Introduction

Narratives of paid domestic work across time and space point to the dilemmas and contradictions faced by domestic workers seeking respect in their lives. Contemporary accounts of paid domestic work, striving to understand global economic and demographic changes, rarely consider the domestics’ desire for prestige and upward social mobility, important constituents of the notion of respect. Rather, they are driven by the expansion of young female migrant workers from poor, undeveloped regions to service the affluent across the world. This process of globalisation and feminisation of paid domestic work has been attributed to shifts in the structure of the labour market in the developed world with a rise in dual career households (cf. Standing, 1999; Kabeer, 2007) alongside cuts in public services limiting the provision of care services to the elderly and young, in a context of both declining fertility and ageing populations (Yeates, 2005; Razavi, 2007).

Respectability is a signifier of class, but always inscribed in gender identities. It involves a complex set of practices, defined by appropriate behaviour, language and appearance, apart from social rules and moral codes, which enable the framing of people and thereby justify the unequal distribution of resources (Skeggs, 1997). Women domestic workers do have a clear knowledge of their class position and social place; yet in their struggle for social mobility, they invest in symbols of respectability as defined by the dominant. This is, however, not a straightforward process, but highlights the ambivalence about giving up their ethnic identities and symbols of respect for elite, middle-class norms of respectability. The ambivalence persists as they realise that gaining the outward signs of material respectability does not automatically lead to a notion of respect as reflected in the treatment meted out by others (Sennett and Cobb, 1973). Respect involves mutuality, which emerges equally from the development of the self and the interaction with and recognition from others (Sennett, 2003), but for these women, there remains a hidden anxiety about the quality of their experience and its legitimisation in society.