Over the past decades social sciences have observed the increasing expansion of domestic jobs in contemporary European societies as a heterogeneous phenomenon, which resulted from a progressive externalisation: those tasks previously carried out for free by women in the household (housework, assistance for the elderly, child care) are today taking new forms. Since a large number of women in Western industrialised countries have entered the workforce, including traditionally male-skilled jobs, the demand for domestic employees has become even more urgent. This process of externalisation has successfully created the need for unskilled and flexible jobs in the area of social reproduction in which especially migrant women are currently predominant, suggesting not only the strong persistence of an international sexual division of labour in terms of the productive-reproductive work dichotomy, but also highlighting a process of racialisation and ethnic construction in the latter.

Through an interesting comparative study that focuses on France and Italy, Scrinzi’s book has the merit of placing this trend in a globalised and neoliberal context, which is affected by several social and long-term changes, such as the impairment of the welfare state and the reduction of public/social services; the transformations of the labour market; the intensification of migrations and the role of racism in the new sexual division of labour; the demographic transformations in family structures; the role of public policies in a European context that is marked by the racialisation of social relations, and so on.

Drawing on a wide literature on this topic, Scrinzi’s approach lies at the crossroads of two major strands of research: the materialist feminist analysis of the articulation/imbrication of the different social relations (sex, class, race), and the sociology of international migrations. On a methodological level, her ethnographic research is based on a range of interviews and participant observations, made between 2000 and 2005, based in Paris and Genoa. Her research specifically focuses on the study of those intermediary actors who favour the insertion of migrant women in caring for the elderly through particular recruitment and professional training practices, showing how it is precisely in these interactions that the construction of non-qualification and the categories of ethnic otherness are produced and reproduced.

The book is divided into five chapters. As the author points out in the first chapter, the integration of migrant women in domestic employment provides a privileged ground to observe how social relations of sex/class/race mutually reproduce and co-produce themselves, since women are differently impacted by the sexual division of labour according to their class, nationality and ethnicity. Scrinzi uses the notion of an ‘international division of domestic work’ to examine the articulation between the externalisation of domestic work and international migration, stressing the role of public policies in the process of simultaneous construction of the feminisation/non-qualification/racialisation of domestic jobs. This concept allows her not only to explain the articulation of social relations, but also to examine the process of naturalisation and essentialisation on which the social construction of non-qualification of domestic work is based. As Scrinzi argues, one of the effects of the international division of domestic work is the social polarisation that is created between women: between employers and employees, as well as between different groups of the precariously employed among whom a hierarchy is established. The second chapter focuses more on how the international division of domestic work is supported differently in France and Italy by institutional factors and regulatory frameworks, taking into account the role of migration policies and their interaction with the reorganisation of welfare policies.

The third and fourth chapters respectively focus on the analysis of the different modalities through which in Italy and France migrant women are selected, trained and integrated in home care services for seniors. In Italy the most common trend of organisation is ‘direct employment’ – broadly not declared, and generally mediated by informal networks that are related to the local Catholic institutions, while in France recruitment is managed by a formal associative sector supported by the state via intermediary organisations. Such diversity in the organisation of domestic work should be associated with significant differences in terms of the presence of migrants in society, of colonial histories and immigration histories, of migration policies and of registers used in the construction of ethnicity.

In the fifth and final chapter the author develops an interesting comparative approach, which allows her to compare the different mechanisms in France and in Italy for naturalising migrant domestic work and for (re)producing ‘ethnic otherness’. As Scrinzi observes, the issue of racism in this type of work has largely remained invisible in both scholarly research and public debate. One of the most remarkable aspects of her investigation is indeed the clarification of the dynamics of racialisation and building of hierarchies between different groups of workers, which take place in the recruitment/training/placement practices. In doing so, the author illustrates how the role of women responsible for such practices is decisive and at the same time ambiguous in the construction of the non-qualification and racialisation of domestic work. In both Italy and France the insertion in those jobs is contradictorily presented to migrant women as an opportunity to integrate, stressing the benefits of their necessary ‘professionalisation’ – a representation that dramatically obscures the social relationships at work. At the same time, they are indeed associated with a model of traditional or ‘premodern’ femininity.

As Scrinzi points out, the category of ‘migrant domestic worker’ repeatedly employed in the book, is a very heterogeneous category, which is likely to naturalise an extremely complex reality, not being able to take into account the different life experiences of the women involved, their different nationalities, legal statuses, social classes and education levels; at the same time, this is a key notion for understanding how the experiences of migrant women in incoming countries are affected and shaped by the social relations of ‘race’.

The richness of the analysis of this book shows to what extent such an approach is able to articulate the issues resulting from public action, from the reorganisation of work, from migratory phenomena and the racialisation of social relations, and can be productive in highlighting contemporary social dynamics. However, such questions as the resistance strategies and the complex trajectories of migrants in both their local and transnational dimensions remain in the background of Scrinzi’s analytical focus, representing an excellent starting point for the further research.