Guest Blogger: Ruthann Robson

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Ruthann Robson (left) as today's guest blogger.
Ruthann is Professor of Law and University Distinguished Professor at CUNY School of Law (home institution of IntLawGrrl Rebecca Bratspies, and former home of guest/alumna Penelope Andrews). Ruthann's teaching and scholarship examine constitutional law, family law, feminist legal theory, and sexuality and the law, often with reference to the class dimensions of these issues.
As detailed at her webpage, Ruthann is the author of many works developing a lesbian legal theory, including books like Sappho Goes to Law School (1998) and Lesbian (Out)Law: Survival Under the Rule of Law (1992), works of fiction like a/k/a (1997), and articles. Among her recent essays is “A Couple of Questions Concerning Class Mobility” (2009). Ruthann also is an editor of Constitutional Law Prof Blog, which today joins the "connections" blogroll in IntLawGrrls' righthand column.
In her guest post below, Ruthann presents her new article on class issues relating to domestic service by considering both a recent account of servants in the early 20th century English household of writer Virginia Woolf (as reviewed here) and two early 21st century judicial accounts of domestic service in the United States.

Heartfelt welcome!

A Servant of One's Own

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for this opportunity to guest-post on my article recently published in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law, and Justice.)

My essay, "A Servant of One's Own: The Continuing Class Struggle in Feminist Legal Theories and Practices", starts by taking a look at a wonderful book that I read when it was first published in England. It is Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2007) by Newcastle University Professor of Modern English Literature and Culture Alison Light. I’d recommend the book even if you think Virginia Woolf is overrated or overexposed.

In many ways, Woolf is just a prism refracting working class life and relations amongst the classes in Victorian Great Britain. Alison Light does a pretty good job of not letting Virginia Woolf (and her husband Leonard) become the book’s moral and empathetic focus. The lives of the domestic servants maintain center stage. (credit for photo at left of Sophie Farrell, who cooked for Woolf) Additionally, domestic service is considered in broader social and political frameworks. My essay provides some of the legal background and developments, especially as women struggled for the vote -- and some women obtained it. But not all women, for the original voting qualifications operated to exclude domestic servants.

The essay then considers two recent legal developments.

The first is Long Island Care at Home v. Coke (2007), in which a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court upheld a regulation that exempted certain employees in "domestic service" from minimum and overtime wage laws even if they were hired by a company rather than a household. The essay considers the oral argument and the opinion, both of which make Evelyn Coke (below right), the servant, as invisible and nameless as the ideal servants in the Victorian era. (photo credit)

The second legal development is the trial and proceedings in U.S. v. Sabhnani, 566 F.Supp.2d 139 (E.D.N.Y. Jul 19, 2008), in which the United States prosecuted and a jury convicted a woman and a man for "forced labor" and "document servitude" of two women from Indonesia. This case received a great deal of press with much vilification of the convicted woman, Varsha Sabhnani, who was dubbed “Cruella.”

In comparing the situations of Virginia Woolf and her servants, Long Island Care at Home, Ltd. and its servants, and Varsha Sabhnani and her servants, I found many odd similarities. Issues of migration, immigration, race and ethnicity complicated all the relationships. As for gender, I think it can be very easy to see “class” issues when we think of master/servant, and less simple when there is a woman – perhaps even a feminist woman – in charge. I argue that any relationship categorized as "servant" and "master," even when the "master" is a "mistress," and even when the master/servant dichotomy is viewed as a relatively equal contractual relationship rather than one based on status, is deeply problematical. I also think that feminists need to be much more attentive to class, even when it is messy.

On January 25, ...

... 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London. She grew up in a literary household -- her father was an editor who once had been married to the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of the novel Vanity Fair. After studying at Kings College she became part of the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and took his surname to become Virginia Woolf (right). Under that name she would write many novels and other works. Personal favorite: her 1929 essay "A Room of One's Own," "a discussion of women’s writing and its historical economic and social underpinning." Afflicted with psychiatric disorders throughout her life, she died in 1941, drowning herself in a river near her country home.
... 1996, a judge in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada, awarded a judgment of $750,000 to Leilani Muir, 50, whom the province's Eugenics Board had sterilized without her knowledge in 1959. Having spent her early life in foster homes, the orphan Muir was placed at age 10 (below right) in the Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives, where she was "declared a "moron"" -- as it turned out, a false diagnosis -- "and approved for sterilization." Then a teenager, Muir was told the surgery was for removal of her appendix; only later in life did she learned she had been sterilized. Her successful lawsuit opened the door to many more such actions. This Alberta heritage website elaborates on the extent of the province's sterilization program during the 20th century:

Many thousands of people endured similar experiences under Alberta's Sterilization Act. In 1928, Alberta became one of two provinces and twenty-eight states in North America to pass such legislation. The Act was based on the principals of eugenics, meaning "good birth". It was believed that if only those people with desirable genes bore children, the human race as a whole would improve. The Alberta government and pressure groups including the United Farm Women of Alberta sought to limit the reproduction of many kinds of people, including visible minorities and the "feeble-minded". They attributed much of the rise of crime, poverty, alcoholism and other vices to these people.
Almost 3 000 people were sterilized under Alberta's Sterilization Act. Many more were not released because they would not consent to sterilization. Even in 1972, the year the Act was finally repealed, fifty-five people were sterilized for their "danger of transmission to the progeny of mental deficiency" and for being "incapable of intelligent parenthood".

For readers in the United States, the case calls to mind the similar challenge that Carrie Buck (left) brought before the Supreme Court in 1927. Her unsuccessful suit prompted Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to comment on behalf of 8 of the Court's 9 Justices: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."