From rural villages to towns. Personal narratives of female domestic workers in Ethiopia and Tanzania

This thesis will present the ethnographic research I carried out in Ethiopia and Tanzania in 2018 and 2019 as part of my PhD program, in collaboration with Comunità Volontari per il Mondo (CVM), an Italian non-governmental organization (NGO) that works to support female domestic workers in both countries. The research was largely conducted in two cities where the Italian NGO has its premises: Debre Markos (Ethiopia) and Morogoro (Tanzania). The research design entailed a comparative analysis of the situation of female domestic workers in both countries. In my study, I take domestic workers to be the young women who move from rural and semi-urban areas to major towns and cities to work within households outside their own families of origin. Their main work activities encompass cleaning the house, washing clothes, cooking, running errands and taking care of children and sick people. They are primarily live-in domestic workers, so they reside in the households where they work. Through an analysis of their narratives, I have sought to shed light on the gendered relations in which women’s lives are embedded, and on the complex interweaving of personal strategies and social constraints regulating such relations. In particular, I have explored the reasons behind their movements, life trajectories, future plans, their ambitions and expectations, and the strategies they employ to carve out spaces of action, overcome challenges and achieve goals. By privileging a relational framework (Strathern 2014), I have explored the various (kin and non-kin) relations that women mobilize within and outside the workplace in different phases of their lives: from when they leave their villages of origin to life and work in their cities of current residence (where I met them). Domestic workers live in asymmetric power relationships, some of which seem to recall master-slave relations. These multiple (asymmetric) relations in women’s lives turn out to be both constraining and enabling. Interestingly, they include idioms and practices of power and domination, as well as of protection and care. Through the analysis of domestic workers’ narratives, I have explored the everyday making of these asymmetric relations which occur at multiple levels in their lives. One of the key aspects of this work is precisely the attempt to illustrate this intricate and ambiguous relational knot, where relations of power, domination and exploitation, and relations of love, care and protection, are hard to disentangle.