Middle-class Women and Domestic Work in India and the United States: Caste, Race and Patriarchy

Abstract

This study compares middle-class women’s experience of domestic work in India and the United States(US), highlighting similarities in how domestic work is organised in its paid and unpaid forms across both sites. The focus on middle-class women’s experience as unpaid workers and employers of domestic workers provides an insight into how the social and economic values of domestic work are determined. Despite social and political differences, the political economies of India and the US and interlocking systems of oppression including patriarchy, neoliberalism, caste and race have produced similarities in the undervaluation of domestic work at both sites.

Stuck between the ideal worker and the bread winner: experiences of motherhood and work during the COVID-19 pandemic in India

“…However, the study was designed to focus on the middle-class due to the fact that the entry of middle-class women into paid work is a recent phenomenon as an outcome of globalization (poor and working-class women have always been participating in paid work in India) (Singh and Hoge, 2010). Second, middle-class women outsourced their household work to domestic help, which has never been possible for working-class women due to economic constraints; they largely rely on their family network for care work (Nair and Hofman, 2022). The next section discusses the framework of the study elaborately.…”