AllMovie

While South Africa was under apartheid, over 1,000,000 black women worked in white homes. This amounted to a state of domestic bondage in which these women were underpaid, overworked, and separated from their own families. In Maids and Madams, Mira Hamermesh uses the complex relationship between black and white women as a microcosm of the racial divide in the country. This powerful documentary examines the tragedy of apartheid through the very human and intense relationship of employer and employee.