Before the College of Arts and Sciences' D3 event - Dinner and Discussion at Drexel - even began, each table was given a page of questions that were to be discussed in lieu of the evening's lecture by Drexel's guest speaker, Dr. Raka Ray. After these discussions, Dr. Ray took the podium and discussed her new book: Traveling Cultures of Servitude: Loyalty and Betrayal in New York and Calcutta.

Ray began her talk with a theory of women's collective action. Women who participate in collective action strive to change wages, rape laws, and other such concerns. Ray's book discusses large social changes wrought by women's collective action, and it discusses how in daily life, it's necessary to deal with inequality or "fight against it." Ray thinks about "the structure of things and how we counteract them"; she believes that social inequality permeates our lives and begins in the complex world of the home and the work that takes place therein.

Ray has noticed two things about domestic work. First, that many of the women activists Ray has spoken with have employed domestic workers, and that it has affected their activities. "It freed them up," Ray said. It allowed them to go out and fight inequality in their lives. Second, Ray noticed the daily battles that husbands and wives had over domestic work were highly politicized. Ray posed the question that if domestic duties are work, should wages be paid for said work? If so, who would pay them—the spouse? If domestic work was considered a labor of love, Ray continued, then there wouldn't be any battles over who did the work and if the worker should receive payment. However, domestic work is not considered a labor of love, and it therefore breeds inequality between who does it, and doesn't do it.

"Households created power inequality," Ray said, as well as gender inequality; they also sustain this inequality. Ray went into writing her book knowing these things. She wrote about New York, as well as Calcutta, because she wanted to show that distance does not matter in terms of inequality. Every culture of the developed world has a culture of servitude, she claims. In one form or another, servants are used to do the household work that no one else wants to do. She lamented that a house is not supposed to be a place of labor, but a place of refuge, of relaxation. However, not all ideals of relaxation are the same from person to person. The home thus creates racial and gender inequality issues that become normalized in society.

Domestic servants were, in feudal times, part of the family and comprised a distinctive class of workers. They were characteristic of the middle class. Within the feudal system, most servants were men and served their masters as retainers, or loyal, life-long family members. Despite the respect they enjoyed from their masters, though, they were still not of equal status.

In modern times, servants are being seen, more and more, as being essential, and they are now serving in smaller homes closer to their "masters," or employers, and with less privacy. Some people, Americans especially, do not see the domestic worker as any sort of friend, but someone whose presence is uninviting or unsavory. Other people have developed close friendships that ended in what the employer saw as a betrayal of that friendship. Ray said that modern women "tried to create horizontality," or equality of status, between themselves and their servants. Because the home is a complex labor site that is also tied up with strong emotions, the eventual impossibility of equality between employer and domestic worker will be a let down, a betrayal, when the employer misunderstands the need of the servant. In the end, the employer-employee relationship can never become equalized, and this fact is no different in the case of the master and the domestic servant.

Ray is an associate professor of sociology and South and Southeast Asia studies, chair of the Center for South Asia Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Gender and feminist theory are her special interests.

Charlotte Lenox is majoring in English at Drexel, and is a transfer student from the University of Alaska Southeast. She was born and raised in Juneau, Alaska.