Many domestic workers support their extended families, and high unemployment tends to silence any complaints about low renumeration and exploitation. Voicing dissatisfaction might lead to dismissal, even after the Labour Relations Act was passed in 1995, which may explain why it took Sindiwe Magona twenty-five years to publish her grievances. For many decades, fieldwork done by white sociologists and anthropologists was the only written source of information about the experiences of domestic workers. Whether their findings ever had a direct influence on employers and policymakers is hard to say.

During the 1980s a couple of collections appeared, including Suzanne Gordon's A Talent for Tomorrow: Life Stories of South African Servants (1985) and Lesley Lawson's Working Women in South Africa (1985). ‘Labour in The Suburbs’ in Vukani Makhosikazi: South African Women Speak (1985) comprises interviews with eight domestic workers, exposing the soul-destroying routine, low salaries and loneliness of their work. One such worker, Johanna Mokone, states: ‘There is nothing good about this work, but at least I have a job.’ Vukani Makhosikazi was published at the height of a very difficult decade in South Africa's history. In the preface to the book, the six authors (fieldworkers, trade unionists and researchers for organisations such as the Black Sash and the South African Institute of Race Relations), emphasise the need ‘to document’ and ‘understand’ the experience of black women in South Africa, the people ‘most abused by the process of apartheid and capitalism’. The authors express the hope that they might succeed in giving an accurate reflection of the women's lives, and that the book would go some way ‘towards enlightening other South Africans about their problems and their potential as a force within the struggle for real change in South Africa’.