The Woman-of-Color Nanny Novel

The young nanny has long captured our collective imagination as a feminine ideal: youthful, vulnerable in a stranger’s home, and professionally obligated to please. She’s invariably beautiful, or at least sexually appealing in her availability, and it is a classic trope for men to fall for their nannies or governesses: Jude Law, Captain von Trapp, and, of course, the epitome of literary examples, Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. Yet for all her girlishness, the young nanny also gets to serve as a mother figure without having had to make the physical sacrifice of childbirth. And while she lives among the elites, gaining access to their most intimate belongings and quarters, she is not corrupted by their wealth or privileges because she remains an outsider.