In essence, Valuing Domestic Work is a reframing and a call to action. As a number of the contributions show, increasing the social value attributed to domestic work is crucial to creating justice for domestic workers. Celebrating some of the most powerful and innovative organizing work being done in New York State and across the country, this issue highlights the contributions that scholars have made in establishing domestic work and other types of care work as an important area of feminist studies. Our contributors call on all of us to raise our awareness of the process by which we devalue and overlook this sector of our economy—a sector that affects each and every one of us, often on a daily basis.
Valuing Domestic Work brings together scholarly essays on gender and care labor, as well as documentation of campaigns by New York’s Domestic Workers United and the National Domestic Workers Alliance to gain visibility and legitimacy for domestic work, as well as basic legal protections for these workers. The issue also features contributions made by allies and partners of these organizations, including Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Third World Newsreel, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women, who have all created their own documents aiming to value domestic work in the United States. Valuing Domestic Work weaves individual stories from workers and employers with other ways of analyzing the role race, gender and nationality play in care work in the U.S. and abroad.
