ABSTRACT
This chapter examines domestic service in Jamaica outside of 'modern' labor regulations, which treated their employers' households as 'workplaces', and their work as 'real' labor. Twentieth-century Jamaican society was built on foundations of centuries of European colonialism and enslavement of Africans. As Higman argued, the domestic service sector always employed 'large proportions of young people'. Although Romero's analyses were focused on the experiences of Chicana domestic workers in white American homes, her insights are applicable in the Jamaican context, where racial difference was apparently less of an issue. Since domestic workers in Jamaica often shared the race/color, gender and even class designation of their employers, the barriers between the groups appeared to be perforated so that domestic workers and their employers may have seemed to be redefining and redeploying the Afro-Creole concept of maternal networks for the benefit of the nation's children.
