Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,220
result(s) for
"Women household employees"
Sort by:
Like family
When Mrs. A. first enters the narrator's home, his wife, Nora, is experiencing a difficult pregnancy. First as their maid and nanny, then their confidante, this older woman begins to help her employers negotiate married life, quickly becoming the glue in their small household. She is the steady, maternal influence for both husband and wife, and their son, Emanuele, whom she protects from his parents' expectations and disappointments. But the family's delicate fabric comes undone when Mrs. A. is diagnosed with cancer. Moving seamlessly between the past and present, Giordano highlights with remarkable precision the joy of youth and the fleeting nature of time. An elegiac, heartrending, and deeply personal portrait of marriage and the people we choose to call family.
Book
Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens
As African American women left slavery and the plantation economy behind, many entered domestic service in southern cities and towns. Cooking was one of the primary jobs they performed in white employers' homes, feeding generations of white families and, in the process, profoundly shaping southern foodways and culture.Rebecca Sharpless argues that, in the face of discrimination, long workdays, and low wages, African American cooks worked to assert measures of control over their own lives and to maintain spaces for their own families despite the demands of employers and the restrictions of segregation. Sharpless also shows how these women's employment served as a bridge from old labor arrangements to new ones. As opportunities expanded in the twentieth century, most African American women chose to leave cooking for more lucrative and less oppressive manufacturing, clerical, or professional positions.Through letters, autobiography, and oral history, this book evokes African American women's voices from slavery to the open economy, examining their lives at work and at home. Sharpless looks beyond stereotypes to introduce the real women who left their own houses and families each morning to cook in other women's kitchens.
eBook
Mothering Sunday : a romance
\"From the Booker Award winner: a luminous, profoundly moving work of fiction that begins with an afternoon tryst in 1924 between a servant girl and the young man of the neighboring house, but then opens to reveal the whole life of a remarkable woman. Twenty-two-year-old Jane Fairchild, orphaned at birth, has worked as a maid at one English country estate since she was sixteen. And for almost all of those years she has been the secret lover to Paul Sheringham, the scion of the estate next door. On an unseasonably warm March afternoon, Jane and Paul will make love for the last time--though not, as Jane believes, because Paul is about to be married--and the events of the day will alter Jane's life forever. As the narrative moves back and forth from 1924 to the end of the century, what we know and understand about Jane--about the way she loves, thinks, feels, sees, remembers--deepens with every beautifully wrought moment. Her story is one of profound self-discovery and through her, Graham Swift has created an emotionally soaring and deeply affecting work of fiction\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The New maids
The New Maids is a pioneering study, grounded in rich empirical evidence, which expertly addresses the thorny questions surrounding the growing number of migrant cleaners and caregivers who maintain modern Western households. Supported by an ethnographic study of immigrant domestic workers and their German employers, the author argues that domestic work plays the defining role in global ethnic and gender hierarchies. This exciting book not only will enhance the reader's understanding of the new care economy, it also sets a new standard for feminist methodology.
eBook
Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers
Domestic and caregiving work has been at the core of human existence throughout history. A team of international scholars addresses the issues of state, agency, and domestic service in colonizer frames globally in historical perspectives.
eBook
A death of no importance
\"New York City, 1910. Invisible until shes needed, Jane Prescott has perfected the art of serving as a ladies maid to the city's upper echelons. When she takes up a position with the Benchley family, dismissed by the city's elite as new money, Jane realizes that while she may not have financial privilege, she has a power they do not--she understands the rules of high society. The Benchleys cause further outrage when their daughter Charlotte becomes engaged to notorious playboy Norrie, the son of the eminent Newsome family. But when Norrie is found murdered at a party, Jane discovers she is uniquely positioned--she's a woman no one sees, but who witnesses everything; who possesses no social power, but that of fierce intellect--and therefore has the tools to solve his murder\"--Amazon.com.
Book
Unprotected Labor
Through an analysis of women's reform, domestic worker activism, and cultural values attached to public and private space, Vanessa May 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,Unprotected Laborassesses middle-class women's reform programs as well as household workers' efforts to determine their own working conditions.May 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, May challenges depictions of domestics as passive workers and reformers as selfless advocates of working women.Unprotected Laborilluminates how the domestic-service debate turned the middle-class home inside out, making private problems public and bringing concerns like labor conflict and government regulation into the middle-class home.
eBook
Like family : domestic workers in South African history and literature
More than a million black South African women are domestic workers. These nannies, housekeepers and chars occupy a central place in South African society. but it is an ambivalent position. Precariously situated between urban and rural areas, rich and poor, white and black, these women are at once intimately connected to and at a distant remove from the families they serve. \"Like family\" they may be, but they and their employers know they can never be real family. The author shows that slavery at the Cape shaped South African domestic worker relations, establishing social hierarchies and patterns of behavior and interaction that persist in the predicament of black female domestic workers today. The author examines the representation of domestic workers in a diversity of texts in English and Afrikaans. Authors include Andrâe Brink, JM Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Elsa Joubert, Antjie Krog, Sindiwe Magona, Es'kia Mphahlele, Sisonke Msimang, Zukiswa Wanner and Zoèe Wicomb. She uncovers wry and subversive insights into the \"madam/maid\" nexus, capturing paradoxes relating to shifting power relationships.
Book
Families Apart
In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families, documenting the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when reuniting with their mothers in Vancouver.
eBook