For several decades, labor history has been a key part of Chilean history. Anyone entering the field will read about miners, rural laborers, artisans, and industrial workers, to name a few. Throughout her career, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison has focused on women, a group often left out of the standard narrative. In her first book, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor, and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930 (2001), women workers took center stage, and a rather different history of Chile came to light. In this new book, Hutchison homes in on a figure so omnipresent in Chilean society yet also lacking coverage in recent scholarship: domestic workers. This is not to suggest that there is a total absence of scholarship on domestic workers, but Hutchison argues that the limited literature tends to think of them as marginalized and oppressed, not active agents of change themselves. Instead, Hutchison brings out the...

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