Middle-class Women and Domestic Work in India and the United States: Caste,Race and Patriarchy

Abstract

This study compares middle-class women’s experience of domestic work in India and the United States(US), highlighting similarities in how domestic work is organised in its paid and unpaid forms across both sites. The focus on middle-class women’s experience as unpaid workers and employers of domestic workers provides an insight into how the social and economic values of domestic work are determined. Despite social and political differences, the political economies of India and the US and interlocking systems of oppression including patriarchy, neoliberalism, caste and race have produced similarities in the undervaluation of domestic work at both sites.

Keywords

domestic work middle-class women caste race neoliberalism

Introduction

A serious reckoning of domestic work as work, began primarily with the work of social reproduction theorists who emphasised that domestic work played a significant role in the reproduction of capitalism as a system and its workers. Emphasising on the false distinction created between public and private domains of work, paid and unpaid works, social reproduction theorists argued that these domains were not distinct but rather entangled and interdependent (Federici, 2004; Fortunati, 1981; Mies, 1986).

Social reproduction theorists contributed significantly by highlighting the gendered nature of processes of accumulation and reproductive activities. Their work remained significant in highlighting that unpaid work was also in fact value producing (Mezzadri, 2019). While unpaid forms of such work continue to remain unaccounted from official statistical frameworks, the Indian state introduced a nation-wide time use survey for the first time in 2019 to understand the gendered contribution to paid and unpaid works within the household. In the United States (US), the work of Arlie Hochschild and others has emphasised the second shift phenomenon that women much more frequently than men have been saddled with. In addition to gender however, and with the significance of intersectionality as a framework, other axes of identity such as race and caste were given analytical weight to understand how work which was characterised as ‘women’s work’—emerged and adapted, but persisted with a gender association.

In this study, the analytical lens of class is combined with an intersectional perspective to understand mediations around domestic work. This is done by unpacking how middle-class women across two different social–cultural locations—the US and India—negotiate domestic work. This study highlights this negotiation from the point of view of middle-class households where women who take on roles as household managers are economically in a position to outsource this work entirely or in part to others—often women, of colour and those belonging to ‘lower’ castes. This perspective is adopted, not at the cost of further negating the voices of vulnerable women; instead, the perspective of a sociology of the elites provides the ability to understand how households in an economically advantageous position determine divisions of domestic work and negotiate its value as it moves from the domain of unpaid to paid work. In a neoliberal context, where few public resources are made available for providing care work (often a large component of domestic work), it is often the informal labour market to which households turn, to outsource ‘women’s work’ to poorly paid domestic workers (DW). This is particularly in cases where middle-class women are combining unpaid domestic work with paid work. Within this neoliberal context, gender norms around domestic work combine with structures of race in the US and caste in India, to inform the relation of employment.¹

Although class cultures are complex and beyond the strata of income, for the purpose of this study, middle-class is defined as pertaining to households which in the US have a cumulative annual income of at least $40,000 and approximately $7,000 for India.² This study refers to DW as individuals who are paid for their work in households in contrast to middle-class women who perform unpaid household work and are managers of DW.

Exploring how gender is learned in India and the US, we focus specifically on the social location of middle-class women, the role of DW as existing between the public and private spheres and the links with structures of caste and race against the backdrop of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism as a socio-political framework that supports capital mobility and ‘free’ market enterprise over state control (Harvey, 2005) plays an important role in shaping women’s labour. Much of domestic labour scholarship has focussed on the lived experiences of DW (Anderson, 2001; Chang, 2000; John, 2013; Nettha, 2009; Raghuram, 2001; Sharma, 2016). This study builds on this, but in contrast, explores domestic work from the perspective of employers of DW to unpack how class and race or caste mediate in what is not a simple relation of exchange. Cross-cultural studies of countries with distinct histories of neoliberalism tend to highlight societal differences. However, as this study demonstrates, there are more similarities than contrasts in how domestic work is perceived and organised by middle-class women in India and the US. In tracing self-perceptions of middle-class women on household labour and their relations with DW, this study examines how the valuation of household labour shifts depending on who performs the work and under what context.

At this contemporary moment, the global trend remains one of women entering into paid work in larger numbers, without an accompanying shift in equality of work performed at home (Antonopoulos & Hirway, 2010, pp. 2–4, 58–59). In contrast, in India, economic development is accompanied by a withdrawal of middle-class women from the labour force even as their education levels rise (Banerjee & Raju, 2009, pp. 115–123) often discontinuing work after marriage. In the US, a spectacular backlash on progressive legislation makes gender equality a mainstream concern. Women in the US suffer from a near stagnant wage gap (currently 80% vis-à-vis men for Caucasian women and higher for women of colour) (Pew Research Center, 2018), endure sexual harassment in the workplace and unequal access to positions of leadership and/or promotion. American women have only experienced a 2% narrowing of the wage gap since Obama enforced the Lilly Ledbetter Act in 2009.³ Even as middle-class families in both India and the US benefit from paid domestic labour, socio-culturally situated gender norms continue to disproportionately affect women’s experience of the ‘second shift’. Moreover, paid domestic work highlights caste and race relations which continue to inform labour practices in both societies.

The Work of Middle-class Women

Hochschild’s (1989, 2003) ‘second shift’ framework enables a discussion on how women’s entry into paid work did not translate into a reconfiguration of the division of labour at home in the US. While more women are engaging in paid employment, the ‘stalled revolution’ and the social and economic institutions which maintain it, continue to place responsibility of domestic work on women. Women suffer a leisure gap; a consequence of women’s time being devalued in paid and unpaid works. Previously, Friedan’s (1963) study of middle-class women in the US reeling from the effects of heterosexism that required giving up paid work in favour of the unpaid work for the creation of domestic bliss, linked the familial space with broad socio-economic shifts. An economic model encouraging home ownership and household assets, this consumerist, service-oriented model would further escalate with the establishment of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s in the US, and the emergence of free-market reforms in India a decade later.

Even as more middle-class women entered into paid work in later decades (poor and working-class women having always participated in paid work), the wage gap persisted. Arguably, middle-class women’s home contributions are seen as more cost effective, leaving paid work to men. However, with the emergence of global consumer culture and the rise of the cost of living, middle-class households in India and the US often felt the need for two incomes in order to acquire their class position (Dickey, 2000; Meyer, 2014). These trends and others began to push against older gender ideologies and heteronormative contentions.

Paradoxically, while Indian women’s education levels have been steadily rising there has also been a decline in their labour force participation particularly among the middle-classes (Mazumdar & Neetha, 2011). The recent Economic Survey of India (Ministry of Finance, Government of India, 2018, p. 108) maps a decline in the female labour force participation from 36% in 2004–2005 to 24% in 2015–2016. This trend lies in sharp distinction with the global pattern which has seen women’s participation in labour rise with improving economic standards. Feminist scholarship has increasingly highlighted that the family, state and market have not served adequately to advance gender equality (Cooke, 2010; Dex, 2010; Shire, 2015). The wage gap (Meurs et al., 2010), parental leave and job protections for women returning from parental leave (Petersen et al., 2014), sexual harassment (Geetha, 2012), access to reproductive health and family planning and the manner in which those in domestic partnerships divide the work at home have had significant ramifications on determining equality between genders (Antonopoulos & Hirway, 2010; Bianchi et al., 2012; Langdon & Klomegah, 2013).

The Value of Domestic Work

The devaluation of domestic work however, is a product not just of gender norms but also caste and race. Ideologies of motherhood, middle-class femininity and domesticity have prevented the recognition of housework as work, given its historical separation from the productive ‘work’ sites (Davis, 1981, 2011) and in light of women of colour and ‘lower’ castes consigned to perform it (Chakravarti, 1993, 1995; Dickey, 2000; Parrenas, 2004; Ray, 2000; Ray & Qayum, 2009; Sangari, 1993).

That stated, not all housework is experienced or devalued in the same way. Oakley (1974) identifies parts of domestic work which are viewed as creative/interesting. The division as it plays out in middle-class households’ weaves in this distinction, with women household members engaged in creative work—the decoration and/or fine maintenance of the home, for example, cooking, playing with children, etc.—leaving the ‘deep cleaning’ and drudgery works to maids. The introduction of household technologies has done little to alleviate inequalities of housework (Fox, 1990; McGaw, 1982). In response, middle-class households often recruit other women for domestic work. Historically, in India under the caste system and in the US under slavery, domestic work was enabled through systems of oppression that created a steady supply of labour for the home and home-based economies. With the abolishment of slavery and slow attempts at dismantling the caste-occupational structures, paid domestic work as a form of employment has burgeoned around the world (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002). However, there has been little progress to break the links between who performs the work and who employs. As Theodore et al. (2019) point out, the unregulated domestic labour force (predominantly undocumented women of colour) can be understood as a holdover from slavery and the devaluation of black and brown workers, and DW’s ethnicity and race significantly shape their relations of work (Chang, 2000; Gutiérrez-Rodríguez, 2014; van Hooren, 2018). In India, paid domestic work remains tied to the informal sector where it is unregulated, poorly paid and rife with caste discrimination (Frøystad, 2003; Matilla, 2011; Ray & Qayum, 2009; Sharma, 2016). The critical issue remains that women themselves, including those who hire DW are groomed to perpetuate the ideological devaluation of housework and categorise it as an intensely private affair affecting both its paid and unpaid forms.

Methods

This study was driven by early observations by the two authors of domestic work in the US and India. It was observed that Indian middle-class households employed a range of DW for care and domestic work in addition to unpaid work by women in the household with negligible contributions from men, while in the US, middle-class households hire DW and continued to follow traditional gendered divisions of domestic work of the ‘inside-outside’ form. Unpacking how middle-class households were organising the production of domesticity, across the sites provided insight into how domestic work is perceived and accorded value. The study identified and delineated components of the work performed by DW and those left over as unpaid work for women of the household.

This study was conceptualised through a cross-cultural teaching and research collaboration and based on a total of sixty-seven time-use surveys and thirty-seven open-ended interviews with middle-class women in India and the US. Participants were between twenty-five and sixty-four years old and were either married or previously married. The interview sample consists of nineteen interviews with urban, ‘middle’ to ‘upper-caste’ Indian women and eighteen interviews with midwestern urban and suburban women residing in the US. The interviewees live in and around Pune and Chicago where the authors’ institutions of higher education at the time of research were located. Two same-sex couples residing in Chicago, were part of the study. As a result, there are no generalisations made possible about heterosexual and homosexual partnerships pertaining to domestic work divisions. What can be said is that greater equality in domestic work was observed with same-sex couples. The surveys and interviews were collected over an eleven-month period by the authors and their students; pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of interviewees.

Familial Contexts

Familial arrangements followed by earlier generations of the household shaped the norms and practices around housework. In India, arranged marriages influenced housework practices. Caste remained a significant determinant of marriage patterns both in arranged marriages as well as in choice/‘love’ marriages and indicated the strong presence of caste which shaped the familial and domestic spheres. Irrespective of the form of marriage, familial arrangements at the affinal home determined whether the joint or nuclear family structure was adopted. If patrilocal residence was in the same city, the young couple did not establish a separate household initially. As the interview sample attests, this patrilocal arrangement persists until the present. Yet, the trend after the neoliberal turn in India post 1992 was for the wedded couple to establish a separate household nearby when they became financially stable.⁴ The structure of the household significantly affected the manner in which domestic work was performed. In joint families, where members ranged from six to thirteen individuals, cooking and care for the young and elderly constituted the bulk of work. Cleaning and washing were taken up by DW. In this communal management of domestic work, the mother-in-law or the oldest daughter in-law was the ultimate manager of the domestic staff. As Shilpa explained:

My mom … she is the eldest daughter-in-law of the house. Being the eldest daughter in law of the house takes a lot from you. The whole family ka (family’s) responsibility is on your shoulder.… My mom was most involved.… She was basically responsible for the kitchen.… We had a variety of people at home so she had to take care of the kind of masala, the kind of oil. The younger generation would not have the same thing. You should make something good for them and something sober for the elders … it’s 90 % to my mom.

In such multigenerational households, work was split among the women of the household with little to no involvement of men. Gendered distributions of domestic work continued even when members of joint families transitioned into nuclear families. For most, the unequal division of domestic work was rarely questioned. Rama, who also held a job, explained away her husband’s lack of participation—‘He works from eight to eight, so he really does not have much time, sometimes he cooks dinner on holidays … he is very lazy *laughs*’. The advantages of multigenerational families which some respondents emphasised such as shared work and emotional resources were however competing with changing cultural values where the ‘private’ space for the couple was valued, which nuclear households offered. In comparison, in the US no extended household arrangements were observed (even if that model is common among first-generation immigrants). But familial roles could have its paid equivalent—as Claire described it, when she needed a care-giver for her children she hired a ‘grandmother like figure’. Both, in the US and India, domestic work remained marked as ‘women’s work’ leading to women assuming responsibility as household manager allocating work to DW and supervising them, with minimal participation from men (even as men in the US were more involved than Indian men). In most cases men’s participation in domestic work, much like in India followed the traditional divide where men handled the work outside and retained financial control over the household. Men’s participation was also viewed as ‘help’ towards domestic chores as opposed to a substantive and equal division of work. As Alex explained, it was only under dire circumstances that her husband came to be involved in such housework:

With my husband, presently, when I had the babies, right, I had most of the responsibilities, right. And it’s evolved over time. He has picked up more of the workload. I was disintegrating, and he could see it, and it wasn’t good for anybody to time see me disintegrate … and um, so he does a lot of the chores, so we kind of split it up.… I would do the cooking, most of the time, I would do the laundry. He takes care of, you know the vehicles, the maintaining of oil changes, you know, stuff like that.

Many interviewees in the US pointed to how men only contributed to tasks that were allotted to them but did not always initiate or anticipate the work to be done and did not share in the mental load:

A lot of men feel insecure about knowing what to do precisely, so if I had a recipe that either was printed out or I would write for him and tell him exactly what to do then he’d do it, he was fine. But otherwise he won’t step up and say, hey I’d like to cook tomorrow, never, it doesn’t occur to him.

While some of the interviewees were conscious of the more active role they played in housework, even as they challenged it in part, others saw the unequal gender division as inevitable. On the double shift, Marianne declared, ‘I don’t like to view it that way. I am in this situation by choice. I view it as the role I decided to take. I am the one who chose to work outside of the house’ (emphasis added). Implicit in Marianne’s statement is the claim that the double burden resulted from the decision of women to engage in work outside the home. This bears resemblance to the Indian women interviewed who too viewed the double shift as inevitable, when they undertook paid work. ‘Help’ was only taken from a mother/mother-in-law who lived nearby. This gendered ascription of domesticity is underscored by a discourse of duty that seems to permeate among the Indian women we interviewed. Maya indicated how her husband and father had remained uninvolved in housework: ‘He does not help out with any of the cleaning work.… He doesn’t feel like it is his duty.… My mother’s duty was to take care of her children and run the entire household’.

Maya believed that it was necessary to not view housework as a burden and believed household work as part of her essential duty as a mother and wife—a value she wished to instill in her daughters—‘… all three of my daughters have to balance their work or paid work along with their household work … like their duty as a mother and as a wife.’ Children being groomed into domestic roles began early with daughters being socialised into the double shift. Even in cases where mothers were aware and not keen to practice traditional divisions of labour, children’s chores fell into traditional patterns. As one American mother argued,

That which requires thought, I usually give to my daughters who are pretty thorough thinkers, critical thinkers. My son is very intelligent and an accomplished student, etc. but he is not a thorough thinker at all, his head is in space. So, giving him less thoughtful tasks often means less agitation on my part.

American women overwhelmingly reported exacting schedules of work burdened with the bulk of cooking and cleaning. This was typically the case if they were engaged in domestic work alone, but particularly in cases where they combined this with part-time or full-time jobs. Feelings of exhaustion were common and continued, even as they transitioned from full-time work to being a stay-at-home mother and in such cases DW provided relief from work.

For many of the interviewees to be economically independent was important. This was also seen as a necessity for the family and its socio-economic status, particularly to retain their class position or to gain mobility. The interviewees, in both the US and India, emphasised the necessity of the double income for the family and it enabled them to negotiate perceptions regarding their domestic roles and participation in paid work. A common sentiment expressed was—‘I work because I want to contribute to my house expenses. My husband works all day, I would like to help in every small way I can’.

However, even as they saw the double income as vital to maintain their class position, our Indian respondents often termed their entry into paid work as a compulsion or sacrifice. In the time-use survey, most Indian respondents indicated that paid work was in service of the family and not for them and this possibly explains why women drop out from the labour force in India when households can afford to ‘return’ women to the home. In contrast, our American respondents reported working either out of necessity or because they found it personally fulfilling. Even in cases where women were ambitious about their careers, they noted how they had to juggle their career and commitments to their family. Husbands—either in the US or India—did not adjust long-term careers or short-term schedules around the needs of children or other members of the household.

Between the Public and Private

In this context, DW are critical to maintain middle-class housekeeping standards and class positions in both societies. But a labour surplus society, the presence of a large informal economy and depressed wages, have all resulted in DW being more common in India than in the US. DW are hired to perform a range of household tasks daily such as dusting, cleaning, etc; while cooking in India as well as the US tends to be undertaken by women of the household. Care work for the elderly and children might also be undertaken by DW but typically this is in addition to caregiving from women of the household. In the US, higher costs of employing DWs translate into services that are hired once a fortnight as compared to the daily service in India.

Of household chores, cooking was the task that most women favoured, while cleaning was preferred the least. This high valuation of cooking spills into the paid component of work as well where DW who cook, are paid the highest, while cleaning and dusting work command low pay and are perceived as low-skill work.⁵

Even as DW are integral to middle-class Indian households and provide services on a daily basis, the findings indicate that Indian women as supervisors of DW and cooks have schedules as fatiguing as that of American women. The time-use surveys revealed that most women began their days at around 5 AM and ended late in the day; often in addition to paid work. The findings also included Indian women who reported over 10 h of domestic work a day, despite hiring DW. On an average, in the US, women were spending 5 h a day on domestic work a day, while in India the average was 5.48 h.

Both Indian and American women are thus averaging around the same hours of work despite the average middle-class household employing DW. This study highlights that although domestic work can be broken into some basic categories such as cleaning, cooking and child care, these practices themselves are subsequently mediated through cultural values. Consequently, the amount of time spent on cooking for a family of four in the US and India might vary. A reliance on processed foods, for example, varies across cultures and households. Immigrant women in the US⁶ are engaged more frequently in daily fresh food preparation, in close similarity to Indian women, and in contrast to non-immigrant American women. In some Indian households, cultural practices demand different foods to be prepared for lunch and dinner, increasing the daily demands of cooking.

The most striking cultural and material differences were observed however in cleaning. Most American women relied on technological devices to aid with cleaning while in India there continued to be a reliance on labour intensive methods—work performed by DW. In India, a daily regimen for cleaning was seen as a critical in the production of middle-class domesticity. Technology was limited largely to washing machines, with DW cleaning households with labour intensive means of brooms and mops and washing dishes by hand. This was in contrast with American households, where cleaning was undertaken by women of the household through vacuums and dishwashers and supplemented on a weekly basis by DW engaged in ‘deep cleaning’. The contrast in the cleaning regimen can be explained by the wider prevalence of dust in Indian cities, but also through concerns around cleanliness rooted in caste.

Dirt as Material and Cultural Substance

While the amount of dust one may encounter in Indian cities varies, the material existence of dust is visibly noticeable in urbanising spaces in India. The liberalisation of the Indian economy initiated in 1991 pushed an agenda of economic activity unencumbered by environmental concerns. Indian cities are now notorious for their pollution, and dust their daily reminder. Dusting is therefore viewed as integral to cleaning practices in households of big Indian cities. However, attitudes towards dusting and cleaning work in India are distinct from the US. Perceptions towards dirt are constructed through discourses on hygiene and health but are also shaped by caste (Douglas, 1966). Under the caste system, the notions of ‘purity’ and ‘pollution’⁵ are significant in determining the social location of individuals and communities and the social space of the home. The caste system continues to determine and shape everyday life ascribes notions of dirt and repulsion to objects, work and people, drawing a link between all three. Manual labour is thus viewed as ‘polluting’ and ‘dirty’ work and falls low in the occupational hierarchy of the caste system. Consequently, ‘upper-caste’, middle-class women see themselves marked by the ‘low’ and polluting status of work involving cleaning ‘I don’t like dusting and sweeping, it makes me feel dirty myself’ (emphasis added).

Alternately, discourses towards dirt in the US are associated with Christian morality. Middle-class Christian white women in the US have historically aimed to transcend dirt and impurity by virtue of their social status in society. Immaculate domesticity, femininity and hygiene have been associated with the phrase ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’, derived from an 18th century sermon. The view of cleanliness next to godliness is rooted in the disassociation of the ‘dirty impure woman’ and the ‘unclean household’. Consecutively, Christian middle-class women’s virginity and sexual purity put together with her well-kept clean home were prized and upheld as the pinnacle of proper femininity and domesticity. In the 21st century, these values have evolved to represent middle-class domestic bliss. The burden of upholding these values associated with cleanliness has been transferred to working-class women of colour who historically were not required to demonstrate purity or pristine domesticity.

Not having a real concern with either dust or pollution, women in our US sample were mostly concerned with keeping dirt out of sight, namely keeping up appearances of domesticity and cleanliness rather than the required daily deep cleaning that we noted with our Indian interviewees. These cultural purity codes help explain occasional domestic hires in the US. Alma explained—‘We usually hire cleaners around the holidays and for special occasions’.

For women who hire DW, the perception of work and workers is mediated through structures of caste in India, and race and ethnicity in the US. It is not therefore surprising that in India almost all the interviewees identified cleaning as one of their least preferred tasks. Owing to these cultural constructions of the work as ‘dirty’, most respondents were keen to hire DW for it. Here dirty stands not just for what is unclean but also which is seen as ritually impure (Sharma, 2016). The ability to hire DW to perform such work is not just a product of the class position of the household but is also critical to the maintenance of caste hierarchies and thus the supervision of DW is an important aspect of this, adding hours to the unpaid work women performed in their households. Complementing this, cooking, continues to be work undertaken by women of the household themselves or by hiring separate DW exclusively for this. Cleaning as ‘polluting’ work is to be performed by ‘lower’ castes especially the cleaning of bathrooms, while cooking which demands ritual purity to be maintained, is ideally to be performed by those of a ‘high’ caste.⁷

It is therefore not surprising that with the liberalising economy and the income expansion it brought to sections of the middle-class, cleaning was the most common domestic task to move from unpaid to paid labour through the entry of DW. It permitted ‘upper’ caste, middle-class households to maintain norms of caste defined domesticity. This was achieved in no small part by following discriminatory practices of untouchability within households. Often this takes place, as Sharma (2016, p. 53) indicates through the use of separate cutlery for DW and a denial to use the very bathrooms they clean, in households where they are employed.

Transitioning to Transactional Relationships

Neoliberalism in India and the US is well entrenched and has led to expected outcomes—a diminishing role of the state, an expanded scope for the market and labour market flexibility. However, the historical trajectory and conditions in both countries are distinct. In the US, historically higher standards of living however have meant that DWs even as they remain underpaid live in starkly different conditions from the bulk of DW in India who are informal workers who constitute the poor (India has the largest number of people living below the international poverty line of $1.90 a day).⁸ The experience of neoliberalism has not been identical in the two countries; in India in particular even with the retreat of the state and the incursion of the market, there remains a public infrastructure around health and education, albeit limited. The force of neoliberalism has however been strongest in labour market reforms, which has led to feeble labour laws and a large deregulated informal work force.

Significantly, however, in both countries, the market alone is not a determinant of social relations of work. We find that, the penetration of capitalism, alongside race and caste, shapes the labour market and consequently relations between employers and DW. This does not imply that caste and race are the same, but the distinct social structures of each have been weaved into the relations of production in each context.

This reality becomes explicit within households in India where DW were referred to as ‘servants’ or ‘help’, an invocation of feudal relations between DW and employers. As Sharmila exclaimed ‘… my mother-in-law gave me the best gift, we had a boy who we used, to play with my son in Lonavala and he just moved in with us’. The reference to a young worker⁹ as a gift is typical of the objectification of DW, in older social relations between employers and DW in India. Ray and Qayum’s (2009) study of older generations of DW, documents employment that was often life-long and with workers residing within the household. Familial terms were used for workers and strong emotional bonds existed between workers and employers, even as caste rules were rarely breached. With the breakdown of joint families (Shah, 1968) and the swell of economic opportunities that came in the decades after Independence, the feudal form of such relations withered, DW now rarely remain tied to households for their entire lives.

The assertion of working caste and class movements in India also dented the feudal bond that existed. But many ‘upper’ castes remain tied to feudal and gendered ascriptions of domestic work as duty and have not adopted the term ‘worker’ for DW; demonstrative of how neoliberal assertions of the dominance of the market relations have been resisted in some quarters by those who have benefitted from it. This is in sharp contrast to the perceptions of DW, who are attempting to strip the relationship of feudal notions of servitude and replace it with a modern and transactional understanding. In contrast, employers who see themselves as patrons, believe the employment they provided was what allowed the worker’s household to survive and therefore do not respond well to calls for higher wages or cash bonuses preferring instead gifts in kind (Joseph et al., 2018) that echo older forms of patronage. In response to a strike by DW on annual wage revisions, in a locality of Southern Indian city, employers advised one another on a WhatsApp group—‘… do hand holding but watch out for arm twisting’. This was in contrast with how many interviewees in the US responded to hiring DW. Often the presence of workers was viewed as providing immense relief but also guilt. As Deborah said ‘I didn’t like the idea that I was asking someone to do work that I thought I didn’t want to’. Marjorie noted that she often did a quick clean of her house before the DW came to clean and Felicity noted how she cleaned alongside the worker.

Critically, when DW are hired it is not viewed as a purely transactional relation but mediated through a cultural context in both countries. In the US this context is one where historically DW were slaves and thus not employees, and where low wage domestic work continues primarily to be performed by women of colour and/or immigrants. While some women did respond that DW earned a good living from working in multiple homes they did not ascribe it to their own patronage but to the hard work of DW. Even when viewed as a transactional relationship, the attainment of domestic labour service remained historically anchored in servitude and thus continued to be viewed as remorseful. One respondent claimed that her sense of guilt had led her to overpay the DW she hired. Yet evidence suggests that DW in the US remain low paid, undervalued and overrepresented by women of colour and immigrants (Savas, 2010) as well as subject to sexual exploitation (Weiss, 2017).

But it is also precisely a neoliberal context, of systemic denials and piece measures (Gothoskar, 2013, pp. 63–75; Moghe, 2013, pp. 63–68)¹⁰ by the state which enables exploitative relations between employers and DW. The heavy dependence on DW and the fear of a changing normative basis of the employer–DW relation underscores middle-class support in India for an absence of the regulation of domestic work. In the US, where unprotected and unregulated work is more common (than formal work channelled through agencies)—undocumented DW are at great risk of sexual harassment and other forms of abuse including withholding pay. A neoliberal regime of restrictive movement of labour (Sassen, 2005) has meant few protective accommodations exist (mainly for foreign agency employees on nanny visas) and no policy exists on the federal level to protect DW from potential abuse and labour exploitation.

Gendered Labour under Neoliberalism

In the comparison of the US and India there appears a remarkable similarity in how domestic responsibilities are perceived by middle-class women. Even as the form of neoliberalism remains different in the US and India, and patriarchy remains rooted in specific cultural contexts and idioms, the outcome for women’s time as divided between paid/unpaid work and leisure remains largely the same. While neoliberal policies restricted state spending and limit the ability to create effective public institutions for care-work, the policy form varies across both countries. In the US, childcare is largely a market driven exercise; the absence of a law, making maternity leave mandatory demonstrates the state’s attitude of privileging the capitalist economy at the cost of women’s labouring bodies. In a climate of assault on reproductive rights, it is clear that American women will continue to bear the second shift, with women of colour and working-class groups, often working as DW themselves, facing the biggest brunt. As this study indicates, even middle-class households hired DW, middle-class women’s own hours of unpaid work continued to remain high in both absolute terms, as well as relative to their male partners. Time, being limited and a labour market that continues to reward men more favourably, makes inevitable that the steep costs of domestic work remain tied to women. The link between domestic work, gender and labour in the capitalist economy continues in an unbroken chain in the US today.

In India, even as neoliberalism has been embraced, large scale poverty compels the state to push some welfare measures. But the intent of welfare policies linked to poverty alone, means that state has been unable to break the link between care work, gender and capitalism, similar to the US. For instance, in rural India, childcare is organised through publicly funded Anganwadis, tasked with preventing malnutrition. The state hires women to cook and care for children in Anganwadis, and does not recognise them as workers but as volunteers, paying meagre amounts for their ‘service’. The state reinforces the notion that childcare is both a woman’s responsibility and is not work, thus preventing a just monetary compensation for it. As is evident, the break between gender and domestic work has simply not taken place, and caste and race associations are also reinforced as domestic work remains unregulated low-wage labour. Changing gender norms have meant that men’s contribution (in the US) has increased over time but this is nowhere close to bridging the gap. Further, only in a technological utopia could the simple introduction of technology transforms this relation. The political environment in both countries suggest another level of similarities which have to negotiate populism in both, although the US has taken a short sojourn from Trumpism. Nevertheless, consistent right-wing voices are making it difficult to imagine a new public policy committed to break the chains between structural inequalities produced through caste and race, neoliberalism and patriarchy.

Domestic work is thus a matter of broader social change and not policy alone and the study highlights the undervaluation of domestic work as a product not just of patriarchy but also caste and race, to this end. One of the significant forces at this time, to challenge this systemic inequality is coming from unions of DW in India, which are challenging casteist regimes in domestic work, granting it visibility and value, by pushing a neoliberal state towards its regulation.

Conclusion

It is important to note that there remains an overwhelming pressure on women to drop out of the workforce in order to get married or when they are tasked with childcare at both sites. The period of the pandemic and lockdowns have highlighted, how women now work the first and second shifts simultaneously. But at a time when middle-class women were accessing the paid work of DW, they were participating in unpaid domestic work themselves, as well as actively engaged in supervising DW—informed by a caste or race-based relation of employment.

Even if gender relations have shown signs of change, significant social change around domestic work remains almost stagnant. This is because the devaluation of domestic work between its paid and unpaid forms is linked and domestic work becomes the site where hierarchies of caste, race and class are re-inscribed and maintained. It is therefore imperative to reimagine the future of domestic work that the manner in which domestic work reproduces inequalities across these distinct social hierarchies is addressed. Thus, for norms and practices to shift around domestic work, a shift in gender norms alone will not suffice, but must be interlinked with shifts in norms around caste and race. The Indian puzzle of missing women from the workforce and the American riddle of the continuing second shift can be resolved through a broader feminist challenge being mounted. Such a challenge must incorporate within it an agenda that includes tighter regulations around domestic work including stipulations on minimum wages, and prevention and protection from economic harassment, social discrimination and sexual abuse. This is particularly important at a time when domestic work is being incorporated into the gig economy which could result in lesser control and weaker bargaining power for DW. Worker solidarities that can confront these interrelated structures of oppression and inequality are the best hope to realise a better future of domestic work at both sites.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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