I have completed my training as a household technician and know that I don’t have to scrub floors down on all fours anymore.
—A GRADUATE OF NDWUA’S HOUSEHOLD MANAGEMENT TECHNICIANS PROGRAM
In 1970 Dorothy Bolden and the NDWUA in Atlanta established Maids’ Honor Day to recognize the contributions of domestic workers. Employers were asked to submit letters of nomination explaining why their maid should be named “Maid of the Year.” “The purpose of this event,” the NDWUA announced, “is to recognize and honor outstanding women in the field of domestic labor, for their courage and stability, and the remarkable ability of being able to take care of two households at one time.”1 The Maids’ Honor Day banquet was held annually in May; the celebration included distinguished speakers, citations, awards, and a benediction.
Maids’ Honor Day, which sought to bring respect and recognition to an occupation both undervalued and underpaid, was part of a broader campaign to improve working conditions for domestic laborers. The struggle for dignity was part and parcel of the struggle for rights. For poor black women who scrubbed other people’s floors, the banquet was a rare opportunity to dress up in their finest attire, enjoy a lavish dinner, and publicly take pride in who they were. Even workers who did not win the honor of Maid of the Year undoubtedly benefited from basking in the praise of their employers.
Bolden’s was not an isolated effort. Across the country, domestic-worker-appreciation events sought to recognize the contributions of domestic workers. Some “honor days” were established and run by domestic workers themselves. In other cases, states issued formal proclamations in response to activists’ campaigns. In Michigan, Governor William Milliken declared a Household Workers Week in April 1972. Governor John J. Gilligan of Ohio, in announcing an annual Household Employees Week, described domestic labor as “an honorable and indispensable profession which requires a high degree of skill and expertise,” and hoped to “pay just and proper tribute to the domestic specialists and technicians.”2 When Governor Jimmy Carter signed an executive order to proclaim Maids’ Honor Day in Georgia in April 1972, he was flanked by Dorothy Bolden and other household-worker activists.
Implicit in these efforts to honor household workers was the acknowledgment that household labor is different from other kinds of labor, by virtue of its taking place in the domestic sphere. The home as workspace fostered a perception that domestic workers did what they did out of love and loyalty; in this sense, the work was equated to the unpaid labor of housewives. One employer nominating her maid wrote, “This letter is a love story.” Another said of her employee, “She is more than a maid (just as a wife is more than just a housewife). She is a very dear part of us.”3 Another claimed she is “my very dearest friend.” Employers’ framing of the labor as “care work” reinforced the notion that this was labor emanating from and centering on an emotional connection. In contrast, household workers in the 1970s rarely used the framework of care to talk about their work. They preferred a “labor” construct over a “care” construct—a focus on rights rather than emotion. At the same time, employers maintained a strict separation between family members and women working in their homes to justify unequal treatment. Thus, proximity and distance, familiarity and difference, characterized household labor.4
Jimmy Carter signs the Maids’ Honor Day proclamation in 1972. Dorothy Bolden is on the right. (Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library)
Domestic workers had complicated relations with their employers because of the personal nature of the work and the fact that their workplace was a private household. Their jobs brought them in intimate contact with members of the household, and the “housework” they performed tended to be devalued. Household workers often expressed a love for their work and felt that maintaining a close, cordial relationship with their employers was necessary. But they also rejected the culture of servitude that had produced the mammy stereotype and wanted to be seen in a professional context. As Josephine Hulett explained: “I have found that a major problem is to break down the maid/domestic/servant images, and the misunderstandings and prejudices that go with these images. Since people think that household work is inferior, they are prone to think that the people that perform this work are inferior.”5
At the core, domestic-worker activists advocated recognition of their labor as work and the same protections afforded to other workers. They sought control over the work process and wanted to determine for themselves the standards and expectations of the occupation. They rejected employer-initiated training programs and created their own programs and uniform codes of job standards. They asserted their rights as workers by insisting on basic rights and protections. They hoped to professionalize the occupation and raise wages to enhance the power of workers and transform the employer/employee relationship. In short, they wanted to reshape the contours of the occupation and reestablish it as one of dignity, respect, and professionalism.
Alice Childress used the phrase “one of the family” to describe a central reality of domestic labor: individuals laboring in the home with little public recognition of their status as workers.6 The location of the work fostered an environment where the boundary between being a worker with specific responsibilities and acting as a personal attendant was fuzzy, even for household cleaners who theoretically were not caretakers.7 Workers were often expected to be at the beck and call of their employers rather than having a clearly defined set of responsibilities.8 The confusion extended beyond assigned tasks and blurred the distinction between employee and household resident. The fiction of familiarity was used to extract additional labor from workers and make leftovers and hand-me-downs acceptable forms of remuneration.
Testimony from employers during Atlanta’s Maids’ Honor Day illustrates how employers viewed their domestic help and the roles they played in the household. The nomination letters included numerous accounts of household workers simultaneously cleaning, cooking, caring for children, helping neighbors and other family members with chores, and taking care of the disabled, ill, and dying. A worker’s commitment to the household, often at the expense of her own family and personal well-being, was an ever-present theme. Household worker Leola King, for example, stayed at her employer’s house over the Easter weekend because the family was out of town and someone needed to “take care of things” and look in on the employer’s sister, who was in a nursing home. When the woman became ill, Leola had to find care for her own grandson, whom she was caring for, as well as contact the woman’s doctor and go to the hospital, missing “the only thing she wanted,” which was to attend evening service on Easter Sunday.9 Mrs. Toon, another employer, testified about Jeanette Everhart: “Numerous times, she has neglected family and come to my rescue.”10 One employer nominated her domestic worker because she was “the epitome of quiet, gentle strength.”11 Mrs. James Coody explained that Sophie, even though she had her own family, worked for thirty years for her employers, acting as “pediatrician, psychologist, advisor, counselor, confidant, companion and contributor to spoiling our son.”12 Anne Winston explained that her domestic worker, Rosie Powell, “swooped in like Mary Poppins” and saved the family from being broken apart, while accepting a “very low salary.” Moreover, Rosie “sustained third-degree burns of her forearm when she risked her life to put out a kitchen fire which endangered my baby. When she returned from the hospital with her arm wrapped in bandages, she insisted on serving supper to the family rather than leaving the chores to me after I had been at school all day.”13 Maids’ Honor Day provides a window into employer perceptions about household workers—the affection they felt for their employees, how they depended upon them, and their expectations of what defined a good household worker. Many employers believed they simply could not survive without the help of their workers.
Employer testimony sometimes invoked the stereotypical mammy figure. Betty Talmadge of Lovejoy, Georgia, wrote about the family’s maid, Lucille, whose mother also worked for the family. The women lived on the family farm, and Lucille not only tended to her employer’s children, grandchildren, and dying mother, but also cooked, cleaned house for her employer, and worked in the employer’s ham processing plant. The multigenerational family ties and claims of loyalty seemed to harken back to an earlier era.14 Another employer submitted, as part of the Maids’ Honor Day nomination, her fourteen-year-old daughter’s school essay on her “most favorite character,” with the title “Rustin’s Mary.” After detailing Mary’s multiple roles in the household, the daughter wrote, “Many people ask us if we ‘own’ her, but the truth is, Mary actually ‘owns’ us . . . [because] Mary told everyone what to do and when to do it.”15 The essay reveals how the slave past continued to inform notions of household labor and how the mammy stereotype persisted within the white household, with the image of the unswervingly loyal black maid as central to family life.
Employer stories became part of the narrative of the struggle for domestic-worker rights and were the basis for honoring particular maids because they conveyed a sense of the value and importance of this labor. Employers repeatedly testified about the indispensability of their household workers. As one explained, “I don’t know what I would do without her”; another asserted, “She is a stand-in mother to my babies while I work.”16 These stories also reinforced the power of employers to define the terms of employment and determine what distinguished a “good” from a “bad” worker. Clearly, these employers lauded the values of deference, loyalty, and self-sacrifice (even to the point of a maid putting her own life in jeopardy)—the very aspects of the occupation that domestic-worker rights activists found intolerable. Johnnie Saulsberry, the 1976 “Maid of the Year,” deserved the honor, her employer wrote, because she bathes and cares for the employer’s seventy-five-year-old mother, entertains her mother’s friends for afternoon tea, takes care of a dog, cleans a ten-room house, does the laundry, tends to fifty plants, cooks fabulous meals, never complains about unexpectedly having three or four guests or large numbers of extended family for dinner, and often stays late if her employer is delayed returning home. Another supporter wrote that Johnnie was “cheerful, bright eyed, and remarkably pleasant.” Another letter writer for Johnnie wrote that she was “unselfish” in giving extra time, underscoring the way the labor was perceived as caring work and that refusing to give extra time may have been viewed as selfish. Johnnie’s own status as a mother was mentioned, but as a footnote in her list of attributes.17 Rather than scrutinizing the unrealistic demands of employers or the standards of employment, Maids’ Honor Day redirected attention to how well employees conducted themselves and whether or not they fulfilled the expectations of their bosses. Maids’ Honor Day revealed how many employers depended on their workers, and how this dependence sometimes came at the expense of domestic workers’ basic rights.
As “one of the family,” domestic workers had to ensure that household members were taken care of and tasks completed, even if doing so meant longer hours and no additional pay, since household members—especially women—routinely engage in caretaking out of love or responsibility, without compensation. Indeed, Jewel Adams’s employer called her “our friend and part of the family.”18 The metaphor of family suggested an emotional bond, mutual obligations, and a relationship separate from the marketplace, obscuring what was in fact a market relationship. Characterizing domestic workers as “family” and constructing their work in terms of “care” enabled employers to flout the law and create informal and unpredictable work situations. Employers were entrusting their home and their children to another individual. And in order for that situation to be viable, they had to believe that care and love were central components of the occupation.
Many household workers were devoted to the people they worked for and took pride in what they did. NDWUA established Maids’ Honor Day in part to express “love for our labor” and the ways in which workers exhibit “voluntary love with an aim for service to others.”19 This sentiment was an important theme in household workers’ campaigns and emerges again and again in their testimonies. Many household workers became emotionally intertwined with the families they worked for. Geraldine Miller described grieving over the loss of someone in one family and worrying about an illness in another family.20 Household workers valued and recognized the work they did and they genuinely enjoyed it. But even though household workers expressed love of their labor, they did not see their work as a labor of love. Mable Franklin, a member of the Dallas Committee on Household Employment, grew to love the family she worked for: “The love and joy I have known for doing my best is something nobody can take from me. The loving and caring goes two ways and most people have it—at least some of it—with the people they work for. But love won’t pay their grocery bills.”21
Employer claims to kinship were rarely genuine, and in any case were not reciprocal. Although domestic workers were expected to carry out familial responsibilities, they were rarely accorded familial rights such as using the front door, sitting at the dinner table, or being properly fed. The question of food was a recurring one. Food served to workers was often poor quality, leftover, or simply not enough. Geraldine Miller recalled being offered food that was inedible: “I’ve had sandwiches where the cheese was so hard I could throw it and hit you in the head and hurt you.”22 Moreover, domestics were not interested in building these sorts of familial relationships. Bolden and others wanted to be treated as workers. They saw their work as rooted in a labor-market transaction, not an emotional connection. For household workers, the language of care and kin masked their central concerns of rights and responsibilities. As Carolyn Reed, who became a national leader in the movement, put it, “I don’t need a family. I only want a job.”23
The location of the work tied it closely to unpaid labor in the household and what traditionally has been considered “women’s work.” The association contributed to its degradation because it was often not considered “real” work.24 Household work as nonproductive labor is a modern construction. For centuries, the home was the core of the economy, the center of both production and consumption. Or to put it another way, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman asserted in 1903, all “industry began at home.” Since the nineteenth century, with the rise of a “separate spheres” ideology, home and work were constructed as distinct places—making it hard to recognize the work that takes place in the home, whether paid or unpaid.25
Although the home has been artificially cast as a private space—a space of nurturance and love—the kitchen, the dining room, the bedroom, and the bathroom were locations where hierarchies of difference were created and re-created through the practices and policies that governed domestic work. The widely accepted customs of having household workers enter through the back door, use separate rest rooms, and eat leftover food was how race was remade on a daily basis in private spaces. The racial boundaries established by employers constructed a politics of inhumanity and invisibility that domestic workers encountered in their places of employment.
In an oral history in the late 1970s, Geraldine Roberts recounted a degrading job-interview experience. After examining Roberts’s teeth, a prospective employer told her: “Any girl . . . with a mouth this clean and pretty clean teeth was a pretty clean gal ’cause I don’t like dirty help in the house.”26 This illustrates the employer’s orientation as a prospective “owner” of the employee. The story conjures up images of the slave auction block where slaves’ physical health, including their teeth, was closely examined by potential slave buyers and was emblematic of the way in which the bodies of domestic workers were scrutinized and subject to regulation. The connection between domestic work and slavery was reinforced by Josephine Hulett. In a 1973 workshop of about fifty household workers in Miami, she gave a talk titled “Are You a Household Slave?” claiming, “We are not the old stereotype, you know, fat, black, and with a rag tied around our heads.”27
Roberts’s experience illustrates how the intimate nature of the work subjected domestic workers to a degree of monitoring and regulation rarely experienced by other workers. Domestics worked, and sometimes lived, in close physical proximity to employers and engaged in food preparation, washed the family’s laundry, spent time in bedrooms and bathrooms, and physically cared for the young, elderly, and sick. This intimacy often became a justification for queries about health, demands for medical documentation, or degrading personal examinations.
Employers had long been concerned about domestic workers’ exposure to disease and were fearful, especially in the early twentieth century, that domestic workers were infected with tuberculosis or syphilis. Employers and public health officials believed the occupation required a degree of control that included government regulation of the bodies of household workers. States and municipalities passed laws requiring domestic workers to submit to medical tests and obtain doctors’ certificates, and employers sometimes expected their help to carry cards verifying their health status. While purportedly about safeguarding the well-being of middle-class families, such attitudes served to reinforce control and bodily ownership of domestics by their employers.28 Employers wielded enormous power to monitor their workers and enforce arbitrary standards, which served in part to structure hierarchy between employer and employee. Yet the concerns about disease offered little regard for the health of domestic workers.
In Like One of the Family, Alice Childress, in an account titled “The Health Card,” conveyed the sentiments of many household workers. Mildred’s employer, after inquiring if she lived in Harlem, asked her if she had a health card. Mildred told her that she did indeed and would bring it the next day. Her relieved employer responded that she didn’t mean any offense, but “one must be careful.” Mildred agreed fully and explained: “Indeed one must and I am glad you are so understandin’ ’cause I was just worryin’ and studyin’ on how I was goin’ to ask you for yours, and of course you’ll let me see one from your husband and one for each of the three children. Since I have to handle laundry and make beds, you know . . .”29 This exchange colorfully illustrates the double standard that household workers were subject to, as members of the household and yet other.
Many employers acted in the belief that they were not simply purchasing the skills of a domestic worker but their physical presence. Domestic workers were expected to invest their household tasks with positive emotional energy. One employer singled out her maid as someone who “scatters sunshine with her cheerfulness.” Another adored her maid because “she has not complained once in nine years.”30 Unlike other forms of labor, where employees sold their time or a service, domestic workers’ bodies were considered commodities. This fostered a work environment where employees’ character, not only their ability to complete specified chores, became a measure of one’s job performance. One employer appreciated her maid because “she always answers in a pleasant ‘yes, Ma’am.’”31 Domestic workers were often, especially in the 1960s, hired and fired because of particular personality traits rather than their occupational skills. As Carolyn Reed put it, “Household workers have not been selling their services; they have been selling their souls.”32 The intimate nature of the work made it different from other unskilled labor that was filled by bodies believed to be easily replaceable and interchangeable. Domestic workers were evaluated by their ability to be cheerful, caring, and compassionate. They were expected to listen to and comfort employers, nurture children, and project an upbeat yet deferential personality. The occupation required employees to engage in the physical labor of cooking, cleaning, and household maintenance, as well as, to use sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s term, emotional labor.33 Geraldine Roberts explained her dissatisfaction with the emotional labor expected of her: “We were not satisfied; we were afraid we may not have the job—that we might get fired. So we was submissive to the boss lady to some degree; as we were to our mistresses in slavery time: the fear of the employer, the fear of not being able to get another job, no references being given if she got angry. We had to pretend and smile when we didn’t want to smile and show our teeth and laugh loud and [act] stupid to make her feel that we were quite humble to her.”34
Roberts’s reference to slavery and performative behavior is significant because it suggests that despite outward appearances, domestic workers were deeply unhappy with the expectations of their work and that a degree of coercion shaped their behavior. She suggests that the act of smiling and laughing was often for the benefit of the employer and didn’t reflect how employees actually felt. In her history of African American women and rape, Darlene Clark Hine identifies a “culture of dissemblance”—in which African American women created an appearance of openness while in reality shielding their inner selves. In their employment relationships, household workers developed a similar culture of dissemblance, shielding their true feelings from employers. So, household labor was embodied labor in which not only the body, but the mind and the heart, as well, were seen as determining the quality of the work. Workers were expected to lift, bend, climb, carry, scrub, protect, sooth, smile, and love. They were evaluated by their personality, demeanor, hygiene, character, as well as their set of acquired skills. Patterns of deference enabled white employers to wield power over women of color, fostering a relationship that was both personal and paternalistic.35
Although household workers’ bodies were hypermonitored, domestics were simultaneously deemed invisible, as if they were not present in the workspaces they inhabited. Consequently, domestic workers were privy to personal information about the family. Josephine Hulett explained how domestic workers often overheard conversations not meant for their ears: “Some employers will discuss your most intimate affairs over the dinner table. They will discuss their most intimate affairs around you, too, but you’re not supposed to have ears, or to understand. Or they’ll discuss racial issues, talking about how ‘they’ are trying to move into their neighborhood. You’re not supposed to hear that, either.”36 This assumption that topics could be discussed or workers could be a subject of conversation and that, despite their presence, they somehow wouldn’t hear is further evidence of dehumanization and domestic workers’ treatment as nonpersons.
Carolyn Reed experienced this as well. When Reed took a live-in job for a wealthy family in Scarsdale, New York, she was welcomed as “one of the family.” That meant working from seven in the morning until midnight. In five years, Reed never got a raise, received Social Security, or had a vacation. “Then one night, the woman of the house—who had been having an affair and was very, very nervous—began to scream at me for not having done something she thought I should have done. . . . As she screamed I realized I wasn’t real to her. I mean, I wasn’t a person to her. . . . She had no respect for me, for what I did. . . . I was a servant to her, maybe even a slave. I remember while she was screaming I began saying ‘I don’t work for you anymore.’ . . . And that was it. I packed my bags in the middle of the night; my husband, who was then my boyfriend, came and got me, and we took off.”37
These practices of bodily control, emotional demands, and invisibility illustrate core features of household labor. Race, class, gender, sexuality, and unequal power relations were constructed, articulated, and experienced within the home. In that regard, the processes constituted—and resisted—in the so-called private sphere were a reflection of larger political and economic structures.
Domestic workers engaged in multiple strategies to reclaim their labor as legitimate work and challenge the unequal power structure that characterized their employment. They tackled the problem of lack of recognition in part by thinking about naming and forms of address as a way to remake their identity and subjectivity. Naming reflected status and identity.38 Household workers were expected to engage in deference rituals—to refer to their bosses as Miss or Mrs.—yet they were often called by their first names, or even more offensively as “girl.” Employers’ reference to their workers by their first names indicated a degree of personalism and informality that didn’t accurately reflect how domestics felt about the relationship—nor how they believed their employers felt about the relationship. Geraldine Roberts expressed her disapproval of employers calling their workers “girl” with a rhetorical question: “Was she twelve, or was she ten, or was she twenty-one, or is she fifty?” A typical employer response, according to Roberts: “Well, I call my best girlfriends . . . girls.” Roberts retorted: “Well, she’s not your best girlfriend. She’s your employee.”39 When household workers gathered for their first national convention in 1971, the question of respectful form of address was a key one. Edith Sloan urged the women in attendance: “The next time someone calls you Sally or John, you tell them that you are Free, Black, Brown, Red or White and 21 and that your name is MISS Sally or MR. John. And if someone calls you AUNTIE, as Mary McLeod Bethune once answered, you ask them ‘and which one of my sisters’ children are you?’”40
Roberts elaborated on how changing perceptions and forms of address led to a shift in the status of the occupation: “We’ve changed some of that, attitudes towards you. Mainly the middle class looked down upon their servant help in such a very unpleasant way, a possessive sort of thing that they owned and we were their things. It was ‘my Mary’ and ‘my Annie’ and ‘my Gerry’ and we were a part of the family . . . but nevertheless, I was not in the family will or if there was any illness and I could no longer work all at once I was not a part of that family any more.”41 “Now we meet our new employer and we are respected as Mrs. Roberts, Mrs. Thomas.” Being addressed as Miss or Mrs. was a sign of respect and recognition of professionalism and independence that many domestics insisted upon.
The shift in terminology also extended to the category of work, and activists were eager to put forward more empowering names for their labor. Although Bolden used the term “maid,” most household workers were moving away from that word as a term that signified subservience. By the mid-1970s, Bolden was also using the designation “household technician.” Irene Lloyd, who headed the Nassau-Suffolk Household Technicians in Long Island, explained, “The word ‘maid’ makes me a slave, and I am not a slave.”42 As Carolyn Reed explained: “When I think of domestic, I immediately think of a very tame animal—a cat or dog or something. I am not a tame person, I am not a domesticated person. Servant to me goes back to the days of slavery.”43 The term “household technician” was a deliberate choice on the part of domestic-worker organizers, who sought to convey a degree of professionalization. They wanted to be acknowledged, not as maids or servants, which had connotations of subservience, but as skilled workers. Geraldine Miller, a New York City–based activist, explained: “We took the name of Household Technicians because we feel that we were able to do anything with little or no supervision.”44 A graduate of one of NDWUA’s training programs in Atlanta testified that when her employer demanded that she scrub the floor on her hands and knees, she responded: “I have completed my training as a household technician and know that I don’t have to scrub floors down on all fours anymore.”45 For this worker, the designation “household technician” defined the type of labor that could be expected of her.
Domestic workers were convinced that the degradation of domestic work hinged in part on public perceptions and lack of value attached to their labor. If those could be remedied, they believed the status of the occupation could be transformed. Josephine Hulett observed, “Isn’t it funny how garbage collection was a dirty job until they changed the name to sanitation engineers and raised the salaries to $12,000 a year and up?”46 So, professionalism, along with pay and dignity, was a rallying cry of the movement. As Geraldine Roberts explained, “I considered myself a professional and I said, other domestics, look upon yourselves as professional technicians.”47 The naming and renaming associated with household labor, much like the stories that domestic workers shared with each other, was part of the process of establishing a new identity for domestic workers.
Household workers also reframed the character of their labor through professionalization and training programs. For domestic workers, personalism, intimacy, and the location of their work led to battles with their employers over control of the work process.48 The unregulated nature of domestic work gave employers an enormous amount of power to determine tasks and assign chores arbitrarily. Domestic workers defined the expectations of their labor and established the boundaries of acceptable work through uniform codes and standards. A booklet published by one local group delineated chores that domestic workers wouldn’t do, including climbing ladders, washing windows, cleaning walls out of reach, and scrubbing floors on their knees.49 Model contracts and codes of standards outlined benefits and specified work expectations, which enabled workers to be autonomous rather than subject to minute-by-minute supervision by employers.50 When expectations were explicitly detailed and previously agreed upon, employers wielded less authority to make unusual or unexpected demands on workers. And employees would have a clear sense of how to accomplish their specific tasks. According to Edith Sloan, “Through implementation of the code, and organization of activities and programs, NCHE seeks to end the master-servant relationship and to render private household employment a respectable, well-paid occupation.”51 DC Household Technicians also prepared “A Code of Standards” detailing minimum wages and hours, and declaring that “clothing and/or food should not be considered part of payment.” They insisted on time-and-a-half for work over forty hours a week and double time for more than forty-eight hours a week. They suggested: “A written agreement between employer and employee should clearly define the duties of the position, including specific tasks, how often they must be performed and the desired standards.” The contract outlined specifics such as: “Schedules with provisions for rest period, meal times, telephone privileges and time out for private activities (such as church attendance for live-in employees) should be agreed upon in advance of employment.” And they insisted that “a professional working relationship should be maintained,” which “includes proper forms of address for both employee and employer and their respective families.”52 By standardizing the labor process and trying to professionalize their work, private household workers eroded some of the racial and class power that employers wielded and challenged the disciplinary practices that were designed to disempower and create a more compliant and controllable workforce.
Domestic workers also established training programs to professionalize the occupation. The perception of domestic work as unskilled labor was one reason for the occupation’s low status. Yet most household workers were aware that their jobs were not ones that just anyone could step into, but required a certain kind of skill: “We were well educated with a PhD in common sense,” explained Dorothy Bolden.53 Despite the substantial knowledge necessary to care for small children and maintain a household, domestic work was considered a job that didn’t require a formal education or specialized training. This assumption—that employees had few marketable skills and employers could offer the necessary guidance—contributed to the power imbalance between worker and boss. It divested workers of control over the work process and invested their employers with the power to determine how work would be completed. Much like deskilled manufacturing workers in the early twentieth century, domestic workers found that as “unskilled laborers” their leverage as workers was diminished.
Geraldine Roberts believed that the perceived unskilled nature of the work offered limited occupational advancement and left black women stuck in the same position decade after decade. “There isn’t any advancement. For thirty years a domestic worker’s still the same cook in the kitchen. For thirty years she’s still the same lady who runs the vacuum cleaner and for thirty years she’s the same laundry woman. The first chore she had upon acceptin’ that job thirty years before usually is her same task thirty years later and, in most cases, not very much advancement in pay, no promotions, no scholarships offered, no fringe benefits.”54 In response, Roberts organized programs to give women the skills and training to leave domestic work. In Cleveland, she developed a collaborative relationship with Cuyahoga Community College and encouraged domestics to pursue their education to learn skills and move up the economic ladder: “We feel that the domestic worker must look further ahead especially if she’s a younger person that house cleaning should not be her goals for her life. That she should seek educational programs, scholarships and ways and means to improve and bring pride and dignity to her life.”55
Most training programs, however, aimed to elevate the status of domestic work, rather than enable them to leave the occupation. They advocated specialization of their work, where employees were responsible for a clear set of tasks that may include cooking or cleaning or child care—but certainly not all. Geraldine Miller explained how at one time, household labor was more specialized, with laundresses, cooks, and chauffeurs, but now, “They lumped it all up into one. Your housekeeper now is doing at least three to four or five, six jobs.”56 A number of local groups offered courses, prepared workers for the job market, and placed them in employment positions. NDWUA’s training programs enabled domestic workers to acquire “specialized and technical training to provide better services in the field of Household Management.”57 Trainees engaged in comparison-price shopping, cooking lessons, driver education, child care, elder care, and first aid. They learned how to dress appropriately, answer the telephone, and set the table. Upon completion of the course, they participated in a ceremony, received a certificate, and, according to Bolden, became “professional women.” Training reinforced the idea that household work was skilled labor and required both a level of knowledge and a measure of instruction.58 It also placed household workers in positions of expertise, since they ran the programs. As NDWUA outlined in its training proposal: “It was determined by the members of the union that the best teachers in any training program would be the domestics themselves.”59
Mary McClendon, a household worker in Detroit, was one of the foremost advocates of training and professionalization for domestic workers. McClendon founded and led the Household Workers Organization (HWO) in Detroit, which held its first meeting on September 4, 1969, at the offices of the Civil Rights Commission.60 McClendon was the most active and passionate member and the force behind the organization. She was born on October 3, 1922, in Andalusia, a small town in Alabama about an hour and a half south of Montgomery. She was one of six children and graduated in 1944 from the Covington County Training High School.61 Both her mother and grandmother, who was a slave, did domestic work. Like so many other black women, McClendon began domestic work at a young age, when she went to work with her mother. She moved to Detroit in 1955 to join her cousin, who was a doctor. In some ways things were quite different in the North. McClendon voted for the first time in her life, which she described as “like a flash of freedom.”62 Her experiences as a household worker, however, were not all that different in the North, and the slavery metaphor was one that seemed to apply to her new setting, as she explained after she began to organize, sounding very much like Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke in their description of the slave markets: “Slavery is alive and well and living in Detroit. Each day hundreds of women—predominantly Black and poor—are taken to the suburbs to clean house. In exchange for their back-breaking labor, they earn nine to eleven dollars from which social security is deducted. The workers earn no sick or vacation pay; they are not entitled to Workman’s Compensation; they have no say about working conditions, hours or fringe benefits; there is no grievance machinery to handle their complaints against the employer. After a nine or ten hour day, spent cleaning two or three large suburban houses, the workers return to Detroit with often no more than nine dollars in their pocket, and no assurance that they will have a job tomorrow.”63 These observations were compounded by her own personal experience: “I never shall forget I was working for one woman and she told me to eat my food in the room where the dog was, not in the room with the family. Some of these people were treating their dogs and cats better than we were treated.”64 By the time she became involved in the domestic workers’ rights movement, her husband, Benjamin McClendon, passed away and she was a single mother raising her son alone. HWO had no office, limited funds, and operated out of McClendon’s home. In 1969, after nearly forty years as a domestic worker, McClendon started working full-time for the HWO, and within a couple of years it had about 150 mostly black and Latino members. McClendon also connected with HTA through Josephine Hulett and Edith Sloan, who went to Detroit several times to offer their support.65
HWO engaged in a range of activities, including offering an employment service that guaranteed employees a minimum wage and lunch and rest breaks, and promised employers a “neat, punctual, honest worker.”66 It also advocated on behalf of individual workers who were having problems with employers. McClendon shared the typical example of an employer who promised to make Social Security payments. She inquired with the Social Security office. If no payments were made, HWO needed to prove that the worker was employed by that individual. It sent the employee to a department store to apply for a credit card, using the employer as a reference. When the employer verified that the individual worked for them, the organization had a case.67
The center of McClendon’s work in Detroit was the training programs. She, like other domestic workers, believed that the category of “household labor” was a catch-all label that masked domestic workers’ many roles. She insisted on spelling out the multiple kinds of household tasks and the expertise necessary for each. In a training manual, McClendon delineated the following areas of specialization: “General Housekeeping Technician, Kitchen Manager, Child Supervisor, Home Geriatric Aide, Party Aide, Party Supervisor, and Household Manager.”68 She developed nine different courses, one in “Job Readiness” which taught basic remedial skills, attitude, rights and benefits, as well as grooming and personal appearance; “Home Safety and Sanitation” included first aid, accident prevention, insect and pest control, and handling food and toxic materials. The course on “Home Geriatrics” covered psychology of the elderly, home nursing, and recreational therapy.69 McClendon defined a household technician as “a person with college-level vocational training for employment in private households.”70 She also counseled domestic workers to set boundaries on what they would do. Household work that included picking up toys off the floor, cleaning cobwebs, mopping, dusting, and polishing were all acceptable. “But we tell them not to pick up personal underwear.”71
McClendon also made a point of educating employers. Most household workers believed that unless employers saw their jobs as professional and came to think of the work differently, little headway would be made in transforming the occupation. So employer training was part of their agenda. In 1971 McClendon worked with the Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council, an organization that included many employers, to publish a pamphlet entitled You and Your Household Help that aimed to teach employers “the art of finding good help and maintaining a good business relationship.” It suggested paying employees fifteen dollars a day plus carfare, and live-in employees seventy-five dollars a week, with all meals, “a pleasant private room and bath,” and two days off each week. Paid sick leave after three months of employment, paid vacations, overtime pay, paid national holidays, Social Security, a clear definition of household responsibilities, regular breaks—a half-hour lunch plus two fifteen-minute breaks for an eight-hour day—and two weeks’ termination notice should all be considered standard. “The employee should be referred to as ‘housekeeper,’ not ‘maid,’ as a ‘woman,’ not a ‘girl,’ and never should be referred to as ‘part of the family.’ The master-servant attitude is out of date.”72 While some employers, such as those affiliated with the Grosse Pointe Human Relations Council, were supportive, others were not. After a local television appearance in 1973, McClendon received hate mail. One individual, after racist and vitriolic insults, wrote, “What really got me upset, was your dumb statement that unskilled workers should get as much pay as SKILLED WORKERS, on account of their expenses being as big! . . . Domestic workers are at the bottom of the totem poll [sic], just exactly where they belong. They aren’t educated sufficiently (neither are you) to do any other kind of work, so it isn’t anybody’s fault but their own.”73 This sentiment was indicative of some of the barriers household workers faced.
Through professionalization and training, women like Mary McClendon worked to transform the occupation in which generations of African American women and other poor women had long been engaged. She argued, “We would also like to see a curriculum for household workers in the schools—just like home economics—so that it will become an occupation, like nursing. . . . What’s a dirtier job than nursing? Yet there is dignity attached to it.”74 Employers and employers’ associations had for generations established training programs, usually to mold women into their ideal workers. Training programs implemented by women like McClendon were designed to upgrade the skills and pay of workers even as they set employment standards. The question of who ran the training programs distinguished HTA’s programs from those initiated by employers. Workers were wary of programs not run by workers. One member of the executive board of the HTA suggested that certain training programs exploited women. “These pilot programs get the women’s hopes up and then leave them. Zora Gardner told of a training program in which she was trained as a medical technician and upon completion of the course she was asked to be a nurse’s aide. She told them that this was not what she was trained for, and she then refused the job. This was an example of those government programs which just pacify the public.”75 Josephine Hulett experienced something similar when she enrolled in a practical nursing correspondence course, which she later learned was not accredited and wouldn’t enable her to move out of domestic labor. Whether or not it was always successful, training, especially training programs organized by domestic workers, became one avenue to regain control of the work process.
Domestic workers’ campaigns for training, professionalization, and recognition of their work were designed to reorder household arrangements and redefine the boundaries that shaped domestic work. Domestic-worker activists boldly challenged the social scripts of deference, which suggested that domestic workers remain passive and silent, but smile on demand. They questioned the assumptions that domestic workers should take hand-me-downs and do any and everything asked of them. They analyzed the cultural production of their labor—its roots in slavery and servitude and the daily practices of their employment—and objected most strenuously to the ideological construction of domestic workers as servants. They addressed the degradation of their labor and worked to establish a new level of respect for the occupation.76 In the mid-1970s Dorothy Bolden reflected on shifts in the occupation: “In the past seven years there’s been a great deal of change. These women used to be embarrassed about saying they were maids. You had to take such hardships that you didn’t want nobody to know you were. Now it’s different. You can’t tell a maid from a secretary anymore. In the past, if a black woman was a maid you could tell by the way she dressed. Now they don’t carry the shopping bags as much, they go neater, and they look more lively and intelligent.”77
Jessie Williams of the Household Technicians of Auburn, Alabama, similarly declared: “We won’t go in the back door any more. We won’t be told to eat scraps in the kitchen and stay out of the living room, except when we are sweeping. We feel domestic work is just as professional as any other job. If people go on making it degrading, there won’t be any workers doing it much longer.”78
The connections and political alliances that domestic workers made with one another both in their local groups and through the national HTA offered a space and opportunity for them to tell their stories—stories that all too frequently revolved around exploitation and lack of respect. The stories wove together the shame and degradation of the labor with love, empowerment, and aspirations. Although these were individual stories, collectively they created a common narrative of domestic work that included the history of racism, sexism, and a struggle for rights and dignity. The public testimonials and stories helped construct an identity among domestic workers and erased some of the shame publicly associated with domestic service.79 The stories served as a tool to build solidarity among household employees and laid the groundwork for some of the critical themes the movement would address.
Domestic-worker narratives about bodily control, about working in the intimate space of the home, about contested notions of family and “care” work, disrupted employer narratives about the meaning of domestic labor. Yet they also relied on employer narratives to bring value and recognition to their work—a strategy they would use again when they pushed for federal minimum wage coverage. They asserted that household labor—both paid and unpaid—was work and ought to be treated as such. Through their narratives domestic workers challenged the racial and class differences that others had attached to the labor. Their campaign illuminated the links between home, market, and state and highlighted the ostensibly private domestic sphere as a site of labor where hierarchy and inequality were created through daily ritualistic practices. Household workers claimed dignity and respect and sought to put employers and employees on a more equal footing and erase the vestiges of racial servitude that were so closely tied to domestic service. As Geraldine Roberts explained: “Our pride, dignity, and respect has meant a lot to household workers. . . . Human dignity is one’s total pride of life. Without dignity, one is nothing.”80