Cleaning the Revolutionary Household: Domestic Servants and Public Welfare in Mexico City, 1900-1935
Author(s)
Blum, Ann S.
Abstract
Explores the relation between early revolutionary public welfare and labor reform in Mexico. The case of domestic service in Mexico City demonstrates the mixed results of family and labor policy during the early 20th century. The constitution of 1917 established protections against the exploitation of women and children and the 1917 Law of Domestic Relations outlawed the use of adoption as a source of domestic labor. However, economic disruptions resulting from the revolution and the worldwide economic depression that followed exacerbated the weak position of single mothers, widows, and abandoned wives dependent on domestic service for their own livelihood. Even the successes of protective legislation and increased standards for public health and hygiene strengthened the link between public assistance and domestic service by pushing poor, uneducated women out of public domestic service into informal, private sector work, requiring that they place their own children in the care of the state while they cared for the children of their employers. Although the federal labor code of 1931 provided legal recognition for waged domestic laborers, by placing them on the same level as apprentices or casual day laborers, it perpetuated a system of social reproduction that maintained an informal gendered labor sector.
