ABSTRACT
The employment of domestic workers has been a vexed question for feminists globally with writers such as Enloe questioning whether the notion of a 'feminist domestic employer' was not in fact a contradiction. Global examples relating to the US, Singapore, and Brazil all indicate a problematic relationship between female employers and their domestic employees and the resurgence of domestic work in southern Europe is bringing the issues to the fore. Despite the existence of patchy state welfare provision in some of the southern European countries, as well as a familiaristic social structure, the issue of domestic work continues to be somewhat misleadingly conceptualized as a relationship between women - female employers and female employees. From a global perspective, the domestic work sector is increasingly the target of specific pro-active government regulation. By the end of the 1970s, the ACLI-COLF had begun to interpret the increased demand for domestic workers as a replacement for the housewife figure.
