HILL, BRIDGET. Servants. English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1996. vii, 278 pp. £35.00.

ROMANO, DENNIS. Housecraft and Statecraft. Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore [etc.] 1996. xxvi, 333 pp. Ill. $54.00.

Over the last two decades, our understanding of domestic service, its changes throughout history and its links to larger political and economical transformations, has been enriched by feminist and historical scholarship. A first step towards a better understanding of domestic work was made when feminists challenged the dominant theoretical bias that formerly had concentrated exclusively on the production process, and argued that the separation of the domestic and the public which occurred with the emergence of capitalism became the root cause of women's subordination. This separation resulted in a situation where anything associated with the domestic became hidden, undervalued and perceived as unimportant. In later debates this dichotomizing framework has been further developed into discussions on the ways in which “the domestic” may shift in content and form; how it may be associated with not only what is conducted within the home, but also with the type of work (domestic work) and the type of people (women) considered as belonging in the home. Although the boundaries separating the domestic and public spheres may perpetually experience shifts, the implications of this separation are considered to be more or less clear, namely the devaluation of women's work and women's identity.

The history of prostitution, defined as the commercial exchange of sexual services, provides a fertile ground for the study of the intersections between gender, race and class. Obviously, the sale of sexual labour has implications for constructions of gender, although the specific implications may change with time. Commercial sex offers particularly sharp insights into the ways in which gender considerations intersect with class and race because of the physical intimacy and potential for procreation involved in the sex act. Prostitution literally forces societies to come face to face with their assumptions about and attitudes to class and race hierarchies and relationships. The Australian case is especially useful for studying these relationships because of the imbalance in the ratio of men to women which has characterized colonial society generally and certain types of communities in particular, and the ways in which this imbalance affected some classes and ethnic groups more than others. Colonial Australia also provides a complex tapestry of ethnic/racial issues because it included divisions not just between “white” settlers and indigenous Aborigines, but also between both of these groups and various groups of immigrant, “coloured” workers. In the twentieth century, when demographic patterns became more balanced in gender terms and more homogenous in racial terms, the international sex industry continued to be important because it played a part in Australia's quest for recognition as an independent member of the community of “civilized”, white, nations. Finally, the process of reassessing Australia's place in the world was intimately connected to a reassessment of Australia's domestic policies, both in relation to prostitution generally and to the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women.

In the years before and immediately after World War I, gendered and racialized bodies at work became the focus of debate and discussion in France amongst an informal alliance of engineers, doctors, scientists, employers, workers, and the state. Seduced by the promise of “modernity”, and the seemingly endless possibilities of science and mechanization, the state attempted to modernize public services and employers sought new ways to discipline labor for greater productivity. Both mobilized rationalization – Taylorism and work science – in the service of greater efficiency and in an effort to identify the allegedly “natural” qualities that made gendered and racialized workers suitable for certain kinds of jobs and would exclude them from others. A not insignificant dimension of this project lay in how French work scientists began to envision the potential uses of gendered French and colonial labor. The development of the French North-African and Indochinese colonial empires around the turn of the century heightened attention to racialized difference. World War I had opened the opportunity to use racialized colonial bodies, both on the military front and in the factory. Thinking about race and gender characteristics continued to influence work science and its applications in the 1920s and 1930s. Work scientists' experiments to ascertain the physical endurance of colonial male workers and white workers underscored the durability of gender meanings i n dealing with white French workers and the instability of those meanings in assessing the abilities of workers of color.

The 1999 plan of the Social Democratic government to adjust Germany's 1913 nationality law has generated an intensely emotional debate. In an unprecedented action, the opposition Christian Democrats managed to gather hundreds of thousands of signatures against the adjustment that would have granted citizenship to second generation “immigrants” born in Germany. At the end of the twentieth century, Germans still strongly cling to the principle of jus sanguinis. The idea that nationality is not connected ot place of birth or culture but rather to a “national essence” tJiat is somehow incorporated in the subject's blood has been strong in Germany since the early nineteenth century and has been especially decisive for the country's twentieth-century history.