| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Swapna M. Banerjee. Men, Women and Domestics. Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xii, 247. $35.00.

The nature of domestic work and the relations forged around it have been of especial interest to feminist scholars. At first, the focus was on the housewife and the difficulty of characterizing her unpaid labor within the rubric of a capitalist economy dominated by relations of reciprocal exchange (however unequal these may be). In the last two decades, the question of paid domestic work has also received considerable attention. There are perhaps two reasons for this. First, historians have noted the critical significance of women's domestic service in early industrial societies, both as the chief wage-earning occupation open to women as well as its role in the construction of intimate oppressions of class and gender within middle-class homes. Second, there has been, in the past few years, growing concern over the international migration of young women for domestic service. The bulk of this movement has been within Asia or from Asian countries to countries of the developed West. In Southeast Asia, for instance, civil society groups have raised the question of how to protect such women from the extremes of physical and sexual torture to which they are often subjected. There have been a variety of initiatives examining domestic work across historical, spatial, and cultural contexts and the specific ways in which domestic work and domestic workers have been constituted through race, class, gender, and ethnicity.

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