ABSTRACT
Domestic service has endured a long history as an intractable political problem. For feminism, women's relegation to the private sphere of the home was emblematic of women's gendered subordination. Queen Sophie, the maid-cum-madam mutates into a superhero, 'a black superwoman figure who escapes her subaltern condition through fantasy', as a local commentator put it. Colonial relations are confronted, good triumphs over evil, and social justice is restored by Sophie the superhero Employing a domestic worker was no longer just deciding how to get the floors scrubbed, or the laundry done. The South African democratic state thus inaugurated one of the world's most comprehensive efforts to modernize, formalize, and professionalize domestic work, and it did so by legally codifying the maid as 'the most vulnerable worker. In 1906, Lucy Salmon not only argued that the solution to the political problem that was paid domestic work would be to recognize it as employment like any other.
