Submerged Citizenship. Domestic Labor in Italy from the 19th to the 20th century century

Abstract

The paper discusses the history of domestic labor as invisible citizenship, making it a great contradiction within the bourgeois juridical order that was consolidated around the notion of the individual as a subject of rights: a society organized around the idea of equality between citizens defined as property owner, and where – at least in theory – there was no place for servitude of any kind. Thanks to the clear separation between family and work, domestic labor in the bourgeois family increasingly became a female prerogative: Labor without rights, still founded on the idea of benevolence, therefore opposed to the idea and the practice of contract. In Italy, legal regulations about domestic work were introduced in 1958, in a context defined by social modernization and “economic miracle”, and by the shrinking offer of domestic labor to the middle class families. Despite its general social decline in the following decades, domestic work had a new surge in the 1990s, associated with care work, and the growing need for assistance for elderly people with special needs. Two problems raised from this new situation, that the Law was only partially capable to see and deal with: on the one side, elderly people solitude and physical vulnerability, and on the other the poverty of the care workers, mostly female, that, facing the incertitude of the future, accept to work outside the legal parameters of the labor laws.