In the late summer of 1909, young immigrant women workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York's garment industry famously went on strike to secure better hours, higher wages, and safer working conditions. Within a few months, over 20,000 in the “needle trades” joined in a pivotal strike—The Uprising of Twenty Thousand — that led to profound gains to the women's labor movement such as the 52-hour workweek and the right to paid time off. Working women's other gains in the Progressive Era include the formation of the Women's Trade Union League to aid in the organization of labor unions as well as the creation of the Women's Bureau to study and advocate for women in the workplace. These gains were dramatic and lasting, but they did not affect the majority of working women who did not work in factories, schools, and hospitals prior to 1940 (most working women were employed as domestics). In Unprotected Labor, historian Vanessa H. May explores the factors which prevented domestics from achieving the same rights as their counterparts in other employment sectors and asks why labor reformers did not push for better hours, wages and working conditions for these workers in tandem with their efforts to improve conditions for women in other sectors.

May first emphasizes the fundamental difference between domestic work and other jobs: domestics worked in the private arena of middle- and upper-class homes—not more public places such as sweatshops or beauty parlors. Then she questions why middle-class women's groups, who were amongst the biggest champions of workplace regulation for public jobs, were not advocates for the regulation of domestic work in private homes. May's main thesis is that middle-class women reformers viewed the home as a private space “dedicated to the nurturance of middle-class families” (p. 12), which should not be subject to government regulation. May argues that these middle-class reformers proved to be exceedingly hypocritical individuals who fought for justice for women workers in their public lives but mistreated their servants in their private lives.

Her study of domestic service focuses on servants in New York City, which she argues was at the forefront of the labor movement during the early twentieth century (p. 5). Thus, May posits that an investigation of the failures of domestic service regulation in New York is an instructive case study that has applications for the rest of the nation. May does not provide quantitative evidence on domestic service but instead brings forth an impressive compilation of qualitative evidence from contemporaneous newspapers articles, domestic servants’ interviews, women's group meeting minutes, and union records. While the bulk of the primary source evidence originates from employers, activists, and government bodies, May provides enough accounts from servants themselves to show the severity of the injustices they faced and how employer complaints vastly contradicted those of domestics. May explains that middle-class women routinely complained that domestics had a “proclivity for sexual vice” (p. 30) and that employment agencies should vet them on a set of moral standards while domestics described incidents of sexual assault by the men of the house (p. 49). In another example of contradiction, employers expressed fears that servants brought diseases into their homes and pressed for the introduction of bills in the state legislature requiring domestics to undergo medical testing (p. 129), while domestics complained that they caught illnesses from their employers’ homes (p. 165). While domestics fought their employers by attempting to unionize and filing complaints with the Legal Aid Society (p. 65), it was not until the end of the 1930s that they began to win some workplace protections. They successfully campaigned against legislation requiring medical testing by arguing that if employers truly cared for the physical wellbeing of domestics, they would enact policies to enforce the eight-hour workday, thus allowing workers to rest and stay healthy (p. 168). But it was not until 2010 that domestic workers earned basic rights such as overtime pay for live-out workers in New York State.

The strength of May's book lies in her use of narrative evidence to unpack the incentives, motivations, and hypocritical nature of middle-class women reformers. A limitation, however, is that she does not adequately address the shifting racial demographics in the domestic sphere that resulted from the Great Migration of African Americans to the northern cities starting in the 1910s, as well as the passage of the anti-immigration acts in the 1920s—events that resulted in domestic service becoming a predominantly African American profession. The public/private dichotomy that May sets up as the foundation for her argument necessitates that these two spheres possess racial homogeneity. The percentage of blacks in domestic service in New York City rose from 14.32 percent in 1910 to 34.9 percent in 1930 (IPUMS census samples). May argues that middle-class women reformers crusaded for women's rights in the public sphere, while denying basic rights for their domestic employees; however, she does not address the fact that these women did not extend their campaigning efforts to black women in the public sphere. For example, these middle-class women reformers were amongst the biggest proponents of the passage of Mothers’ Pensions, which were state-level programs that provided aid to impoverished women with children in the 1910s and 1920s, and which became the blueprints for the creation of federal welfare legislation in the 1930s. Yet, few of these middle-class women supported the provision of mothers’ pensions for African American women, which led to the widespread denial of aid for black mothers and children.

Overall, May successfully exposes the hypocrisy of many middle-class women in regards to white immigrants. Anyone with an interest in early twentieth-century politics, reforms, and poor relief will find May's work intriguing as she sheds new light on a profession that is so frequently in the shadows both in the literature and our everyday lives.