Abstract

PITE, Rebekah E. Just Like at Home on Television? Mistresses and Maids in 1960s Argentina. rev.estud.soc. [online]. 2013, n.45, pp.212-224. ISSN 0123-885X.

Over the course of the mid-twentieth century, Doña Petrona C. de Gandulfo established herself as Argentina's leading domestic expert. Her popularity reached new heights when she began broadcasting her cooking lessons on television with her assistant, Juanita Bordoy. This article explores the model of domestic work portrayed by these two women in comparison to that of other Argentine homemakers and their paid help during the 1960s by drawing from a broad base of sources that includes oral histories, television programming, magazines, and government and legal documents. Such evidence suggests that Doña Petrona and Juanita Bordoy's public interactions were both captivating and open to critique because they enabled others to observe a typically private domestic relationship during a period in which many women's relationships to domesticity and to paid work were in flux. This article argues that, to understand the tensions surrounding these changes, we must shift our framework and our terminology. While scholars of Latin America have tended towards casting domestic work relationships as paternalistic, the bonds of power and affection between Doña Petrona and Juanita Bordoy-and countless other domestic pairs-were (and continue to be) more maternalistic in nature.

Keywords : Domestic service; homemakers/housewives,; gender,; class; power; television.

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