Abstract

PEREZ, Inés. Maids and Electric Servants. Images of Paid Domestic Work within the Strategies that Promoted the Consumption of Household Goods (Argentina, 1940-1960). rev.estud.soc. [online]. 2013, n.45, pp.42-53. ISSN 0123-885X.

The home mechanization process in Argentina received a major boost starting in the 1940s, which was related to the housing policies of this period and to the expansion and diversification of consumption. In that context, the discourses that promoted the consumption of domestic appliances relied on the figures of the "maid" and of "electric servants". These images were used in the promotion of these new goods in various texts targeting housewives as way to deal with and also exploit the anxieties generated by the transformations of everyday life which characterized the central decades of the Twentieth Century: on one hand, by changes in domestic service (especially the approval of labor rights for domestic workers); on the other hand, by the changes in gender relations, related to the increasing presence of married middle class women in the labor market and to the emergence of domestic masculinities.

Keywords : Domestic appliances; consumption; advertisements; domestic work; representations.

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