Mucamas y domésticas – Trabajo femenino, justicia y desigualdad (Mar Del Plata, Argentina, 1956-1974)

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the history of domestic service through the reconstruction of some the paths transited by paid domestic work in Argentina in the central decades of the Twentieth Century. We observe the construction of categories such as “domestic maid” and “hotel maid” in the legislation of this period and we compare the different rights granted to these workers. Later, we study the uses of the law performed by different actors, in which the overlapping of those categories is recurrent. The history of the law and its uses reveals that, even decades after different legal regimes were passed, there were channels of communication between the situations of these workers, based in the closeness of their activities with unpaid domestic work, usually done by women. While this period saw the emergence of different paths for different kinds of “maids”, it was also the scenery for their confusion and overlapping; the result was a complex system of inequalities in the world of labor and justice.