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Political Economy of World-Systems 2002 Conference Riverside, California |
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Abstract Servants of the World-System: Amy Holmes Letters, travelogues, and personal journals written by Europeans who either visited or immigrated to the northern United States in the 19th century indicate that one of the peculiarities which sprang to their eyes was the remarkable lack of servile behavior on the part of those they considered to be subordinates; in fact, many travelers commented on the utter dearth of anything reminiscent of a serving class. In his book Democracy in America, published in 1840, Tocqueville even claimed to have never met a man in the United States who resembled a genuine servant (Tocqueville 1840/1948). Beginning in the mid 20th century, modernization theorists such as Lewis Coser would write articles entitled "Servants. The Obsolescence of an Occupational Role" and take this circumstance as being solid proof of democratic progress (Coser 1973). To their certain consternation one can now testify that the United States currently possesses, 150 years after the publication of Democracy in America, the largest servant population of any core country. Of course, this oversimplified version of the history of servitude in the United States is not entirely accurate, and it would be misleading to claim that servants were unknown in the American colonies. Indeed, domestic service used to be the most common occupation for women of all ethnic backgrounds throughout most of the 18th and 19th century (Anderson and Zinsser 1988: 253). In this paper I would like to trace the history of domestic service from the colonial period up to the present day and demonstrate how macro-structural transformations, such as the rise of the United States to hegemonic status, affected micro-level changes in the division of labor within the household. During this period master/servant relations also changed gradually: whereas servants were earlier considered to be apprentices who assisted their masters and were to a certain extent integrated in family life, over time they were treated more and more as employees to be kept at a distance (Engelsing 1978, Romano 1996, Boureau 2000). Alain Boureau, who has focused on the European context, argues that the "patriarchal dimension" between master and servant can be traced back to the 16th century (Boureau 2000). These phenomena can all be regarded as part of the process of domestication, or housewifization of women (Mies 1983). What follows will be an analysis of domestic service - not of slavery - although some parallels between household slaves and household servants will be drawn in order to illustrate similarities and important differences (Anderson 2000). In the second part of the paper I will then discuss the reappearance of the servant in American society at the end of the 20th century. Saskia Sassen has coined the term "the return of the serving classes" to describe this phenomenon, yet I would like to distinguish between the bludgeoning number of workers employed in the service sector and those who are literally servants as Tocqueville would have understood them (Sassen 2000). These are present-day domestic servants (live-in or live-out), but they are now usually referred to as housekeepers, nannies, maids, or cleaners and who are almost inevitably women, and often immigrants. As increasing numbers of women are affected by structural adjustment policies in the periphery, they often choose to migrate to a core country and accept a job for which they are overqualified - usually performing some form of commodified reproductive labor - before risking unemployment in their own country (Altvater and Mahnkopf 1999, Salazar Parrenas 2000). The financial crises of the 1990s which have ravaged large parts of Asia, Russia, and Latin America, have contributed to creating a pool of laborers who are in desperate need of cash income; here women are especially vulnerable as they are often the first to lose their jobs during recessions, although ever fewer women can rely on a male "breadwinner" (Chin 1998, Afshar 1999, Dalla Costa 1999, Enloe 2000). All of these factors have meant that ever more women are migrating, and often not as part of a family unification strategy, but on their own. These women then often end up doing that work which women in core countries are either unable or unwilling to do. For example, by the late 1980s so few American women were training to become nurses due to the low wages and miserable working conditions, that Congress passed the Nursing Relief Act in order to import nurses from other countries (Sassen 2000). Yet there are numerous other examples: elder care workers, child care providers, home-care workers, as well as workers in the "entertainment" industry, ranging from table dancers to prostitutes, are all jobs which are increasingly being assumed by immigrant women (Truong 2000, Chang 2000). Most significant in the context of this paper is that the State Department has recently issued special visas which allow diplomats to import domestic servants to the United States. Of course, this international transfer of reproductive labor can not be sufficiently explained by merely dealing with issues of supply and demand or push and pull factors; instead, the inherently exploitative relationship between core and periphery needs to be taken into focus. In this sense world-systems analysis provides an appropriate framework. Hence, it is my objective to investigate how domestic service has evolved over the longue durée in the United States and how it is being transformed once again during the process of globalization, which simultaneously integrates and polarizes different zones of the world-economy. Wallerstein describes the household as one of the four primary institutions of the world-system, which means that the world-system perspective should also in this way lend itself to a feminist analysis of domestic service (Wallerstein 1984). Yet this is not entirely the case. In fact, world-systems analysis has not sufficiently incorporated issues of gender and race into its theoretical framework, as many scholars have already demonstrated (Ward 1993, Forsythe 1998, Moghadam 1999, Misra 2000, Dunaway 2001). Furthermore, servants have received scant attention from historians in general; even labor historians seldom regard servants as being "true proletarians", and if so, as playing merely a marginal role in the history of the working class. From a sociological perspective, servants embody the tension between the family and the household, as they are inside the household but outside of the family. This also means that they are in a unique position from which public/private contradictions can be examined. Finally, political economists need to take into consideration that the world-system is increasingly characterized by a new international division of reproductive labor. By focusing on the gendered nature of domestic service over the longue durée, I hope that some of these omissions can be corrected. |
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27th Annual Conference of the Political Economy of World-Systems Spring Hosted by the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside |