Mayeri reviews Nadasen, "Household Workers Unite"

Over at JOTWELL, Serena Mayeri (Penn Law) has posted an admiring review of Premilla Nadasen's Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of the African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon Press, 2015). Here's the first paragraph:

Law is simultaneously at the center and the periphery of Premilla Nadasen’s engaging study of the domestic workers’ movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The absence of regulation made the household a largely lawless space in which the shadow of the law—and of the civil rights movement—nevertheless loomed large. Though not primarily a legal history, Household Workers Unite highlights how the law’s limitations can foster collective action in sometimes surprising ways. Beyond the reach of New Deal legislation and of labor and employment regulation generally, the African American women who dominated the ranks of household laborers for much of the twentieth century campaigned not only for legal rights but for material and dignitary benefits beyond the law, pioneering new organizing strategies that paved the way for the twenty-first century labor movement.

Read on here.