Domesticity and Dirt

Library Journal

When productive work moved outside the household, why did the elite married white woman agree to stay behind? In part, Palmer explains, because she was promised a managerial job at home, supervising the domestic servants--usually women of color--who would do the dirty work. This division fed white women's sense of racial and class superiority, and ``persuaded . . . them to accept their exclusion from centers of male power.'' In a well-written scholarly examination of the interwar years, Palmer elaborates on the perspectives and experiences of both middle-class employers and the workers they exploited, playing out the implications of a domestic work system based upon class and race. For academic and larger public libraries.-- Cynthia Harrison, Federal Judicial Ctr., Washington, D.C.