Paid Domestic Work in Postsocialist Contexts: Regional Traits of a Global Phenomenon: An Introduction

It has been a long-standing tradition of European studies of paid domestic labor to consider the former socialist countries as a source of cheap, predominantly female, domestic labor for the countries of Western Europe. As an allusion to the Iron Curtain, which separated two different worlds, the concept of the Care Curtain of Europehas been actively developed. This curtain draws an imaginary boundary or global division of labor between the postsocialist and the rest of Europe, where the former donates care and the latter receives it. For many, this model of movement of carefrom East to West has been the only possible research subject in the realm of paiddomestic labor.