Search Results

This chapter examines the ways in which nannies accommodate and/or resist employer-imposed definitions of their role and limitations on the bond they forge with the children in their care. The analysis reveals that nannies and au pairs often sought not to reduce their childcare responsibilities but to increase them and, more important, to gain recognition for them. Their professionalization project entailed reframing their work as skilled labor and redefining themselves as third parents and as valued team members rather than as mother's helpers. Ironically, allegiance to the intensive-mothering ideology led them to forgo viewing their work as an exchange of wages for services.

This chapter explores the advice literature and periodical press fascination with the changing nature of the twentieth-century home. It describes the ‘labour-saving movement’, and the associated development of gas and electricity within the home. The persistence of domestic service within the changing context is highlighted, and many ‘labour-saving’ devices were understood as perpetuating domestic service, rather than making it redundant. The ‘servantless’ home was thus never very firmly established, and most middle-class households continued to expect domestic assistance. The chapter outlines attempts made to employ new categories of domestic workers (nannies, lady helps, mother's helps, au pairs) to avoid the opprobrium of being a ‘servant’. The servant-keeping practices of the late twentieth century are placed into a broader time span, and ‘doing for oneself’ is seen as a brief experiment, rather than a necessary feature of ‘modern’ living.

This chapter considers the case of domestic and caring work as a site where the social construction of labour is revealed and contested, and examine the tensions manifest in immigration controls when applied to domestic labour. It begins with a brief consideration of domestic labour in the UK. Deregulation and informality mean that private households are a site where people with ambivalent immigration statuses can find precarious work. There have also been two types of visa that have been available for domestic labour from the late 1970s onwards, the au pair visa and a visa for domestic workers who enter the UK with employers. Both visas are principally for live-in work, and both are outside the usual migrant labour channels. In this way, paid domestic labour is treated as exceptional. These visas help to construct the labour market for domestic services but also contribute to shaping the political subjectivities of migrants.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book which is about the micropolitics of the so-called shadow mothers, nannies or au pairs. This book's close examination of commodified mother-work challenges assumptions concerning the self-sufficiency of the nuclear family and the permeability of the public-private divide. It examines the delegation of mother-work such as conceiving, gestating and bearing children, the creation of family ties or the economic support of children and analyzes the cultural and structural constraints that shape the mother-nanny relationship. It proposes ways for resolving the ideal mother/ideal worker conflict and alternative models of the mother-nanny relationship and avenues for change.

This chapter details events in Denise Levertov's life after she set sail for Holland in January 1947, to work as an au pair. Levertov was barely twenty-three when she left England presumably for adventure, but in doing so she also escaped. She had no suspicion that by the year's end her life would change irrevocably. Her hastily arranged job as an au pair was seemingly a means to an end—the opportunity to travel. But the adventure began inauspiciously. Holland was cold, damp, and ravaged by war. She did not like the food or the Dutch, whom she considered tactless and dull. She left Holland for Paris in March and later on moved to Geneva where she met a Russian-American from Harvard, Mitchell Ira Goodman. Denise and Mitch married on December 2, 1947. In October 1948 the couple boarded an army ship for New York City. At age twenty-five Denise was finally on her way to America, and her joy was double in that she knew she was pregnant.