Life stories behind the closed doors of housework

“The girl who helps me at home” It is a still-used catchphrase for a domestic worker who cleans bathrooms, makes beds, sweeps floors and washes dishes, and who likely works without contributions from her employer. The “helps me” part erases the importance of her role while foregrounding that of her employer, who uses the phrase to assume that she is doing the main thing and that the employee is just helping her. A new edition of Never in front of the servants. Faithful portrait of life above and below (Periférica), originally written in 1973 by the English journalist Frank Victor Dawesallows us to look back at how various books and audiovisual works attempted to represent the world of servants, maids, cooks, governesses and other positions that were always located in a subordinate place. The current fact is: According to the International Labor Organization (ILO), in Argentina the 77 percent of domestic workers are not properly registered from their employers.

Cinderellathe famous story of Charles Perrault and published in 1697, is one of the classic forms that have left their mark on popular culture, featuring stories in which women have to do work in other people’s houses. As early as the 19th century, the Brönte sisters brought fearsome governesses to life in their works and Gustave Flaubert in a simple heart1877, gave a leading role to Felicité, a humble maid living at the time in rural Normandy.

In the following century, PG Wodehouse, among others, highlighted various butlers in his humorous novels, as Dawes remembers. Another milestone already achieved by the social heat of the 60s is Below. Memoirs of an English Cook from the 20s, where its author, Margaret Powellpasses the paper with concise chronicles on to his employers in the British capital. Published in 1968, the work served as the basis for the television series Downton Abbey And Up and down.

1985 the Canadian Margaret Atwood published his novel The Handmaid’s Talewhere women are reduced to mere breeding grounds and slaves in a dystopian future. The work inspired a film released in 1990 and a series in 2018. At the level of films, it can be remembered Cross stories2011, based on the novel Maids and ladiesby Kathryn Strockett, published in English in 2009. And it is inevitable Romealso from 2018, by the Mexican Alfonso Cuarón, which tells the story of Cleo, a domestic worker from a middle-class family in Mexico City.

In 2001 it was released via Anagrama A true story based on liesfrom the American Jennifer Clementwhich tells the story of Leonora, a domestic worker who is sexually repressed by her employer, and Aura, the daughter of this relationship. In 2017, another American, Lucia Berlin, shone Cleansing manual for womena volume of stories about various staff who worked in homes, also published by Anagrama.

It can be saved at the level of the journalistic book María left us and my life is chaosby Jessica Fainsod, from 2008. And Interior doors. A chronicle of housework (Marea), written by journalists Camila Bretón, Carolina Cattáneo, Dolores Caviglia and Lina Vargas, in 2022. At the Latin American level, it was published in 2013 From maids and servants to working women. Journalistic reports on housework in Central America and Mexicoa project funded by the FES Foundation – Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, which can be downloaded free of charge from the organization’s website: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/fesamcentral/10123.pdf-

The academy also paid interest on the work of domestic workers. For example, it came out in 2018 Paths that branch out. Domestic service and labor rights in Argentina in the 20th centuryby Romina Cutuli and Débora Garazi. In Everyone in their place? (Biblos, 2018), experts Débora Gorban and Ania Tizziani reveal the research, reflections and findings of a study lasting more than nine years on the different aspects of the work experience of the women who work there and the special relationship that binds them with their employers. And in 2021, a researcher (a remarkable fact since there are few men dedicated to this topic), Santiago Canevaro, published by Prometeo Like a family. Affection and inequality in housework.

Works that deal with the lives of domestic workers often come from middle-class authors with no family ties. An exception is Dawes himself, the son of a mother who had worked as a maid in private homes for many years. Affected by this history, in 1972 he and another journalist friend planned to reconstruct the experience of housework in 20th-century England and published an appeal for this purpose in a newspaper for which he worked. In Never in front of the servantsadmits that he estimated that he would receive around forty letters containing statements from maids, servants and superiors; 700 arrived.

In the book, Dawes illustrates how, at least in England, until the first decades of the 20th century, every middle-class family had a “bed-in” housemaid. By 1931, more than a million people worked in this sector. For much of the last century and the beginning of the next century, servants, maids, and cooks had to sleep in attics or lofts, and during the day they had to perform their duties mostly on lower floors or directly in basements. Of course, they had different (and more inconvenient) doors and stairs than those of the homeowners, so they couldn’t cross them. “It wasn’t exactly slavery, but it was entirely due to the internal hierarchy,” confessed Lord Bath in the book, longing for the past when his English mansion was full of lackeys.

The South African writer Sindiwe Magona is one of the few writers who has proven work in domestic service. After working in this profession for years, she was able to complete her studies in the USA and also devote herself to activism for gender equality there. He has written novels, plays and poems as well as two autobiographies telling his story.

But you don’t have to go that far. Mayra Arena, who was employed as a political consultant and Peronist activist, recalled in her famous TED talk and in her autobiographical books: “I was bedridden in several families for several years.” Of course, her present is very different, although she doesn’t deny that past.

But is there a personal statement from a domestic worker who is still active? If you cross the Río de la Plata, you meet Mary Núñez, who was born in Artigas in 1966 and has lived in Montevideo since 1987. Since then she has never stopped working as a housekeeper. In 2018 he published Domestic or slaveby Double Click Editora.

“Today I have three jobs, one of which is with the family that gave me my first job in Montevideo in 1987. Next year I hope to retire,” says Núñez N. The trigger for the book was a situation at another job: he had asked for an increase in his salary and the employer had cut it in revenge. Then they humiliated her at a dinner in front of forty people, shouting at her: “For a piece of gizzard from the roast I cooked in the boss’s son’s house.” They fired her and she decided to record what she and many other domestic workers had experienced in her book.

“There are good and bad employers,” he admits, “just as there are good and bad employees.” The most common negative experiences were “abuse, neglect and, most importantly, not making the contributions they need to make.” A member of the Uruguayan Domestic Workers Union, she admits that she “reads little because of lack of time” and remembers it His first readings were works by Biran Weiss, Isabel Allende and his country’s constitution. He has already published a second book about rape stories, and a third is in the works, about the life of a Uruguayan soccer player about whom he does not want to give any further information.

“I have to work to survive,” Núñez says, worrying that his future retirement will be “so bad.” Aside from the differences in times, geographies, and customs, there are invisible threads between the London described by Dawes’s correspondents, modern-day Montevideo, and a city like Buenos Aires.