Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2021

The article looks at the significance of the International Women’s Year (IWY) 1975 for the development of Dutch policy on development-related gender equality issues. It analyses how the route to the IWY World Conference and Women’s Tribune in Mexico City was marked by power struggles in and around the United Nations (UN), amongst member states, and between national governments and women’s organisations, in a geopolitical context of the Cold War and Global North–South divisions. The article discusses how, despite little initial enthusiasm for the IWY amongst the Dutch government and feminist groups, engagement with IWY generated a new momentum for national and international policy advocacy that was to come to fruition after 1975.

This ethnographic study draws from my research on the three main care practices Latin American domestic workers experience in Barcelona: caring as part of their jobs, caring for their families from afar, and caring for each other. Stemming from grounded theory, I will argue that one of the main pressures they suffer daily is social isolation and loneliness. Starting from a brief analysis of how migrant domestic workers bear the burden of care individually – firstly, as part of their jobs and, secondly, as part of their gender duty when being mothers from afar – this paper will trace a third dimension of care seen in collective practices to cope with social isolation. The last section of the empirical overview will focus on the daily navigation of the concepts of self-care, activism, and feminism by Latin American domestic workers. These concepts were encountered in fieldwork by my research participants and given a new meaning when developing their own versions of them based on collective values more present in their home cultures.