Sisterhood and Domestic Service: Race, Class, and Gender in the Mistress-Maid Relationship

The relationship between a domestic worker and her employer is unlike any other labor arrangement — it unfolds in the intimate space of the home, blurs the boundaries between personal and professional, and is structured by deep inequalities of race, class, and gender. In Sisterhood and Domestic Service, Mary Romero critically examines whether feminist solidarity can bridge the divide between women who hire domestic help and the women who perform it.

Drawing on interviews with Chicana domestic workers, Romero challenges the notion that shared gender identity creates meaningful bonds across the employer-employee relationship. Instead, she reveals how the mistress-maid dynamic reproduces racial and class hierarchies even within households that consider themselves progressive or feminist.

Published in Humanity and Society in 1988, this article was among the first to apply an intersectional lens to the politics of domestic labor, anticipating debates that would reshape feminist theory in the decades to come.