ABSTRACT
In chapters 8 and 9, my focus is on the response oftwo women's associations to the presence of ethnic minority women and thus to a new and racialised constituency of gender. My main argument here is that both organisations, in different ways, were unable to totally relinquish their primary roles as representatives of indigenous Italian women. Moreover, their inability to be fully inclusive of migrant women's interests was partially determined by the conflict of interest implicit within the employer/employee domestic work relationship which characterised relationships between Italian women and migrant women. This chapter will consider the evolution of the ACLI-COLF organisation from the 1970s to the early 1990s. In the 1970s, both the delegitimisation of Catholic ideology1 and the strength of the trade unions were particularly pertinent for associations representing domestic workers. As discussed in chapter 4, in the face of these new trends, the API-COLF remained committed to the pre-1971 strategy, reinforcing its links with Catholicism,2 while the ACLI-COLF anticipated a fruitful relationship with the workers' movement. I shall focus here on the ACLI-COLF association, as it is this latter association which embarked on a radical new policy direction to challenge the organisation of the domestic work sector.
