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In Workers Like All the Rest of Them, Elizabeth Quay Hutchison recounts the long struggle for domestic workers’ recognition and rights in Chile across the twentieth century. Hutchison traces the legal and social history of domestic workers and their rights, outlining their transition from slavery to servitude. For most of the twentieth century, domestic service remained one of the key “underdeveloped” sectors in Chile’s modernizing economy. Hutchison argues that the predominance of women in that underpaid, underregulated labor sector provides one key to persistent gender and class inequality. Through archival research, firsthand accounts, and interviews with veteran activists, Hutchison challenges domestic workers’ exclusion from Chilean history and reveals how and under what conditions they mobilized for change, forging alliances with everyone from Catholic Church leaders and legislators to feminists and political party leaders. Hutchison contributes to a growing global conversation among activists and scholars about domestic workers’ rights, providing a lens for understanding how the changing structure of domestic work and worker activism has both perpetuated and challenged forms of ethnic, gender, and social inequality.

In a summer 2018 interview conducted for this special issue of RHR, the US-born lesbian feminist artist, activist, and scholar Margaret Randall reflects on the Cuban Revolution’s achievements and shortcomings in the arena of women’s and sexuality rights. What have women and sexual minorities contributed to Cuba’s experiment in radical equality, and what remains to be done? How has feminism—in all its variety—shaped the aspirations of Cuban men and women, and what have US feminists learned from their efforts? What makes gender justice happen, and who or what constitutes barriers to change?

In recent years, the life course perspective has received increasing support from researchers across a number of behavioral science disciplines. The purpose of this article is to examine the relevance to social work of selected findings of the last 15 years of empirical investigation of life course concepts and themes. This discussion is organized around five basic concepts (cohorts, transitions, trajectories, life events, and turning points) and six interrelated themes (interplay of human lives and historical time, timing of lives, linked or interdependent lives, human agency in making choices, diversity in life course trajectories, and developmental risk and protection). Implications of life course theory and research for social work are overviewed.

The regulation of labor relations and social rights substantially changed workers’ lives over the course of the 20th century. Domestic service, however, was only poorly and belatedly protected under labor law, and its incorporation proceeded in a slow, ambiguous, and nonlinear manner. The specific ways in which domestic service regulation emerged in Chile and Argentina, respectively, offer insight into this process and also present some important contrasts, despite the nations’ geographic proximity. In Chile, although the rights recognized for household workers were limited, the Labor Code of 1931 included an article on domestic service. In Argentina, the first comprehensive regulation for this sector was a special statute sanctioned by decree in 1956. In both cases, the “special” nature of such regulation was attributed to the place of domestic service in family life. As domestic labor was reconceptualized through legislative reform in each country, household workers gradually came to enjoy some, but not all, of the rights guaranteed to other workers.