"I Didn't Come Here to Do Housework"

On the basis of 13 in-depth interviews with Swedish women and one month of ethnographic work in the Swedish community in Singapore in 2009, this article examines how Swedish women, travelling from Sweden to Singapore as "expatriate wives" in the wake of their Swedish husbands, navigate gendered and racialised transnational spaces of domestic work and negotiating their changed identities as both housewives and employers of live-in maids in the household. How do the women justify their current division of labour in the light of Swedish national ideologies of work and Swedish ideals of gender and class equality?