Domestic workers’ experiences of motherhood in mid-twentieth-century Buenos Aires

Abstract

This article advances the burgeoning field of the history of emotions by discussing not only how parents expressed love for their children but also how they experienced such emotions, and what impact working conditions had on those experiences. Specifically, it addresses domestic workers’ experience of maternal love in mid-twentieth-century century Buenos Aires, focusing on those who placed their children under institutional care. The files analyzed in this article document workers’ lives beyond the workplace. Moreover, they allow us to trace the movements of workers over time and hear the workers give voice to their experiences. They further permit us to make an affective turn in labor history, showing the constraints imposed on workers by the particularities of their employment as well as their agency and the strategies they developed to confront those limitations.