Vanessa May
Professor
Department of History
Seton Hall University
United States of America
Biography
She is interested in the history of women and gender in the United States. Her book examines the public debate over domestic service in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She explains how and why domestics, the largest category of women workers before 1940, did not win protective labor legislation until 1974. In contrast, women industrial workers benefited from this legislation as early as 1908. She investigate the debate over domestic service from both sides of the class divide, assessing middle-class women’s reform programs as well as domestics’ efforts to determine their own working conditions. She argues that working-class women sought to define the middle-class home as a workplace even as employers and reformers strictly regarded the home as private space.
Research Interest
History of women and gender in the United States
Publications
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• Domestic Service (Book Chapter), In Joe W. Trotter, Stephanie Shaw & Daniel Littlefield (Eds.), Encyclopedia of African American History, New York: Facts on File, April 2011
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• Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle Class Reform in New York 1870-1940 Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011
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• "Standardizing the Home?: Women Reformers and Domestic Service", Journal of Women’s History, June 2011
