HAHR / February / Olcott

separation of paid work from the household has often been attributed to the his-
torical process of industrialization, . . . the conceptual separation of the realms
of work and family created a family or domestic ideal that only the privileged
could attain.” As Blum and Milanich document, even paid labor came with addi-
tional, unpaid labor of family members often performing the same tasks.
Sociologist Denise Segura’s research has demonstrated the importance of
considering paid and unpaid labor in relation to one another. Her study of mexi-
canas (women born and raised in Mexico) and Chicanas (Mexican-­descended
women born and raised in the United States) regarding their attitudes toward
combining motherhood with extradomestic wage labor challenge not only the
conflation of these two groups into the unified category of “Hispanic” but also
the assumption of “linear acculturation,” which posits that more recent immi-
grants will hold the most traditional concepts of motherhood and family. Her
research found Chicanas, presumed to be more modern and acculturated, more
likely to exit the wage labor force to care for children, while mexicanas, who
had been “raised in a world where economic and household work often merged,
do not dichotomize social life into public and private spheres, but appear to
view employment as one workable domain of motherhood.”38 Segura cautions
scholars against allowing ideologies of motherhood to overshadow its material
implications, arguing that “conceptualizations of motherhood that affirm its
economic character may be better accommodating to women’s market partici-
pation in the US.”39
As a corollary to debates over how to “count” reproductive labor, scholars
and activists have speculated about whether women should demand wages for
housework, as Evita Perón once suggested to the Argentine Congress (as Pite
relates), or preserve reproductive labor as one of the last uncommodified forms
of labor. As Christine Delphy has pointed out, reproductive labor remains one
of the only sectors (the other being subsistence agriculture) where individu-

38. Denise A. Segura, “Working at Motherhood: Chicana and Mexican Immigrant

Mothers and Employment,” in Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency, ed. Evelyn
Nakano Glenn, Grace Chang, and Linda Rennie Forcey (New York: Routledge, 1994),
212. Anthropologist Patricia Pessar made a similar observation a decade earlier regarding
Dominican women in New York. Patricia R. Pessar, “The Linkage between the Household
and Workplace of Dominican Women in the United States,” International Migration
Review 18 (1984): 188 – 211. This observation coincides with the findings of studies of Latin
American women workers more generally; see especially Porter, Working Women in Mexico
City, 155, and the essays in French and James, The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women
Workers.
39. Segura, “Working at Motherhood,” 215.
Introduction 17

als routinely perform the same labor in both commodified and uncommodi-
fied forms.40 Like agricultural labor, domestic employment is widely considered
exempt from wage and benefits regulations that generally characterize modern,
industrialized societies. All of the articles included here examine the imbrication
of commodified and uncommodified labor. For example, according to Milanich
the majority of paid wet nurses in late nineteenth-­century Santiago were wives
of inquilinos on nearby haciendas, simultaneously participating in commodified
and uncommodified labor relations. Domestic service, which remains more
commonplace in Latin America than in the United States, includes a diverse
array of arrangements whereby the worker’s compensation often consists partly
of accommodations and/or meals, further blurring the distinction between
commodified and uncommodified labor.41 As Blum notes, such arrangements
often played a critical role in working-­class survival, as children took work as
apprentices or domestic servants to alleviate pressure on household budgets. In
quite distinct settings, Pite and Milanich both demonstrate how these semi-
commodified and semifamilial employment relationships muddied the distinc-
tion between patronage protection and labor exploitation.
Considerations of modernization and industrialization have also raised
questions about the importance of laborsaving technologies and their impli-
cations for reproductive labor. The impact of domestic technologies plays out
differently, of course, in parts of the world where they (or the electricity to run
them) remain inaccessible, but technologies such as mechanized corn mills or

40. Delphy, Close to Home, chap. 5.

41. On paid domestic labor in Latin America, see Isabel Laura Cárdenas, Ramona y
el robot: El servicio doméstico en barrios prestigiosos de Buenos Aires, 1895 – 1985 (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Búsqueda, 1986); Lesley Gill, Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class, and Domestic
Service in Bolivia (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994); Mary Goldsmith Connelly,
“Uniformes, escobas, y lavaderos: El proceso productivo del servicio domestico,” in Trabajo,
poder, y sexualidad, ed. Orlandina de Oliveira (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1989),
103 – 32; Michelle A. Johnson, “ ‘Decent and Fair’: Aspects of Domestic Service in Jamaica,
1920 – 1970,” Journal of Caribbean History 30, no. 1 – 2 (1996): 83 – 106; Anna Rubbo and
Michael T. Taussig, “Up off Their Knees: Servanthood in Southwest Colombia,” Latin
American Perspectives 10, no. 4 (1983): 5 – 23; Ximena Bunster and Elsa Chaney, Sellers and
Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru (New York: Praeger, 1985); Beatriz Ruiz Gatyán F.,
“Un grupo trabajador importante no incluido en la historia laboral mexicana: Trabajadoras
domésticas,” in El trabajo y los trabajadores en la historia de México, ed. Elsa Cecilia Frost,
Michael C. Meyer, and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (Mexico City: El Colegio de México /
Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1979), 417 – 55. On the United States, see Romero, Maid in
the U.S.A.; Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt; Katzman, Seven Days a Week; Hondagneu-­Sotelo,
Doméstica.
18 HAHR / February / Olcott

water pumps also have had a tremendous impact on the composition of wom-
en’s reproductive labor burdens. Latin Americanists have observed ambiva-
lent responses among both men and women to the introduction of laborsav-
ing devices, revealing fears that it diminishes the value of reproductive labor
and threatens the patriarchal gender order. Historians Arnold Bauer and Dawn
Keremitsis each have shown that, despite the tremendous impact of motor-
ized corn mills on alleviating women’s daily labor burdens, communities were
often slow to embrace them.42 Katharine French-­Fuller has found a similarly
ambiguous response to the introduction of washing machines in contemporary
Santiago, Chile.43 As with more conventional labor histories, anxieties over
laborsaving technologies often center on recognition of skills and expertise.44
The Chilean domestic workers’ repeated demand for professional certification,
as documented in Hutchison’s article, sets in relief the relationship between
respectability and the recognition of skills, as does Doña Petrona’s public per-
formance of culinary skills as bourgeois domesticity.

42. Arnold J. Bauer, “Millers and Grinders: Technology and Household Economy in
Meso-­A merica,” Agricultural History 64, no. 1 (1990): 1 – 17; Dawn Keremitsis, “Del metate
al molino: La mujer mexicana de 1910 a 1940,” Historia Mexicana 33, no. 2 (1983): 285 – 302.
See also Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham, NC:
Duke Univ. Press, 2005), 141 – 49.
43. Katharine French-­Fuller, “Gendered Invisibility, Respectable Cleanliness: The
Impact of the Washing Machine on Daily Living in Post-­1950 Santiago, Chile,” Journal of
Women’s History 18, no. 4 (2006): 79 – 100. US historians disagree about whether laborsaving
technologies have reduced reproductive-­labor burdens or simply restructured them. See
Strasser, Never Done, 6; Alice Kessler-­Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical
Overview (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press / New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1981), 21; Cowan,
More Work for Mother, 45.
44. On the relationship between gender ideologies and definitions of skill, see Ava
Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1991); Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor, “Sex and Skill: Notes towards a
Feminist Economics,” Feminist Review 6 (1980): 79 – 88. US scholars again place a greater
emphasis on race than Latin Americanists. Palmer shows how home economics curricula
constructed the imaginary of middle-­class white women as skilled domestic laborers and
poorer, black women as unskilled. Thus, white, middle-­class housewives, like their
blue-­collar counterparts, struggled to claim expertise that made them indispensable in the
reproductive labor force (Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt.) The sociologist Mary Romero,
describing the household as a “site of class struggle” and domestic labor as a “capitalistic
mode of production,” found that the Denver domestic workers she interviewed insisted
upon recognition of their expertise. Romero, Maid in the U.S.A., 44, 93.
Introduction 19

Intimate Politics: Public Policy and Reproductive Labor

As Heidi Tinsman has recently noted, Latin Americanist feminist scholarship

has tended, more than its US and European counterparts, to retain a Marxist
and more state-­centered framework, often analyzing domestic labor through the
lens of dependency theory and structural inequalities.45 Historians have focused
on state agencies’ efforts, often at the behest of industrialists, to “modernize”
reproductive labor, using educators and social workers to shape conceptions of
skilled homemakers to produce a modern, socialized industrial labor force.46
“The central feminist insight,” observes Maxine Molyneux, “was that the pri-
vate or reproductive sphere, the social terrain upon which gender divisions and
inequalities are constituted, lies at the interface between state and civil soci-
ety.”47 The articles included here exemplify the corollary Molyneux indicates;
just as studying public policies illuminates domestic practices, investigating
reproductive labor helps us better understand the process of state formation.
Even though a conspicuous gap has existed between law and experience,
as Blum and Hutchison attest, laws and legal practices have remained use-
ful sources for gauging ideas about reproductive labor. As Milanich explains,
even though wives and servants often performed indistinguishable labors in
nineteenth-­century Santiago, they enjoyed very different status and protection
before the law, which allowed wives more respectability and autonomy. Milan-
ich shows us the significance of absent laws, including the Chilean legislature’s
rejection of measures — ­such as vagrancy laws and passbook requirements — ­to
discipline domestic servants, as well as exclusion of domestic employees from
early twentieth-­century labor reforms. Pite points out that Argentine domestic
employees’ rights also lagged behind their industrial counterparts, catching up

45. Heidi Tinsman, “A Paradigm of Our Own: Joan Scott in Latin American
History,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (2008): 1357 – 74. Examples range from early
interventions by scholars such as Ester Boserup to Jane Jaquette’s recent reassessment: Ester
Boserup, Woman’s Role in Economic Development (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1970); Jane S.
Jaquette, ed., Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke Univ.
Press, 2009).
46. See for example Barbara Weinstein, “Unskilled Worker, Skilled Housewife:
Constructing the Working-­Class Woman in São Paulo, Brazil,” in French and James,
The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers, 72 – 98; Mary Kay Vaughan,
“Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in Mexico,
1930 – 1940,” in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore
and Maxine Molyneux (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), 194 – 214.
47. Maxine Molyneux, “Twentieth-­Century State Formations in Latin America,” in
Dore and Molyneux, Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, 34.
20 HAHR / February / Olcott

only after Juan Perón’s ouster. Even then, Pite concedes, customary practice
often eclipsed legal rights. More commonly, nonstate institutions mediated
reproductive laborers’ interactions with state agencies. Milanich demonstrates
that, through Santiago’s Casa de Huérfanos, the Chilean state played an active
role in “subsidizing, training, and allocating this labor.” Taking in the children
of domestic servants and contracting out wet nurses, the publicly funded Casa
functioned as the most important broker of reproductive labor. Notably, the
Catholic Church figures prominently in both Chilean cases included here,
playing an active role in defining understandings of dignity, respectability, and
social justice.
Reproductive labor’s ambiguous status as incompletely commodified, com-
bined with its imbrication with intimate and affective relationships, has compli-
cated relationships with reproductive laborers’ two most probable institutional
allies: labor unions and feminist organizations. As Hutchison shows, domestic
workers’ unions carefully managed their relationships with feminist organiza-
tions, the Catholic Church, and the changing Chilean regime. By the early
1980s, the union had a delicate but collaborative relationship with the Círculo
de Estudios de la Mujer. Jo Fisher has found that substantial numbers of Argen-
tine women addressed tensions between labor unions and the growing women’s
movement by forming a labor union of housewives, the Sindicato de Amas de
Casa, which claimed a membership of a half-­million women by 1995.48
Many Latin American women’s organizations and women-­dominated
unions have tried to bridge labor and feminist concerns through maternalist
discourses, invoking motherhood as a political identity rather than a social or
familial role. Although feminists in Latin America and elsewhere have debated
whether maternalist strategies exacerbate the conflation of womanhood with
motherhood — ­and a particularly idealized conception of motherhood that held
women above the fray of partisan politics and competitive markets — ­t he con-
cept has retained considerable traction, not least because of maternalists’ dra-
matic roles in challenging authoritarian regimes and serving as a basis for politi-
cal and economic rights.49 Much in the way that labor unions have highlighted

48. Jo Fisher, “Gender and the State in Argentina: The Case of the Sindicato de Amas
de Casa,” in Dore and Molyneux, Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America,
322 – 45.
49. Among the most celebrated instances of maternalist activism has been the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which many observers credit with eroding the legitimacy
of Argentina’s military junta. For a somewhat hagiographic depiction of the movement, see
Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, Revolutionizing Motherhood: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1994). See also Donna J. Guy, White Slavery
Introduction 21

workers’ economic contributions to demand political rights, maternalist move-

ments have leveraged women’s caring roles and motherly virtue to influence the
political realm. Latin Americanist scholars have investigated the efficacy and
resilience of maternalist strategies. As Maxine Molyneux has observed, “Latin
American feminists highlighted gender differences and framed their demands
for citizenship in terms of their maternal social function and superior morality,
which they would deploy in the service of society.”50 Latin Americanists have
taken a particular interest in Sonya Michel and Seth Koven’s argument corre-
lating strong maternalist movements with weak welfare states as the emergence
of welfare states highlighted questions about the economic value of housework,
since unpaid labor generally did not qualify women for public pensions.51

and Mothers Alive and Dead: The Troubled Meeting of Sex, Gender, Public Health, and Progress
in Latin America (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000); Christine Ehrick, “Madrinas
and Missionaries: Uruguay and the Pan-­A merican Women’s Movement,” Gender and
History 10, no. 3 (1998): 406 – 24; Sarah Buck, “Activists and Mothers: Feminists and
Maternalist Politics in Mexico, 1923 – 1953” (PhD diss., Rutgers Univ., 2002). These
movements sometimes took an unsavory turn, as when “republican motherhood” yielded
to eugenicist motherhood. See Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and
Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2005).
50. Molyneux, “Twentieth-­Century State Formations in Latin America,” 45. Scholars
of other parts of the world, some of them with one foot in Latin American studies,
have considered maternalist political strategies as well. Interviewing women about their
responses to the Love Canal toxic waste disaster, environmental racism in North Carolina,
and housing movements in South Africa, the historian Temma Kaplan found that their
maternalist activism offered the possibility of a “third space that is neither public nor
private.” Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grassroots Movements (New York:
Routledge, 1997), 11. More recently, economist Lourdes Benería and political scientist
Kathi Weeks have also held up reproductive labor (although not maternalism per se) as
a promising arena for fashioning a new political paradigm. Lourdes Benería, Gender,
Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered (New York: Routledge,
2003); Weeks, “Life Within and Against Work.”
51. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics
and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993). For Latin Americanist
scholarship, see Nichole Sanders, “Improving Mothers: Poverty, the Family, and ‘Modern’
Social Assistance in Mexico, 1937 – 1950,” in The Women’s Revolution in Mexico, 1910 – 1953,
ed. Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007),
187 – 203; Nichole Sanders, “Gender and Welfare Reform in Post-­Revolutionary Mexico,”
Gender and History 20, no. 1 (2008): 170 – 75; Nichole Sanders, “Mothering Mexico: The
Historiography of Mothers and Motherhood in 20th-­Century Mexico,” History Compass 7,
no. 6 (2009): 1542 – 53; Buck, “Activists and Mothers”; Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises;
Donna J. Guy, “The Pan American Child Congresses, 1916 to 1942: Pan Americanism,
Child Reform, and the Welfare State in Latin America,” Journal of Family History 23, no. 3
(1998): 272 – 91.
22 HAHR / February / Olcott

The articles included here also examine how women have leveraged their sta-
tus as household workers, rather than as mothers, for state-­sanctioned rights and
material benefits.52 A diverse array of women, from Chilean domestic employees
to poblana street vendors, demanded recognition not of their morality and abne-
gation but rather of the dignity and skill of their labor.53 As I have argued else-
where, women in postrevolutionary Mexico struggled for recognition of their
uncommodified labors as a basis for claiming citizenship rights and standing as
workers.54 Jo Fisher demonstrates that the Argentine housewives union, arguing
for union recognition and state-­f unded wages and benefits, “emphasized women
as workers with rights, not as wives and mothers carrying out their work out of
love and duty. ‘It’s considered that women are naturals for housework — ­we say
it’s got nothing to do with nature — ­it’s a cultural question.’ ”55

Methods, Lacunae, and Opportunities

The articles collected in this special issue offer methodological suggestions for
illuminating the poorly lit corners of reproductive labor history. Since reproduc-
tive labor practices only rarely appear in archival documentation, studies of paid

52. In the US case, Barbara Nelson has argued persuasively that New Deal welfare
policies reinforced the perception that the “real” work of wage labor entitled men to social
security and workmen’s compensation, while “mother’s aid” and its successor “welfare”
programs constituted a charitable handout. Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-
­Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mother’s Aid,” in Women, the State,
and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin, 1990), 123 – 51. Subsequent
studies explored this dichotomy and the irony of its roots in the Progressives’ conviction
that motherhood indeed constituted a full-­t ime job. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and
Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1992); Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers
and the History of Welfare, 1890 – 1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Gwendolyn Mink,
The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917 – 1942 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1995); Molly Ladd-­Taylor, Mother-­Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State,
1890 – 1930 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1994).
53. Sandra Mendiola considered poblana street vendors in “Taking Children to Work:
Street Vendors in a Mexican City,” paper presented at the Latin American Labor History
Conference, Duke University, May 2007.
54. Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico.
55. Fisher, “Gender and the State in Argentina,” 326. The US welfare historian Felicia
Kornbluh similarly underscores in her 1996 review essay that maternalists argued that
“women as mothers deserved a return from their government for the socially vital work
they performed by raising children.” Felicia A. Kornbluh, “Review: The New Literature on
Gender and the Welfare State: The U.S. Case,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 1 (1996): 178.
Introduction 23

domestic labor far outnumber those of unpaid domestic labor, and anthropolog-
ical studies outnumber histories.56 Blum’s and Milanich’s articles demonstrate,
however, that sources such as social workers’ reports and legal records provide
glimpses of the intimate and quotidian lives of popular actors who rarely enjoy
a prominent place in official records.57 In most of Latin America, the strong
influence of the Napoleonic Code, which specifies rights and duties of males and
females at different life stages and operates on a case-­by-­case legal interpretation
rather than precedent, has generated troves of rich evidence documenting com-
peting expectations of social practice and household obligations. Latin Ameri-
canist historians have also turned a critical eye on older ethnographic accounts
that provide details about life in rural and impoverished communities.58
Blum and Milanich both demonstrate that documentary records, no less
than ethnographic accounts, demand reading within the framework of their
own contribution to knowledge production. To begin with, as Milanich and
Pite both note, the documentary record often leaves out the informal labor
negotiations and agreements that may have been oral or even implicit and that
render archiving institutions less central. Further, state agencies and powerful
institutions such as the Catholic Church or prominent political parties and labor
unions enjoy greater importance in the archives than they would in the lives of
ordinary people. Thus, the articles here and other scholars of reproductive labor
have complemented documentary sources with oral and visual sources.

56. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro, eds., Muchachas No More: Household
Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1989).
Early feminist interventions were divided on whether to integrate the study of paid and
unpaid household labor. Joan Scott and Louise Tilly’s classic study of French and British
women’s labor excludes household labor unless it was performed for pay, focusing instead on
“productive activity.” Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (1978:
New York: Methuen, 1987), 5. Alice Kessler-­Harris’s ambitious 1981 survey of women’s
work, meanwhile, dedicates nearly half its pages to housework. Kessler-­Harris, Women Have
Always Worked. Her most recent volume, however, focuses entirely on women’s wage labor.
Alice Kessler-­Harris, Gendering Labor History (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2007).
57. Susan Porter Benson has recently used social work reports to reveal surprising
aspects of working-­class survival strategies in the Depression-­era United States. Benson,
Household Accounts.
58. See for example Robert Redfield, Tepoztlán, a Mexican Village: A Study of Folk
Life (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1930); Robert Redfield, The Folk Culture of Yucatán
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1941); Oscar Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in
the Culture of Poverty — ­San Juan and New York (New York: Random House, 1966); Oscar
Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books,
1959); Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez, Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York:
Random House, 1961).
24 HAHR / February / Olcott

Oral sources offer two dividends particularly relevant to investigating

reproductive labor: perspectives from workers who often do not leave written
records, and accounts of the ordinary realities that might not merit mention
in documentary records. Latin American historians have long relied upon oral
testimony and ethnographic accounts to study family life. From Peter Winn’s
Weavers of Revolution to Daniel James’s Doña María’s Story, students of Latin
American labor history have explored the methodological challenges and possi-
bilities of oral sources, creating a rich source base and increasingly nuanced and
illuminating methods for exploring personal experiences.59 While documentary
evidence often parses experience into, for example, bureaucratic or legal catego-
ries, oral testimony tends to depict reproductive labor in a more holistic fash-
ion, recognizing the love-­labor hybridity as part of the fabric of everyday life.
Sources such as novels and memoirs likewise reveal details and rhythms of daily
life, but they impose a greater narrative coherence than oral histories, often
obscuring the contradictions and inconsistencies of lived experience. Subjects
giving life histories or interviews tend not to isolate reproductive labor from the
rest of their lives as, for example, wage laborers, church members, union activ-
ists, or pleasure seekers, thus yielding a more complete perspective on everyday
experience. They describe their domestic and extradomestic activities not in
opposition but rather as integrated, each necessitating the other.
Two articles here use oral sources to investigate aspects of reproductive
labor. Hutchison interviewed founding members of the Chilean Catholic
household workers’ association ANECAP to chart how their demands and
strategies changed over the course of the Popular Unity and Pinochet govern-
ments. These informants all shed light on aspects of their respective histories
that remain either outside of or oversimplified by the documentary records. Pite
performed both collective and individual interviews with audience members to
gauge the reception of Doña Petrona’s show, in particular her interactions with

59. James offers a detailed discussion of oral history theories and methods, particularly
as they illuminate conceptions of gender and the interplay between domestic and
extradomestic life. Daniel James, Doña María’s Story: Life History, Memory, and Political
Identity (Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2000). See, among many other examples,
Farnsworth-­A lvear, Dulcinea in the Factory; Verena Radkau, “La Fama” y la vida: Una fábrica
y sus obreras (Mexico City: SEP Cultura, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en
Antropología Social, 1984); Tinsman, Partners in Conflict; French and James, The Gendered
Worlds of Latin American Women Workers; Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur
Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986); Peter Winn,
ed., Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1972 – 2002
(Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2004).
Introduction 25

Juanita, her domestic employee both onstage and off. Pite also makes particular
use of visual sources, considering images from Buenas Tardes, Mucho Gusto, with
its self-­consciously embodied representations of domesticity and household
authority.
As much as the articles offer, they also are far from comprehensive. Deep-
ening our understanding in this field will require a more complete engagement
with Latin American scholars, who often bring a different set of questions and
analytical frameworks. As noted above, questions of race and racism remain
understudied in Latin American history, including reproductive-­labor history.
Indeed, the very resistance to talking about race, as Pite found, itself merits
examination. Further, although discussions of sexuality and sex commerce often
entered into our discussions of reproductive labor, none of the articles here has
taken up those questions. Like other forms of reproductive labor, sex and sex
work move in and out of the domestic realm, between commodified and uncom-
modified forms and between labor and pleasure. Sex is often only nominally
voluntary and, along with other domestic labors, has historically been consid-
ered part of what a wife owes a husband, part of the alimentos that Blum consid-
ers. We know from oral histories and memoirs that sexual abuse of domestic
servants, particularly those who live in, has been commonplace, and the line
between domestic service and sex work has often been breached. Such practices
remain difficult to historicize and often appear most prominently as aberrations
documented in criminal records and mass media. Going beyond these sensa-
tional and spectacular representations demands careful and delicate research.
The influence of social and cultural geography as well as the growth of
transnational and comparative studies has set in relief the extent to which repro-
ductive labor, in both its imaginaries and its practices, reflects specific histories,
cultures, and ideologies and required constant policing and reinforcement.60

60. On social and cultural geography, see Katharyne Mitchell, Sallie A. Marston, and
Cindi Katz, eds., Life’s Work: Geographies of Social Reproduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2004). For a particularly illustrative example of the usefulness of transnational studies in
this field, see Katz, “Vagabond Capitalism.” For a discussion of the differences between
and benefits of comparative and transnational historical studies, see Micol Seigel, “Beyond
Compare: Historical Method after the Transnational Turn,” Radical History Review 91
(2005): 62 – 90. A recent special issue of Gender and Society (vol. 17, no. 2 [April 2003]) on
gender and care work demonstrates feminist sociologists’ transnational turn in studying
reproductive labor. The turn to comparative perspectives lent itself to the production of
edited volumes that challenged conceptions of motherhood and domestic work as natural,
biologized, or overdetermined. See for example Collins and Gimenez, Work without Wages;
Glenn, Chang, and Forcey, Mothering; Nash and Safa, Sex and Class in Latin America; Nash,
Safa, et al., Women and Change in Latin America.
26 HAHR / February / Olcott

Whereas earlier studies had used comparative perspectives to search for uni-
versals regarding reproductive labor, this research sets out to dissolve these
universals, highlighting the contingencies of reproductive labor practices.61 In
her introductory essay to the 1994 collection Mothering, Evelyn Nakano Glenn
insists on “attending to the variation rather than searching for the universal,”
arguing that the “concept of motherhood as universally women’s work disguises
the fact that it is further subdivided, so that different aspects of caring labor are
assigned to different groups of women.”62
Studies of migrant communities that result from both international migra-
tion and rural-­urban migration particularly highlight these contingencies and
further demonstrate how globalization affects unpaid reproductive labor much
as it does other forms of labor.63 Some scholarship has considered diverse tac-
tics for accommodating reproductive-­labor demands through extended kin
networks, cooperative efforts, and, most recently “transnational motherhood”
(migrant women’s practice of leaving their children with family or community
members in their home countries while they work abroad, often tending other
people’s children).64 In addition to Segura’s telling study of Chicanas and mexi-
canas, for example, Jennifer Hirsch has found that, unlike the earlier genera-
tions of braceros, the more recent generation of Mexican migrant workers tends
to perform more domestic labor when they return to Mexico.65
The articles here seek to restart a conversation between feminists and labor
historians that has repeatedly been interrupted or cut short. They would evi-
dence the ways that the field of reproductive-­labor history engages the fields of
political, social, economic, family, and cultural history, demanding a wholesale
reconsideration of the ways historians have separated public from private, pro-
duction from consumption, and labor from love. The political stakes of such a

61. The earlier approach is exemplified by the eminent anthropologist Jack Goody
in Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976).
62. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Social Constructions of Mothering: A Thematic
Overview,” in Glenn, Chang, and Forcey, Mothering, 5, 7.
63. For a review of this literature in the US context, see Schneider, “The Work That
Never Ends.”
64. Pierrette Hondagneu-­Sotelo and Ernestine Avila, “I’m Here, but I’m There:
The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood,” Gender and Society 5, no. 11 (1997):
548 – 71.
65. Jennifer S. Hirsch, “En el Norte la Mujer Manda: Gender, Generation, and
Geography in a Mexican Transnational Community,” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 9
(1999): 1339.
Introduction 27

project are striking: both paid and unpaid reproductive laborers generally find
themselves without access to health insurance and retirement pensions, and the
structural adjustment programs of the 1990s eviscerated many state services,
leaving reproductive laborers to take up the slack in tending the young, elderly,
and infirm. Historicizing reproductive labor would go some distance toward
making the case that reproductive laborers should struggle for and enjoy rights
and benefits. However, the historiographical stakes are also high. Most obvi-
ously, the study of reproductive labor history allows us to examine more rig-
orously and more thoroughly a vast area of human experience that currently
remains underexamined compared to other fields, including labor history. Just
as important, it is an area of inquiry that challenges conventional analytics and
boundaries between historical subfields and opens a significant reconceptualiza-
tion of how we think, write, and teach Latin American history.