In “White Folks’” Kitchens:
African-American Domestic
Servants in the United States,
1930-1980
MA Thesis
By P.J. van der Wind
1469169
Advisor: Dr. M.E. Messmer
20 ECTS
Contents
Introduction……….…..2 ONE
A Raw Deal: The Racism Black Domestic Servants Faced on the
Governmental and Institutional Level……….……...…...9 TWO
Caught in The Trap: Black Servants in American Society……….…..…26 THREE
Introduction
The United States has a long history of domestic servitude. In the nineteenth century, for many a working class young woman, domestic servitude was seen as a rite of passage, a phase in her life before she could find a husband and care for her own home or move on to a better job. Who worked as a domestic servant differed regionally. In the South, domestic servants were invariably black women.1 The occupation’s association with slavery ensured that no self-respecting Southern white woman would want to work as a domestic servant. Wherever black women started working as domestics the job soon became undesirable for white women, because the low racial status of the women working in the occupation reinforced the low social status of the work itself. The occupation became associated with blacks and thus with an unwanted inferior social standing.2 In the Northern cities, native born white women, immigrant women, and black women all worked as domestics. In small towns and the countryside, some native-born white women continued to work as domestic help, even after immigrant and black
women started taking over the profession in the cities. Throughout the nineteenth century, when native-born white women still constituted a large part of the women working as domestics, the occupation was seen as a stepping stone for working-class women to better jobs or married life. For foreign-born white women it was a way to learn English and to integrate into society. Working as a domestic servant was a means to an end, and these women left the occupation as soon as other jobs opened up.3 This gave rise to
considerable discussion of and publications on the “servant question” among housewives
1
David Katzman, Seven Days A Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 24-27.
2
Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 51.
3
at the end of the nineteenth century. Immigration declined and so did the number of servants.4 During the interwar years black women began to fill the majority of positions for domestic servants in both the North and the South (60 percent of black working women worked as domestics in 1940).5 However, the occupation was never the same stepping stone for black women as it had been for native white and immigrant women. Black women were not able to move on to other jobs because of discrimination and thus remained trapped in domestic service. Whereas for other ethnic minorities as well as for lower-class whites, the domestic service occupation served as a “gateway through which socioeconomic marginals pass into the mainstream,” in the United States, one specific racial group was contained within the occupation and thus within a “social and economic underclass.”6 Because black women were unable to move up the socioeconomic ladder, a significant proportion of American white women would continue to be able to hire
another woman to do her housework until well into the twentieth century. This thesis examines the causes for the “ghettoization”7 of black women in this occupation.
Of course, all African-Americans were restricted by racism throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century. However, domestic servants constitute a special case because they worked and even lived within close proximity of the people that discriminated against them. In addition, an examination of this particular group also illuminates the interaction of the three major structures of power within American
society: race, class and gender. Although research on domestic service has been done in a
4
Ibid., 62.
5
Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 12-13. Although this number dropped to around 50 percent by 1944, black women still constituted 60 percent of all servants at that time.
6
Rollins, 55.
7
number of contexts,8 the attention has not yet been focused on the structural and institutional circumstances that caused black women to be ghettoized into domestic service. Although many studies on domestic service identify racism and discrimination as the main causes for the dominance of black women in the occupation throughout the twentieth century, they fail to fully analyze how different forms of racism and other prejudices interacted with each other to maintain the situation.9
On the most basic level, discrimination constitutes the differential treatment of a person or group because of characteristics unrelated to their own merits, such as their race, color, sex, or social class. This simple definition presents a problem, however, because it suggests that racial discrimination only occurs in situations in which the treatment is easily identified as race-based. Yet racismis not only expressed in forms that are directly, explicitly, or even consciously related to race, but in more subtle forms as well. These instances in which the racial component of a discriminatory treatment is not immediately obvious need to be taken into account as well when examining the weak position of black domestics. Many of these obscure instances of racism can be called institutionalized racism, a term attributed to Stokely Carmichael: “‘The second type [of racism, institutionalized racism,] is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. … The second type originates in the
operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type [individual racism].’”10 Because this form of
8
David Katzman (1974), Judith Rollins (1985), Phylllis Palmer (1989), Bonnie Thornton Dill (1995).
9
David Katzman, Bonnie Thornton Dill, and Judith Rollins, for example, all identify certain economic conditions and individual situations in which racism was an important factor, yet they do not examine the connection between these conditions and larger systemic forms of racism that influenced black working-class women.
10
racism is ingrained in established social, governmental and educational institutions, it is often taken for granted and no longer recognized as race-based discrimination. Very often however, these forms of institutionalized racism can be far more detrimental than
individual acts of racist behavior. But as long as racism is only viewed as isolated actions perpetrated by bigoted individuals, the underlying structures that facilitate and strengthen these expressions of racism will remain in place.
The fact that institutional forms of racism have not received much critical attention so far in scholarly studies on domestic servants might be explained by the fact that the majority of studies are centered on the level of the individual and on
interpersonal relationships, i.e. on the mistress, the employer’s home life, ideology, and standard of living. Most of these studies often only focus on that part of the domestic’s life that she spent in contact with her employers, while her own home life and
responsibilities are not always given proper attention. This focus has resulted in thorough investigations of the relationships of power and dependence between white mistresses and black servants.11 However, racism was not only at work within individual homes, but manifested itself throughout American society as well as at various governmental and institutional levels with which domestic servants came into contact during their job search and afterwards. Although current research has gradually started to take these wider issues into account,12 I contend that a more differentiated approach is both necessary and possible. This thesis will try to provide such an approach by arguing that three levels, in particular, need to be taken into account in order to explain why black women, unlike any
11
Especially by Phyllis Palmer and Judith Rollins.
12
Joe R. Feagin, for example, has focused on the continuing effects of institutionalized racism in his book
other minority in the U.S., were kept “in their place” and unable to progress from the domestic service position to more profitable occupations. In the following, I shall draw on Feagin’s analysis of institutional and ideological forms of racism to argue that
systematic racism on the governmental, societal and individual level worked together and reinforced each other to cause both visible negative consequences for African-American women in terms of income, job opportunities, housing and education, as well as invisible ones in terms of lowering their self-esteem throughout the twentieth century. Even though one might expect that, in particular, visible and institutionalized forms of racism would be greatly diminished after the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s, I shall
demonstrate that, with the exception of a few minor improvements, the actual status and position of servants did not change.
In the first chapter, I shall focus on the governmental/ legal level. I shall in particular draw on Phyllis Palmer’s study of New Deal laws pertaining to the domestic service occupation to analyze how this legislation indirectly disadvantaged black
women.13 This is a good example of why a generalizing explanation of “racism” remains insufficient, because on a governmental/institutional level, racism is not always clearly identifiable. The New Deal legislation, for example, did not exclude black women per se from minimum wage and maximum hour laws, but it did exclude domestic service
workers, a disproportionate number of which were black women, who, it could be argued, were in need of protection even more, given the vulnerable position servants were in due to the personalized employer-employee relationship. Although later amendments and in particular the Civil Rights Act seemingly improved the legal position of domestics, the
13
weak enforcement of those laws did not change their working conditions in practice. This systemic racism contributed substantially to keeping black women powerless.
Chapter two will examine how, on the societal level, racism worked to disadvantage black women and to prevent them from moving out of the service
occupation. They were excluded from jobs other than service and from unions, and were kept in overcrowded neighborhoods through discriminatory housing contracts. In
Chicago, for example, the white property owners who lived around the black ghetto entered into restrictive covenants, promising not to sell or rent their houses to black people.14 Moreover, black women were ignored or discriminated against in women’s organizations such as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and later the National Organization for Women (NOW).15 Racism on the societal level manifested itself in many different areas, all of which influenced the position of black women.
The third chapter concentrates on the one area that has received the most scholarly attention to date: racism on the individual level. Based on the analysis of personal accounts of domestic workers and interviews with former domestic servants, the chapter examines the effects that the treatment of the employer had on the psychological state of the servant, and the ways in which the housewife tried to create a distance
between herself and the servant. White mistresses strove, for example, to denigrate black women psychologically so that they could justify the bad working conditions and low wages. The servant was put down and denied any sort of acknowledgement for her work in order for the mistress to appear superior.16 This also rendered the servant quasi
14
St. Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1945), 179-185.
15
Palmer, 112-113.
16
invisible, as Rollins and Katzman have observed. The servant was not acknowledged as a person and the family she worked for could act as if she was not there. This kind of classism, intensified by racism, constituted an attack on the servants’ dignity and self-confidence and ensured that black servants could more easily be considered inferior.17
In contemporary American society racism still trumps sexism, but classism may become one of the most subtle yet detrimental additional factors, and black working women are still restricted in their choices by all three of them. Joe Feagin poses that today – despite all the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement – everything that the white elite in power does, is still aimed, unconsciously and consciously, at
maintaining “the social, economic, and political organizations and institutions, as well as ideologies, that reflect their interests.”18 Thus it can be argued that American society and politics are still permeated by systemic racism, which is reproduced not primarily through the actions of individual bigots, but mostly through the racially organized structures and the racist ideological apparatuses that protect and justify white privilege.19 This thesis shall attempt to clarify the ways in which institutionalized racism both reflects and strengthens racial prejudice on the societal and individual levels, as well as the manners in which this racial discrimination impacts on black women’s day-to-day lives and on their general position in American society.
Government legislation has the potential to either create change and improvement or to impede the structural progress of minorities. As can be seen in the following chapter, in the case of domestic servants, the government did not always take a leadership role in protecting all American workers.
ONE
A Raw Deal: The Racism Black Domestic Servants Faced on the
Governmental and Institutional Level
Throughout the twentieth century the American government has repeatedly passed legislation to protect its working citizens. Among these, the labor and social laws that were passed during the Great Depression in the 1930s are often understood as the basis of modern protective labor legislation since a number of these laws still remain in effect today. However, domestic servants were not able to enjoy most of the benefits that workers in other industries enjoyed through these measures. They were directly and indirectly excluded from coverage.
It is commonly believed that, by the beginning of the twentieth century, federal government institutions and legislation were no longer intentionally biased, and that, if laws had a prejudicial effect, this would quickly be corrected. However, by examining some of the most important labor laws between the 1930s and the 1980s, as well as comments made by domestics about government assistance, this chapter argues that, in the case of black domestic workers, the legislation passed during the New Deal and afterwards constitutes a typical example of what I have earlier termed indirect
“institutional forms of racism,” given that a disproportionate number of domestic workers (and agricultural workers, the other group of workers that was often excluded from labor legislation) were African-American.20 New Deal legislation that excluded domestic workers thus lends credence to what Joe Feagin argues: that American society is “a total
20
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to
[sic] racist society in which every major aspect of life is shaped to some degree by the core racist realities.”21 This kind of institutional racism is not unintentional, a minor flaw in an otherwise perfect society, but, according to Feagin, is part of the foundation of the United States: “[M]any white analysts have written about the ‘race problem’ as ‘in’ U.S. society. Yet, race relations – or, more accurately, racist relations – are not in, but rather
of this society.”22 Feagin thus insists that racism is a pervasive structural problem in American society and is thus reflected on all levels of government legislation and throughout all governmental institutions.
This chapter examines several New Deal laws, their later amendments, the Civil Rights Act and the enforcement of these laws to demonstrate the structural racial bias that existed in government legislation and institutions. A myriad of laws were passed during the New Deal, and many scholars have written about significant race and gender
prejudice in temporary programs such as the Work Progress Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps.23 This chapter, however, focuses primarily on legislation that originated in the New Deal era but is still in effect today (with the exception of the National Industrial Recovery Act). It will center on two sorts of bias written into these laws which negatively impacted on black domestic workers. Firstly, direct and explicit exclusion, and secondly, indirect exclusions. The Social Security Act, for example, specifically excluded domestic workers from coverage, therefore denying them the rights
21 Feagin, 16. 22 Ibid., 17. 23
Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis, ed. To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 413-415. Lois Scharf, To Work and To Wed: Female
and protections afforded other American workers.24 The National Industrial Recovery Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, on the other hand, did not explicitly exclude domestics, but only covered workers engaged in interstate commerce and thus indirectly excluded domestic work, a local occupation by definition and nature. These laws had a tremendously positive impact on workers’ rights in many other industries in areas such as minimum wages and security in old age. By excluding domestic workers, these New Deal measures thus relegated them to an inferior economic and social position. Furthermore, this chapter argues that, despite amendments to some of the New Deal laws and the passing of the Civil Rights Act in later years, the position of domestic workers did not improve substantially with time, in part because these seemingly positive changes in legislation were not strictly enforced.
All Employees Except … : The Social Security Act
A central part of the New Deal legislation was the Economic Security Act (Social Security Act) of 1935. Social Security had several components to provide a social safety net for the American people. Old Age and Unemployment insurance were federally administered and were paid as an entitlement out of payroll taxes collected by the federal government.25 Old Age assistance, Aid to Dependent Children and Aid to the Blind were federally subsidized payments administered by the states.26 However in section 210 of Title II of the Social Security Act – Federal Old Age Benefits – the following definition is presented: “when used in this title … [t]he term employment means any service, of
24
Another important act from which domestic servants were explicitly excluded was the National Labor Relations Act (The Wagner Act) which gave workers the right to organize themselves into a union and to bargain collectively with their employers.
25
Palmer, 130.
26
whatever nature, performed within the United States by an employee for his employer, except (1) Agricultural labor; (2) Domestic service in a private home.”27 In Title VIII and IX – Taxes with Respect to Employment and Tax on Employers of Eight or More – this definition is repeated.28 Domestic service workers were thus explicitly excluded from Old Age insurance and Unemployment insurance. In 1939, a number of important
amendments were added to the Social Security Act, and although domestic workers fought to be included, Congress decided to make no extensions in coverage at that time.29
This exclusion disadvantaged domestic workers in different ways. Due to the unstable nature of their occupation, unemployment insurance was essential for domestic servants. The inability to draw on it denied servants the security of an emergency income to bridge the gap between jobs that workers in other occupations enjoyed. Moreover, “over a third of women homemakers working as domestics were heads of households. Families with a woman head and without regular access to male income were the most needy, but even in multi-earner families, many had substantial reliance on domestic workers’ incomes.”30 This was even more true of black domestics, many of whom lived in female-headed households. The insurance legislation, however, did not account for families in which a woman was the breadwinner. Men were seen as the primary wage earner in any family, which ignored the circumstances of many domestics who were single, widowed, divorced, or abandoned.31 By excluding domestic workers (a largely female and disproportionately black occupation) from unemployment compensation,
27
“The Social Security Act of 1935,” Social Security Online – History,
https://www.socialsecurity.gov/history/35actinx.html (accessed June 2, 2009)
policy makers demonstrated their bias towards traditional gender roles within American families and made economic survival even more difficult for black domestic workers trying to support their family, with or without a husband.
Old Age insurance would have given domestic workers the right to federally administered pay-outs built up on the basis of the number of years working in a covered occupation.32 This would have provided them with more security in retirement because they would have had a right to these payments whether or not they were in need because of the taxes they and their employers had paid. Such financial protection was an
important aspect of the social safety net that other workers benefitted from, and for low-wage workers it was especially crucial. However, because of their exclusion from the federal insurance programs, domestics in financial need were dependent on Old Age assistance and Aid to Dependent Children, which were administered on a state level. The disadvantage of this regulation was that all states determined individually who qualified for assistance in their programs, and the level of relief also differed from state to state.33 These were issues that all persons applying for assistance encountered, though
dependence on these programs was even more damaging for black domestic workers because their exclusion from federal insurance forced them to appeal to potentially prejudiced state officials to be certified for relief. Often local administrators refused to certify black women for relief because they argued that there were always jobs available for black domestics.34 Black women were thus considered to be “employable” and were frequently denied relief, regardless of whether there was work available, of their
condition to perform the work, or whether it paid wages on which they could subsist. As
32
Palmer, 131.
33
Lewis Meriam, Relief and Social Security (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1946), 28-33.
34
a consequence, this often relegated black domestics in the cities to the so-called “slave markets.” As a black stenographer in Chicago explained:
“A large number of girls go there daily and hire themselves by the day to the highest bidder. The more enterprising would solicit – others would wait to be approached. Many days I worked for 50 cents a day and no carfare – one meal was given. I then applied for relief. After suffering more embarrassment and humiliation I was refused relief because I could now and then get jobs at the ‘slavemarket.’”35
Black domestics were thus forced to remain dependent on the low-wage economy. Moreover, state officials would also often operate under the popular assumption that “‘it cost colored people less to live than white.’”36 These attitudes and myths were part of the barriers black domestics faced when interacting with “white” society and institutions, and these perpetuated their lower standing and maintained white privilege. By leaving the responsibility to meet their needs to the states, the Social Security Act left African-American women vulnerable to arbitrary decisions by state officials, and placed them on an unequal footing, forcing them to face unequal treatment compared to their fellow citizens of a different race and/or social class.
In the 1950 amendments to the Social Security Act, domestic servants were eventually included in the Old Age insurance provision, although not in Unemployment insurance.37 However, as Judith Rollins’ research indicates, noncompliance with the Social Security Act was still wide-spread throughout the 1980s. Out of the 20 domestic
35
Quoted in Drake and Cayton, 246.
36
Quoted in Bound by Our Constitution: Women, Workers and the Minimum Wage by Vivien Hart (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 116.
37
workers she interviewed, only eight had Social Security payments taken out of their wages. Holly Woodward, an employer, rationalized this neglect in the following way: “‘No, I never took out Social Security. … Nobody did it; why should you be a dope and add to your burdens?’”38 Only two of the interviewed employers made Social Security payments for their workers, at the insistence of their husbands. As Ms. Coleman explains: “‘We do it [take out Social Security] because it’s illegal not to and because my husband wants the childcare deduction on his taxes.’”39 In fact, sometimes domestic workers themselves did not want Social Security payments deducted from their wages, though this mainly demonstrates the precarious economic circumstances in which they existed and the hardship resulting from even a small decline of immediate income. More importantly, the employer’s refusal to pay Social Security for their employees reveals their
condescending attitude towards the work performed by their servants. Household work was seen as not warranting the same legal standards as other work, and was viewed as a more informal profession. The apparent lack of enforcement that this wide-spread
breaking of the law points to, is compounded by the reluctance of government agencies to protect domestic workers, a less powerful voting constituency than their employers. This suggests that even during the 1980s there still existed a regulatory culture in which the evasion of this law was tacitly accepted, and that it did not have the stigma of, for example, tax evasion or similar transgressions.
employer-employee relationship. The structural exclusion of domestic workers from direct protection by government legislation throughout much of the twentieth century demonstrates the biased treatment of these workers by the government. It reflects the government’s interest in protecting the racial and economic status quo over the rights of a certain minority group. White middle-class housewives remained a more influential and well-connected constituency than black working-class women. The powerful idea of the home as a private feminine sphere, which could not possibly be intruded upon by legislation, won out over the interests of domestic workers.
“Interstate Commerce” Does Not Include Domestic Workers
In addition to the direct exclusion from Social Security, domestic workers also suffered from the indirect exclusion from other federal New Deal labor laws. One of the first legislative measures that was passed in response to the Great Depression was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933. The Act had two important Titles. Title I was devoted to industrial recovery, it authorized the establishment of industrial codes of fair competition, and supported trade union rights. Title II authorized the president to establish a “Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works,” and provided funding for the projects that this agency would engage in.41 With an executive order, President Roosevelt created the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Public Works Administration (PWA) to implement the NIRA. Congress based its
authority to pass this Act on the “Commerce Clause” in Article 1, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which gave the legislative branch the right “to regulate commerce with
41
“Transcript of National Industrial Recovery Act (1933),” Our Documents, 100 Milestone Documents
foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes.”42 Therefore, only workers in industries engaged in interstate commerce were covered by the NIRA and the NRA.
The codes of fair competition that were designed by the industries and the NRA included “the standards as to the maximum hours of labor, minimum rates of pay, and such other conditions of employment as may be necessary in such trade or industry.”43 However, the Women’s Bureau found that in 1934 only 10 to 15 percent of black women were “‘eligible for participation in code benefits as compared with more than half of all white women workers.’”44 Because domestic workers were not engaged in interstate commerce, no code of fair competition – which provided workers in other industries with basic standards regarding their working conditions – was produced for household work. Domestic workers protested their exclusion because they looked towards the NRA codes as a means to improve their working conditions. Serena Ashford, a cook in New York wrote to president Roosevelt, “pleading for protection and expressing the disappointment of servants who found ‘that the large and unprotected class of Domestics were not
thought of. I keenly felt for my kind when you spoke of the robbery of the Bankers but never mentioned the robbery of Housewives.’”45 The secretary of John Hughes, the NRA director, answered similar letters protesting the exclusion of domestics with the following statement: “‘The homes of individual citizens cannot be made the subject of regulations or restrictions and even if this were feasible, the question of enforcement would be
42
“Transcript of the Constitution of the United States (1787),” Our Documents, 100 Milestone Documents
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=9&page=transcript (accessed June 3, 2009)
43
“Transcript of National Industrial Recovery Act (1933)” Title I, section 7 (b).
44
Quoted in Palmer, 119.
45
virtually impossible.’”46 Despite their protests, domestics were thus not able to gain protection from exploitation by their employers. The refusal of NRA administrators to consider the effects of the exclusion of domestic service from the codes of fair
competition suggests that domestics were not viewed as workers of equal status by the authorities.
The NIRA was deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935, and operations of the NRA and PWA ceased quickly after that. They were substituted by The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which was one of the last pieces of major New Deal legislation. With provisions on child labor, wages, hours and over-time, the Act aimed to replace the wages and hours provisions in the NIRA and the NRA codes that became void after that Act was struck down. The FLSA states that the purpose of the act was “to provide for the establishment of fair labor standards in employment in and affecting interstate commerce.”47 Similar to the NIRA, the FLSA was thus based on the power granted to the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, and only
workers engaged in interstate commerce would enjoy the benefits of the federal minimum wage, a 40-hour workweek, and a premium rate for over-time. As with a majority of the New Deal measures, domestic servants were therefore not eligible to benefit from the provisions in this law either.
The scope of the category “interstate commerce” was narrowly defined in the 1930s, and thus the portion of the workforce that worked in covered industries was fairly limited. The provisions in the FLSA mostly benefitted the predominantly white male workers that were employed in big unionized industries. While only 14 percent of female
46
Quoted in Palmer, 120.
47
“The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938,” June 25, 1938, 29 United States Code, Ch. 8, § 201, Citizen
To exclude domestic service workers from an Act that was described by union leader John L. Lewis as “‘a bill of rights for labor’”52 was to deny important, supposedly universal rights to women and black workers. By defining who was considered an “employee” in the labor laws, the federal government privileged certain workers while neglecting others. Legislators functioned as gatekeepers to the rights that came with being included in the definition of the term “employees” in the law and in the process denied certain kinds of workers the right to define themselves. Although the fact of establishing a federal minimum wage could be seen as being revolutionary, with its tactical exclusions, the FLSA did not challenge the racial and economic hierarchy prevalent in American society during the first half of the twentieth century.53
In 1974, after a series of amendments to include many occupations, domestic service workers were finally included in the provisions of the FLSA, because of the fact “that employees in domestic service employment handle goods such as soaps, mops, detergents, and vacuum cleaners that have moved in or were produced for interstate commerce.”54 Live-in domestic servants were, however, exempted from the over-time provisions of the law, thus maintaining their vulnerable position in relation to their employers. Even after domestic service was included in the FLSA, there remained cases in which the minimum wage was not paid, usually in the Southern states or in cases involving immigrant workers.55 Even though the federal government eventually decided
52
Quoted in Palmer, 121.
53
A very similar pattern of exclusion from labor laws also emerges on the level of individual state legislation. For a more detailed discussion see the following report: “Summary of State Labor Laws for Women,” Women's Bureau, Wage and Labor Standards Administration (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Labor, March 1969).
54
“Application of the Fair Labor Standards Act to Domestic Service,” 29 United States Code, part 552. U.S.
Department of Labor, http://www.dol.gov/dol/allcfr/ESA/Title_29/Chapter_V.htm (Accessed June 13, 2009)
55
that domestic workers were entitled to the rights that other workers had enjoyed for decades, domestic employees were still at a disadvantage because they were years behind in strengthening their structural position within their employer’s household and within American society at large. Equality was not achieved as soon as the exclusions from important labor legislation were corrected because even this new legislation could not change the idea of housework as non-professional. Housewives were reluctant to accept that their servant had rights and that service was similar to other occupations. Moreover, lack of enforcement added to the unwillingness of employers to comply with the laws that were now applicable to their employees.
Domestic workers were thus caught in political, cultural and economic
circumstances that supported their systemic exclusion from any sort of protective labor legislation. On the federal level, the restrictions of the “interstate commerce” requirement disqualified domestic service as a local industry. The government on a state or local level was reluctant to take on the responsibility that came with trying to enforce labor laws in private family homes. Culturally, the idea of the home as a private sphere, separated from the public world, went against any sort of public intrusion into the home. In addition, because of the gendered stereotypes of a woman’s service in the home, domestic servants were not conceived of as part of “labor” or “industry.” The myth that the servant was part of the family that employed her, helped to perpetuate the idea that the service she
eventually gain some of the rights that other workers benefited from during the Civil Rights Era.
A Cautious Promise: The Civil Rights Act
The Civil Rights Act was signed into law by president Johnson in 1964 and represented a victory for the Civil Rights Movement which had fought to have the U.S. Supreme
Court’s ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case implemented and their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guaranteed.56 Apart from the federal support for voting rights, desegregation of public accommodations and public education, and nondiscrimination in federally assisted programs, the most important Title of the Civil Rights Act for black domestic workers was Title VII – Equal Employment Opportunity.57 The act states: “It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to
discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”58 The act made the common discrimination of all African-Americans in the labor market unlawful and established the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission to enforce the law.
The Civil Rights Act can be credited with some structural improvement of the position of black women. In general, they gained wider access to the clerical and sales
56
The Fourteenth Amendment extended the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights to former slaves.
57
“Transcript of Civil Rights Act (1964),” Our Documents: 100 Milestone Documents
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=97&page=transcript (accessed June 13, 2009)
58
jobs that were previously dominated by white women.59 The percentage of working black women employed as domestics declined steadily from its maximum of 59,9 percent in 1940 to 19,5 percent in 1970 and 7,5 percent in 1980.60 However, as Delores Aldridge notes, these gains were mostly made by younger black women never going into domestic work as opposed to older black women actually being able to move out of the
occupation.61 Labor mobility for those in the profession was thus not a realistic option. The Civil Rights Act did thus not correct the earlier lack of opportunity in education and professional development that resulted in the limited employment options for older generations of black women. Furthermore, next to clerical and sales work, the largest group of black working women was employed in the service sector excluding private households, 26,8 percent in 1980. The fact that black female employment continued to be centered in service-related occupations signals that their position in society was still not equal to that of white women. And although the younger generations of black women who were able to go into clerical work thus achieved a parity with white women’s
earnings that they had never achieved before, it did not mean that their economic position was in any way equal to that of black or white men.62 Moreover, while some black
women fortunate enough to gain sufficient education were able to profit from this Act and rise on the socio-economic ladder, others remained trapped in poverty and dependent on low-wage employment such as domestic work for survival. For these women, the Civil Rights Act did not constitute an immediate improvement in their working conditions or the status of their occupation.
59
Jones, 277.
60
Delores P. Aldridge, “African-American Women in the Economic Marketplace: A Continuing Struggle,”
Journal of Black Studies 20, no. 2 (Dec., 1989), 140.
61
Ibid., 142.
62
Furthermore, as Patricia Hill Collins has pointed out, even though the Civil Rights Act obviously benefitted many black people, in its enforcement it disadvantaged the needs of black women by making them define the nature of the discrimination they faced either in terms of race or of sex. This excluded their specific needs as a group that faced discrimination on the basis of the interlocking factors of race, sex, and class.63 The denial of the specific needs of black women that were separate from those of black men and white women relegated them to a weaker, unequal standing as a group fighting for political and social influence.
Although passing the Civil Rights Act and changing federal laws to correct for the exclusion of domestic service were the first steps to eliminate institutional forms of racism and guarantee equal rights and benefits to black female workers, these were not followed up by strict federal enforcement of the execution of these laws. As Louis Knowles and Kenneth Prewitt contended:
The impact of the series of civil rights laws has been greatly reduced from what it could have been because many of the individuals and institutions affected by the laws have refused to comply. There is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that this reluctance to change on the part of local centers of power is aided and abetted by a corresponding reluctance within the federal government to enforce its own laws.64
The governmental treatment of domestic servants, who were predominantly black, reveals the enduring legacy of America’s racially prejudiced past. In legislation on the federal level, and in the administration of public services on the state and local levels, the
63
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of
Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991), 224.
64
prevailing attitude of the government towards black domestics was one of indifference and exclusion. They faced a systematic devaluation of their work and their status as workers, an experience that contrasts sharply with the improved treatment and labor conditions that were being enjoyed at the time by their fellow citizens working in other occupations. The Civil Rights Act was supposed to loosen the economic and social constraints that bound black domestic servants, but many still remained in the profession and there was little direct effect to improve their working conditions and/or treatment. It is therefore inaccurate to consider the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act as initiators of the modern age in American class and race relations. Government treatment of black domestic workers from the Depression-era to the Civil Rights Act demonstrates that the process of eliminating institutional forms of racial bias and of developing a truly equal, universal citizenship for America remained incomplete.
This prejudiced treatment of black domestic servants by the American government was mirrored in the attitudes that black domestics encountered within
TWO
Caught in The Trap: Black Servants in American Society
Black domestic servants encountered racism in American society in a multitude of areas. Their social status was constituted as well as compounded by the intersection of race, gender, and social class. The manners in which these different structures of power and oppression sustained and maintained each other produced a unique disadvantage for black women. They shared with black men the humiliation and economic hardships caused by racial discrimination, and they shared the sexual oppression experienced by white women. This imbalance of power caused black women to be in the lowest socio-economic position in American society as the options open to them were limited by their race, gender, and class. This chapter will examine how American society relegated black domestic servants to a status of second-rate citizenship by investigating manifestations of racism and sexism in discriminatory housing practices, hiring practices, labor movements, the Civil Rights Movement itself and the Women’s Liberation movement. A detailed analysis of biased treatment in these different areas and how this was interrelated with the institutionalized prejudice in government legislation, reveals that racism was not an isolated phenomenon affecting merely one area or organization, it was a structural
servants. As I shall demonstrate in this chapter, these societal circumstances all worked together to create barriers to prevent black women from succeeding economically, they weakened their family and community life, and condemned them to an existence of second-rate citizenship.
Who Lives Where: Residential Segregation and Its Effect On Domestics’ Lives In both Northern and Southern cities the white population tried its best to achieve or maintain residential segregation by keeping black residents in black ghettos.65 This was achieved in a number of ways, which ultimately all resulted in denying black people housing in places where whites did not want them to live. The historical development of residential segregation continued during the decades following the 1930s, and most inner-city black neighborhoods were maintained.
In Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, the black ghetto was maintained with the help of “restrictive covenants.” These covenants stipulated, for example, that “no part of said premises shall in any manner be used or occupied directly or indirectly by any negro or negroes,” and that “no part of said premises shall be sold, given, conveyed or leased to any negro or negroes.” However, to prevent any inconvenience for whites, an exception was made for black janitors, chauffeurs and servants living on the premises.66 The use of these contracts was popular in many other cities as well and their legality was upheld by the courts, until the U.S. Supreme Court finally decided in 1948 that they were not legal, though even after that date covenants continued to be used as an informal way to
65
Katzman, 199. In southern rural areas, however, black and white people did live intermixed, a housing pattern left over from plantation times.
66
“Letter and Restrictive Covenant, Auburn Park Property Restriction Association, Inc., 1929,”
maintain racial segregation.67 This form of residential segregation advantaged white landlords who could profit from powerless black families that desperately needed housing and who had no other option than to look for housing in the black
neighborhood.68 Black families were limited with respect to the areas they could look for housing and generally paid more for renting or purchasing a house than whites would.69
Residential segregation is a good example of a case of social bias on the parts of whites, which was structurally supported and re-enforced through government policy. The Federal Housing Administration – a New Deal agency in charge of helping families purchase homes by insuring their mortgages – favored neighborhoods that were racially homogeneous.70 The guidelines that the FHA used to determine which mortgages in which neighborhoods they would ensure were based on the classification of the neighborhood into four categories. These ratings were determined by the age and qualities of the houses in a neighborhood but also by race. Black neighborhoods were rated lowest, a practice called red-lining.71 As the FHA Underwriting Manual advised: “‘If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.’”72 The FHA also supported the use of covenants to ensure the racial homogeneity of neighborhoods. Because the FHA assumed that the property in black neighborhoods was worth less and that black families would default on their mortgage earlier, it would often refuse to ensure loans for homes in black
67
Gerda Lerner, ed. Black Women in White America (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 410.
68
Robert J. Norrell, The House I Live In: Race in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 87.
69
Kelley and Lewis, 390.
70
Knowles and Prewitt, 28.
71
Adam Gordon, “The Creation of Homeownership: How New Deal Changes in Banking Regulation Simultaneously Made Homeownership Accessible to Whites and out of Reach for Blacks,” The Yale Law
Journal 115, no. 1 (Oct 2005), 208.
72
neighborhoods. With respect to the development of public housing, the FHA also favored residential segregation; it would either refuse to insure mortgages for “integrated
housing,” or, more often, it would use other informal tactics to ensure that public housing projects remained segregated.73 These discriminatory practices continued into the 1960s until president Kennedy ordered the FHA to change their policies.74 However, simply making FHA-insured loans available to black families did not compensate for the advantage white families had had for decades in the real estate market and thus in the growth of capital.75 What is more, during the 1970s and 1980s, ghettoization still
continued but was effected in a less formal manner. As white middle-class families were “fleeing” from the city to the suburbs, companies relocated away from city centers as well, leaving inner-city black neighborhoods economically lifeless and devoid of opportunity. In addition, black home seekers were still disadvantaged by the
discriminatory practices of white realtors and bankers.76 This kind of racism in housing practices had severe consequences for the black community in general and domestic servants in particular.
The greater distance between white neighborhoods and black ghettos in northern cities encouraged live-in service. As one domestic who lived-in in Chicago complained: “‘I don’t even get to see my friends often. Today is the first time I have visited in months and then I didn’t get here until after 3 p.m. … I don’t have to get back for dinner, but I must be there for seven o’clock breakfast, and the ride is quite long.’”77 For black women who worked as live-in servants the separation from their own family and community was
73
Knowles and Prewitt, 27.
74 Gordon, 217. 75 Ibid., 189-190. 76 Feagin, 155-156. 77
an alienating experience.78 However, black married women working as domestics usually insisted on living out, which required them to sometimes travel quite far to get to their employer’s house. Going to work as an isolated black servant in an all-white hostile neighborhood was a difficult aspect of working as a domestic. This alienating experience was strengthened by the strict residential segregation in Northern and Southern cities, which kept interracial contacts in schools, between neighbors and in stores to a
minimum.79 This also caused the relationship between the white Northern mistress and the black servant to be strained because the mistress had often not interacted with a person of the other race before.
The journey to work added to the length of domestics’ workdays and to their economic burdens. A domestic from Galveston, Texas, wrote to President Roosevelt: “‘Me myself when i go to work in the morning i hadter leave my house at Six thurty to get to my work for seven o’clock … and what so hard on we poor colored women [is] we don’t make enough to ride the Bus. i walk a mile every morning to get to my work.’”80 Because in the South residential segregation was not as strict, this woman did have the option of walking to work. In the city, the distance between black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods was often difficult to travel without public transportation. A woman who was forced to offer her labor at the “slave market” in Chicago mentions carfare as a factor in the wages: “‘Many days I worked for 50 cents a day and no carfare – one meal was given.’”81 The fact that she emphasizes that her wages did not include carfare suggests that this was more common in better economic times. In addition, the distance
78
Bonnie Thornton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family
among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 7.
79
Drake and Cayton, 195.
80
Quoted in Palmer, 85.
81
between black and white neighborhoods in some cases limited the employment options for domestics. May Lund, who worked as a domestic in Boston during the 1970s, noted that women who relied on public transportation to travel to their place of work, were only able reach those neighborhoods where employers paid the least. “‘When you don’t have transportation, you have to get on the busline… But I drive and the further out you go, the more money you get … They know they have to pay for the distance… The best you can get in Brookline is five-fifty. And I’m getting eight dollars in Wayland.’”82
In addition to the costs of transportation, the most severe effects of residential segregation were evident in the economic situation of black communities in general. Residential segregation is a powerful example of how racism in American society had far-reaching consequences that disadvantaged black domestics, as it affected much more than just where they lived. One reason for the continued economic instability of the black community that forced black women to work as domestics was that people were kept in overcrowded neighborhoods with poor housing quality and limited access to jobs even after the 1960s. The general deterioration of the housing in the black ghetto caused by the shortage of housing and the exploitative rent prices added to the economic burdens placed on black men and women.83 The white-controlled businesses and realtors strove to maintain these circumstances by preventing black families from purchasing homes and becoming property or business owners. Because of these structural factors, the black ghetto continued to function as a pool of cheap labor, to be accessed whenever white people needed laborers or servants. The living conditions in the ghetto, the lower quality of education, and the limited access to employment opportunities within the
82
Quoted in Rollins, 75.
83
neighborhood ensured that the economic mobility of black people was limited. They were forced to take the lowest-paid jobs, which they were paid less for than whites, to be able to afford housing, which they paid more for than whites. Moreover, the low rates of business ownership among black people also held back the economic development in black neighborhoods. Women who might otherwise have been working as cashiers in black-owned stores, were now dependent on white people for their wages. In addition, black people were forced to purchase their daily groceries from white store owners who refused to hire blacks. This had already inspired resistance during the 1930s from the black community in the form of “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns, which promoted the boycotting of stores that refused to hire black employees.84
I Didn’t Have Any Choice!: Discrimination in the Labor Market
Because of the perilous economic conditions in the black community, black women were forced to take whatever employment they could get, which, in the first half of the
twentieth century, usually meant domestic service. Employers abused their vulnerable position by only offering low wages and exploitative working conditions, by adding on additional tasks such as time-consuming laundry or requiring more tasks to be done in fewer hours.85 Contrary to some of the white middle-class women who hired black domestics to facilitate their employment outside of the home, black women did not work for self-fulfillment, they worked out of necessity. Because their economic options were limited by their race and gender, they often had no choice but to submit to whatever the employers demanded.
84
Kelley and Lewis, 429.
85
The exploitative economic system was kept in place by and started with the sub-standard education that black girls received. The quality of the segregated schools was very low and if they were able to take any further education, black girls were actively pushed into the learning of skills that would only facilitate low-paid employment, such as cleaning, cooking and laundry.86 Girls in southern “colored” schools for example, took “‘8 lessons each in bleaching, removing stains, washing linen, cotton and woolen goods.’”87 With these skills they were sure to end up in service-related jobs. The education system was a very important part of the white racist ideology. By securing segregated schools – by law in the South and by the redrawing of district boundaries in the North88 – and by teaching young black people different, lower-level skills than young white people, the education system ensured that the possibilities for socio-economic mobility remained limited. It also signaled to black girls that their purpose was to serve white people. Upper-, middle- and even working-class white families in the South considered “black ‘help’ part of their birthright.”89 After segregation in public schools was deemed unconstitutional by the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1954, it still took several decades for most public schools to integrate, a process that would never be fully complete, and the difference in quality of education remained.90
Hiring practices in industries were also highly discriminatory. Many companies simply did not hire black people at all during the 1930s.91 A woman in Boston explains
86 Palmer, 96. 87 Quoted in Palmer, 97. 88 Norrell, 88-89. 89
Kelley and Lewis, 354.
90
Ibid., 571.
91
why she went into domestic work: “‘I did it because I had to. There was nothing else a colored woman could do then.’”92 Another woman, Jane Louis, born in Boston,
confirmed these limited options for black women: “‘Practically every black woman in her fifties has done [domestic work]. In Boston, if you weren’t a domestic, you were an elevator person. And I’d rather do domestic work than run an elevator.’”93 Another woman working as a domestic in Chicago had actually managed to get a college
education, but still ended up in service: “‘Then I finished college, later taking up musical work. Jobs seemed hard to get at this time, and … I had to take the first job I could get, which was housework.’”94 If black women managed to get the education for higher administrative positions, they were usually unable to utilize this education and ended up back in the service industry. When they did fight their way into industries other than service, usually during war-time labor shortages, it was still only at the lowest levels. There existed an invisible yet no less insurmountable race barrier between black unskilled positions and white skilled positions,95 which kept black women trapped in domestic work. In addition, during the Depression, white men or women were preferred even for menial jobs in industry and domestic service. The popular sentiment during the
Depression was expressed in campaigns such as: “No Jobs for Niggers Until Every White Man Has a Job.”96 This slogan used during a protest in Atlanta illustrates the racial tensions and the racist attitudes that prevailed during times of economic hardship. The preference for white employees forced black domestics to underbid white women to the
92 Quoted in Rollins, 108. 93 Ibid., 109. 94
Quoted in Drake and Cayton, 245.
95
Lerner, 238-239.
96
point where a day’s work was grossly undervalued.97 These market conditions kept black women defenseless against abusive employers. They were unable to demand higher wages or better working conditions, and thus were easy to manipulate and control. The developments during the decades following the Depression reveal that although black women were able to attain jobs outside of domestic work, it was usually a consequence of white women moving out of those positions to higher ones.98 The white population could thus continue to profit from the labor of African-American women.
Economic dependence is a powerful structural method of social control. By keeping the black community unstable and in poverty, the white population tried to prevent them from revolting against the racist system and ideology. Black women were dependent on white people for jobs and economic means. The only jobs that were open to them were low-wage occupations, and the possibilities for rising to higher positions were limited, even after the 1960s. Furthermore, because black men were not able to secure employment at decent living wages, many black women were forced to take on added economic burdens to support their families.99
Put Down Your Rag and Unite!
Black women were prevented from escaping domestic service by the closing off of opportunities in other occupations. However, improving the working conditions and wages in the occupation itself through unionization also proved difficult due to the racial
biases exhibited by almost all trade unions.100 Those unions which existed during the Depression era, especially the American Federation of Labor (AFL), were committed to protecting their white membership and showed little interest in organizing the unskilled labor or service occupations in which most black women worked.101 But even after the Civil Rights Movement, many unions continued to exclude black people altogether, and others practiced other forms of discrimination and exclusion.102 Black women who
managed to get into existing unions, for example, were discriminated against by the white male union leaders. Their needs were often ignored and preference was given to
protecting white workers’ interests. The situation that Florence Rice describes
demonstrates this bias: “And I brought the complaint to the union, and the union man came in there, and was very nasty to me, and told me if I didn’t want to do it he would get someone else. Well, the union wasn’t for us blacks, that’s one of the things you recognize.”103 Later, in 1962, Ms. Rice repeats this testimony before the House
Committee on Labor, Education and Welfare. As Ms. Rice’s testimony illustrates, even though the exclusion might not have been practiced so openly in the period shortly before and especially after the Civil Rights Movement, black female workers still faced barriers of custom and habit within male-dominated, white unions.104 Black workers therefore continued to see unions as white organizations, unresponsive to black workers’ needs.
100
Despite these biases and the lack of government backing for domestic service unionization, some domestics did try to start their own unions. In New York, Washington D.C., and Baltimore, for example, unions were started which were sometimes successful in gaining some concessions from the employers but more often were unsuccessful and short-lived. Lerner, 232.
101
Palmer, 126. The only union which did promote organizing in industries in which blacks worked was the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
102
Kelley and Lewis, 412.
103
Florence Rice, “It Takes A While To Realize It Is Discrimination” in Black Women in White America, Gerda Lerner, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 277. Although this example comes from the garment industry, it still demonstrates the prejudice black women faced in unions.
104
These factors made black workers in general a difficult group to organize and black women even more so because of the constraints put on them by the responsibility for their own household and children, in addition to their employers’ households and children.
The reluctance of unions to integrate and to include black men and women demonstrates that racial class divisions trumped economic class divisions in American society and the labor market even after the Civil Rights Movement. White laborers often refused to work alongside black workers, which, for decades, was used as an argument by employers to not hire any black people at all. As one firm excused its exclusion of black workers: “‘We just sort of work like a family here.’”105 Although discrimination in hiring was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, black female applicants were still disadvantaged by employers’ (unconscious) desire to have their workforce resemble a “family,” a homogeneous group in which workers have similar (racial) backgrounds.106 Furthermore, employers charged that “‘to bring in Negro workers would cause confusion and cause white workers to feel that their jobs had lost in dignity if being done by
Negroes.’”107 This feeling was also the reason why no self-respecting white southern woman would work as a domestic, because it was seen as “nigger’s work.”108 These sentiments reflect the strong associations of blacks with inferiority. Not only were black women themselves seen as inferior, the work they performed also took on the stigma of inferiority, which demonstrates that there existed – and continues to exist – a caste system in which a certain group in society is reduced to performing those jobs deemed
105
Quoted in Kelley and Lewis, 412.
106
Jones, 304.
107
Quoted in Kelley and Lewis, 412.
108
undesirable by the higher castes. The class solidarity that did bring about some substantial changes in European countries in the course of the twentieth century was fractured by the racial divisions in American society.
Thus, in a period which is seen as a golden age for organized labor, black
domestic servants were unable to reap the benefits enjoyed by other workers. Organizing, as a common method of gaining job security and economic stability, remained out of reach for the majority of black women workers. Their gender and race prevented them from trying to win the collective power they could potentially have.
To Change Things for the Better
In addition to attempting to organize in unions, black women were also socially and politically active and joined different organizations in an effort to improve their working and living conditions. As always, black women had to choose which part of their identity they would give preference to. Within women’s organizations such as the National Organization of Women (NOW), they faced prejudice as their needs as black, working-class women were not aligned with the needs of the organization’s predominantly white middle-class members. Within civil rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC), black men took on the leadership positions and
Women’s organizations were reluctant to take up the cause of the improvement of working conditions of domestic servants during the 1930s. This can be seen in the way the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) treated its servant members.
Although the YWCA organized camps, meetings and conferences in order to find ways to improve the working conditions of servants, in the end, they could not prioritize the needs of domestics over the needs of their white middle-class membership.109 As one YWCA employer expressed her hesitation about giving her maid standardized working hours: “‘And so I have never reached the place where I have said to the maid: your hours are from seven in the morning until one, and from five o’clock until seven-thirty, and it is your privilege to stop at one and at seven-thirty whether the work is finished or not.’”110 The white middle-class housewives that were enjoying their enlarged public role with the help of domestic service could not bring themselves to voluntarily regulate their servants’ hours.
These opposing interests were also evident within the Women’s Liberation Movement, which garnered support during the 1960s. While white middle-class housewives identified with Betty Friedan’s description of “the problem that has no name,” and protested the traditional organizational structure of the family, many black women were trying to stabilize their families by assuming the traditional role of wife and mother.111 The image of the white unhappy housewife did not apply to a majority of black married women who were employed, often as domestics in the homes of these unfulfilled wives. Therefore, many black women did not want to have anything to do
109 Palmer, 113. 110 Quoted in Palmer, 115. 111
Renee Ferguson, “Women’s Liberation Has A Different Meaning for Blacks,” in Black Women in White
with the women’s movement at all because they had internalized the arguments of black male civil rights organizers who proclaimed that in order for black women to ever achieve equality, they had to support black men achieving equality with white men first.112 The few women who did participate in organizations like NOW, expressed frustration at the movement’s emphasis on personal fulfillment instead of issues that would benefit black working-class women such as public transportation and welfare reform, facts of life that white middle-class women did not have to worry about.113
Although the predominantly white membership of organizations like NOW tried to reach out to black women with meetings and speeches, their white-focused goals revealed a reluctance to accept the differing objectives and needs of black women within the movement. In addition, the middle-class women volunteering in these organizations also needed domestic workers to keep the household in order while they themselves protested against their inferior social position as women. Even though white women were also victims of oppression in America’s patriarchal society, they continued to be the oppressors in a racial and economic context. The bonds of gender thus would not overcome the divisions of race and economic interest.
Within the Civil Rights Movement, black women could not participate on an equal basis with black men. Black women had been active grassroots organizers and had constituted a vital part of the different campaigns for civil rights in the South during the 1950s and early 1960s. Yet, though their efforts were widely praised by black leaders, they were not given leadership positions and were kept in the background. At the infamous bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, for example, black domestic workers
112
Lynne Olson, Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to
1970 (New York: Scribner, 2001), 366.
113
