Women of color in white households: Coping strategies of live-in domestic workers

Drawing upon data from fifty intensive interviews, this research explores coping styles used by live-in colored domestics working for white employers. Immigration and labor policies enable middle-class Canadian families to employ a captive, vulnerable group of Third World women in an exploitative situation which generates gender, class, and race discrimination. Three types of coping strategies are identified: external—mobilizing community resources and ties with people outside the labor situation, internal—utilizing resources from within work situations, cognitive—altering the definition of the situation. By demonstrating the power resources of the oppressed, this study attempts to overcome the powerlessness bias in the literature on domestics.