Until they recognize the unpaid labor in the home, they won’t recognize paid labor.
—CAROLYN REED
In the early 1970s, Gloria Steinem, prominent feminist, journalist, and supporter of NCHE, held a fund-raiser in New York City, hiring members of the Household Technicians to cater it. Some guests were appalled by the image of black women in uniforms serving the crowd of largely white women. HTA member Carolyn Reed served at the gathering that evening but perceived the situation very differently. She lectured the attendees of the fund-raiser: “I don’t like you to think we’re maids—we are household technicians; we’re experienced; we are professionals. And we’re being paid—that’s very important . . . so you have to get it out of your head that this is a demeaning job. If you don’t want to do it, I’m glad you don’t want to, because we will gladly do it for you—but for a salary, and with respect.”1 Reed recounted this incident in many public venues, using it to illustrate her fundamental commitment to the professionalization of household labor. When she was invited to the White House a few years later and observed black men, and only black men, in white gloves serving tea and coffee, she expressed a different view of the racial divide: “What I saw in the White House was very disturbing to me, because it certainly reminded me of plantation days.”2 In the case of the Steinem fund-raiser, Reed seems to have been restricting her critique to a feminist devaluation of household labor that existed in the 1970s. Reed’s insistence in this feminist gathering on the value of household labor and the need for adequate pay reflected the domestic workers’ campaign in the early 1970s to build a feminist alliance to support the passage of minimum wage legislation for domestic workers.
The minimum wage campaign was part of domestic workers’ claim to social citizenship—the economic security that was increasingly guaranteed for workers by the state.3 Domestic workers, who up to that time were excluded from most labor laws, lobbied for and won amendments to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974, which granted them a federal minimum wage. Household workers testified about the value of this work and its need for recognition and legal protection, countering racial and gender assumptions that undergirded congressional debate on the amendments.4 Domestic workers’ views dovetailed with those of some feminists who felt stifled and burdened by their roles as housewives and sought to draw attention to unpaid household labor. Despite what seemed like a conflict of interest between middle-class feminists, who were sometimes employers, and household workers, they developed a strategic alliance to push for federal labor protection, both having experienced the consequences of the degradation of household labor. The HTA’s coalition building and lobbying relied on feminist labor activism and cross-class alliances among women.5
The passage of the amendments, however, was a bittersweet victory. It reversed a historic exclusion of domestic workers from basic labor protections and won legal recognition of their work. But the legislation also created a new stratification among domestic workers, some of whom—such as home-health-care aides employed by an agency and live-in workers—were explicitly excluded from the legislation. The campaign for minimum wage was historic nonetheless—it expanded the definition of “worker,” which had been circumscribed in the 1930s. If the struggle for civil rights was intended to deracialize American political citizenship, then the domestic workers’ rights movement aimed to deracialize and degender the concept of work as embedded in American social policy.
For decades, household work was traditionally outside the boundaries of US labor law. Legislation passed in the 1930s as part of the New Deal became the key marker of social citizenship. It assured much of the working class the economic and political benefits of American national belonging. Through guarantees of a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and Social Security, as well as the right to organize and bargain collectively. But because these rights were not universal, the New Deal fostered inequality. By linking the benefits of social citizenship to contributions made through employment and excluding certain types of labor, it reinforced and re-created the racialized and gendered hierarchy of the labor market.6 Those outside the labor market in need of economic assistance were either dependents on full-time wage earners or were relegated to second-tier, less generous, and more stigmatized public assistance, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children or Old Age Assistance, programs generally falling into the category of “welfare.” Women performing unpaid household labor were denied the benefits of economic citizenship, as were part-time and intermittent workers, who tended to be people of color.
But even among those who worked full-time, not all contributions to the labor market were equally valued.7 Southern congressmen, insisting on control over the African American labor force, policymakers, and labor leaders, who prioritized the needs of the white male industrial worker, advocated circumscribed coverage of work-related benefits.8 The factory worker became the prototype that informed assumptions about what constituted legitimate work and who qualified as a worker. Much of the paid work performed by women and African Americans, including domestic work, did not receive the benefits of social citizenship, establishing what historian Eileen Boris calls the “racialized gendered state.”9 Thus, New Deal labor policy further degraded domestic work through legal statutes.10 The contradictory legacy of the New Deal makes clear that in the twentieth century, even as the United States seemed to embrace a more robust citizenship through the expansion of social welfare policy, legislators embedded stratification in the category of “social citizenship” by connecting it to race, gender, and one’s position within the labor market. So social status and work, or more specifically, legal recognition of work, became the barometer for social citizenship. Those outside the labor market or in those occupations not included in New Deal social policy were more marginalized.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was a cornerstone of New Deal labor policy. Passed in 1938, it established the first federal minimum wage law, mandated overtime pay, and abolished child labor. The FLSA extended the power of the federal government, which was justified in terms of the government’s right to regulate interstate commerce. Like other labor legislation, it excluded several categories of workers, such as those in retail, service, nonprofit, government, agricultural, and domestic work, jobs performed disproportionately by women and people of color. At the moment of passage, the FLSA covered only 20 percent of the American workforce and had the effect of privileging some forms of labor over others. Although the constitutional justification for the federal government’s regulation of the workplace was rooted in the commerce clause, the definition of interstate commerce was malleable, and expanded over the course of the next forty years.11
Since the late 1930s, white labor feminists, including Esther Peterson, Frieda Miller, and members of the Women’s Trade Union League, and black feminists such as Claudia Jones, Marvel Cooke, and Dorothy Height, had lobbied for extension of the federal minimum wage law and labor protections to domestic workers. In 1996 a political climate committed to alleviating poverty and inequality contributed to expansion of the law to cover farmworkers, nursing home employees, and school and hospital workers. By the early 1970s, domestic workers were the only significant category of workers excluded from minimum wage laws, and only three states—Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and New York—provided minimum wage for household workers.12 So, even before the emergence of the HTA, labor activists and reformers had pushed to make the FLSA more inclusive.
The emergence of a domestic workers’ rights movement added urgency and political pressure to this trend. The HTA, along with the NCHE and a coalition of civil rights, labor, and women’s organizations, lobbied hard for passage of a congressional bill that would increase the minimum wage and expand minimum wage coverage to domestic workers. Domestic-worker representation and testimony proved to be an important component in the legislative debates. Congressional hearings and efforts to mobilize support for the bill provided a platform for domestic workers and their allies to publicly share their stories.
Shirley Chisholm, the first African American congresswoman, led the fight for the passage of a minimum wage bill. Chisholm’s family was originally from Barbados, but Chisholm was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was a seamstress, although, like many other women of African descent, during the Great Depression she took on domestic work to help support her family. Chisholm tied her support for minimum wage for domestic work to her own family’s history. In a speech before the House of Representatives in 1973, to enhance the power of her comments, she drew on that history: “My own mother was a domestic, so I speak from personal experience.”13 Chisholm’s reference to her family history was another indication of the way in which personal stories of household labor became part of the discussion around the FLSA. Chisholm allied herself with the household technicians movement and attended the HTA founding convention as well as subsequent national gatherings. According to Geraldine Miller, “She was an outspoken advocate for the disadvantaged and the underdog. She was not big. She wasn’t tall, but she was dynamite.”14 In 1972 Chisholm spoke before the national convention of domestic workers: “Organize and work together with the women’s groups and labor and civil rights groups in your community,” she urged them. “Hold meetings and rallies. Talk to the local press. Let everyone know that you are first-class citizens and that you will not settle for anything less than a fair and equal chance to share in the fruits of this country.”15 For Chisholm, labor protections were the most important indicator of equal citizenship, and she made passage of minimum wage for domestic workers one of her primary goals in Congress.16
The passage of amendments to the FLSA was a protracted process that took close to three years. It began in the summer of 1971, when the US House of Representatives Committee on Education and Labor held hearings to consider amendments to increase the minimum wage and expand coverage to government employees and domestic workers. The AFL-CIO and civil rights and women’s organizations supported the bill, while the US Chamber of Commerce as well as some Republicans opposed it.17 Both the House and the Senate passed a version of this legislation in 1972, but a conservative coalition in the House, fearful that the final bill would be more liberal, never sent it to a conference committee to iron out differences with the Senate. In 1973 Congress passed another minimum wage bill, but President Nixon, citing concerns about inflation and job loss, vetoed it. In March 1974 Congress passed a nearly identical minimum wage bill. This time, Nixon, feeling politically vulnerable in the midst of the Watergate scandal but also aware that Congress had the votes to override a veto, signed the bill. The 1974 law raised the minimum wage and extended it to domestic workers, as well as state and local employees. From the initial committee hearings until the bill became a law, household workers played a role in the legislative debates and the public dialogue about domestic workers’ labor rights and mobilized support for the legislation.18
As Congress debated the bill to extend FLSA coverage in 1971, domestic workers gathered just a few miles away at the Marriot Motor Hotel for their first national convention in Washington, DC. Convention participants took advantage of their geographical proximity to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress. Over the course of the weekend, delegations of household workers visited congressional officials to make a case for passage of the legislation. Mary McClendon, for example, went with a delegation of thirty-six household workers to Representative John Conyers’s office to rally support for the bill. In addition, Edith Sloan and Josephine Hulett testified in support of the legislation before a congressional committee. During the two-year period when the bills were debated, members of the HTA and the NCHE made powerful arguments about the value of their labor. Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Labor in 1973, Sloan framed domestic work as one of a number of options available for those entering the labor market. She argued that were it not for low wages, domestic work would be a better occupational choice than factory work: “We are convinced that one of the major reasons why many men and women choose monotonous assembly line positions in factories is that they have little choice. A more rewarding, interesting job caring for an infant or toddler or elderly person simply does not command a decent, living wage.”19 It is unclear whether or not higher wages alone would have attracted new recruits to the field of domestic service, given the low status, servile character, and demanding time commitments of the job.20 Nevertheless, Sloan’s comment is important because of her characterization of household labor as inherently superior to “monotonous assembly line positions.” It reflected a widespread belief among domestic-worker activists that the work they performed was important and gratifying. Carolyn Reed explained: “I feel very strongly that I contribute just as much as my doctor contributes, you know. And that because he is a doctor does not make him better than me, as a household technician.”21 In this way, the campaign for minimum wage was connected to the struggle for dignity, recognition, and professionalization, as well as the goal of social citizenship, which assured household workers a level of economic security.
Sloan insisted that domestic work be afforded the same rights of social citizenship and New Deal benefits as other occupations: “Pay must be increased to provide a livable wage. Second, workers must receive the so-called ‘fringe benefits,’ which long ago stopped being ‘fringes’ in every other major American industry. At this time, household workers usually do not receive paid sick leave, vacations, or holidays. Coverage under unemployment and workmen’s compensation is extremely limited and varies widely from state to state.”22 Mary McClendon similarly spoke of the disconnect in citizenship rights and civic responsibilities when she outlined the denial of basic benefits to household workers and concluded, “It is crystal clear that these workers have no constitutional protection of the law, yet their sons and relatives march off to Vietnam to die.”23 For McClendon and Sloan, the rights of social citizenship were precisely that—rights—rather than privileges or benefits. And domestic workers were entitled to the same economic rights as other American workers.
The male-dominated congressional debate surrounding the minimum wage bill exposed the racial and gender assumptions about women, housework, race, and class embedded in social policy. Politicians and policymakers framed housework and domestic work as primarily women’s work and cast minimum wage for domestic workers in terms of the rights of domestic workers versus the rights of housewives.24 Legislators opposed the minimum wage bill because they claimed it would bring “the federal bureaucracy into the kitchen of the American housewife,”25 and they wanted to protect the domain of white middle-class women.26 Robert Thompson of the US Chamber of Commerce predicted a flood of “irate housewives,” because the law would increase costs and prohibit some women from hiring domestic workers.27
By relegating the question of minimum wage for domestic workers to the “women’s sphere,” male politicians employed a rhetorical strategy that absolved them of any responsibility for the legal rights of domestic workers. They used the cloak of gender to dismiss the class and race politics that were central to the exclusion of domestic workers from labor legislation. They placed responsibility for low wages and poor treatment squarely on the shoulders of middle-class female employers—their “wives”—and framed domestic work as an occupation that took place in the privacy of the home, which legislators presumably could not regulate. This argument about the sanctity of the private sphere reinforced the artificial construction of the home as a personal space of refuge devoid of politics. Compounding the home/business distinction, policymakers also claimed that housewife-employers were incapable of complying with the law and keeping records, thus making the legislation impractical because housewives had minimal business knowledge. Secretary of Labor Peter Brennan explained: “Homemakers are not engaged in business in the traditional sense with experience in maintaining business records.”28 Brennan supported the minimum wage increase but opposed extending coverage to household workers, a position that reflected his class politics. Born and raised in New York City, Brennan was of working-class origin and a certified union man. He started off as a housepainter during the Depression—working, ironically, like household employees and housewives, in the domestic sphere. He rose up the ranks of the Painters Union and eventually became president of the Building and Construction Trades Council of Greater New York. He served as secretary of labor under Presidents Nixon and Ford from 1973 to 1975. Although Brennan was an unwavering advocate for the rights of working people, his opposition to the minimum wage for domestic workers illustrates his somewhat narrow gender- and race-based view of labor.
Although Brennan seemed to discount the importance of household labor, a closer reading of the FLSA legislative debate underscores a deeper concern of congressmen and administration officials. They were fearful not only of “irate” housewives and their supposedly inadequate accounting practices but also of a potential disruption of the gender division of labor and its consequences. Clearly defining and recognizing domestic work posed a particular problem for male politicians, who quickly realized that raising the status of domestic workers meant raising the status of unpaid household work performed by many women. Senator Pete Dominick, an opponent of the bill, in his exchange with Secretary of Labor Brennan, expressed concern about the difficulty of defining domestic work and the impracticality of including domestic workers in the legislation. He argued that “the services provided by the householder ought to be included in the definition of what is or is not a minimum wage.” Brennan elaborated on the problem this recognition posed: “Yes . . . you open the door to a lot of trouble. Your wife will want to get paid. I think we are going to be in trouble here because, as we say in here, there are many cases the wife cannot afford it; she will have to do it herself or someone in the family will have to. That means that you or I or we have to pay her. So we have to be very careful unless we are ready to do dishes.”29
The legislative debates are striking because, although congressmen and administration officials rhetorically framed domestic work as an abstract and distant issue outside their domain, the question of domestic labor and FLSA coverage for household employees was deeply personal for some of them. Rather than arguing that domestic work was not really work, this discussion reveals how they were quite clear that the home was a site of work and the labor of household workers was work—work that they, as congressmen, did not want to perform. Their narrative exposed their understanding of the links between paid and unpaid household labor and the belief that the gender division of labor was a foundation for the social order.
Domestic-worker organizers similarly made connections between paid and unpaid labor in the home, which enabled them to build a cross-class, cross-race gender alliance. In making their claim for minimum wage, domestic workers drew attention to the work that took place in the ostensibly private space of the home—both the work of social reproduction that was associated with women’s unpaid household labor and work that was performed for pay primarily by women of color. By making this link, they shifted the conversation away from the responsibilities and shortcomings of white female employers toward the way that men characterized housework as women’s work and left female employers and employees to deal with it. Household workers’ understanding of the gendered nature of their employment and the common experiences of employer and employee prompted them to seek allies among middle-class women in the campaign for regulation of domestic work.
Domestic-worker advocates were acutely aware of the gendered middle-class conflict around household labor. They observed interactions within the homes of the more affluent and understood the implications of male politicians relegating housework to women’s domain, especially in the context of a burgeoning women’s movement. They used this to their advantage by driving a wedge between middle-class men and women and exploiting tensions about who needed to take responsibility for household labor. They claimed that failure to pass the amendments—rather than their passage—would result in a shortage of domestic workers because women would leave the occupation, suggesting that upgrading the occupation was necessary to retain domestic workers. But the loss of paid household labor, they argued, would not lead to double duty for housewives in the home, particularly in light of the women’s movement’s demands to be unshackled from household work and for greater employment opportunities outside the home. Instead, they predicted the burden would fall on congressmen. Geneva Reid, a leader in the HTA, explained to a House committee in 1973 that if the shortage of domestic workers continued apace, “it may come to this, the affluent and Congressmen cleaning up after themselves because the women of the household have become liberated and have joined the work force and will not have time to cook, clean, wash, iron, and take care of the children.”30
The domestic workers’ rights movement saw itself as part of this burgeoning women’s rights movement. Both Carolyn Reed and Geraldine Miller helped build a coalition of domestic workers and middle-class women’s organizations in support of minimum wage legislation for domestic workers. Both had solid connections to a number of women’s groups. Miller was president of the Bronx chapter of the National Organization for Women and the first president of the NOW Women of Color Task Force. She served at different points as president, co-president, and vice president in the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and rubbed elbows with prominent leaders such as Florence Kennedy and Bella Abzug. She saw her labor activism as feminist and her feminism as underpinning her labor activism. Miller reflected on the need for feminist alliances in the campaign for minimum wage legislation: “We really and truly needed the help of the other women who were of different nationalities to help us push for that, and that’s the reason why we got under the Federal Minimum Wage.”31
Carolyn Reed similarly found her first political allies among feminists. She was on the executive committee of the Women’s Action Alliance, the steering committee of the National Women’s Political Caucus, and a cofounder of the National Black Feminist Organization. She brought to her labor organizing a feminist sensibility rooted in her fierce independence and the aspirations of her childhood. As she explained, “I was happy to be involved with feminist groups. Before even knowing the word, I had always, in a sense been a feminist.”32
Although both Miller and Reed, like other household technicians, claimed an identity as feminists, their relationship with the women’s movement was somewhat tenuous. Paid household labor was largely an occupation of women employing women. As Mary McClendon explained in 1975: “Over work and under payment has been inflicted upon Household Technicians by white and black female employers, as well as white and black male employers. So many females have been slave masters of other females for over two hundred years.”33 Historically, domestic workers had strained relationships with their employers. The mistress of the household was often the source of domestic workers’ most trying work experiences. Female employers were responsible for the day-to-day supervision of “their help,” including establishing working hours and wages.34 The occupation divided women by race and class by defining women who engaged in domestic work as “dirty” and the women who benefited from their labor as “clean.”35 The status, opportunities, and identity of middle-class women were inextricably linked to their access to domestic workers, who could attend to the time-consuming and unpleasant tasks that made for a well-run home.36
The women’s movement of the 1960s complicated the potential alliance between domestic workers and middle-class women. The mainstream women’s movement, which most often defined liberation in terms of paid employment outside the home, expressed disdain for domestic work. Betty Friedan, author of the seminal book The Feminine Mystique, described housework as boring and repetitious. As she explained: “Vacuuming the living room floor—with or without makeup—is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity.”37 The pitting of household labor against work opportunities outside the home contributed to negative perceptions about the value of this work. Middle-class women’s claims that they needed jobs outside the home because housework lacked meaning inadvertently undermined the arguments of sectors of the women’s movement that sought to revalue household labor and support the domestic workers’ rights movement.
Carolyn Reed, on the other hand, saw a dirty house as an opportunity. “[Feminists’] theory was that housework is dirty work. I happen not to consider it dirty work and I had to get it across to them that the dirtier their places are, the more job security we have.”38 Household workers believed that middle-class women’s low opinion of household labor contributed to the marginalized status of domestic workers. The NCHE drew links between the degradation of domestic work and middle-class women’s entry into the labor force.
“Underlying many difficulties that household workers face in trying to improve pay and working conditions,” the organization stated in a document in 1976, “is a more subtle and pervasive problem of the household worker’s image in our own eyes and the eyes of our employers. This image is deeply rooted in Americans’ attitudes toward women and their traditional functions and toward the service professions generally. . . . Ironically, the changing attitudes that are giving many American women a new sense of their own worth and dignity, is working against the professional dignity of household workers. As women enter the work-force finding careers outside the home, they look on housework as demeaning drudgery.”39
But the idea that housework was not meaningful and that women needed other sources of fulfillment represented only one component of the women’s movement. There were multiple strands and competing perspectives among women’s activists.40
Some socialist feminists had a different perspective from the mainstream women’s movement. New York Radical Feminists was a staunch supporter of domestic workers. In October 1973, it cosponsored with the Professional Household Workers Union a speak-out on working-class women that was attended by seventy-five people. Invitees were encouraged to “hear what it’s like to be a household worker,” illustrating the importance of storytelling and testimony to convey ideas about the occupation. NYRF argued that working-class and middle-class women had closely aligned interests. Pointing to the economic vulnerability of middle-class women who were not financially independent, they suggested: “Most women . . . are only a step (or a man) away from a working-class job—if they are not already employed in one.”41
Socialist feminists, like domestic workers, rethought the meaning and value of household labor. They offered a broad critique of American capitalism and its relationship to patriarchy. They argued that the devaluation of housework was a product of economic development—in particular the emergence of wage labor—and the consequent separation of public and private spheres. Women’s reproductive labor, they believed, was absolutely essential to the functioning of the economy. Without it, American capitalism would not have a next generation of workers. Rather than viewing domestic labor as nonproductive labor, they suggested that it was productive and benefited capitalists because the costs of sustaining workers was borne by the unpaid labor of women.42
One offshoot of socialist feminism was the “wages for housework” movement. Spearheaded by Selma James and Maria Dalla Costa, the wages for housework movement, rather than seeing women’s employment outside the home as the only path to liberation, attempted to reclaim housework as legitimate labor.43 Much like welfare rights activists who made a claim for government assistance to support them in their work as mothers, members of the wages for housework movement advocated the commodification of household labor—attaching a wage to it as a way to revalue the work and compensate women. This argument for commodification was rooted in an understanding that wages were a measure of labor’s worth in a capitalist economy. Moving domestic labor from the unpaid to the paid category, they believed, would upgrade the work. In a similar vein, Reed supported Social Security for housewives as a way to recognize that work, claiming, “they can all become household technicians.”44 Although this was a legitimate argument, the experiences of paid domestic workers offer a different perspective. Some domestic labor had been commodified since the emergence of capitalism. But as domestic workers repeatedly attested, a wage, in and of itself, did not raise the status of the work.45 Socialist feminists offered promise for collaboration across feminist lines, but were, however, only a minority of women’s activists.
As middle-class women won access to previously closed occupations and entered the workforce at a faster rate, the question of who would do the household labor became more pressing. As journalist Gail Sheehy wrote in the Boston Globe in 1980, “Behind just about every successful woman I know with a public as well as private life, there is another woman.”46 One employer who nominated her domestic worker for Atlanta’s Maid of the Year testified about the need for household assistance to further her own goals: “Having Lula with the family made it possible for me to continue my education, and to do my research and teaching which I enjoy very much. If it had not been for Lula, I could not have worked toward and earned my PhD. . . . I never worried about [my children] coming home from school without me there because they came home to Lula’s welcoming love. . . . Best of all, because she kept my house for me, I could spend all my time at home with my husband and daughters, because the chores were done.”47 Increasingly, middle-class women who saw personal empowerment bound up with employment outside the home wanted to free themselves from household labor. The goal for many in the women’s movement became, as Angela Davis put it, “the abolition of housework as the private responsibility of individual women.”48
Domestic work cut at the heart of the feminist dilemma of a desire for employment while still attempting to fulfill the responsibilities of mothering and housework. Feminist demands for greater contributions from male partners and government-funded child care to resolve this dilemma were less successful. The privatized solution of hiring someone else—preferably someone compliant and inexpensive—to do the work became the most viable one.49 As Essence magazine explained in 1974: “It is the women who have fought sex discrimination in employment who are now discriminating against the Black women hired to work in their homes.”50 The goals of the mainstream women’s movement increasingly narrowed to focus on the employment prospects of middle-class women and their individual achievements. Mary McClendon summarized the problem this way: “Nice ladies who have bought their freedom from household work at the expense of those who have no choice and must work for insulting and inadequate wages.”51 The most visible feminist heroes became those who broke through the glass ceiling rather than those who still labored downstairs but made possible the success of those at the top. The hiring of domestic workers as middle-class women went to work enabled feminist liberation for some without disrupting the gendered social order in middle-class homes.
Despite the fragility of the feminist coalition, household technicians forged ahead in developing a strategic alliance to pass the FLSA amendments. Domestic workers’ stories mobilized the support of groups such as the National Organization for Women and the Business and Professional Women’s Club, as well as some socialist feminists.52 The congressional debates provided a platform for domestic workers to speak out publicly, reach out to other women, and share their narratives of domestic labor. Their gendered analysis suggested that household labor, whether paid or unpaid, united women of different backgrounds.
HTA activists drew parallels between the plight of domestic workers and the dilemmas of the middle-class women who hired them. Both were responsible for housework. Both understood what maintaining a home entailed. Both experienced the devaluation of housework in the larger society. Josephine Hulett succinctly explained this in an interview: “After all, there’s a sense in which all women are household workers. And unless we stop being turned against each other, unless we organize together, we’re never going to make this country see household work for what it really is—human work, not just ‘woman’s work’: a job that deserves dignity, fair pay, and respect.”53 Similarly, Geraldine Miller argued that “as we upgrade the household worker, we will upgrade the woman in the home.”54
Many feminists, like those at Gloria Steinem’s fund-raiser, grappled with the ethical issues of paid household help, and for political and personal reasons did not want to replicate hierarchical or exploitative relationships. Domestic workers acknowledged feminist unease and assured them that there was nothing wrong with hiring household help as long as workers were well paid and treated as professionals. Josephine Hulett recalled her interactions with middle-class women who were hesitant about hiring domestic help. “I’ve also met women involved in the Women’s Movement who feel guilty about employing another woman, and who even fire their household worker and try to do without. I explain to them that we need the job; it’s a good job. We just want to be respected—and to be decently paid.”55
Domestic workers argued that even if employers experienced financial constraints, the demand for decent pay was nonnegotiable and family budgets shouldn’t be balanced on the backs of household workers. Hulett believed female employers should demand more money from their bosses or their husbands to make ends meet. “I’ve run into employers who say, ‘But how can I pay that? I don’t have any money myself.’ I sympathize with those women. I know we’re all pretty badly off. . . . But if you didn’t have the price of a car, you couldn’t talk the dealer down—you’d just have to get along without it. And that’s the way it should be with household help too. Maybe if women employers see it that way, they’ll make more trouble with their husbands or their own employers, and get proper pay for themselves and their sisters.”56 Domestic workers framed gender solidarity in terms of privileged women’s support for poor women’s work and suggested that middle-class women’s advocacy of domestic worker rights would benefit all women.
Domestic workers forged a diverse coalition with a small group of feminists. Their ability to ally with feminists of very different political orientations is a testament to the significance of this issue and the ways in which different categories of women were connected to it. Household workers didn’t gloss over the vast differences between poor and middle-class women. But they did find a common thread that linked them. Through their testimony and storytelling, domestic workers articulated an alternative vision that claimed housework as real work and tied the degradation of the occupation to both women’s unpaid household labor as well as the history of racism. Domestic workers’ claims of household work as labor powerfully resonated with middle-class women who felt burdened by their domestic responsibilities.
The underlying tension between middle-class women and household workers became more clear when attempts were made to enforce the new minimum wage legislation. After passage of the amendments in 1974, HTA and NCHE made a commitment “to increase knowledge of and compliance with fair labor standards among household employers and the general public.”57 Gloria Steinem was asked to head the program and mobilize local women’s organizations to ensure compliance with the FLSA.58 Steinem pledged the active support of the women’s movement. Carolyn Reed had a great deal of respect for Steinem. “When I think of people who’ve supported us, the first name that comes up is Gloria Steinem . . . she is accessible without the whole fanfare. She was the person who has been most consistent—really putting her money and her actions where her mouth is, just constantly doing it and not really seeking publicity for it. . . . You can call on her and get action.”59 Steinem also appreciated her alliance with the Household Technicians, especially because it projected a different image of the women’s movement. She said about Reed in 1993: she was “exactly the kind of person who should get recognized and doesn’t and then people think only three of us are feminists and we all wear suits.”60 Carolyn Reed did not wear a suit, but for her a maid’s uniform could be as fiercely feminist as the attire of those climbing the corporate ladder.
The goal of the NCHE minimum wage–enforcement campaign was to get ten thousand employers to place a sticker in the window of their homes that read “This is a Fair Labor Standards Household.” This harkened back to a New Deal strategy to encourage businesses that complied with federal regulations to display a blue eagle. Despite the support of individuals like Steinem and their laudable efforts, enforcement remained an insurmountable problem, even among feminists. Educating millions of employers was a massive undertaking and many employers were simply unable or unwilling to comply on their own. As middle-class and working-class women of different racial backgrounds joined the workforce, they relied more on paid household workers. The situation was especially difficult for working-class women for whom a generous wage for a child-care worker or housekeeper would have likely stretched them beyond their limits. Did they have alternatives? It seems not, given the competing demands of working and having children at home to care for. Yet, poor women, such as household workers, struggled with this same conundrum and rarely had the option of hiring someone to do this work for them. And because cutbacks and political attacks on welfare increasingly required welfare recipients to take paid employment outside the home, staying home to take care of their own children was less of an option. Day care was one solution. In 1968, Dorothy Bolden and the NDWUA in Atlanta hoped to start a worker-run day-care program because “far too many of the women have no child care so their children are left alone during the day.”61 In 1976, the NCHE’s “Program Priorities” called for government-funded affordable day-care programs to meet the child-care needs of household workers and other poor women.62 Government-funded day care, also advocated by some feminist groups, never gained traction, however. Household workers who were mothers patched together unreliable caretaking options—they turned to friends, family, and unregulated day care, or left children home alone. And they rarely had the luxury of returning to a clean house after a long day at work. As Bolden explained: A typical day for her was to “get up at 4 a.m. to leave home by 6 a.m., and be on the job by 8 a.m., perform all those duties necessary to the proper management of a household for eight hours, leave there by 4 p.m. to be home by 6 p.m. where I would do the same things I’ve done all over again for my own family.”63 Working-class women’s hardship is not something all women should suffer. But recognizing those hardships could and should prompt us to consider solutions to meet the needs of all families, regardless of their economic status.
The passage of the FLSA amendments in 1974 was an important milestone in African American history and the history of social rights. It won labor rights for this excluded sector of workers and brought them into the fold of legally recognized labor. An NCHE press release claimed: “Minimum wage coverage for household workers gives to these one and a half million employees a legal mandate, a recognition of the value of their services and basic equality with other workers. . . . For the domestic worker, whether she is Black, White, Red or Brown, or lives in the North, East, South or West, it means a new respect—for her service and her person—and the ability to support herself and family.”64 The passage of minimum wage legislation was one of several victories for household workers in the postwar period. In 1950 they won the right to Social Security assistance. In 1974, they came under minimum wage laws. And in 1976, they obtained access to unemployment insurance. This body of legislation addressed a fundamental inequality that had structured social rights since the 1930s and marked the postwar period as one of racial progress. Although they never achieved full equality—domestic workers are still excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and civil rights laws—these advances were important and represented the movement’s effort to upgrade household labor.
Household workers’ struggles were part of a broader campaign for economic rights among social justice advocates. Activists in the 1960s and 1970s utilized divergent strategies, including demanding reparations for slavery and a guaranteed annual income to bring all Americans to a minimum standard of living, but the most common approach was seeking legislative equity in the workplace. Mainstream feminist and civil rights activists lobbied for the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act, both of which attempted to ameliorate racial and gender discrimination in employment. Passed in 1963, the Equal Pay Act, spearheaded by the Women’s Bureau, amended the FLSA and prohibited unequal wages between men and women for the same work. Women in occupations already covered by the FLSA would be assured equality with their male counterparts. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discriminatory practices in the workplace and gave employees a means to file claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to challenge race and sex discrimination. These acts helped end widespread practices of discrimination in the labor force, opened up previously closed occupations, and made hiring and evaluation processes more transparent.65
But there was a tension between the antidiscrimination approaches of the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act—which focused on the rights of individual workers’ equal access to previously closed occupations or equal pay for men and women in certain occupations—and broader campaigns to expand the social safety net, include unprotected workers in labor law, and upgrade occupations. The individual rights approach, according to historian Alice Kessler-Harris, benefited middle-class women most and left poor women vulnerable. Scholar Venus Green, for example, argues that NOW’s adoption of a narrow, gender-based concept of inequality in its battles with Sears and AT&T failed to adequately address the needs of black women. Similarly, the campaign for comparable worth, which sought equal pay between women and men for jobs of similar skill level, didn’t address the growing divide among women in occupations of different skill level. Most working-class women were not competing with men for jobs, but were in gender-segregated occupations. Consequently, white women benefited much more from these decisions than did African American women.66 Antidiscrimination laws enabled middle-class and professional women opportunities in previously male-dominated occupations while the continued devaluation of care work assured them access to an underpaid labor force of domestic workers, home care attendants, and nursing home workers, to whom they could outsource household responsibilities. Individual women and people of color benefited from the equal-rights approach, but the vast majority were stuck in occupations that continued to devalue their labor and underpay them. So, Title VII and the Equal Pay Act may actually have exacerbated the divide among women.67 Antidiscrimination law did not restructure the workplace and did not revalue occupations such as care work.
Domestic workers’ campaign for social citizenship rights was part of this larger struggle for justice in the workplace. They were more closely aligned with union campaigns to upgrade certain occupations and the goals of social movements, such as the welfare rights and wages for housework movements, to revalue household labor.68 Many African American women leaving domestic service undoubtedly fought for equal access to other kinds of employment and an end to discrimination within those workplaces. But the thrust of this movement was to upgrade their jobs and change the terms of social citizenship by extending labor rights to their current occupation. Annie Love, a mother of four, household worker and organizer in Miami, expressed her view: “A lot of people talk about training household workers to be something else. It isn’t that I haven’t been interested in another kind of job, it’s just that this is what I really want to do.”69 Less concerned about individual access to new jobs, and perhaps aware of the obstacles that poor black women faced in escaping low-wage jobs, they aimed to transform the political and economic status of an entire occupation and gain federal recognition of their work.70 Even training and education were less about obtaining new jobs than improving old ones. Geraldine Roberts attended a community college, but wanted to “still continue as a domestic worker.”71 Household workers’ claims for rights and recognition of their work of social reproduction disrupted long-standing notions of both labor and citizenship and expanded the definition of “worker” that had been circumscribed in the 1930s. They intended to raise the status of the work of social reproduction and reverse the marginalization of African American women domestic workers in labor law.
Minimum wage legislation for domestic workers didn’t fully achieve the expected results and had a mixed legacy. The granting of formal rights to domestic workers absolved the state of its most blatant exclusions, reinforcing and strengthening the abstract construct of universal equality without creating a mechanism for enforcement. The end result was a turn away from state responsibility toward individual employer responsibility. Once domestic workers were legally protected, it was assumed that the real obstacles were employers who refused to comply. The decentralized nature of the work and its location in the home—issues that historically made regulation difficult—still impeded enforcement. The Department of Labor had little power and few tools to ensure compliance. Moreover, the ideology of the home as a private sphere continued to hold sway over the public imagination in a way that inhibited people from acknowledging the home as a workplace.72
The FLSA legislation also excluded important categories of domestics, including live-in workers and home-health-care aides, who, along with babysitters, were defined as providing “companionship” services.73 Home care was distinct from private household labor because it was funded by state agencies and often had a third-party employer. These new exclusions became even more important as the occupation shifted. At the turn of the twenty-first century, home-care assistance was one of the fastest-growing industries because of changes in health-care administration, state funding patterns, and greater stratification in health-care delivery. Domestic workers, especially African American women, increasingly left private household labor for home-care work as well as institutional employment as nurses, cleaners, and cafeteria workers. Thus, those who became home-health-care aides left one unprotected occupation only to find themselves in another unprotected occupation. The other exclusion of live-in workers also became important with the influx of immigrant workers. As live-ins, these new workers were not entitled to minimum wage protection. So the legal recognition of the category of domestic work also narrowed that definition and removed protections for some. The reforms of the 1970s attempted to mitigate stratification within labor law but created new forms of stratification at the same time.74
In the 1970s, domestic workers forged an alliance with middle-class women and waged a campaign for full citizenship rights by insisting that domestic work was legitimate work deserving of the same labor protections as other occupations. Since the 1930s, they had been excluded from labor legislation and were marginalized in both their work and their legal status. Domestic workers claimed their labor as legitimate work and built a broad-based alliance to suport the passage of minimum-wage legislation.
In their campaigns, domestic workers’ voices and experiences and their participation in the policymaking process were critical elements of the legislative debate. Their analysis of the gendered nature of domestic labor told through stories of racial exclusion, hardship, and unmet expectations, as well as their hope to revalue household labor served as a basis for a feminist alliance. Although passage of minimum wage legislation was an important victory for domestic workers, it was also limited, offering domestic workers legal status but little political leverage.
Domestic workers’ campaigns for equality in the 1960s and 1970s were never solely about labor legislation and citizenship rights. Although the question of social and economic rights was critical for domestic workers, most did not see these rights as the ultimate goal but rather as one part of a broader agenda. Concerns about dignity and respect were also crucial. As Josephine Hulett explained: “Raising pay by inclusion under FLSA is not an end in itself. But coverage under FLSA is a vital prerequisite—a vital means of achieving a larger aim—which, from the employee’s view is to provide her with a profession that is respected and pays adequately.”75 Domestic workers viewed the degradation of their work as deeply rooted and informed by the racialization of the occupation as well as the lack of value placed on household labor.
The struggle for social citizenship was a step toward achieving rights and respect for this sector of the African American community and aimed to remedy the marginalization that resulted from decades-long inequality in social citizenship. Edith Barksdale Sloan wrote in the NCHE newsletter, “Many employers are slowly beginning to realize that there has been a revolution in the kitchen, and like it or not, there is a new force and a determined new worker who will no longer work unreasonable hours under unreasonable conditions for unjust wages, some leftover food and a worn-out garment.”76 Domestic workers’ victorious passage of the FLSA amendments pushed the boundaries of American citizenship and managed to redefine the very meaning of work that had been so circumscribed by New Deal labor legislation. The shifting, contingent, and contested notions of work and citizenship suggest that this has been an important arena of political struggle for marginalized groups—a struggle that is still unfinished.