Home Economics: Domestic Service and Gender in Urban Southern Africa

(Hardback)

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Home economics provides the first in-depth study of domestic service in black households in southern Africas post-colonial cities. Its innovative theoretical approach brings waged and kin-based domestic labour and child and adult workers into a single frame of analysis for the first time, and foregrounds female labour.

Focusing on Lusaka and drawing wider comparisons, the book traces how black employers and workers reworked domestic service practices as part of broader responses to changing gendered employment patterns, economic decline and endemic poverty. In this context, kin-based domestic service gradually displaced wage labour and women and girl workers came to dominate kin-based and waged domestic service, with profound consequences for labour regulation and worker organising. This rich, timely study challenges the narrow focus of existing scholarship and policymaking and breaks new ground in the history and theorisation of work in southern Africa.

Author Bio

Sacha Hepburn is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London