Black Women, Domestic Work and Expanding Resistance: 1909-1945
By Gregg Godwin
Honors Essay Department of History
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
9 April 2014
Approved:
Primary Advisor: ______________________ _________________________ Print Signature
Introduction
For much of America’s history, black women’s experiences have been
intertwined with domestic work. Many modern Americans are aware of this
association, due to the enduring popularity of older books and films such as Gone
With the Wind or more recent examples such as the popular 2011 film The Help.
Usually, black domestic workers are portrayed in these works as accepting of their
position of servitude within the white household, with perhaps a streak of feistiness.
The focus of these works is the white family, and little if any attention is given to the
workers’ lives or ambitions outside of their workplace. Unaddressed questions about
these black women linger. Do these workers have families of their own? Do they
really accept their lot in life, or are they willing to fight for something better? In 2011,
the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) released a statement criticizing
The Help for omitting or glossing over those exact questions. According to the
ABWH, The Help ignored the “support and the validation of personhood necessary to
stand against adversity” that the black family and community provided. In addition,
the ABWH stated that The Help underrepresented the “rich and vibrant history of
black Civil Rights activists” during the film’s setting, the 1960s.1 Thus, although
many Americans are aware of the historical association between black women and
domestic work, the average person who consumes only popular media will not know
the full story of these women’s experiences.
I started this project with some knowledge about the conditions of black
women in domestic work during this period, having completed a twenty-page research
paper on the topic for a previous course. I knew that prior to 1950, a majority of black
women who earned wages were in the domestic service sector; for example, in North
Carolina in 1930 this figure was 52%2. I knew something about the hours, the wages
and the treatment in the workplace. I could gather that these women did not have an
easy life even when they exited the workplace; Southern black women in particular
met the stifling oppression of Jim Crow in nearly every aspect of their lives. In short,
my impression of the work was that it had the potential to consume people, wear them
down with constant toil, monotony and mistreatment, disarming them of any ability or
inclination to resist injustices in the workplace or elsewhere.
I also knew something else; despite the popular depiction of the black freedom
struggle as completely dependent upon a few male leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr., black women were vital “behind the scenes” participants in the movement.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, for example, depended on the courage of
thousands of black women domestic workers who braved the elements and walked
miles to work instead of taking segregated buses. These women and their activism did
not come out of nowhere; they must have evolved over time. Historians Robert
Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein argue, “All too often the [civil rights] movement’s
history has been written as if events before the mid-1950s are a kind of prehistory.”3
Evidently this notion is not true, but what I did not know was the how. How did black
women in domestic service, operating within the circumscription of their race, gender
and occupation, become involved in this activism that defied everything about their
alleged subservience? It turns out that the roots of black women’s activism are very
deep, much deeper in fact than this project can encompass.
The concept of the “long civil rights movement,” proposed by historian
Jacquelyn Down Hall in an article in 2005, has gained much attention recently.
2http://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html
3 Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the
Although I did not engage with Hall’s article until the later stages of this project, its
argument has certainly impacted my questions and my research. Hall argues that the
memory of the Civil Rights Movement has been changed, watered down and
manipulated to suit political goals over time. The movement is portrayed by many as
simple and noble, aiming only to end formal, legalized segregation and
discrimination, practices that have clearly ceased and can now be quarantined in the
distant past or the museums of today. As Hall states, “Gone is [Martin Luther] King
the democratic socialist who advocated unionization, planned the Poor People’s
Campaign and was assassinated in 1968 while supporting a sanitation workers’
strike.”4 Clearly, there was a link between the black freedom struggle and larger
economic and labor efforts. The question that interests me is how black women and
domestic work fit into these intertwined labor and social movements.
I set out to analyze the various ways that black female domestic workers
exercised agency over their conditions, particularly the workplace. However, it
gradually became obvious that confining the project exclusively to domestic workers
was not entirely practical, since people move in and out of occupations quite
frequently. A woman who was doing domestic work in 1933 may have been a farm
worker in 1925 and might become a defense worker in 1942. For that reason, the
project is centered on working-class black women, the majority of whom were
engaged in domestic work during the early 20th century. In addition, as the project
came to focus more on resistance than on working conditions, I began to see workers
leaving domestic service not as a challenging aspect of the sources but as another
potential strategy they employed.
4 Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” The
At its core, this project is about activism, a term that takes various forms and
can have a number of meanings. For the purposes of this essay, I will define activism
as efforts to challenge broader societal restrictions. Activism took place within the
workplace, as workers contested the racial hierarchy by pushing for more equal
relations with the employer and thus a greater say in labor conditions. However, over
time workers increasingly employed this definition of activism outside the domestic
workplace, in new arenas such as public policy discussions and even broad societal
conditions like public segregation. Some distinctions between forms of activism, such
as individual strategies versus collective strategies, are self-explanatory. Others are
not, including the term “protest,” which is used frequently in chapter 3. I use protest
to describe a particularly assertive, usually public and collective form of activism that
proposes a radical change. For example, striking to challenge segregated facilities in a
factory is protest, but one person’s migration is simply an individual strategy or
initiative. These distinctions are helpful to clarify and understand exactly how the
nature of working-class black women’s efforts changed over time.
The time period I cover is 1909-1945, an eventful era that saw an incredible
amount of change in nearly every aspect of American society. However, it is a much
more manageable period when considering that thirty six years is shorter than a
typical person’s working life, particularly in domestic work. I chose 1909 as the
starting point because the National Training School for Women and Girls, which
forms a key part of chapter 1, was established in that year. In addition, the first Great
Migration began around 1910 and is also an important element of chapter 1. Of
course, 1945 saw the end of World War II, a momentous event for working-class
is sizeable and migration further complicates the story, ultimately an argument about
labor and activism emerged and became clear.
Outline of Chapters and Arguments
The first chapter lays the foundation for the entire thesis by describing the
working conditions that domestic workers typically encountered between 1909 and
1932. Using existing, published interviews with domestic workers, I try to incorporate
their words as often as possible to illustrate the workplace as they saw it. I argue that
workers generally found conditions to be unsatisfactory, from the miniscule wages
they received and endless hours they worked, to the disregard and disdain that
employers often showed them. Furthermore, as the American economy was becoming
increasingly industrialized and regulated, domestic workers found themselves stuck in
an occupation that felt pre-industrial. They were often required to “live in,” meaning
they slept at their employer’s home except perhaps on their day off. This arrangement
meant that their hours were not limited as they would be in an office or factory, and
their lack of time and money hampered their ability to engage in the newly emerging
leisure culture that accompanied industrialization. I argue that the arrangement of
“living in” was a strong motivating factor for domestic workers to begin to demand
and make changes.
Two strategies that emerged in this earlier period were migration and
vocational training. Of course, African-American women had been migrating for
economic reasons since Emancipation, but around 1910 the volume of migrants began
to increase significantly in what became known as the first Great Migration. Many
domestic workers headed for Northern and Midwestern cities such as New York,
Philadelphia, Washington, Detroit and Chicago, while others simply moved to the
economic opportunity and security for domestics, and Northern cities in particular
offered a slightly more hospitable atmosphere in which to initiate change. Meanwhile,
establishment of the National Training School for Women and Girls (NTSWG) in
Washington in 1909 gave some black women the opportunity to get vocational
training for domestic skills. The school’s founder, Nannie Helen Burroughs, hoped
that her school would professionalize domestic service and make it more respectable,
thereby improving conditions for black domestics. Using letters written by
prospective students to Burroughs during the 1920s and early 1930s, I argue that
domestic workers wanted to attend the NTSWG but did not necessarily agree with
Burroughs’ philosophy. Ultimately, domestic workers did not lack skills as much as
they lacked leverage in the workplace.
Chapter 2 covers the time period 1933-1938, and I argue that the New Deal
was a potential turning point for domestic workers’ efforts. Operating during a crisis
of capitalism and a more radical political environment, black women began to engage
in more public and more collective forms of resistance. For instance, this period saw
the growth of labor unions organized by and for domestic workers. One of the most
prominent was the Domestic Workers’ Union (DWU) established in New York City
by Dora Jones; similar organizations could be found in San Diego and in Jackson,
MS. These unions sought to utilize domestic workers’ collective strength during an
era of economic hardship for many Americans. Although the 1930s were a period of
strength for organized labor in general, domestic work was historically a very difficult
field to organize, and the emergence of these unions speaks to both the social and
political climate as well as workers’ determination.
Also during the 1930s, domestic workers began to write by the thousands to
Frances Perkins to explain their conditions and request government help. The letters I
draw upon in this section, found in the papers of the Department of Labor’s Women’s
Bureau, are perhaps the richest primary sources in this project. In these letters,
domestic workers ask public officials to extend legal protections such as the National
Recovery Act (NRA) or the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to cover domestic
labor. In the end, neither the NRA nor the FLSA did cover domestic work. However,
these letters are significant for showing that workers were bringing this field of work,
traditionally considered part of the private sphere since it took place within homes,
into the public discourse by engaging with political officials. Like any source
material, these letters dealt me a number of challenges, particularly the difficulty of
determining which letters were likely written by African-American women and which
were not.5 Nonetheless, they provide strong evidence for domestic workers’ move into
public and collective resistance strategies.
The final chapter covers the early 1940s and shows that many black women
were able to leave domestic work and expand their activism during this period.
Despite continued job discrimination, black women moved into defense industries
during the wartime boom. In addition, many of these women protested unfairness in
hiring and in the workplace by writing to the Fair Employment Practices Commission
(FEPC), which was established in 1941, urging it to prevent discrimination in
federally contracted defense industries. On the national political scene, black
women’s groups such as the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW)
5 I began with approximately 40 letters that were written by domestic workers themselves, and many
successfully lobbied for the creation of the FEPC and later unsuccessfully pushed for
it to be made permanent. Since war industries were disproportionately located in the
cities of the West Coast, many black women left domestic service in the South to take
up jobs in Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area.
Although many black women returned to domestic service after the war ended,
many others were able to keep their new jobs, which brought higher status, better pay
and the protections of labor regulations. I argue that regardless of whether their exit
from domestic work was temporary or permanent, many black women were changed
by their wartime experience. With the knowledge that workplace discrimination had
followed them into defense industries, and was therefore not unique to domestic
service, many black women expanded their activism with the goal of improving their
communities as a whole. In particular, they engaged in voting and voter registration,
and combating both de jure segregation as well as de facto segregation in areas such
as housing. This expanded activism was a result of the wartime experience, and had a
great impact on the future of the black freedom struggle.
Over a period of thirty six years, black women redefined the occupation that
had threatened to define them as subservient, unskilled and unempowered. First using
individual and private strategies such as vocational training and migration, they
sought to influence the conditions and the geography of their labor. Then, by
organizing labor unions and writing to public officials, they opened up a public
discourse on the reality of domestic service and their rights within the workplace.
Finally, many women left domestic service at least temporarily when the opportunity
arose, and this experience encouraged them to expand their activism beyond the
domestic workplace. Throughout this era, black women’s strategies demonstrated
accept them. The long-term impact of their actions disputes the notion that the time
period 1909-1945 constitutes a prehistory of any kind.
In 1918 in rural Escambia County, Alabama, a young African-American
mother named Elizabeth passed away, leaving behind a nine-year old daughter named
Priscilla. Elizabeth, a domestic worker who specialized in caring for white newborns
and mothers, had conceived her daughter with a local white man from the wealthy
Clinton family. It is unknown whether their contact was consensual or coerced.
Before she died, Elizabeth made the Clintons promise that her daughter would receive
treatment that would elevate her above the lot of most local blacks. She was to be
raised by her mother’s sister, and she would never be compelled to work in the fields.
In times of need, Priscilla could go to the Clinton plantation store and get some basic
necessities. Most strikingly, Elizabeth requested that her daughter Priscilla would not
have to “nurse nobody’s babies until she’s nursed her own.” Although Priscilla Butler
would eventually support herself by working in domestic service, her mother’s
request was fulfilled.6
Elizabeth likely wanted her daughter to avoid domestic work if at all possible
because the job usually entailed long hours performing grueling tasks for little pay.
Although conditions varied, domestic work generally had among the lowest pay and
longest hours of any occupation, in part due to a lack of legal regulations and
unionization. One particularly unpleasant aspect of domestic service for many
workers was the arrangement of “living in.” This arrangement meant that the worker
lived in the employer’s house or somewhere on the employer’s property. This
arrangement physically separated domestic workers from their family, including any
young children of their own. In many cases, a domestic would spend much of her
workday raising the children of a white family, while her own children were raised by
babysitters or extended relatives. By contrast, “living out” meant that a worker could
6 Susan Tucker, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in
return to her own residence at the end of each working day. Workers almost
universally preferred to live out, and “living in” became one aspect of the work that
workers’ strategies sought to change.
Black women usually entered domestic work because of their family’s
economic needs, and because they had few other careers from which to choose.
Describing the long hours of performing household tasks, historian Leon Litwack
asserts, “It was not as though alternatives were readily available, if at all.”7 During
this time period, many Southern African-American women were born into families of
sharecroppers, and saw domestic work as an alternative to field work and the
crippling debt that often accompanied sharecropping. Domestic worker Mamie
Johnson recalled of her sharecropping childhood, “When you raised that stuff [crops]
and he [the landowner] gets ready to sell it…He was supposed to have this book
and…show you how much money he gone let you have…But Mr. Gullich would tell
him…how much they owed.”8 Domestic work sometimes provided cash wages for
women, a better deal than many sharecropping arrangements. Augusta Swanson
remembered that, after growing up on a rented farm, “When I was eight years old, my
mother sent me to live with a lady. Her name was Miz May…she taught me…how to
housekeep.”9
However, while domestic work was seen as a step up from field work in the
South, most professional jobs were almost completely off-limits to black women in
both the North and South. Litwack explains that black women were limited to jobs
“that paid the least wages for often grueling work. The bulk of black workers could be
7 Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Vintage Books,
1998), 126.
8 Katherine Van Wormer et al, The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim
found in domestic and personal service.”10 In Northern cities, an enormous demand
for domestic labor and the promise of better conditions served as “pull” factors for the
migration of Southern black women as well as European immigrant women. And
although northern cities lacked the formal discrimination of the Jim Crow South,
black women were still excluded from most jobs in offices and factories. Through a
combination of social limitations and a desire to engage in indoor wage labor, many
black women found themselves working in white homes during this period.
Despite all the disadvantages black women had both in and out of the
domestic workplace, they devised and acted upon strategies to improve their
conditions. In the time period 1909-1932, vocational training and migration were two
of the most notable examples of such strategies. The first Great Migration, in which
millions of African-Americans left the Jim Crow South for better socioeconomic
conditions in Northern cities, took place during this time period. However, the
migration patterns of black domestic workers during this period cannot be
summarized as simply “rural South to urban North.” Large numbers of black female
domestic workers also migrated to Southern cities such as Atlanta, Mobile, and
Durham. Despite the fact that Southern cities had the same legalized discrimination as
the surrounding rural areas, they offered some improvements for domestic workers.
These improvements included an increase in employment opportunities, community
connections such as black women’s penny saving clubs, and more opportunities to
take part in the growing American leisure culture.
African-American domestic workers also saw vocational training as an
opportunity to improve their workplace conditions. This chapter will focus on one
notable school, the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington,
D.C., that trained African-American women for domestic work and other professions.
The school’s founder, Nannie Helen Burroughs, had a strong philosophy of
self-improvement that she applied to domestic workers and their acquisition of skills.
Every year, scores of women wrote to Mrs. Burroughs to ask questions about the
school’s curricula and fees, although many women wanted to use the school for their
own purposes and did not necessarily share Burroughs’ philosophy. Nonetheless, their
letters reveal much about the conditions they were experiencing in domestic work and
the improvements they hoped to make through vocational training. Specifically, many
workers hoped that formal training would command more respect from employers,
allowing them to negotiate more favorable conditions, specific tasks and wages, and
“live-out” arrangements.
This time period is characterized by domestic workers’ resistance strategies
that were mostly individual and focused on self-improvement. The period begins in
1909 because that year saw the founding of the NTSWG in Washington, and the first
Great Migration is widely considered to have begun around 1910.11 The period ends
in 1932 because the following year brought sweeping political and economic changes
thanks to New Deal legislation. Although the strategies that domestic workers
employed between 1909 and 1932 seem less radical than later efforts, these earlier
strategies laid the foundation for future successes. For example, the first Great
Migration facilitated more collective efforts in the 1930s due to the increased ability
to organize in an urban setting. The limited ability of the NTSWG to secure concrete
improvements may have inspired domestic workers to abandon the school’s rhetoric
of self-improvement and instead develop a greater sense of the government’s
responsibility for economic justice. Still, the determination of domestic workers in
11 James Gregory, The Southern Diaspora: How the Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners
this earlier period is evident, from migrating to “living out,” and shows their desire to
improve their working conditions.
Working Conditions
The average domestic worker during this time period could expect a long
working day and week, with little time off. Describing her domestic work in Mobile,
Alabama around 1930, Priscilla Butler said “Maybe it be nine-thirty before you’d get
out of the kitchen. And oh, my dear, you’d been there since six-thirty in the
morning.”12 These sorts of hours often prevailed because of the employing family’s
desire to be served breakfast and dinner by the worker. Of course, these hours meant
that workers did not get to spend mealtimes with their own families. Further, extended
periods of time off for a domestic worker were usually unheard of. According to
historian Elizabeth O’Leary, it was a Southern custom for employers to give domestic
workers every other Sunday afternoon off, as well as Thursday afternoons. However,
this custom was not a hard and fast rule. Neither Thursdays nor Sundays were given
to all workers, and some workers took off other days such as Saturday.13
Employers commonly expected domestics to work on holidays, or even to
accompany employers’ families on vacation. Tucker observes, “Work on Christmas
morning and other holidays for black mothers was not considered by white employers
as unfair. Indeed, work on these days was seen as particularly important to the job.”14
For many black female domestic workers, being expected to work on holidays and
employer’s vacations added insult to injury. Not only did these expectations multiply
their already long hours, but they increased black women’s isolation from their
families and communities. Expectations like these, which would be considered
12 Tucker, Telling Memories, 25.
13 Elizabeth O’Leary, From Morning to Night (Charlottesville: UVA Press, 2003), 108.
14 Susan Tucker, “The Black Domestic in the South: Her Legacy as Mother and Mother Surrogate,” in
unreasonable in almost any modern job, increased the tension between demanding
employers and workers looking to gain some kind of workplace leverage.
Indeed, for many domestic workers, the hours of their job were virtually
unlimited. At Maymont House in Richmond, the residence of the wealthy Dooley
family, there was a live-in staff that included at least two women (a maid and a cook).
Staff members could expect to hear a bell ring during the night, “summoning them to
dress and hurry upstairs,” where the Dooleys slept.15 This example demonstrates the
employer’s focus on their own convenience over the basic needs of domestic workers.
For domestics like Frances Walker of Maymont House, the lack of set hours was yet
another frustrating aspect of their work. It was conditions like those at Maymont
House, with midnight work interruptions commonplace, that drove many domestic
workers to formulate strategies for making changes.
Tasks varied greatly for domestic workers across time and space, with some
women experiencing more demanding and tedious work than others. Ella Thomas, a
domestic worker from Washington County, Alabama, had a typical set of duties. She
was expected to dust and clean “the restrooms and the tub and whatever” as well as
cook meals.16 Mamie Johnson, from Durant, Mississippi, cleaned and did the dishes
for two white families. She also did laundry on the side, and claimed that “It’d take all
day to do one family’s laundry” with the laborious washboard.17 Cecilia Gaudet, a
mixed-race woman from Mobile, recalls her time in domestic service with more
fondness than most. However, the list of tasks she describes is still formidable:
washing and ironing, cooking, general housekeeping and working at house parties
thrown by her employers. One question that remains unresolved is how much of the
15 O’Leary, Morning to Night, 102-107. 16 Tucker, Telling Memories, 87.
demeaning nature of domestic labor was due to the tasks themselves, and how much
was due to tense and unpleasant relationships with employers.18
One of the more tedious tasks a domestic might be expected to perform was
the care of the white family’s children. As social critic Lillian Smith notes, “It was
customary in the South, if a family possessed a moderate income, to have a colored
nurse for the children. Sometimes such a one came with the first child and lived in the
family until the last one was grown.”19 Annie Johnson, a domestic worker from
Ripley, Mississippi, mentioned a practice that she witnessed in the 1930s, although it
became less common as time passed. “The black women would breastfeed the white
babies” she said, a job requirement that exploited black women both physically and
emotionally.20 Nancy Valley, a domestic worker from Alabama, describes an
experience that shows how, even without breast-feeding, caring for white children
could lead to a great degree of intimacy between the domestic and the family.
Referring to a white child she had cared for, Ms. Valley said “I thought I’d seen her
grown and my work was over when she married. But no! She was going to have a
baby, and she said she wouldn’t go to the hospital unless I went.”21 She went on to
raise a second generation of children from the same white family. Situations like
Valley’s could, for a domestic, lead to contradicting feelings of affection for the
children but also awareness that they would become the next generation of enforcers
of Jim Crow.
Low pay was another relative certainty involved in domestic labor. Pay could
be given by the hour, or more commonly by the day or week, but it was almost always
barely sufficient for the worker to support herself and her loved ones. Domestic
18 Tucker, Telling Memories, 82-84.
19 Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 128.
worker Essie Favrot said that around 1924, she made 25¢ per hour. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator, that comes out to a 2013 equivalent of
$3.42 per hour, less than half of today’s minimum wage. Clelia Daly, who worked as
a part-time domestic in Mobile in the late 1920s, made even less. For 15-20 hours of
work, Daly was paid $3 per week, the equivalent of about $2.35 per hour today. These
tragically low wages highlight the economic stresses felt by black women engaged in
domestic work. Since the field of domestic work had no government standards for
hours or pay during this period, many workers saw it necessary to begin taking
matters into their own hands.22
Even more troubling than the payment of shamefully low wages was the
tendency many employers had to not pay domestics proper wages at all. Pearline
Jones, a domestic worker from Mississippi, said “Some…wouldn’t pay you, just give
you some ole rags…some ole clothes. No money to clean up their houses.”23 Another
common practice was called ‘toting,’ wherein the domestic worker took home leftover
food from her employer, usually to supplement her meager wages. According to
sociologist Katherine Van Wormer, “Such informal arrangements reinforced the
power balance in the mistress-servant relationship as the servant’s reimbursement for
service depended totally on the kindness, generosity and whims of the mistress.”24
Even Edith Whitney, a white woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, reflecting on her
days as a domestic employer, acknowledged that the remuneration was inadequate.
She recalled, “You know it was a shame how we paid…We did not pay enough. I
don’t know why.”25 Whatever the reason, low pay and reliance on gift-giving were
22 Ibid., 118, 199.
http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm (Accessed October 22, 2013) 23 Van Wormer et al, Maid Narratives, 70.
aspects of domestic labor that left black female workers struggling to make ends
meet.26
Living Conditions
One of the first things domestic workers sought to change about their job was
its living arrangements. Early in this period, particularly in the South, most domestic
workers were “live-in” workers, meaning that they lived in their employer’s house or
somewhere on their employer’s property. “Live-out” workers were able to leave their
employer’s house at the end of the working day and spend the night at their own
residence. As historian Elizabeth Clark-Lewis points out, there was often a world of
difference between these two types of arrangements. Employers could easily ask a
live-in worker to start work earlier in the morning or keep working late into the
evening, because she had nowhere else to be. Workers also detested other aspects of
the job. Amy Kelley, who worked in Washington, D.C. during this period, said her
living situation was “a room in the attic…you couldn’t bring nobody over there.”27
Kelley felt not only physically cramped by the unpleasant accommodation she
occupied, but also isolated due to the way that her living situation cut her off socially
from the African-American community. “Living in” also robbed domestic workers of
privacy. Workers would often try to carve out small chunks of down time during the
working day and in the evening, only to have an employer give them an additional
task or otherwise disturb them.
Domestic workers almost always preferred to live out, for many reasons
besides regulated hours and physical conditions. One particularly important reason for
many workers was the ability to attend church on Sundays. Employers frequently
26 Tucker, Telling Memories, 28.
27 Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African-American Domestics in Washington, D.C.,
required domestics to work at least part of the day on Sunday, forcing workers to
attend a Sunday evening service or miss church altogether. In the Washington, D.C.
area, domestic workers often spoke jealously of black women with “big jobs” such as
cleaning government buildings, because these women could attend church on
Sundays.28 Some domestic workers expressed their disgust for oppressive live-in jobs
by linguistically disowning them, and creating a dichotomy between “my job” and
“they job.” Velma Davis, a domestic worker in Washington, D.C., explained “They
job was for them, not your life…I started to try to get…a rest at the end of the day.
That’s why you try to live out.”29
The struggle to live out was not easy, even after domestic workers migrated to
Northern cities. Many white employers preferred domestic workers who lived in,
since they could be available for work any time of day, and their behavior could be
observed and controlled more completely. In 1924 a group of Baltimore employers
used worker health as a reason to oppose the growing trend of living out. Ironically,
they argued that younger workers who lived out would stay up too late socializing,
depriving them of sleep and hurting both their health and the quality of their work.
Workers often earned more for living in, likely due to a combination of employer
preference for live-in help and worker demands to be more highly compensated for
living in. Thus, the tension felt between workers and employers was clearly illustrated
by the issue of living in versus living out.30
Making Changes: Migration and Vocational Training
28 Ibid., 127-129.
29 Ibid., 123-124.
30Ibid., 130, 141-142.
Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple Press, 1989), 86.
In 1930, Priscilla Butler and her husband moved from the Alabama
countryside to Mobile. They were looking for job security in a time of worsening
economic downturn, and they stayed with Priscilla’s aunt Caroline until they got
settled.31 Butler and her husband were among the millions of African-Americans who
migrated during this time period, which was an unprecedented movement. Despite
opposition from whites, black domestic workers had used migration as a tactic for
controlling their job situation since Emancipation. What made the time period
1910-1930 unique was the scale of migration, with over a million African-Americans
leaving the South for other regions. This event is known as the first Great Migration,
and popular destinations included New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and
Detroit. 32 Many more, such as the Butlers, moved to Southern cities like Mobile,
Atlanta and Richmond. The huge scale of this migration allowed complex family and
community networks to develop which in turn domestic workers could use both at
their origin and destination. Indeed, domestic workers helped, and were in turn helped
by, these family and community members both financially and in other ways.
Regardless of the destination, however, socioeconomic concerns were usually the
predominant reason for the move. Domestic workers sought to live at locations where
social and economic conditions were better for themselves and their families.33
The first Great Migration began in earnest during WWI, when a wartime
boom presented economic opportunities in the industrial cities of the North and
Midwest. Most industrial jobs had previously not been open to black women, and
remained closed to them. However, black men could find industrial work more easily,
and female domestic workers could keep their families afloat by providing a second
31 Tucker, Telling Memories, 24.
32 For the purposes of this work, Washington, D.C. is also considered a Northern city despite its
income. By 1917, at least one prominent black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, was
urging Southern blacks to seek better opportunities in the North.34 Subsequently, in
1924 restrictions on immigration severely limited the flow of European women
willing to engage in domestic work in Northern cities, leading to an increasing
number of domestic jobs available for black women. However, domestic work could
be just as taxing and unpleasant in the North as in the South. Northern black women
nevertheless did not have to deal with the same formalized segregation as in the
South, or with the physical and cultural reminders of slavery. Yet domestic work in
the North still had disadvantages: workers were usually expected to report to the wife
of the household, not the husband, and demeaning uniforms for domestic workers
were common in the North.35
Given the disapproval of Southern whites, traveling north was generally not
easy; but domestic workers continued to make the journey, bringing their hopes of a
better life with them. Velma Davis, who migrated from rural Nelson County, Virginia
to Washington, D.C. in 1916, recalls the feeling of liberation that she got during her
train ride north. “When you got on the train, you felt different! Seem like you’d been
bound up, but now this train untied you.” 36 Other workers viewed their migration
with less rapture and more pragmatism. Priscilla Butler moved from rural Alabama to
Mobile in 1930, and stated that in spite of the Depression “in the city, women could
always work in white homes.”37 Thus, whether it was the perceived liberation of the
North or simply the economic security of a Southern city, domestic workers saw
34 Van Wormer et al, Maid Narratives, 53.
35Of course, there could be great variation between households as to whether the husband or wife
was more unpleasant to report to. Generally, though, domestics disliked answering to the housewife, since she was more likely to stay home during the day to supervise, criticize and come up with additional tasks.
Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, “Community Life and Work Culture Among African American Domestic Workers in Washington, D.C., 1910-1940,” in Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander, eds., Major Problems in American Women’s History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 231-232.
36 Ibid., 231.
migration as a way to improve their conditions by having some amount of choice
about their surroundings.
Domestic workers who migrated often relied heavily on family members and
African-American community organizations for help adjusting to their new
surroundings. Frances Walker, who worked at Maymont House in Richmond during
the 1920s, migrated to Philadelphia in 1931. By that year, Frances already had two
family members living in Philadelphia, a brother Tom and a sister Mary. Once in
Philadelphia, Walker secured work as a live-in cook for a Jewish family and relied on
family members to care for her young children.38 Another migrant, a 19 year old
whose story is told in an anonymous letter, also made the most of family connections.
After migrating from Warrenton, N.C. to Paterson, N.J., this young woman lived with
her sister, Mrs. Romie Jackson. Since her sister was treasurer of the Paterson
“Women’s Fortnightly Club,” this young woman was able to benefit from the support
and connections offered by that organization.39
Indeed, domestic workers formed clubs, often called “penny savers clubs” to
support each other after migrating north. These clubs had both social and financial
significance, and can be seen as a predecessor to formal labor unions, during an era
that was unfavorable to organized labor. Penny savers clubs provided insurance for
domestics and their families in the case of illness or death, and unlike banks, they
accepted very small deposits, sometimes literally on the scale of pennies. Mary
Person, who worked as a domestic in Washington, D.C. during this period, was a
member of the Mites, a penny savers club composed of women who had migrated
from Alabama. “You’d hear the Mites were giving a party…you’d go – if you was off
38 O’Leary, Morning to Night, 143.
39 This “fortnightly club” was likely similar to the penny savers clubs described in the following section.
that day or evening – and see all your people…But it was to help, you know, people
from down home who were up here, and it raised money for the sick fund.”40 These
migrant women felt a sort of kinship with each other, based on a common place of
origin and the need for security in times of hardship, such as illness. Making
connections with family members and community groups at their destinations was
extremely important for domestic workers, considering their financial stresses. These
women not only had to support themselves, but also were often expected to send some
portion of their income back to family members who had stayed in the South.41
The benefits of migrating generally fell into two categories: economic
improvements such as increases in pay, and somewhat less tangible improvements in
social conditions. Augusta Swanson, who moved from rural Alabama to Mobile in
1926, seemed to have been mostly focused on the former. Before her move, she “was
making a dollar a week,” she stated, “but I wanted better.”42 Migrants to Northern
cities may have also found it slightly easier to negotiate and contract with employers
for better conditions and pay than in the South, where racial hierarchy was more
firmly entrenched. Historian Cecilia Rio argues that after domestics began to migrate
north, “more and more African American women became independent contractors of
domestic service. For these domestic workers, migration had resulted in a radical
break from the feudal exploitation they experienced in Southern households.”43 Of
course, migration did not solve every problem. Rather, domestic workers used
migration as a first step towards economic gains such as higher pay.
40 Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out, 136-138.
41 Clark-Lewis, “Community Life and Work Culture,” 230-231.
42 Tucker, Telling Memories, 114.
43 Rio, Cecilia M. From Feudal Serfs to Independent Contractors: Class and African American Women's
However, domestic workers who chose Northern cities also considered social
improvements, such as the diminished presence of formal segregation and, after 1920,
the ability to vote. Cecilia Gaudet, who moved from Mobile to Chicago in 1921,
claimed that “Couldn’t nothing stop me from going to Chicago…the white folks up
there – there were some more willing to let black people get along and try things out
just like whites.”44 Some domestic workers simply sought the “sense of increased
autonomy and independence” that often resulted from a move from South to North.45
Workers surely knew of such a phenomenon, either from friends and family who had
already migrated or from African-American media like the Chicago Defender. Some
workers may have even seen a parallel between migration – the spatial liberation they
could clearly achieve – and living out, the spatial liberation they desired.
Another social improvement that domestic workers desired was the ability to
engage in leisure activities, which were growing and becoming more commercialized
by the 1920s.46 Of course, taking part in leisure activities requires time and money,
which partly explains why domestic workers fought for more of both. Historically,
household work stifled leisure participation because it limited workers’ access to free
time and disposable income. Nonetheless, black women carved out areas of social
enjoyment wherever they could. In Atlanta during the 1910s, domestic workers
enjoyed a thriving group of black dance halls that had become established along
Decatur Street.47 In 1920s Detroit, the Koppin Theater anchored the blues and jazz
culture of the heavily black East Side, and hosted prominent performers like Bessie
Smith and Ma Rainey. Black women in Detroit also frequented the city’s numerous
44 Tucker, Telling Memories, 83.
45 Rio, Feudal Serfs to Independent Contractors, 159.
46 Robert Harrigan, Pastimes in Washington: Leisure Activities in the Capital Area, 1800-1995 (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2002), 171-174.
47 Tera Hunter, “’Work That Body’: African American Women, Work and Leisure in Atlanta and the
speakeasies, facilitated by the smuggling of liquor from nearby Canada.48 Domestic
workers were aware of their growing possibilities for leisure and the role that rural to
urban migration played in facilitating it.
In Washington, D.C., where migrant domestic workers were fighting to live
out during the 1920s, a conspicuous example of commercialized leisure was
established in 1921. Called Suburban Gardens, it was an amusement park for black
Washingtonians to tap into the emerging American leisure culture. Located in
Northeast Washington, an area heavily populated by African-Americans, the park
offered rides, a swimming pool, and a “dance pavilion [which] would accommodate
three thousand on the [dance] floor.”49 In 1924, Suburban Gardens hosted a bobbed
hair contest for women, and the park also offered a carousel and playground that
domestic workers with children certainly appreciated. Women could dance for free,
since the park did not have an admission fee, charging only for thrill rides and special
events. Unfortunately, Suburban Gardens closed in 1934 due to the Depression.
Nonetheless, leisure opportunities like these served as motivation for domestic
workers to fight to live out after moving to the city.50
In 1909, just as the first Great Migration was about to begin, Nannie Helen
Burroughs founded the National Training School for Women and Girls (hereafter
NTSWG) in Washington, D.C. The school was intended to train African-American
women and girls in domestic vocations as well as other areas such as handicrafts and
music. Burroughs – who has sometimes been compared to Booker T. Washington for
her focus on vocational training for blacks – has a fascinating life history and
philosophy. The greatest significance of Burroughs’ school was the impact it has on
48 Victoria Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001), 100-103.
the goals and actions of the domestic workers who attended it. During the time period
1909-1932, hundreds of eager girls and women wrote to Burroughs to ask for
information about the school. It is clear that Burroughs believed that vocational
training would benefit African-American domestic workers, although workers
themselves saw the potential benefits in a more nuanced way.
Burroughs was born in Orange, Virginia in 1879 to a mother who was a
former slave. As a child, Burroughs and her mother moved to Washington, D.C., and
she grew up witnessing the importance of both paid labor and family assistance for
working-class black women. Burroughs graduated from Washington’s Colored High
School, one of the best black high schools in the nation. There, she made connections
with some of Washington’s black elite, including club women and prominent female
educators.51 However, Burroughs never lost her inclination to identify with working
class African-Americans, and the pragmatic philosophy of the NTSWG strongly
reflects that commitment. Historian Sharon Harley outlines the details of Burroughs’
pragmatism in her 1996 article for The Journal of Negro History:
Professionalizing domestic work reflected Burroughs’ two-fold mission: to enhance the employability of African-American women whose job options fell primarily in this category and, as Higginbotham writes, ‘to define and re-present black women’s work identities as skilled workers rather than
incompetent menials’…Accepting the fact that domestic service work was a reality for the vast majority of African-American women, Burroughs set out to enhance their employment opportunities, wages and, most especially, their image in the white and black communities.52
Burroughs believed that, by attending the NTSWG, female domestic workers
could learn “how to do at least one thing superbly well,” thereby increasing their
authority and negotiating abilities relative to employers.53 This authority would in turn
51 Sharon Harley, “Nannie Helen Burroughs: The Black Goddess of Liberty,” The Negro Journal of
History, Vol. 81. No. ¼ (Winter-Autumn 1996), 63-64. 52 Ibid., 64-65.
53 Nannie Helen Burroughs, “There is Nobody Home,” speech in Washington, D.C., date unknown. MS.
lead to better workplace conditions for domestics, and generally more stable and
prosperous black households. This belief assumed that the onus for improving
workplace conditions – and possibly even the prosperity of the black household –
rested with workers, rather than employers, the government or white society as a
whole. This philosophy was popular with some other black leaders of the time such as
Booker T. Washington, but became less widely held by the 1930s. Nevertheless,
hundreds of domestic workers wrote to Burroughs with interest about attending her
school.
Women who wrote to Burroughs rarely engaged with her philosophy of
self-improvement, but their letters hint at both their conditions and some potential uses
that they had for the school. For example, some women may have sought out the
NTSWG for its location in Washington, D.C. as well as the actual instruction. Alma
E. Jackson, who wrote to Burroughs in 1931 from Jackson, MS., seems to fit that bill.
“Kindly consider my application to become a student of your institution,” she wrote,
adding “the course that I am interested in is Home Economics.”54 Not only did
Washington offer a more favorable job environment than Mississippi, but NTSWG
students like Jackson also had plenty of opportunities for leisure since the Suburban
Gardens were located right across from the school. Due to Washington’s size, leisure
opportunities and established black community, it may have been as much of a draw
for the school as the coursework.
Other workers sought enrollment for their daughters at the NTSWG, for a
variety of reasons. Pearl McNeil moved from Fayetteville, N.C. to Jamaica, N.Y.,
before writing a letter to Burroughs in 1932. “I have a daughter I would like very
much to have her enter your school…[she lacks] 4 units of high school from South
Side High School in Fayetteville, N.C. I had to move to N.Y. and bring her with
me.”55 Perhaps McNeil saw the school as a way to get her daughter formal training in
domestic work, so she could negotiate better conditions in the workplace. However, it
is also possible that some women like McNeil intended to use the school simply for
childcare. Having the ability to drop children off at a school which offered job
training and was run by fellow African-Americans may have been very helpful,
especially for migrant women or those without extensive family networks. Regardless
of McNeil’s true intention, it is important to realize that women who wrote to
Burroughs placed a variety of their own designs on the school.
Some women were so intent on using the NTSWG that they offered goods or
their labor in place of the tuition money they did not have. One Mrs. Martin from
Timmonsville, S.C., penned a letter to Burroughs in 1932 that reflects the extent of
her poverty, but perhaps also her determination to gain entrance to the NTSWG. She
wrote, “I would like to pay in part next term in the following: meat, corn meal, sweet
potatoes and white potatoes. [I] will appreciate a list stating the number of pounds,
bushels, etc. to cover at least one half of the expenses.”56 While Martin’s request was
unusual, many women offered to pay part of their tuition, books and fees with their
labor. Barbara Criss wrote to Burroughs from Jackson, MS., in 1931 with one such
offer. “I would like very much to enter this fall,” she wrote, adding “I am not able to
pay all of my board…is it any way you can help me to enter by giving me some kind
of work to earn the rest of my board[?]”57 Criss, like other women, was motivated
55 Pearl McNeil. Untitled Letter to Nannie Helen Burroughs. 26 July 1932. MS. Nannie Helen Burroughs Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Print. Accessed 9 September 2013.
enough to attend the NTSWG that she bargained using her labor, which was often one
of the only things a domestic worker had to offer.
Conclusions
Black women like Priscilla Butler faced an enormous number of challenges
during this period. Kept out of the best jobs in both the North and South because of
their race and gender, many black women found domestic work to be the best (or
only) job available to them. However, most women found the conditions imposed by
their employers to be unacceptable. Many domestics had higher aspirations for
themselves, and certainly for their children, than working twelve hours every day for
a few dollars a week. The common arrangement of “living in” provided a particularly
strong motivation for black women to initiate changes. Supported by family and
community networks, many domestic workers during this period embraced migration
or vocational training as an opportunity to gain ground in the struggle for better
conditions.
The significance of migration during this period is largely due to the number
of migrants and the way that rural to urban migration facilitated collective strategies
later on. Since a large majority of wage-earning black women in this period were
domestic workers, the number of domestics who participated in the first Great
Migration is in the area of a half million. These women, as well as migrants to
Southern cities, sought and often achieved markedly better conditions once they
reached their destination. This process was neither quick nor easy, however.
According to Clark-Lewis, it took an average of seven years for migrants to
Washington, D.C. to acquire the financial savings and social savvy to begin working
towards living out.58 Groups formed by migrants, including the Penny Savers’ Clubs,
were an early indicator of the potential for collective efforts in urban areas. By voting
with their feet, early migrants exercised agency and demonstrated the potential for an
individual to improve her lot, while opening the door for group action.
As for the NTSWG, there is little evidence that Burroughs’ school produced
concrete labor gains for many of its students. Burroughs’ philosophy stressed
workers’ improvement of skills, but what workers really needed was increased
leverage with their employers. Women who entered Burroughs’ school were making
an effort to control the terms of their labor, but the philosophy underpinning the
school was ineffective. Although the NTSWG gave many domestic workers hope that
they could negotiate for better conditions in the workplace, bigger changes could only
come about when workers could take advantage of a changing political and social
climate.
Chapter 2 – “What is more important than to keep a home going?”: Increasingly Public and Collective Strategies in the New Deal Era
On July 30, 1933, domestic worker Florence Jacobs of Toledo, Ohio wrote
and mailed a letter. She was writing to a woman whom she thought might be
work covers [a] 17 room house,” she wrote, and her weekly salary of $15 had been
“cut to $10 two years ago.”59 Although her employers had cut her pay, they could still
afford to throw frequent parties, and her service at these parties raised her average
workload to “11 to 16 hours daily.” Additionally, Jacobs wrote that “in my three years
employment [I] haven’t had one evening out [,] just two ½ days each week.” Jacobs
asked for a quick reply, by August 5th, because her employers were about to go on
vacation, leaving her without pay for three weeks, even though she was guaranteed
half pay during vacations when she was hired. Jacobs attested to many of the poor
conditions that domestic workers experienced during the early 20th century, and her
tone was not one of complaint but rather of one friend asking another for advice.
Jacobs’ letter was extraordinary, however, because its intended recipient was
Frances Perkins, the newly appointed Secretary of Labor and first ever female Cabinet
member. Jacobs was writing to Perkins not just to describe her low pay, long hours
and harsh treatment, but to inquire about domestic workers and the prospect of
protective legislation. “Please advise me in regards to wages and hours concerning
house work,” Jacobs wrote, “as my employers claim the new N.R.A. does not cover
domestic work.” The National Recovery Administration was one of the first agencies
created by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and its attempts to
standardize labor practices and wages were popular with workers. For Jacobs and
many other women, the political atmosphere of the New Deal era presented hope and
opportunity. For the first time, a realistic chance existed that domestic workers could
obtain standardization in their field, such as a minimum wage and maximum hours.
Standardization could also formalize the employer-employee relationship and make it
more equitable, thereby improving another important aspect of the work. Domestic
59 $10 per week in 1933 is the 2013 equivalent of $180 per week, or $9,365 per year.
workers like Florence Jacobs seized this opportunity, and hundreds wrote letters to
President Roosevelt, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Secretary Perkins and other
officials to request that domestic workers receive the same protections as other
laborers.
The letters from domestic workers to public officials speak to a characteristic
of the New Deal that extended beyond new protective legislation and agencies. The
New Deal changed the relationship between the state and individual citizens, by
expanding the role of the federal government to protect vulnerable citizens from the
most severe consequences of unregulated capitalism. As some of the most vulnerable
of all citizens, black female domestic workers relished the opportunities that this new
relationship promised to bring. Writing to the President, First Lady, or Secretary of
Labor seemed to many women like a reasonable place to start. For one thing, Eleanor
Roosevelt wrote an article in the August 1933 issue of Woman’s Home Companion
entitled “I Want You to Write to Me.” Although this magazine was targeted at
middle-class white women, Eleanor’s message found its way to domestic workers,
who likely had more reason to write about their troubles. In 1933 alone, the First Lady
received 300,000 letters, an unprecedented number that did not include letters written
to her husband.60 Domestic workers who wrote these letters were creating a public
discussion about their labor, and also moving from a discourse of self-improvement to
a discourse in which the government and society were responsible for economic
fairness and equity.
During the 1930s, the New Deal transformed labor, politics and activism not
just for domestic workers but for African-American workers in other sectors as well.
In this chapter I will draw upon the historiography of the New Deal and
Americans working in a variety of areas, such as garment factories and the steel
industry, to assert that the New Deal brought positive change for African-Americans.
However, it also had limitations, particularly in the South. Pressure from white
Southerners in Congress, as well as the inequalities of local implementation, resulted
in African-Americans receiving less benefit from the New Deal than they otherwise
might have. Nonetheless, the economic and political climate of the 1930s allowed
many African-American men and women to enter regulated wage labor for the first
time. Additionally, the possibility of engaging in labor organizations, political
radicalism and other forms of activism was a new opportunity that many
African-Americans took advantage of during this period.
In general, the New Deal era allowed both individuals and organizations to
embrace more collective strategies and begin to focus less on self-improvement and
more on economic justice. For one thing, the Wagner Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor
Standards Act of 1938 made the 1930s a decade of renewed strength for organized
labor, and black domestic workers seized this momentum for their own purposes.
Building on the legacy of the Penny Savers Clubs, domestic workers began to form
unions that collectively asserted their interests in the workplace. One notable example
of this unionizing trend arose in New York City in the mid-1930s. It was called the
Domestic Workers Union (DWU), and it was run by an African-American woman
named Dora Jones. During its heyday in the mid to late-1930s, the DWU had several
hundred members and a charter from the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
Domestic workers also formed labor unions in several other cities during the New
Deal era, including San Diego and Jackson, MS.61
61 Vanessa May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New
More established organizations such as the NAACP also changed their focus
during the 1930s to encourage working-class organizing. For example, in 1935 the
NAACP hired female labor activists Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke to write an article
in the Crisis detailing the effect of the Depression on domestic workers and the
potential for working-class black women to organize. The NAACP’s move to expand
into economic and labor issues for working-class black women shows how the
radicalism of the New Deal era fostered the evolution of thought and actions
regarding the improvement of these women’s conditions. The new strategies that
domestic workers and black organizations adopted, from encouraging the formation
of labor unions to writing letters to government officials, showed an increasing
tendency to act publicly and collectively.
This chapter will show that the New Deal era was a potential turning point in
domestic workers’ struggle to improve their conditions. Unfortunately, the promise of
the New Deal was largely not fulfilled. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which
established a national minimum wage and maximum hours, specifically excluded
agricultural and domestic workers from its protection. Likewise, Dora Jones’ DWU in
New York City ultimately did not reach a critical mass and its achievements were
generally local and modest. However, the 1930s represent a sharp departure from the
previous era in which domestic work and domestic workers were considered by most
people to be purely within the private sphere. In this decade, individuals and
organizations developed more public and collective strategies and began to direct
their efforts towards economic justice, setting the stage for more direct protests in the
1940s and 1950s.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt assumed the presidency in March 1933, the United
States was entering its fourth year of economic depression. In the famous ‘First
Hundred Days’ of his Presidency, Roosevelt passed several bills that raised workers’
hopes dramatically and set the stage for increased expression of these hopes.
Arguably the most significant labor-related act of 1933 was the National Industrial
Recovery Act, which set minimum wage and maximum hour standards and also
established the NRA. Unfortunately, the NRA did not cover domestic workers, and it
was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in 1935. The NRA’s protections and
exclusions highlight the opportunities and the limitations that the New Deal presented
to domestic workers. Despite these limitations, domestic workers forced their way
into the conversation to make specific points about government protection and to prod
the larger forces behind their poverty and unfair treatment.
African-American domestic workers were affected by the Great Depression in
different ways. Some workers lost their jobs when their employers could no longer
afford to pay them, while other women took significant pay cuts or began picking up
more tasks as other workers were let go. However, the election of Roosevelt in 1932
gave many domestic workers hope that the “New Deal” he promised would bring
swift economic recovery, but also a place for their voices in the new political
discourse. Many domestic workers did not wait for the political discourse to come to
them; instead they wrote to public officials to inform them about their working
conditions and their problems, and to advocate for new ways that government could
help them. By injecting themselves into this public debate, domestic workers
demonstrated the possibilities of the New Deal, but also their willingness to harness
