Nadasen offered lessons from the domestic workers’ movement for the current moment in the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward: “We, as feminists today, like domestic workers in the 1970s and in the early 2000s, need to think outside the box.”
Premilla Nadasen, history professor at Barnard College and author of, among other books, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement, centers much of her scholarship at the intersections of feminist meaning, labor organizing, and visions of social change driven by poor and working-class women.
Outside of the academy, Nadasen has also testified before the Department of Labor and the New York State Assembly Committee on Labor, collaborated with the nonprofit organizations on projects amplifying the history of women workers of color, and written extensively on issues of race, class, and gender for newspapers and magazines—including Ms. Nadasen’s piece in the Fall 2009 issue, “Domestic Workers Take it to the Streets,” is just one part of her larger body of work documenting the domestic workers’ rights movement for Ms.
As part of the third episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, I talked to Nadasen about the lessons she pulled from the then-burgeoning contemporary fight for domestic workers’ rights, how feminist history can be a compass for the fight forward for economic equality, and the questions we need to ask as we move forward in order to make sure no one is left behind.
Nadasen is joined in this episode by labor icon Dolores Huerta, Springboard to Opportunities founding CEO Aisha Nyandoro, National Women’s Law Center vice president for education and workplace justice Gaylynn Burroughs, and economists Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino.
Together, we traced 50-plus years of feminist resistance to workplace discrimination, women’s disproportionate unpaid domestic and care burdens, and the sociopolitical factors that push women, in larger numbers, into poverty—revealing both how the system seeks to devalue all of “women’s work,” and what we can do about it.
Carmen Rios: What led you to writing your piece on Ms. for the organizing that domestic workers were doing?
Premilla Nadasen: I’m a historian—I’m a labor historian, I’m a women’s historian, I’m a historian of race—so I was reading a lot about the labor movement in the early 2000s, and a lot of what I was reading was about how the labor movement had died, there was no vibrant labor movement, union membership was at the lowest level it’s been in 100 years. Policymakers were saying this, journalists were saying this. Historians were saying this.
At the same time, I was involved in the domestic worker rights movement. I was attending demonstrations in Downtown Manhattan, I was attending meetings in Brooklyn, and there was a real disconnect there between what the experts were telling us and what I was witnessing in the streets.
I was really intrigued by this massive multiracial movement of women of all ages who were coming together, who were demanding labor rights, who were demanding fair treatment, who were demanding better working conditions. I felt like this was a movement that really needed to be uplifted, and that’s why I started writing about this movement.
I started meeting the women who were leading this movement; I was deeply impressed. It also led me to write my book about domestic worker organizing, which was inspired, in large part, by the organizing I was witnessing around me.
We can’t think about domestic work as an individual issue within the household, but as a structural problem—and try to come up with collective, rather than individualized, privatized solutions.
Premilla Nadasen
Rios: What was the impact of the piece?
Nadasen: Ms. is the preeminent feminist magazine, and it had a huge impact, both in bringing the work that domestic workers were doing to a broader public audience and raising this question—of organizing, and how we understand feminist organizing in a much broader way—to a larger feminist movement.
Domestic workers have long argued that domestic labor is a feminist issue. It is an issue that unites us all, regardless of class, race, legal status, or ethnic background. It is, historically, women’s work, whether it’s paid or unpaid, and women have, generally, carried the burden of doing or ensuring that domestic work gets done. That, of course, does not mean that there aren’t differences or tensions or even oppositional interests within domestic work, because we know that wealthy women tend to hire poorer women to do this work. In fact, in the 1970s and ‘80s, many middle-class women went into the workforce for the first time, and they hired poorer women, often women of color, to take care of their household responsibilities. Their very feminist liberation was dependent upon the exploitation of other women.
Even though there is this tension, this contradiction, we can’t think about domestic work as an individual issue within the household, but as a structural problem and try to come up with collective, rather than individualized, privatized solutions. That’s where understanding and seeing domestic work in this way can usher us in a whole different direction.
Rios: In your article, you highlight the ways that racism and sexism are not just perpetuated by the nature of capitalism or by corporations; they’ve also been perpetuated, historically, by liberal economic policies and economic justice organizations like unions. When we think about the feminist economic future, how can feminists be sure that we’re thinking about all women, that we are imagining a society that transcends class and, like you said, solves the root problem here of the unpaid and underpaid notion of domestic labor?
Nadasen: For me, that always begins with the least powerful and with the most vulnerable among us. The Combahee River Collective, a group of radical Black feminists in the Boston area, wrote more than 50 years ago that by liberating people who, simultaneously experience sexism, racism, heterosexism, capitalist exploitation, and imperialism, we will free everyone, because freeing them means dismantling all those structures of power.
As contemporary feminists, we have to continually ask: In whose interests are we fighting? Who will benefit from the work that I’m doing right now? Who should we put at the center of our organizing campaigns? If we do that, we are constantly asking the question or trying to address the tensions that naturally exist among this very broad category that we call feminists or that we call women.
Feminism is a political agenda that centers women, that centers race, that centers class—but it is an agenda around which anyone, of whatever identity, can unite.
Premilla Nadasen
Rios: We have seen some progress for domestic workers—12 states have passed domestic workers’ bills of rights, which was the centerpiece of the organizing that the women you were talking to were doing. How do you feel laws like those can shift women’s real, lived economic experiences? How do they reshape the economic structures we live in?
Nadasen: It’s an extremely important step forward. If you remember, domestic workers were excluded from the basic labor laws of the 1930s, from the New Deal legislation. They were excluded from minimum wage protections. They were excluded from social security. To get to a point where we now understand and we recognize that domestic work is work and domestic workers deserve rights is a really important milestone, and it indicates how domestic work has become more visible to all of us.
We also recognized this during the pandemic when there was an absence of domestic workers and other essential workers, which led to a real care crisis. But, we still have a long way to go. These laws are important, but we need to ensure that people are aware of them. Even more importantly, we need to ensure that there’s an enforcement mechanism, and we know the Department of Labor, right now, is having challenges. It’s wonderful to have laws on the books, but how do we make sure that those laws are enforced? That’s the most important challenge before us right now.
Rios: Your piece really focused on this variety of tactics that the Domestic Workers United was leveraging to advance individual and collective justice for domestic workers in New York. What do you think feminists should take away from their organizing? What can we learn from the strategies that they utilized?
Nadasen: Part of what drew me to the domestic worker rights movement in the early 2000s was, of course, the absence of their organizing in the broader political discussion. But it was also the tactics that they used, which were very innovative. We have this kind of standard model of labor organizing, where workers on an assembly line come together in their breakroom and picket outside the factory and meet in smoky, dark rooms somewhere. What I saw was something very different.
Domestic workers were organizing in public places. They were organizing on playgrounds. They were organizing in laundry rooms. They were organizing on buses. They were organizing outside of their places of work because they couldn’t organize in their place of work. They were single employees in a household behind closed doors. They organized, both documented and undocumented workers, and that might seem commonplace to us now, but 25 years ago, the labor movement was still struggling a lot with how to deal with the differences between documented and undocumented workers.
They weren’t only organizing people by employer—they directed their demands to the state, which was extremely important, because it meant that even if you changed employers, you would still get the protections you deserve. Whereas now, if you work for Ford, for example, and you switch to a different company, you might not get the same benefits you got before. To begin to think about how workers could be protected outside of their individual employer, but by broader state-based legislation, was also very important.
I was really intrigued by this massive multiracial movement of women of all ages who were coming together, who were demanding labor rights, who were demanding fair treatment, who were demanding better working conditions.
Premilla Nadasen
The takeaway here for me about this innovative organizing is that we, as feminists today, like domestic workers in the 1970s and in the early 2000s, need to think outside the box. There are tried and true strategies that feminists have used for generations, an extremely important part of our history, but as you mentioned, this is a different moment. We’re in very turbulent times where all the rules seem to be thrown out the window.
We have to think long and hard about how to meet this new moment. We need to grapple with and think about how we understand feminism right now. Is feminism about individual advancement? What does individual advancement mean in a moment where so many people are being marginalized, deported, having basic benefits cut for them, being denied the right to even bring legal cases on in terms of their own protection? Is individual advancement the way to go, or do we have to think about some kind of collective liberation for everyone? Not only for women, but for everyone.
I don’t know that I have answers for everything right now. We’re all still trying to process what’s happening, but as with domestic workers, who were excluded from the right to organize as a labor union, historically, we could use this really difficult moment to think much more expansively and really think in new and different ways about how to organize a feminist movement.
Rios: When you talk about rethinking how we are approaching this moment, what do you hope, in 50 years, we’re looking back on? What are the changes that you hope to come, not just from this moment but over the next half of this century?
Nadasen: We have to think about how to organize outside of social media. We have to think about building community, and how we define that community has to be broad-based.
Right now, our public sector’s being eviscerated. Even basic rights and protections that we have taken for granted are being dismantled. Reproductive justice, basic economic support, healthcare and the right to protection from violence are all in jeopardy. And at the same time, people are being rounded up and deported and put in prisons in other countries. U.S. citizens or people who are here who are not given due process, there are assumptions that they’re here illegally. But there’s no evidence of that, because they aren’t even given the right to a hearing. And then we have genocide unfolding all around the world, most especially in Gaza right now.
We could use this really difficult moment to think much more expansively and really think in new and different ways about how to organize a feminist movement.
Premilla Nadasen
I would love to have us think about how women can unite—I should say feminists can unite, because it’s not a women’s issue. We have to distinguish what we would call a woman’s issue from a feminist issue, and for me, feminism is a political agenda that centers women, that centers race, that centers class, but it is an agenda around which anyone, of whatever identity, can unite.
I’d love to think about how to construct a feminist radical agenda that moves us away from a neoliberal corporatized society, that moves us away from capitalist exploitation and extraction, that moves us away from punitive carcerality, that moves us away from more militarization towards a truly caring society where everyone, and not just people in this country, but also the bombs and the arms that we’re using to kill people elsewhere, where everyone has the support that they need.
I’m so grateful that you’re doing this project, and I’m grateful to Ms. for its very long 50-plus-year history of uplifting the feminist movement. Again, at a moment when history is being erased, when voices that are just simply attempting to uplift the work that has happened in the past that helps us understand the present moment is being erased, it’s more important than ever that we turn to history, that we turn to feminist organizing, we turn to anti-racism organizing as a way to help us chart our new path forward.
Great Job Carmen Rios & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
