Evelyn Nakano Glenn argues that during the first half of the 20th century, minority women were employed as servants to perform the most difficult reproductive labor in white households, relieving white middle-class women of those burdens. Whereas in the second half of the 20th century, with the expansion of the service economy, minority women were disproportionally sorted into the lowest and dirtiest public service jobs. White women filled cleaner, white-colored, managerial, and professional positions. Thus, the racial division of care work among women was reproduced. These same patterns played themselves out in different regions, although, with different minority groups. That is in the South African American women tended to be relegated to household service and the lowest public sector jobs, and the Southwest, it was Mexican-American women who filled those positions, and in California and Hawaii, it was Japanese American women. To put these developments in their proper historical context, it's important to bear in mind the prior to industrialization. Most productive and reproductive labor was performed almost exclusively in the household. That is, women perform most of the reproductive labor, like cleaning the house, caring for the kids, etc, at the same time, the engage in productive labor, such as making candles, clothes, shoes, soaps, and other household products that they use for themselves and sold to others. With a dawning of industrial period, the production of these basic goods was gradually taken over by capitalists businesses, that's specialized, for instance, in the manufacturing of shoes, soaps, and so forth. Reproductive labor, however, still remain largely the responsibility of individual households, and so, you had the creation of a new idealized division of labor, where men did productive work outside the home or in the market, and women did reproductive work within the home. This idealized division of labor however, was largely out of reach of most working class households, including immigrant and racial minority families. In these poorer households, women were still forced to perform both productive and reproductive work. By the second half of the 20th century, not only had productive labor been almost completely removed outside the household and into the market. But reproductive labor slowly began to be located more and more outside the household as well. Which is to say, it became commodified. That is, as household members spent more of their waking hours outside the home performing paid work, they had less and less time to provide for one another's physical, social, and emotional needs at home, because families had to become more geographically mobile to land jobs created in other parts of the country. There were also fewer relatives available to them who might help, for example, meet their children's physical, social, and recreational needs. These developments lead to the creation of new services designed to address families unmet care needs. A wide range of reproductive forms of work that had been previously performed without pay inside the household were converted into paid services and taken over by for profit businesses, for example, preparing and serving food, were increasingly performed by restaurants and fast food establishments, caring for handicapped and elderly people, by nursing homes, nurturing children by childcare centers, and providing emotional support, amusement, and companionship by counseling offices, recreation centers, and health clubs. A large army of low-wage workers, mostly women, and disproportionally racial and ethnic minorities were hired by these businesses to perform these new services. At the same time, not all household tasks have been taken over by corporations. Caring for the needs of infants, for example, is very labor intensive and therefore is not amenable to commodification, which is to say, it has limited profit potential from a business perspective, hence, these especially difficult and dirty tasks have largely remained in the household, and working white women have increasingly hired minority women to perform these tasks for them. Over time, minority women have disproportionally performed two forms of paid care work. Domestic service in private households that involves caring for infants, cleaning house, laundering clothes, scrubbing floors, and low-paying public service jobs, like cooking and serving food in restaurants, cleaning office buildings, and caring for the elderly and ill and nursing homes. On the other hand, White women had been disproportionately employed in higher level care professions, like nursing and teaching, and manage your occupations within care organizations. Interestingly, there has been a lot of discussion about how this arrangement has benefited the children of white middle-class women, but very little discussion about how this arrangement fails to provide for minority women's children. In part because of stereotypes, that minority women are not as competent as parents, and that their children would be actually better cared for away from their homes by care professionals like teachers and nurses, most of whom, again, are white. One of the most egregious examples of this patronizing ideology, was when numerous Native American children were forcibly removed from their homes, and put in boarding schools, as shown in this clip from Steven Spielberg's movie into the West. In the segment that follows, we will consider some of the present day dilemmas created by these historical developments.
