Political Science Public Talk with
Eileen Boris
Hull Professor and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies
Professor of History, Black Studies, and Global Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara

The long history of migrant domestic workers challenges the story of the growth of free labor under capitalism. In the post-WWII years, fee-charging employment agencies trafficked African American, Puerto Rican, and Latin American women for domestic work in New York City and its suburbs as well as other major metropolitan areas like Chicago and Los Angeles. To regulate what became known as the maid trade, civil rights, worker, and government advocates responded with new regulations during the period between the 1933 ILO Convention #34 and 1997 Convention #181 on private employment agencies, showing continuities from the intelligence office and reformer efforts in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and marking the re-emergence of household labor in the US as a privatized solution to the crisis in reproductive labor. This is a history of resistance, part of freedom struggles, sometimes through the weapons of the weak, sometimes through law and public policy, as well as a story about the persistence of unfree labor under mid-20th century capitalism.