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“That is why users do not understand the maps we make for them”: Cartographic gaps between experts and domestic workers and the Right to the City
Valentina Montoya-Robledo
Journal:

Data & Policy / Volume 5 / 2023

Published online by Cambridge University Press:

21 December 2023, e41
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A broad gap exists between “God’s eye” transit maps from above that experts draw and how domestic workers map their commutes in Bogotá and Medellín, Colombia, through a street-level approach. Based on fieldwork conducted in both cities between 2017 and 2018, including interviews, participant observation, and social cartography, this translational article brings domestic workers’ understanding of the city they traverse daily vis-à-vis how experts conceive modern and rational public transportation systems. Delving into the literature on cartography, the Right to the City (RtC), and feminist geography, the study analyzes this gap and finds how it limits an effective RtC for this massive group of female commuters. It further provides public policy recommendations to address the gap and ensure RtC for all.

Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement
Laura Schwartz
Published online:

19 July 2019

Print publication:

18 July 2019
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In the early twentieth century, women fought for the right to professional employment and political influence outside the home. Yet if liberation from household 'drudgery' meant employing another woman to do it, where did this leave domestic servants? Both inspired and frustrated by the growing feminist movement, servants began forming their own trade unions, demanding better conditions and rights at work. Feminism and the Servant Problem is the first ever history of how these militant maids and their mistresses joined forces in the struggle for the vote but also clashed over competing class interests. Laura Schwartz uncovers a forgotten history of domestic worker organising and early feminist thinking on reproductive labour, and offers a new perspective on the class politics of the suffrage movement, challenging traditional notions of who made up the British working-class.

5 - The Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland
Laura Schwartz, University of Warwick
Book:

Feminism and the Servant Problem

Published online:

19 July 2019

Print publication:

18 July 2019, pp 147-182
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Summary

This chapter examines the ‘servant problem’ from the servant’s point of view through a history of the Domestic Workers’ Union of Great Britain and Ireland (est. 1909–1910). It is the first ever in-depth history of this or any other servants’ trade union in Britain. It provides an important new perspective on both class relations in the suffrage movement and the gender politics of labour organising in the years leading up to the First World War. My account relies upon the correspondence pages of the Woman Worker and the Glasgow Herald, and on press cuttings from the local and radical press. These letters provide an unusual opportunity for the voices of rank-and-file domestic workers to be heard discussing working conditions and the possibility of self-organisation. The DWU aimed to be a union run ‘by servants for servants’. It sought to reconfigure the mistress–maid relationship as a formal employment contract, and did not shy away from the potential for class antagonism between these two groups of women despite also having its roots in the suffrage movement.