The Myth of Being "Like a Daughter"

A small group of dedicated women is organizing domestic servants in Lima, Peru. Like the maids they organize, these women migrated at a young age from their rural, poor families to work in moderate and upper income, urban families. Their efforts to organize the sector are frustrated both by structural aspects of the relationship of the domestic servant to her family, as well as by the pervasive ideology of the family sphere, which is sanctioned through collective institutions. The journey young women make from the rural to urban context is facilitated through the medium of the family as a socioeconomic and ideological form. The family has seemingly universal characteristics as well as aspects that are specific to particular class and cultural contexts. I shall argue that the idiom of the family as inclusive, just, and as a natural age-based division of labor and power, serves to structure a relationship of inequality-indeed, exploitation-one powerfully legitimized by the church and the state. But, the metaphor of the family is itself contradictory at least in its application to the conditions of domestic service, something that emerges in the experience of the domestic servants themselves. Efforts to organize the domestic servant sector began in the early 1970s, during a period of sustained economic growth and stability of the Peruvian economy. The macroeconomic changes occurring in Peru serve to restructure the nature of the domestic domain, thereby changing the character of the domestic servant's position. As these changes occur, creative strategies for organizing the sector are demanded.