Uncomfortable stains: Cleaning labour, class positioning and moral worth among working-class Chilean women

2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 847-865
Author(s):  
Valentina Álvarez-López
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
Mature Women ◽  
Self Worth ◽  
Domestic Labour ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
A Site ◽  
Paid Domestic Labour

This article explores ethnographically the ways in which working-class elderly and mature women position themselves in class and gender terms through the cleaning practices they carry out in their own households. Following contemporary research, it understands domestic labour as a site of production and negotiation of classed, gendered and ‘raced’ subject positions. Scholars researching on paid domestic labour have emphasised cleaning labour as devalued; however, this article argues that the unpaid cleaning labour the women carry out in their own households might become a source of self-worth. It does so by briefly depicting how the twentieth-century Chilean modernisation and processes of class formation were coupled with an emphasis on hygiene and cleanliness. It also provides an ethnographic description of working-class women’s cleaning practices, attending to the classed and gendered meanings and value the women attach to these practices, and discussing their negotiation of expected standards in relation to material conditions and the multiple demands and values of everyday life. It shows that the margin of negotiation is much reduced when the results of cleaning practices are more open to public view. It also argues that the women not only express their subjectivities through everyday negotiations of cleaning standards, but also produce particular modes of being working-class women.

Voices of Angels

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-174
Author(s):  
Stephanie Vander Wel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Single Mother ◽  
Country Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Musical Discourse ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Representations Of Women

Chapter 6 traces the musical and lyrical developments of honky-tonk in the late 1930s and 1940s with Al Dexter, Ernest Tubb, and Hank Williams and remained a predominant mode of country music after World War II, right when Kitty Wells, Goldie Hill, and Jean Shepard contributed to the musical discourse. These female artists, taking over male-defined and often parodic representations of women, developed narratives that articulated class-specific voices couched in the metaphors of sexual and material desire, heartache, and loss juxtaposed with 1950s ideals of domesticity. Examining the particulars of musical style and vocal expression, this chapter argues that female artists in their various enactments of the honky-tonk angel, the angry, jilted housewife, the single mother, and the forsaken lover disclosed the paradoxes of class and gender and helped to lift the cloak of invisibility shrouding working-class women.

scholarly journals Of “Old” and “New” Housewives: Everyday Housework and the Limits of Household Rationalization in the Urban Working-Class Milieu of the Weimar Republic

1996 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Hagemann
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Lively Discussion ◽  
Household Appliances ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Urban Working

SummaryThe paper centers on the question of how widespread was the impact of the lively discussion of housing and household reform during the Weimar Republic. Therefore the focus is on the experiences of working-class women. Against the background of material conditions in proletarian households, it analyzes which norms and standards concretely shaped working women's everyday housework in the urban working-class milieu in the 1920s, and how these norms and standards arose. The paper demonstrates the substantial reservations and resistance with which even better-off working women approached all efforts at rationalizing their housework in the 1920s. They wanted better living conditions and new household appliances, but the vast majority could not afford both. The specific norms and standards against which a “good” housewife was measured, norms and standards which corresponded more to the “old” model of the “economical, clean and tidy” housewife, also blocked acceptance, however.

scholarly journals Women's Subversive Individualism in Barcelona during the 1930s

1992 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-176
Author(s):  
Michael seidman
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social History ◽  
The State ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender

SummaryA focus on politically uncommitted working-class women alters the traditional historiographical emphasis on collective militancy in the Spanish Revolution. A large number of females acted ambivalently towards the cause, and revolutionaries were forced to confront women's individualism. In the search for the collective identities of class and gender, this individualism has been ignored. Instead of neglecting or condemning the personal, historians should try to understand how an exploration of the varieties of subversive individualism – resistance to workplace discipline, opportunism, and petty fraud – can expand the boundaries of social history and help to contribute to a theory of the state.

Transience, Class and Gender in Interwar Sexual Health Policy: The Case of the Liverpool VD Scheme

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 544-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Health Policy ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Sexual Health ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The City

Abstract Focusing on the implementation of the Liverpool VD Scheme, this article reasserts the importance of morality to interwar medical understandings about the spread of venereal disease. Despite claiming to offer impartial, practical solutions to the spread of venereal disease, the Liverpool VD Scheme, created in 1916, reflected and promoted the notion that the transient lifestyles of many of the working class presented physical and moral threats to the city. This article therefore counters suggestions that the interwar control of venereal disease was shaped by practicalities rather than moralities. Evidence is provided for the persistence of a medico-moralising that continued to place working-class sexual practices at the heart of discussions about the spread of venereal disease. However, presumptions about men’s biological need for sex combined with the local importance of the port, meaning that working-class seamen with VD were judged less harshly than working-class women with the same infections.

Sisters and Sisterhood

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Autonomous Agents ◽  
History Of Education ◽  
Social Reforms ◽  
Political Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Politically Active

This is a book about the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It uses the Kenney family as a case study through which to understand who these women were, what they wanted, and what the vote meant to them. It identifies why they became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicized, why they prioritized the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives in order to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. It addresses questions of class and gender, politics and activism, and agency and identity in the early twentieth century, engaging with recent historiographical research around politicization, networks, and transnationalism. It is a history of education, faith, and social mobility as well of suffrage, and of teachers, theosophists, political activists, social reforms, friends and sisters, as well as suffragettes.

scholarly journals Job Loss and Attempts to Return to Work: Complicating Inequalities across Gender and Class

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Damaske
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Return To Work ◽  
Job Search ◽  
Job Loss ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Family Responsibilities ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender

Drawing on data from 100 qualitative interviews with the recently unemployed, this study examines how participants made decisions about attempting to return to work and identifies how class and gender shape these decisions. Middle-class men were most likely to take time to attempt to return to work, middle-class women were most likely to begin a deliberate job search, working-class men were most likely to report an urgent search, and working-class women were most likely to have diverted searches. Financial resources, gendered labor force attachments, and family responsibilities shaped decision making. Ultimately, those in the middle-class appear doubly advantaged—both in their financial capabilities and in their ability to respond to the crisis with greater gender flexibility.

scholarly journals Inequality confirmed: institutional exclusion in the interaction between job-centre advisors and unemployed young people

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulla Rantakeisu ◽  
Kirsti Kuusela ◽  
Lis-Bodil Karlsson
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Public Employment ◽  
Employment Services ◽  
The Public ◽  
Employment Agency ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Unemployed

Since the 1990s, the pressures on the unemployed have intensified in Sweden owing to increasing demands on individuals to be employable. This article centres on unemployed youths’ experiences of their visits to the public employment services in four Swedish municipalities and how these experiences can be understood against the background of the intersection of social class and gender. A total of 18 unemployed youths were interviewed and their reasoning was compared with their respective employment-agency officers. The analysis shows that the employment agency gives priority to young working-class men over young working-class women and to middle-class youths over working-class youths, respectively. Young working-class women’s wish to combine employment with caregiving is seen as an encumbrance by the employment agency and these women expressed the harshest criticism against the employment agency. When the advisors meet youths who do not correspond with the current expectations and ideals of the labour market, they risk taking part in an institutional process of exclusion of these youngsters.

scholarly journals It’s a rich man’s world: How class and glass ceilings intersect for UK parliamentary candidates

2021 ◽  
pp. 019251212110400
Author(s):  
Rainbow Murray
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
Informal Institutions ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
Family Roles ◽  
Formal And Informal Institutions ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Uk

Why is politics dominated by wealthy men, and how do gendered and class barriers to running for office intersect? This article addresses these questions using the UK as a case study. Drawing on interview data, I highlight the formal and informal institutions that shape the class and glass ceilings in electoral politics. I identify how the high personal costs of running for office, especially in relation to candidates’ time, present a barrier to those without significant financial resources. These costs are gendered, as women typically have less time and money than men. These resource barriers are compounded by additional gendered obstacles including discrimination, abuse and gendered family roles. I find that the intersection of the class and glass ceilings creates cumulative barriers that are particularly prohibitive for working-class women. The findings extend our understanding of class and gender gaps within politics and, crucially, the intersection between them.

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