We refuse to be your mammies, nannies, aunties, uncles, girls, handmaidens any longer.
—EDITH BARKSDALE SLOAN
Born in the Bronx into a working-class African American family, civil rights activist Edith Barksdale Sloan had never been employed as a domestic when she was chosen in January 1969 to head the National Committee on Household Employment (NCHE), an organization of mostly middle-class women committed to reform. Despite having little firsthand experience of the occupation, Sloan’s family had a long tradition of domestic work. As a child she had heard stories about her own family history and about the slave market of the Great Depression, which connected her to the history of domestic-worker exploitation as head of the NCHE.
Individuals, such as Sloan, with a family history of domestic work shared their stories as they set out to build a movement. The stories of past injustices, especially those of the household-labor slave market, resonated with and were reclaimed by African American household-worker activists in the 1960s and 1970s. They were repeated in testimonies and informal gatherings, and illustrated the vulnerability of domestic workers as well as the occupation’s racial character and ties to the history of slavery. In the context of civil rights and black freedom organizing, references to the slave market proved to be particularly powerful. Storytelling became a form of activism and a means of political mobilization.
In a feature article in Essence magazine in 1974, Sloan wrote about the stories she was told as a child about the “Bronx Slave Market” of the 1930s: “It resembled a slave auction with the prospective buyers looking over the workers like so many head of cattle; looking for the strongest and sturdiest.”1 The stories merged with her personal and family history. “Although I never actually saw the ‘Slave Market,’ I do remember seeing the women from our neighborhood on their way to cleaning someone else’s house. One of them was my great-aunt Rie. She would leave every morning about 7:30 with her housedress in a satchel, on her way to Mrs. So-and-So’s house to do her ‘day’s work.’ She would return before dark with her satchel stuffed full of leftover matzos, chicken fat and gefilte fish, and maybe a garment or two that her employer had given her. . . . Aunt Rie always looked forward to her sixty-fifth birthday so she could retire and draw her deceased husband’s social security. She did retire at age 65—and died the next year with every ounce of strength worked out of her.”2 “I don’t ever remember her arriving home with a bonus or her ever receiving paid sick leave or a paid holiday or a paid vacation.”3 Her aunt’s story was one of years of hard labor, long days, and very little payoff at the end; her life seemed to have been given over to her employers.
Education and opportunity ultimately ended this occupational quagmire for Edith’s mother and herself. Her mother was raised in Laurens, South Carolina, by her grandmother, Adoline. Adoline, a household worker, was raped repeatedly by her employer when she was a teenager and bore two children by him. At the age of twenty, she quit domestic work and started her own catering business.4 Edith’s mother was sent to New York when she was fourteen to live with her aunt Rie and her husband, “with hopes of breaking the domestic cycle by attending college.” Edith’s mother went to vocational school and became an expert dressmaker. Both her mother and her father, a postal worker and electrician, exposed her to prominent African American political leaders such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Ralph Bunche, instilling in her a political and cultural sensibility. According to Edith, “She and my father vowed that their children would all have the opportunity to go to college. And we did.”5
Edith Barksdale attended Hunter College of the City University of New York, one of the city’s premier public institutions, graduating in 1959 with a degree in international affairs. Filled with passion to help the less fortunate, she taught in Lebanon for a period and then traveled to the Philippines to work with sick and disabled children under the auspices of the Peace Corps.
While she was abroad, two events in 1963 changed the course of her life: the Ku Klux Klan bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four African American girls attending Sunday school, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. These brutally violent events prompted Sloan to return to the United States and join the burgeoning civil rights movement. After a brief internship at the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial Foundation, she worked with the New York Urban League to register people to vote and address housing violations. In 1965 she married attorney Ned Sloan and moved to Washington, DC. The couple had four sons. Edith Sloan earned a law degree from Catholic University School of Law and continued her commitment to activism, working as a public information specialist with the US Commission on Civil Rights; in 1967 she helped organize the commission’s National Conference on Race and Education.6
Edith Barksdale Sloan speaking at the first national conference of household workers, in 1971. (Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site, National Archives for Black Women’s History)
Under her leadership beginning in 1969, the NCHE brought together workers such as Dorothy Bolden and Geraldine Roberts at a national convention that led to the establishment of the Household Technicians of America (HTA), the first-ever national organization of household workers. Sloan shifted the political orientation of the NCHE from the needs of employers to the rights of domestic workers. Less interested in training domestic workers to expand the pool of available employees than on empowering workers in the workplace, Edith Sloan’s family history and personal connection to domestic work proved to be significant in her leadership. Her family stories of domestic work and those of other domestic workers were central to building the movement for household workers and helped frame her understanding of the occupation. These narratives became the starting point for arguments for reform.
The NCHE, perhaps the most important middle-class organization committed to reforming domestic labor throughout the twentieth century, had two incarnations. The first, lasting from 1928 to 1942, advocated voluntary employer contracts as a way to improve working conditions and increase the number of low-wage domestic laborers.7 The second grew out of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) established under President Kennedy in 1961. Esther Peterson, head of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor, was instrumental in planning the commission. The commission’s report, issued in 1963, drew attention to the poor conditions of household employees and the need for “the reorganization of home maintenance.” The report advocated training, specialization, and placement of workers by private companies, in addition to the extension of unemployment insurance to household workers.8 In June 1964, the Women’s Bureau called a meeting of national organizations to discuss the status of household employment, which formed the basis of a newly constituted NCHE. The new NCHE was concerned not only with recruiting and training workers, but improving their status and compensation, and it was at the forefront of efforts to reform domestic work in the 1960s. It consisted of a group of liberal professional women—many of whom employed household workers—committed to upgrading the occupation. They were driven by both social justice concerns about the workforce as well as the perceived needs of the growing numbers of women who wanted to hire household help. Although emerging out of the 1961 commission, the NCHE was more broadly a result of decades of labor activism by women like Esther Peterson, Dorothy Height, Frieda Miller, Pauline Newman, and others. Much like the radical black feminists of the 1930s, these labor feminists had written about and lobbied for reform of household labor.9
Frieda Miller, a longtime white labor activist and economist, had since the Depression advocated reforming domestic labor. Appointed New York State industrial commissioner in 1938, she helped establish employment offices for domestic workers in 1941 to eliminate the notorious slave markets.10 When Miller headed the US Women’s Bureau from 1944 to 1953, she pushed for minimum wage and social security coverage for domestic workers. She also brought an international perspective to this work. She spent the war years in London as a labor advisor to the ambassador and, while abroad, was impressed by government programs and policies that protected both paid and unpaid household workers. She was also a US delegate to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations body that established international labor standards, and in that forum pushed to address the inequities in domestic work. In 1951, in an essay on the shortage of domestic workers in the United States for the journal International Labour Review, Miller argued that the growing number of women in the workforce necessitated an expansion of the number of available domestic workers. “The provision of a sufficient number of well-trained, well-qualified household workers is therefore a matter of grave and widespread concern in the United States. Equally important are measures to assure to this larger group of workers social status, economic security, pay, and working conditions comparable to those of other workers.”11 Miller had come to believe that addressing the glaring inequality in household labor was essential for justice and fairness and for meeting the needs of all women. This goal was summed up in a 1946 article she wrote for the New York Times titled, “Can We Lure Martha Back to the Kitchen?”12
Esther Peterson, a white labor leader who had worked for the AFL-CIO, was a longtime advocate of racial equality and civil rights. For her, like Miller, international reforms, especially in Europe, deeply influenced her thinking. In the late 1940s, Peterson traveled to Sweden with her family and remained in Europe for nearly a decade. Intrigued by domestic worker organizing there, she hoped to use the Swedish case as a model for upgrading US domestic labor. The Swedish Domestic Worker Act of 1944 made employment contracts standard, regulated hours, wages, and living and working conditions, and created a structure for mediating disputes. Based on her experience in Sweden, Peterson wrote a lengthy report for the US Women’s Bureau that recommended vocational training and legal standards. In 1961 she was appointed head of the Women’s Bureau and assistant secretary of labor and made the plight of low-income women a priority.
Peterson collaborated with Dorothy Height, of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), a prominent leader in the African American community.13 Height’s mother had worked as a nurse in a black hospital in Richmond, Virginia. In 1916, when Dorothy was four years old, her family moved from Virginia to Rankin, Pennsylvania, in search of economic opportunity. Her father worked as a building and painting contractor. But her mother, unable to find a job in a hospital, did domestic work instead, earning three dollars a day plus carfare. “I remember best a family named Johnston, for whom my mother worked over the longest period. My mother felt very close to Mrs. Johnston and her daughter Mary, but my feelings were decidedly mixed: I both liked and hated Mary Johnston. On the one hand, it seemed that during every important event in my life, my mother had to be at Mary’s house, and that bothered me. On the other hand, Mary was about my age and size and had beautiful clothes, many of which I inherited.”14 In 1957 Height assumed leadership of the NCNW, which had in the 1930s called for minimum wage protection for domestic workers and supported unionization. Height continued the organization’s commitment to issues of concern to working-class black women and was also key in the formation of the NCHE. Two decades later, the NCNW would be instrumental in preserving the archival material of the movement of household workers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, these female activists spearheaded efforts to alleviate the shortage of domestic labor and improve working conditions for household workers. They criticized the exclusion of domestic work from New Deal labor legislation and the widening gap between protected and unprotected labor, especially as organized labor won more benefits for its members. They considered professionalization, unionization, training, and improving pay and working conditions their top priorities. Peterson, Miller, and Height helped form the NCHE, which eventually represented twenty-three organizations with an interest in domestic labor, including the National Urban League, the YWCA, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, the National Council of Catholic Women, the American Public Welfare Association, the National Council of Jewish Women, and the National Council of Negro Women. It held its first annual meeting in September 1965, and two years later Frieda Miller was elected chairman.15
One of the central preoccupations of the NCHE was the increasing number of women entering the workforce, which generated the need for a reliable pool of domestic workers. Women’s labor force participation rate increased steadily in the postwar period from 34 percent in 1950 to 38 percent in 1960 to 43 percent in 1970.16 Perhaps more important is the employment rate of married women with children under the age of six. While 12 percent worked in 1950, by 1970 30 percent worked.17 Reforming domestic work, the NCHE argued, was essential to meet the needs of working women. Linking the occupation to women employed outside the home framed paid domestic labor not as a luxury or a status symbol but a necessity. Indeed, the occupation had evolved since World War II. As US society modernized, so too did domestic labor and the employer-employee relationship. Victorian notions of women defined by the domestic sphere were less applicable, as were idealized images of corseted, elaborately dressed women attended by a staff of servants. By the mid-twentieth century, assumptions about the role of middle-class women were changing. The boundaries confining women to the home had weakened with women’s increasing access to education and entry into the workforce.
But even middle-class women not entering the labor force hired help for cleaning and child care in response to changing expectations of motherhood and pressure to devote attention to children and engage in civic and charity work. Postwar ideologies of motherhood and family drew firm boundaries around the private household. With the expansion of suburbs, the middle-class home became more isolated and was cast as a refuge from the demands of work and the market. Middle-class women were expected to devote more time to caring for their children, perhaps best illustrated by the 1946 publication of Benjamin Spock’s best seller, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, which encouraged mothers to be more nurturing and establish strong bonds with their children. These ideologies affected the lives of domestic workers as well, since they were more often relegated to cleaning and less often to nurturing and were similarly isolated in white suburbs. Although many domestic workers still engaged in child care, the celebration of domesticity in the 1950s fostered middle-class women’s interest in the nurturing aspects of domesticity and led to a growing demand for household help to carry out other household responsibilities.18
In the postwar period, domestic labor was less about serving tea to society ladies, and more about completing essential household chores. The availability of paid domestic labor was essential for maintaining the middle-class gendered social order. Women could take jobs outside the home and engage in civic activities as long as domestic duties were taken care of. This arrangement left intact the basic breadwinner ideology and gendered division of labor—men could still provide for the family and didn’t have to do “women’s work”—but women could push the circumscribed gender boundaries. Although social status may have been less important for hiring household labor, romanticized notions of the racialized past and patterns of servitude still sometimes seeped into the occupation. Because the workforce was largely women of color, unequal notions of gender justified and informed domestic labor.19
Coupled with these cultural shifts was a change in the character of the work itself. Over the course of the twentieth century, domestic work became widespread, with more households hiring part-time domestic workers and fewer maintaining a large staff of employees. Domestic workers were more likely to be a single employee in a household taking on multiple roles as cook, housecleaner, and child care worker or working for a family one or two days a week. Technological advances that eased the burden of maintaining a home contributed to this change. It was no longer necessary, for example, to hire someone to do only laundry with the invention of the automatic washing machine. Along with this came a process of de-skilling and multitasking. Household workers were also changing the character of the occupation by insisting on day work. Most household workers in the postwar period continued to work after having families of their own. These largely women-of-color workers began in the 1920s to refuse live-in work. Domestic workers more commonly went home to their own families at the end of the day, and may even have worked for several families in a given week.20
Middle-class women’s demand for workers, combined with continuing inequality and low wages, prompted many to leave the occupation and resulted in a shortage of workers. There was a growing sense among employers that domestic workers in the United States were too demanding, very costly, or not properly trained.21 Popular magazines were filled with stories of middle-class women unable to find household help. Employers were not, according to Life magazine in 1961, “rich or idle,” but working wives and mothers of large families who “desperately need help around the house.” One mother wrote in her diary, which was later published in a magazine, about her frustrating attempt to hire help: “There were some who would not scrub floors. Some couldn’t cook. Some would only cook. Some wanted ridiculous salaries or wouldn’t work weekends.”22
Training became one solution. The call for training emerged in part from perceptions about the cultural distance between employers and employees, who it was believed didn’t share the same values, ethics, or knowledge as middle-class employees. Mrs. Brooks Wiley Maccraken, a former social worker living in Cleveland Heights, was so exasperated by the lack of “good” help, she started her own domestic-worker training program. One evening after hosting a party, she heard the cleaning woman dump all her precious silver into the sink. “So, I began thinking, and I guess because I’m a former social worker I thought about the possibility of training women to care for fine things like silver and china and linen, of teaching them how to set and serve a table, so they would be of real help to women giving parties. It seemed to me if women acquired a specialty like this they would earn more money—and both groups would be happier.”23 In 1960 Maccraken established the Party Aide Training Program at the Jane Addams Vocational School in Cleveland to create a better-prepared pool of workers for middle-class homes.24 The view that the needs of both middle-class women and poor women would be met through domestic-service training programs gained currency.
The mutual dependencies of middle-class and poor women were perhaps best illustrated in a 1967 Woman’s Day magazine article called “Help Wanted!” It began by profiling a young mother who took a job as a school librarian but needed help taking care of her children. It also featured a woman who had been on welfare for eighteen years and was placed as a domestic in the librarian’s home by the welfare employment agency. This “matching” was deemed to be ideal. According to the librarian: “I just love my work! I’m doing what I was trained to do. Yet the house and our children aren’t neglected either.” The former welfare recipient, equally happy, explained: “Now I’m off welfare and we’re all doing fine. I work for some real nice people.” In this scenario, encouraging women, especially women on welfare, to enter the field of domestic service would be universally beneficial. They would move off the unemployment or welfare rolls and into permanent jobs. And middle-class women would get much-needed help.
The arguments for moving poor women from welfare into domestic service were part of a larger anti-welfare discourse that saw welfare as a social ill, rather than an important source of support for single mothers, as was the case when it was established in the 1930s. The growing numbers of middle-class women entering the workforce bolstered critiques of welfare, since the idea that women should stay home with children was weakening. But the anti-welfare discourse in the 1960s was also cast through a racial and gendered lens, where women of color in particular were considered undeserving of state assistance and expected to work—especially when there was a shortage of domestic workers. According to one report: “This demand [for domestic labor] is not being met, although there are millions of unemployed and underemployed people who are seeking decent jobs.”25
The NCHE believed that improving working conditions and making domestic service more attractive would simultaneously reduce the welfare and unemployment rolls and enable middle-class women to enter the workforce. Mary Dublin Keyserling, appointed head of the Women’s Bureau in 1964 after Esther Peterson stepped down, explained at a 1967 NCHE conference on household labor: “The great growth in the employment of women and our rising living standards have increased the demand for household assistance. Many women whose services are needed as doctors, social workers, and teachers and in other essential occupations cannot combine work and family responsibilities unless they can count on competent, trained people to give them a hand at home. Many others also need household services, now inadequately available, if they are to make larger contributions as volunteers or in other types of needed community activity.”26 In conjunction with the Women’s Bureau, the NCHE created a pamphlet for employers that summed up this goal of meeting the needs of employed middle-class women: If ONLY I Could Get Some Household Help! It advised training workers as well as ensuring fair wages, defined hours, and mutual respect.27
The status of the occupation—the stigma, low wages, and poor working conditions—the NCHE argued, deterred women from entertaining it and resulted in a shortage. African Americans, they maintained, would return to domestic service if job standards were improved and the master-servant character of the relationship redefined. This meant, in particular, revaluing the labor. Dorothy Height called for the need to recognize that there was “glory” in the work.28 “Some of these words like ‘maid’ and ‘domestic’ are demeaning and I think we must use more professional terms. . . . Let’s treat household employment as a profession in which workers have a contract and are assured fair hours and compensation, as well as coverage by our protective labor laws.” In addition, the norms and expectations governing the occupation seemed outdated. Peterson suggested: “Household employment is one of the last holdouts against modernization” and must be transformed by encouraging specialization and professionalization and enabling domestic workers to assert their rights.29 She argued: “This [change] is possible if we bring this occupation into the 20th century, if we give it dignity, provide training for it, and educate employers to recognize the hiring of household help as a business proposition.”30 Elizabeth Koontz, appointed as the first African American woman to head the Women’s Bureau in 1969, summed up the goals of the NCHE most succinctly when she said, “We must change the workers; we must change the conditions of the industry; and we must change the attitudes of the employers.”31 The NCHE adopted a program of education, training, and a voluntary Code of Standards for employers that called for a minimum wage of $1.60 an hour, overtime pay, a written agreement of work responsibilities, paid holidays, vacations, sick days, social security, and a “professional working relationship.” The Code, which was also the basis for a model contract, became one way to establish a more businesslike employer-employee relationship.32
The NCHE launched eight demonstration projects underwritten by the Ford Foundation and the US Department of Labor’s Manpower Development and Training Program in 1966 to experiment with ways of reforming domestic service.33 The main goal was to create worker-run cooperatives or corporate entities with the hope that the “business model will transform the occupation.”34 The NCHE’s pilot projects were run by social service agencies, nonprofit organizations, advocacy groups, business leaders, or middle-class individuals with “local expertise” and designed to raise the status and pay of domestic workers and to provide trained, reliable, and professional service to employers. The YWCA-sponsored Household Employment Project based in Chicago, for example, ran seminars for employers on maintaining a professional relationship and training employees in homemaking skills. Another project, Household Management in New York, employed workers and sent them out to private individuals as needed for elder care, catering, child care, or cleaning. Workers were guaranteed full-time work, workers’ compensation, unemployment, sick leave, and a paid vacation. The Homemaker Service Demonstration Project at Kansas State University ran a four-week, live-in training program for women over age forty-five that prepared them to work for a family during periods of crisis. They were trained for “infant and child care, personal care, accident prevention, working with children, home nursing, understanding needs of the elderly, dealing with death, meal planning, buying, and money management.”35 SURGE, a Virginia-based employee-owned cooperative, sent out teams of workers for cleaning jobs. The range of projects the NCHE supported reflected the multiple ways it hoped to transform domestic work: from offering higher wages and benefits, to educating employers, to training workers, to introducing a third party into the employer-employee relationship. While the entrepreneurship model had the potential to put the power in the hands of household workers, most of the NCHE demonstration projects were not owned or managed by household workers but by middle-class advocates.
In the mid-1960s, the NCHE designed programs with the needs of employers at the forefront and offered a narrative of domestic work that linked the fate of middle-class and poor women. The popular press reflected concerns about the shortage of good domestic help, which hindered women’s ability to mother and constrained their options to enter the workforce. Rather than advocating a cheap, compliant, and deferential workforce, the NCHE’s solution was one of a modern workforce with guaranteed basic rights and labor protections. Although their emphasis bent slightly toward the needs of middle-class women, theirs was a progressive vision that sought to shed the culture of servitude that some employers aimed to re-create.
At the same time, the NCHE’s reforms reflected a degree of paternalism. In most of the early projects and campaigns, the power to define the terms of reform was in the hands of middle-class advocates. One NCHE-funded project, for example, in addition to pushing for higher wages, taught black women grooming, personality development, and proper diction through repetition of the phrase “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,” an approach that seemed to emerge from employers’ desire for ideal servants.36 Household workers themselves played only a minimal role in discussions of how to transform domestic labor. This top-down approach would be replaced with a grassroots one, however, which was prompted by the upsurge of domestic-worker organizing and the growing calls among activists and reformers for empowerment and participation. The NCHE would soon find itself on an altered course as it brought together the local domestic workers’ rights groups in 1971 into a national organization, the Household Technicians of America.
A turning point for the NCHE came in 1969, with the hiring of Edith Barksdale Sloan as executive director and the establishment of a committee of household workers. Two years later, a Ford Foundation grant enabled the NCHE to convene a national meeting of local household-worker groups. Interest in reaching out to household workers was not entirely new. Conversations about a membership arm of domestic workers were first raised in 1967, although initially little came of this.37 But Edith Sloan’s leadership proved decisive in moving the organization in this direction. Unhappy with NCHE’s previous emphasis, she believed that “unless the women had a really strong group to support their demands, the gains of better wages and benefits would be lost.”38
At its annual meeting in March 1970, the NCHE board formally requested a conference of household workers. In the long term the NCHE hoped to see an independent national organization of workers.39 It had come to believe that reforming domestic service could best be achieved by placing power in the hands of workers to determine for themselves how the occupation should be changed. This was the beginning of an effort to involve domestic workers and middle-class reformers and involve workers in the transformation of household labor. And most NCHE members expressed enthusiasm for this shift. According to one board member, Uvelia Bowen of HEART in Philadelphia, this initiative would mobilize a “cadre of household workers to decide their destiny in America . . . and this Committee [should] be ready to stand behind them and to make sure that they move in the proper channels to decide their destiny.” Anna Halsted, chairman of the NCHE board, concluded: “I believe that this is one of the most significant and exciting assignments which the National Committee on Household Employment could undertake in our program to improve the social and economic status of household workers.”40
The NCHE’s turn to organizing domestic workers was part of a larger political sensibility in the late 1960s and early 1970s that advocated empowerment and self-determination of ordinary people. Anticolonial movements, the struggle for black power, poor people’s campaigns, the student movement, and women’s organizing all articulated a need for people to act on their own behalf rather than be acted upon. The civil rights movement was one model of how masses of people could participate in social change. Acknowledging people’s agency and giving them the opportunity to take control of their own futures was rooted in the idea that those experiencing a problem understood it best and could offer the most appropriate solutions. This sentiment was also reflected in the federal government’s War on Poverty, launched in 1964, which mandated “maximum feasible participation” of the poor in constructing programs to combat poverty.
The NCHE’s decision to ally with and support the self-empowerment of domestic workers by bringing them together into a separate organization fundamentally altered the political and intellectual direction of the NCHE. Edith Sloan and other advocates of this shift looked at domestic work not in terms of the persistent problems experienced by employers, but in terms of the history of black women and inequities in the labor market. Their new framework in thinking about domestic work drew out a longer historical thread between the occupation and black women’s struggle for dignity, equality, and justice and it created the space for domestic workers to speak out. Earlier black women activists like Marvel Cooke and labor feminists like Frieda Miller had waited for this development for years. In fact, Miller had written in 1951: “I hope to see the day when household workers will come together in an organization, and elect delegates and take a conscious pride in their skilled specialties.”41 That day had come.
Under Sloan’s leadership, these hopes turned to reality and the NCHE increasingly centered the voices, stories, and leadership of domestic workers to reform the occupation. On the national level, it facilitated the circulation and dissemination of domestic-worker stories, which strengthened organizing on the local level and enabled domestic workers to develop a collective identity. Sloan’s story, and others like it, became an important component of domestic-worker organizing because it created a shared history and helped build solidarity, political consciousness, and emotional ties among African American domestic workers. Domestic-worker stories disrupted dominant narratives and offered an alternative history of domestic work, the intimate sphere, and labor organizing. They dispelled the “mammy” stereotype, exposed the power imbalance between employer and employee, and vividly described a life of hardship. The occupation’s roots in the history of slavery and racism, and the ways in which household workers used this history, enabled them to form a collective identity as a group of workers lacking protections, rights, and dignity but empowered to fight for them.42 Josephine Hulett’s role in the movement illustrates this.
In May 1970 Sloan hired Josephine Hulett as a field officer. Hulett was a household worker who had formed a domestic workers’ rights group in Youngstown, Ohio. After she started the group, Hulett wrote to President Lyndon Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, about the terrible conditions of domestic work. Her letter was forwarded to the Labor Department and then to the NCHE, which put her in touch with Edith Sloan and propelled her into the national circles of domestic-worker organizing. After receiving Hulett’s letter, Sloan went to Youngstown in 1969 and asked Hulett to become an organizer for the NCHE and help implement its plan to establish a national organization of domestic workers. Hulett represented Youngstown on the board of the NCHE. Then, in May of 1970, she took Sloan up on her offer and became a full-time field organizer for the committee.
Hulett’s charge was to reach out to and serve as a liaison between local household-workers rights’ groups and the NCHE. In some ways, Hulett was the ideal person for the job. She had worked as a domestic for twenty years and understood perfectly the hardships and constraints of the occupation. Hulett’s willingness to share her story became her signature strategy for organizing domestic workers.
Hulett was born in 1937 near Portland, Arkansas, and raised on a white-owned farm that functioned more like a plantation. Although her family had been “adequately clothed and housed,” their situation deteriorated rapidly when the original owners died and the farm was passed down to their sons. When Josephine was thirteen, her mother died and her father sent her to live with her oldest sister in Ohio. Life wasn’t much easier at her new home. Her sister’s husband was a coal-yard worker, and the couple had a young daughter. Josephine was lonely and couldn’t shake the feeling that she was a financial burden to the family. “Many nights, I used to cry myself to sleep because I was so homesick. I wanted so much to go back home with my father.” To escape this unhappy situation, she dropped out of high school and got married. By the time she was twenty, the couple had divorced and Hulett was supporting a baby boy on her own.43
As a high school dropout with few job opportunities, Hulett turned to domestic work to support herself. Because she couldn’t afford paid child care, she left the baby with her ex-husband’s family during the day, and ventured out from her home in Girard, Ohio, near Youngstown, in search of day work. At her first job she earned twenty-five dollars a week for five and a half days. She paid eighty cents for bus fare, walking two and a half miles each way to avoid paying for an additional bus. Her employer’s husband owned a produce company, yet she was given only a hot dog for lunch every day. She cared for four young children and cleaned a large house from top to bottom. Although she frequently worked late, she was never paid for overtime. One day, when she left thirty minutes early to take her son to the doctor, her employer docked her pay. The next day she left at five o’clock and informed her boss she would never work overtime again. The following week, she was fired.44
At her next job, Hulett accepted a meager salary of $22.50 a week, working for an elderly couple who had no small children living in the home. Despite the anticipated lighter workload, she cooked for the entire extended family on Friday nights and sometimes babysat grandchildren—all for no extra pay. On top of that, when she arrived at work on Monday morning the house was filthy—the sink full of dishes, dirty clothes strewn all over the house, and overflowing ashtrays. In order to make ends meet, Hulett took on extra household work on the weekends. She worked for the family for ten years, fearful that if she demanded more money she would be fired. When she finally got up the nerve to ask for a raise, her pay was increased to $25 a week. But a few days later the family announced they were moving to Florida. They gave her no severance pay, no prior warning, and no benefits.45
Committed to improving her economic situation, Hulett studied part-time to earn her high school diploma. She then spent a year and a half and $285—three months’ salary—taking a correspondence course to become a practical nurse. After completing it, she was shocked to learn that the course wasn’t accredited and she couldn’t practice in a medical facility. Hoping to find work in the health-care field, she looked for home-based nursing work—caring for an infant or an elderly or a disabled person. Hulett encountered yet another obstacle, recalling, “I soon discovered that being a companion or baby nurse were jobs mostly for white women.” She eventually found a job working for a young doctor, his wife, and their two babies, earning $35 a week for five days. In many ways it was a good position and a vast improvement from her previous jobs. She received wage increases, thoughtful gifts, paid vacations, and sick leave. “They regarded me as a professional and an adult. They didn’t pretend that I was a ‘member of the family’ nor did they intrude on my life.” She worked for them until 1970, when she took the position with the NCHE.46 They remained friends long after that. Hulett’s story of her “good” employer also became important symbolically because it illustrated the possibility for just and respectable work and confirmed that there was nothing about the occupation that made it inescapably oppressive.
Hulett’s story resonated with other black domestic workers. She shared her struggles of living in the rural South and how her treatment on the job pegged her as separate and highly unequal. As a single mother, Hulett had to balance care for her son with full-time employment. She spent as much time with her son as she could and carved out one day a week to go out to lunch with him, “and that was an occasion he loved and looked forward to.” As she explained later, “A mother’s going to find a way to support her child at all costs. . . . I know that is the only reason I took some of the conditions I did.”47 As a black woman, she had few other job opportunities. And in those situations when she tried to assert her rights, she found herself unemployed. On a few occasions, she was fired without warning or severance pay, and in her painstaking efforts to improve her economic situation she found that racial barriers prevented her from taking advantage of better opportunities. Hulett was often expected to do cooking, cleaning, and child-care work that was clearly not part of her job description. She was deeply concerned about the status and dignity of domestic workers and her treatment as a servant rather than a worker. “Just because a worker lives in doesn’t mean she should be at someone’s beck and call 24 hours a day. Even for a day worker, sometimes it seems the employer feels he or she owns you. If you’re sick, some employers will call up the doctor to make sure you’re not lying.”48
Hulett’s encounter with another household worker sparked her political activism, underscoring how the sharing of stories and communal connection among household workers laid the foundation for this movement. One morning at 4:30 a.m., Hulett was on her way home from dropping off her employers at the airport when she saw an older black woman walking to work and offered her a ride. The woman had injured her hip while at work and had no sick leave or insurance. She couldn’t afford to take time off. According to Hulett, her “employers refused to accept the fact that her injury had occurred while at work, and they refused to aid her in any way.”49 Although she completed most of her work—sitting on a stool to wash dishes—she couldn’t take the child out for a walk. The employer, who was a stockbroker, hired a babysitter to do it for $2 a day and deducted the amount from the employee’s weekly wages of $42.50 This woman’s story prompted Hulett to contact several other household workers and encouraged them to form the Youngstown Household Technicians in 1968.
After meeting Edith Barksdale Sloan and joining the staff of the NCHE in 1970, Hulett reached out to domestic workers around the country and helped organize the national conference the following year. In her first few months on the job she traveled from site to site, Akron and Youngstown, Ohio, Alexandria, Virginia, Denver, Chicago, Baltimore, East St. Louis, talking with household workers. A small group of household workers in Auburn, Alabama, for example, had been meeting regularly since 1969. In early 1971, they contacted NCHE, which sent organizing materials and arranged a visit by Hulett. This proved transformative. The small informal group formed a functioning organization and sent five representatives to the first national household-workers conference in Washington.51 Personal outreach and Hulett’s ability to inspire other household workers became the hallmark of her leadership. She recognized their “need to feel that someone can say it like it is.” As she explained it, her firsthand experience with domestic work is what made her an effective leader: “I have to . . . really say what my life has been like . . . so that other women who are household workers may be able to connect with my story, and see what we can do together to change our lives.”52 Hulett’s story included a growing awareness of the need to assert her rights. It reflected her belief that political engagement by domestic workers was key to achieving reforms. “When I visit with them,” she observed, “they become highly motivated and dedicated to the cause.” Hulett encouraged the women she met to take action and be a part of the larger movement of household workers.53
Dorothy Bolden and Geraldine Roberts were two of the women Josephine Hulett and Edith Sloan brought together in July 1971 at the first convention of domestic workers, which eventually became the Household Technicians of America (HTA). Household workers traveling to Washington, DC, included Mary McClendon and Bernice Thompson of the Household Workers Organization in Detroit and Geraldine Miller from New York City.54 They came together for what they called the three P’s: pay, protection, and professionalism. All together six hundred household workers from thirty cities participated in a weekend filled with festivities—dignitaries, dinners, and testimonials.55
The gathering at the Twin Bridges Marriott was inspiring. Edith Sloan, in her keynote address, told the gathering: “I know you don’t need to hear the reasons why we are here . . . Your memories and aching bodies and tired bones give you all the answers necessary.” Speaking to the power of the gathering, she claimed: “Unless there are some changes made, ‘Madame’ is going to have to clean her own house, and cook and serve her own meals, because everyone is going to quit.”56 Hulett urged the women to speak out: “We’re women, and we’ve got big mouths. But you ain’t afraid of your big man—now are you gonna be afraid of Miss Jane?”57 One reporter called the gathering “an odd blend of religious fervor, black militancy, women’s liberation and union solidarity.”58 Representative John Conyers declared that “the day for exploiting the domestic worker is over.”59 According to one report, Walter Fauntroy, pastor at New Bethel Baptist Church and congressional representative for Washington, DC, “thrilled the Saturday evening banquet audience” by singing “The Impossible Dream.”60 Esther Peterson attended, as did Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman in Congress, who told the enthusiastic crowd: “We want our piece of the American Dream.”61
Becky Esquivias of Oklahoma City, one of four Native American domestic workers at the conference, shared her story of being expected to wash, cook, plan meals, and clean, although she was hired as a practical nurse.62 Wilhelmina Adams, a mother of three from Charlotte, North Carolina, had worked as a domestic for decades and was involved in several community organizations including her church and the PTA. In the 1960s she became president of the board of Domestics United Incorporated and a paid staff member responsible for training, placing domestic workers in jobs, as well as setting employment standards, such as the refusal to wash windows.63 Domestics United, supported by the Charlotte Area Fund, was formed in 1966 when African American household workers reached out to the Westside Neighborhood Service Center for help with problems of low wages and long hours. By the late 1960s, there were six chapters in the Charlotte area and an estimated two hundred people involved.64 The domestic workers’ conference was a forum to discuss how to organize and build support. The women who gathered in Washington usually knew little about other domestic-worker activism prior to this meeting. Their impetus to organize was rooted in their day-to-day lives and the communities in which they resided. So the gathering provided an opportunity to meet and connect with other domestic-worker organizers. As an attendee from North Carolina said, “Now I know I’m not alone.”65 In that regard the HTA was less an architect of domestic-worker organizing than a conduit linking together the disparate local struggles.
Two weeks after the national gathering, a committee elected at the conference met at the Washington, DC, Statler Hilton Hotel to hammer out the details of the new organization. The planning meeting was a multiracial group of women—black, white, Native American, and Chicana. The Chicana and Native American domestic workers dropped out shortly, and although NCHE attempted to replace them, the organization was never able to build a truly multiracial movement.66 Committee members decided to call the new organization the Household Technicians of America (HTA) and intended “to work with and for workers of all races and ethnic groups.”67 The HTA was composed of elected representatives of local groups of workers and a board of directors, and instituted a dues system to enable the organization to be self-supporting. Geneva Reid of Warren, Ohio, was named the first president. NCHE promised to help advise and fund the organization for one year, then expected it to be independent. Eventually, HTA came to represent over three dozen groups, had a full-time staff, and a membership of some twenty-five thousand, from diverse places like San Francisco, Sacramento, Tulsa, Detroit, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Dallas. The hope was that the HTA would remain independent, but the organization struggled financially and the institutional history of the NCHE and the HTA overlapped, as did the membership. So, in addition to the HTA, the NCHE increasingly came to represent the voices of household workers.
The NCHE’s commitment to organize local domestic workers’ rights groups and form an organization “which would become the national voice of the workers and their instrument for change” was a watershed moment for household workers. Many of the reformers who had been involved with NCHE in its early years, including Dorothy Height, Frieda Miller, and Esther Peterson, were ecstatic about the new organization. Even if they didn’t initially make this a priority in their reform efforts, they were aware of the significance in this turn in direction. Although Frieda Miller died in 1973 shortly after HTA’s formation, Esther Peterson was connected to household-worker organizing until the late 1970s and attended several of its national conferences. And Dorothy Height similarly remained a stalwart supporter. After generations of silent struggle or quiet endurance, of feeling that there simply were no options, domestic workers had begun to come out of the shadows and emerge from behind closed doors.68 The decision to bring together the disparate local groups to work collaboratively to build local organizations and push a national agenda transformed what had been individualized resistance, or informal community organizing, as was the case in Montgomery, into a visible political movement.69
With a cadre of women such as Josephine Hulett in leadership, HTA launched its program of “giving voice” to domestic workers, and as a result, workers’ voices came to play a prominent role in domestic-worker activism. The stories of mothers and grandmothers, of aunts and sisters, and of workers themselves recounted decades of hardship, few rewards, limited opportunities, and, for black women, a history of slavery and servitude. Edith Sloan’s story of Aunt Rie was one such example. It was a way for her to connect with household workers and to make a claim for why reform of the occupation was so urgently needed. Both the stories and this first national gathering of domestic workers proved to be pivotal in the construction of these women’s identity as domestic workers—that they had a set of common interests and could mobilize around a political platform for change.
For household workers, storytelling highlighted their relationship to domestic work, linked past and present, and was a means to achieve dignity and self-empowerment. Storytelling served as a base-building tool, gave legitimacy and authority to those speaking on behalf of domestic workers, and helped craft their identity. They learned about the experiences of other domestic workers and empathized about the common patterns of mistreatment. Moreover, their stories enabled women from vastly different backgrounds to develop a thread of connection that would be the basis of their collective mobilization. By speaking about their lives, their hardship, and love of their work, they hoped to bring dignity and value to household labor.