Many domestic workers lack basic labor and employment protections in the United States. One of the main reasons domestic work remains unregulated by government lies in cultural and social perceptions of the so-called private “domestic sphere” and the more public “economic sphere” where work prevails. These perceptions, termed by sociologists as “separate spheres” and “hostile worlds,” assert that the domestic and economic spheres operate under different and conflicting values, emotions, and norms. In the former, care norms and love structure relationships, while in the latter actors are motivated by rationality and profit. Government would corrupt the domestic sphere if it subjected it to the rules of the economy. 

This Essay describes how domestic work activists overcame separate spheres and hostile worlds perspectives in Illinois in 2016 when they prevailed at the legislature to obtain a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights. To get the bill passed, activists, much in the feminist tradition of combining the “personal” with the “political,” descended in the Illinois state capital with scores of domestic workers to personally educate legislators about what it meant to work in someone else’s home. In including personal stories in their politics, the activists were able to persuade legislators that keeping domestic work paired exclusively to private regulation was a bad idea — what sociologists consider a “bad match” — because the intimate nature of domestic work places some domestic workers in vulnerable situations conducive to workplace abuse. Public regulation was thus a “good match.” Activists also requested that legislators enact special protections just for domestic workers. They wanted legislators to recognize that domestic work was also “unlike any other work.” They were less successful in getting those special protections passed. Hence, the 2016 bill was only a partial success, but a success it still was. The Essay concludes by asserting that good and bad matching concepts, and the related “connected lives” perspective, can help advocates, including lawyers, understand their meaning-making roles as they pursue justice and fairness.