It is important to realize that, in the past, our sisters left us a legacy of organizing that we can follow today.
—BONITA JOHNSON
In 1973 the renowned sociologist Lewis Coser published an article in a prominent academic journal declaring the obsolescence of domestic servants. Paid household labor, he argued, was an antiquated occupation that had no place in industrialized society.1 Coser and other social commentators in the 1970s had come to believe that hired domestic labor was out of step with the democratic ideals of a modern society. Moreover, they argued that technological advances, new consumer products, and shifting cultural patterns made the need for in-home household employees a thing of the past. Such assertions were not entirely new. In 1953 House and Garden magazine promised that electrical appliances would be the “servant that never takes a day off” and that convenience foods were the equivalent of “1001 servants in your kitchen.”
In the mid- to late 1970s, labor economists, feminists, and countless journalists once again lauded a turn toward capitalist innovation as a solution to the problem of household labor. Working mothers no longer had to spend hours in front of the stove when they could easily pick up fast food or prepared supermarket items, such as frozen TV dinners and instant soup. Dishwashers, self-cleaning ovens, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and wrinkle-free fabrics eased the burdens of cleaning. And institutional child care would make nannies unnecessary. The free market, it seemed, would relieve middle-class women of the crushing burden of household labor.
In addition to market solutions, changing expectations of how to keep house—or more accurately, declining standards—reduced the time spent on housework. Many middle-class women had come to believe that a clean house was only marginally important, and may have been a sign of misplaced priorities. Beginning in the mid-1960s, women did less household labor, even when no one else picked up the slack.2 As Geraldine Roberts observed in 1977, “So many employers have seemed to adopt the style that it is not that important anymore about how well the house is kept clean.”3
Despite declining standards and the proliferation of household appliances and prepared foods, the problem of household labor persisted as the number of women in the workforce continued to grow. By 1980 the labor force participation rate of married women was 49 percent.4 Some women joined the labor force because of second-wave feminist ideas that employment and an independent income led to personal liberation. Other women were less moved by ideology and went to work out of sheer necessity as a shrinking manufacturing sector, rising inflation, and high unemployment generated an economic crisis. Single mothers often relied on paid employment to support themselves and their children, especially as welfare increasingly came under attack. And as middle-class and lower-middle-class families found it hard to maintain their standard of living on a single income, women’s employment became the salve for an aching economy. Many families now depended upon two incomes.5
While the drudgery and time devoted to household labor seemed to have lessened given technological advances and changing expectations, the promises that paid domestic labor would soon be a thing of the past were overly optimistic. Market innovations were limited. Ready-made foods were not considered nutritious enough. Institutional day care was perceived to be inadequate by many middle-class families that were bombarded with messages about the importance of one-on-one attention for healthy growth and development of their children. And hopes and expectations that modern-day men would shoulder more of the household chores never materialized. In effect, the overall workload for newly employed women increased because of their double day. Both the “care gap” and the cleaning gap needed to be filled. As in earlier periods, low-paid household workers seemed to be the most feasible solution.6
A new employer-employee relationship emerged in the 1970s because of growing unease with the master-servant model. A New York Times author described it this way: “Relations between the two groups are fraught with feelings of anxiety, guilt and helplessness, all on the part of the employers, none on the part of the employees.”7 Female employers sought greater distance from their employees and were increasingly uncomfortable with their role as employers, perhaps because of the way in which the relationship had come to symbolize racial hierarchy among women. A divorced mother employed in the public relations department of a large food company and interviewed by Westchester Illustrated magazine explained that she hired a white housekeeper because “I didn’t want to present the stereotype of the black maid doing a white woman’s work to my kids.” Another employer despised feeling responsible for all her employee’s problems: “I hate having inherited another person’s life in return for having my tub scrubbed and my floor waxed.” Most employers guarded their privacy and were not interested in the personal relationship that characterized the occupation a generation earlier. A speech pathologist explained: “When my kids were small, I had intimate relationships with the people who cared for them. I knew about their dates and their agonies. Now, I simply don’t want to be bothered. . . . I don’t want an intimate observer at dinner time serving my family. . . . I don’t even like to be at home when my housekeeper’s there. . . . Someone who cleans for you doesn’t have to be patronized as a child or treated as a member of the family if she’s not.”8
Their detached approach sometimes led to a lack of clear instructions. Although employers didn’t want to micromanage or dictate to their workers, they also had high expectations for how care should be provided and tasks completed. One employer explained: “I want a competent person to come into my house, look around, know what’s to be done and do it. I want a housekeeper who’s as expert in her job as I am in mine.”9 The hope was that employees would be independent and take initiative, and, at the same time, conform to their bosses’ often unspoken standards. Household work was shifting because of workers’ initiatives as well. As scholar Mary Romero has argued, Chicano workers transformed household labor into a business relationship wherein they worked for multiple employers and established set wage rates. This gave workers greater control over the work process and better suited employers’ hands-off approach. The emphasis on day work, however, did not eliminate the ongoing need for care workers, which tended to be full-time employment and, in many cases, live-in. Nevertheless, by the 1980s, there was a distinct change in the occupation. Household worker agitation and a new crop of employers combined to dismantle the paternalism and patterns of servitude that characterized the mid-twentieth century.10
In the mid-1970s, African American women, who had been the primary domestic-labor force since the early twentieth century, were a shrinking percentage of domestic workers. They had been steadily leaving household labor since World War II and choosing, when given the opportunity, to take formal-sector jobs.11 This trend accelerated with the victories of the black freedom movement, which removed barriers to employment discrimination and increased educational opportunities for African Americans.
Some African American women moved out of domestic service into clerical, sales, and professional jobs such as teaching, nursing, and social work that were previously closed to them.12 Geraldine Roberts observed: “I think, more than ever now, domestics at this time, at this period, 1977, are beginning to go to school and seek out higher education for themselves . . . women all began to help themselves as individuals saying I’m going to go back to school, try to improve myself because I’m tired of being worked as a slave in this country without a decent wage, tired of being ignored.”13 Other African American women, with less education and fewer employment prospects, ended up on welfare and were relegated to “second tier” public assistance benefits. The bifurcation between the more privileged and the less privileged characterized the shifting employment prospects of African American women, where some moved up and others simply moved out of employment and were further marginalized.14 The net effect was a decline in the number of African American household workers. So, while 42 percent of employed black women were domestics in 1950, by 1970 only 19.5 percent of employed black women worked as domestics. This proportion had dropped to 6 percent by 1980.
Ironically, working-class black women who left private household labor often ended up in occupations that resembled the social reproductive labor they had previously engaged in, albeit in different settings. They shifted “over” rather than “out,” thus re-creating the racial and gender inequality in the workforce. The proliferation of hospitals, schools, nursing homes, and restaurants changed the nature of social reproductive care and relocated some of the work that had previously taken place in the home into institutional settings. Dorothy Bolden was aware of growing opportunities for black women in these employment areas. NDWUA’s training proposal prepared participants for one of two career tracks: private household work or “service delivery and management for institutions” such as for-profit businesses and nonprofit organizations.15 Institutions offered women, and many men, formal-sector jobs that included nurturant care, as well as other kinds of social reproductive work like cleaning, laundry, and food preparation. Women working in institutions were still often relegated to largely female service occupations. But even within this predominantly female workforce, inequalities persisted, with women of color performing the lowest-paid menial work—the “back-room jobs” such as changing bedpans and serving in cafeterias—and white women engaging in nurturant work such as registered nursing and teaching.16
One instance of this widening racial gap in institutional care is evidenced in the home-health-care industry. Over the course of the twentieth century, the health-care industry underwent enormous changes with the creation of occupational hierarchies, including professionalization of certain jobs and the implementation of cost-cutting measures. Government policy encouraged the expansion of home health care—where individuals paid by private or government agencies provided services to the sick or disabled in their homes. Home health care enabled hospitals to outsource patient care to low-wage workers, many of whom were former welfare recipients, domestic workers, or family members of those needing care. This burgeoning field was made up largely of women of color, who worked long hours performing multiple tasks that included nursing and patient hygiene and bodily care, as well as household chores such as cooking and cleaning. These jobs were not vastly different from the labor provided by private household employees for generations. But because home-health-care aides were legally categorized as casual babysitters with the passage of the 1974 amendments, they were excluded from the provisions of the FLSA. Occupations such as home health care proved to be an important outlet for poor black women, and many immigrant women, fleeing private household work.17 So black women, although less important in private household service, continued doing low-paid reproductive care in institutional settings.
Mary McClendon’s life illustrates these trends. After almost fifty years as a private household worker, McClendon enrolled in a community college to become certified as a home-care aide. In some ways, this transition was a logical extension of her efforts to upgrade household labor through professionalization and training. In 1977 McClendon took a job with the city of Detroit as a home-care attendant. She signed a one-year contract with the city’s Neighborhood Services Department to work as a homemaker aide and described her job, which involved cleaning, cooking, and caring for the elderly or disabled, as “household technician work.” But the autonomy she might have hoped for with “professional” status didn’t materialize. Her supervisors called to check in every day, monitored her closely, and required her to inform them if she left her place of employment for any reason. They even instructed her how to dress for Friday meetings and what to say to the seniors she cared for.18
The work was physically demanding and McClendon suffered from long-term ailments that she attributed to lifting clients as a home-care attendant. In 1980 she sued the city of Detroit for workers’ compensation because of chronic back pain. By that time, she was unemployed, received general assistance—a welfare program for the poor without young children—and lived in Highland Park, an impoverished black city within the municipal boundaries of Detroit. At issue in the lawsuit was whether McClendon was an independent contractor or directly employed by the city. This distinction, while seemingly a technicality, was enormously important in shaping the status, rights, and political leverage of home-care attendants. The city claimed she was a contractor and therefore couldn’t make any claims as an employee. McClendon offered examples of how frequently supervisors checked up on her as evidence of her status as an employee of the city’s agency. McClendon lost her legal case, an indication of how home-health-care workers found it more difficult to challenge working conditions, bargain collectively, or bring lawsuits against their employers for unfair labor practices. Her situation exemplifies the continuities in African American women’s low-wage labor both inside and outside domestic service—and, in particular, how labor rights were curtailed.
The exodus of African American women from private household work led to shifting demographics in the occupation. Changes in immigration law in the 1960s created a much larger pool of low-wage immigrant workers, many of whom ended up as household laborers. The Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 abolished the discriminatory national-origins immigration formula established in the 1920s that gave preference to northern and western Europeans and completely excluded Asians and Africans. The new law established a per-country quota, which prioritized immigrants’ skills and family unification, and placed new restrictions on the number of legal immigrants from the western hemisphere. These restrictions regulated a border that was previously unregulated and heightened the number of undocumented immigrants coming to the United States. The loosening of certain restrictions enabled greater numbers of immigrants from other parts of the world to come to the US and expanded the pool of vulnerable immigrants without legal papers. These new immigrants, many of whom were in search of employment, became available for those seeking household workers.19
The turn to immigrant labor as a source of household workers was not unprecedented. Immigrant women were the primary domestic-service labor force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the post–World War II period, women were recruited from the southern United States, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Europe. For example, Domestic Service, Inc., a Manhattan employment agency started in 1950 by Lee Ahneman, specialized in connecting European household workers with employers in the United States. Usually paid between $100 and $150 a month, workers signed one-year contracts. In its first five years, the company placed about six thousand domestics; by 1961, ten thousand were entering the country every year. They came from all over Europe, but especially Britain and Ireland, because of fluency in English and high immigration quotas. A reporter identified another reason why some nationalities were less represented: “No Scandinavians are brought in by the firm, for an interesting reason. They don’t want to come. Domestics in these countries have recently organized and work only an eight-hour day. If longer, they get time-and-a-half.” So, the workers ending up in the United States were very likely less demanding of their rights. Despite the best efforts of companies like Domestic Service however, recruitment agencies could not meet the demand for European workers.20
Another possible source for domestic workers was Puerto Rico. The long-standing colonial relationship made travel back and forth fairly easy and Puerto Ricans’ status as American citizens enabled an unlimited number of people to go to the continental US. Since the early twentieth century, a steady stream of Puerto Ricans, middle-class and working-class voluntary migrants and contract laborers, had arrived in the mainland US, especially New York and Chicago, and some ended up in or were shuttled into domestic work. Puerto Ricans quickly became the second-largest Spanish-speaking community next to Mexicans.21
Private companies recruited contract workers from Puerto Rico. One of the most well-publicized cases was in Chicago. In September 1946, after signing an agreement with the Puerto Rican Department of Labor, a Chicago employment agency, Castle, Barton and Associates, recruited men to work in foundries and women and some men to work in private households with one-year labor contracts. Although the contracts were not legally binding, the agency used them as a form of coercion. The agency head told one employer that if a worker broke a contract, “we could blackball them successfully from any other job.”22 Close to four hundred women, most who had never before worked as maids, served as live-in domestics. To combat workers’ isolation, the Chicago YWCA organized Thursday-afternoon teas for the migrants. Although they were not tea drinkers, the domestic workers seized the opportunity to establish solidarity and share information about their jobs.23 They expressed dissatisfaction with both working and living conditions.
A group of University of Chicago students learned of the plight of the workers and began to document complaints of underage labor, fifteen-hour workdays, mistreatment, and underpayment. They found that employers had deducted money for transportation to and from Puerto Rico from workers’ monthly wages, leaving them with far less than they expected. Carmen Isales, a Puerto Rican social worker who happened to be vacationing in Chicago at the time, confirmed the students’ findings and also discovered that Puerto Rican women earned far less than their African American and white counterparts.24 Low wages seemed to be another form of labor control. One employer testified that the agency told him that if they paid more “it might make [the workers] ‘flighty.’”25 The program was hardly a success. Half the household workers left before their contract was up. Alarming press reports suggested that the “girls” had turned to prostitution and that there was now a “displaced-persons” problem.26 Because of the growing publicity, the Puerto Rican Senate launched an investigation and halted the Castle, Barton and Associates contract-labor program.27
In addition to private initiatives, there were government-sponsored programs. In 1947 the Puerto Rican Department of Labor launched the development project known as Operación Manos a La Obra, or Operation Bootstrap, designed to transform Puerto Rico from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy.28 Operation Bootstrap encouraged migration of working-class, unskilled, and rural Puerto Ricans to the mainland United States as a way to alleviate poverty and unemployment. The Migration Division trained workers, offered information about employment opportunities, organized contract-labor programs with assistance from the US Federal Division of Territories and Island Possessions, and launched a public relations campaign that touted the benefits of hiring Puerto Rican workers. They hoped, in part, to avoid the scandal associated with the recent recruitment efforts in Chicago. In 1948 the Puerto Rican government hired L. Frances Phillips, an African American woman, as assistant to the Puerto Rican commissioner of labor in New York and employment manager of the Metropolitan Household Offices of the New York State Department of Labor. She trained and placed Puerto Ricans in household jobs. Phillips had worked for the New York State Department of Labor since 1935 and was instrumental in trying to eliminate the “slave markets” of the Depression era by creating a registration and placement program for household workers. In 1948, the first twenty-one Puerto Rican workers were placed in homes in Scarsdale, an affluent community just north of New York City. Although the program was hailed as a solution to the shortage of domestic labor, the workers encountered numerous problems, much like the domestics in Chicago, including isolation, overwork, and a language barrier.29
Despite the difficulties, hiring foreign domestic workers still appealed to employers. The benefits were evident in the documents of one employment agency. In 1967, the Frances Green Employment Agency, with offices in Maryland, New York, and Pennsylvania, promised “the services of an English-speaking South American or West Indian domestic.” The owners assured potential clients that they “go to South America and Jamaica every month to personally interview, select and approve all applicants” and offered to take care of all paperwork, such as obtaining a permanent work visa for the domestic. The three-page contract specified workers’ rights and responsibilities. They were expected to clean, do laundry, care for children, and cook, but not wash windows outside, shovel snow, wash cars, or garden. Workers were advised by the company: “In some homes you may be required to scrub a kitchen and/or bathroom the good old fashioned way on your hands and knees. Some employers feel that this is the only way to get all the corners, baseboard and floors clean. Since it is your employer’s home and she is paying you a good salary you are obligated to comply.”30 The agency suggested that on their days off, maids “go to church” and urged them to “choose your friends wisely.” They compiled a dossier for each worker with a photo, references, and “a questionnaire reflecting the applicant’s personality, attitude, intelligence and personal habits.” The agency promised clients a “one-year unconditional replacement guarantee.”31 The detailed contract of the Frances Green Employment Agency is revealing both for what it promised employers—hardworking, morally upstanding, and reliable employees—and its obvious attempt to discipline workers in both their social habits and work expectations.
The Frances Green Agency’s target of “South American” and “West Indian” domestics reflected the growing interest in hiring women from the Caribbean. Caribbean women had a long history of immigration to the United States, but the number increased in the 1970s and 1980s. Mary McClendon experienced this firsthand. In 1970, the HWO in Detroit explained in its newsletter, Household Workers Employment News, the way Jamaican workers were exploited: “Some employers of household workers are hiring foreigners, such as Jamaicans. . . . The only real compensation that they receive is that they are allowed to stay in America. . . . The wages of the Jamaican ladies are so small it’s like robbing the helpless, and the contracts that they are expected to keep along with keeping their living quarters and duties again is slavery.”32 Many Caribbean women were employed in their countries of origin, although not necessarily as domestic workers, and migrated in search of economic opportunity as Caribbean nations experienced shrinking job opportunities, growing debt, and greater vulnerability to austerity policies imposed by agencies such as the International Monetary Fund. Some Caribbean women migrants who were mothers left their children in the care of friends or relatives and sent remittances back home. Those who brought children with them had to juggle their own child-care responsibilities while serving as a nanny for someone else. Although hired as “nannies,” Caribbean domestic workers were expected to do a great deal of housework as well. Immigrant Caribbean women may have been middle-class prior to their relocation and were shocked at their poor treatment, which was exacerbated in situations where employees were sponsored by or dependent upon employers for their green card or permanent residency status. According to scholar Shellee Colen, “The central issue discussed by all the women is the lack of respect shown to them by their employers.”33
The other growing group of domestic workers was Chicanas and Mexican immigrants, who had been an important low-wage workforce since the expansion of the US empire in the nineteenth century, especially in the Southwest. But new legal limits on Mexican migrants in 1965 fueled undocumented immigration because of the way in which migrants were increasingly criminalized for crossing the border without papers. Both Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants, especially those labeled “illegal,” were vulnerable to abuse and exploitation.34 An employer’s guide, titled Your Maid from Mexico: A Home Training Course for Maids, published in 1959, indicated how Mexicans were viewed as desirable domestics. Several nonprofits operated to mitigate the negative impact. The International Institute of Los Angeles found that Mexican domestic workers were paid as little as thirty cents an hour. The director, Robert Armendariz, described the employment of Mexican immigrants as “coerced labor.” Bert Corona of the Autonomous Center for Social Action (CASA), a Los Angeles advocacy group that organized Mexican immigrants, explained: “These dowager ladies in society circles hire them to take care of their babies” so they can do charity and benefit work. “They want to help the poor but they are exploiting the poor at home.”35
Immigrants, even undocumented immigrants, in this period were protected by US labor law. Only much later, in 1986, did it become illegal to hire undocumented workers, and almost twenty years after that, claims of unfair labor practices by undocumented workers began to be curtailed by the Supreme Court. But even in the period when they were entitled to make legal claims, undocumented workers were often unable to assert their rights because of their vulnerability. Employers had the power to report, or threaten to report, employees who lacked proper papers. Immigrants were sometimes unaware of US labor law, may not have been fluent in English, and had few support networks in their communities. Grace Gil Olivarez, Chicana activist and chairman of the National Committee on Household Employment, explains: “If you’re very low on the economic ladder, if you have only one skill, you don’t protest. You have no options in the event the protest backfires.”36
The periodic turn to immigrant domestic workers is one iteration in a long history of racialized labor practices that sought to address the shortage of cheap domestic workers and problem of labor control. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the mammy stereotype cast African American women as ideal domestic servants. Isabel Eaton, who wrote a report on domestic work as part of W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic 1899 study, The Philadelphia Negro, found that employers in the city believed that African Americans were “industrious” and “a great deal better workers and decidedly better cooks than the whites.”37 Other groups in this period also experienced racialization through paid domestic labor. Chinese men were constructed as servile and emasculated and therefore good workers, and Irish Catholic women were deemed unrefined, rebellious, and in need of training in household labor.38 While the particular situation of black domestic workers was distinctive—most obviously because African Americans were not voluntary migrants—employers constructed both African American and immigrant domestic workers as racially different, rendering them invisible and justifying low pay and poor working conditions.
As the demographics changed, so too did ideas about race and domestic labor. In part because of civil rights and domestic-worker-rights activism, by the 1970s African Americans were increasingly viewed as “uppity,” difficult to control, demanding, and lazy. Essence reported in 1974: “Black household workers are banding together to demand improvements. They are becoming more militant and less inclined to settle for crumbs.” NCHE recognized the shift, stating in one report: “Many employers would rather hire a white or oriental alien—legal or illegal—than a black U.S. citizen.”39 African American women, no longer the ideal mammy, were now reconstructed in popular discourse as the lazy welfare recipient. In contrast, immigrants, it was believed, were malleable, controllable, and exploitable. Native-born whites and Europeans—who were always highly sought after—and new immigrants became the preferred household workers, imbued with their own racialized stereotypes about what made them good workers. Want ads for household workers frequently specified “European preferred” or “Oriental preferred.”40
Reliance on immigrant workers and the ways in which certain groups of women were characterized as ideal domestic workers illustrates how the politics of race informed the occupation. Domestic work produced ideas about race as much as it reflected them.41 In the 1940s, for example, Puerto Rican women were perceived as having qualities that made them inherently suited for domestic work. Stories of Puerto Rican women as good maids appeared in the popular press. A 1949 New York Times article suggested that despite poverty and overcrowded conditions, Puerto Rican women were “instinctively tidy.”42 Caribbean women in the 1980s were characterized as being clean, well-educated, and having a good work ethic. By the early part of the twenty-first century, however, as other groups of immigrant women became available, there was growing concern that Jamaican women were “too aggressive.”43 Latina women were especially valued for their ability to speak Spanish and believed to be more nurturing nannies. Filipino women were seen as hardworking, respectful, and compliant. These racial ideas didn’t describe innate traits, or even cultural patterns. Rather they justified, in the employer’s mind, why particular groups of women at particular moments in time might serve as good household workers. And, as was the case for African American women, they could be easily redefined. The ways in which different groups of people enter and exit household labor illuminate the centrality of race relations in shaping and transforming domestic work and the malleability of worker stereotypes.
Domestic-worker organizers like Josephine Hulett and Geraldine Miller saw their core constituency as African American women. But from the outset, they grappled with the question of immigrant domestic workers and were committed to creating a racially inclusive organization. Things did not always go smoothly, as was clear in 1970, as NCHE, which at that time was led by middle-class reformers, was about to launch the Household Technicians of America. Elva Ruiz, a Mexican American staff member of NCHE, issued a press release, signed by several Mexican American organizations, criticizing the organization for its inattention to the needs of the Mexican American community. The NCHE called the release “inaccurate” and “slanderous” and fired Ruiz shortly after that.44 This difficult beginning, however, may have prompted the organization to think more about issues of racial diversity. The next year, the HTA board of directors, at one of its first meetings, discussed how to contact white, Chicana, and Native American household workers, proposed to write a pamphlet in Spanish, and decided to invite underrepresented constituencies to join the board.45 In 1971, Edith Sloan reached out to Francisca Flores, a Chicana activist in Los Angeles and editor of the magazine Carta Editorial. Flores prioritized issues of low-income Mexican American women and, in 1972, formed the Chicana Service Action Center. In her letter, Sloan explained the HTA’s desire to work with Chicanas: “We are very much interested in increasing the participation of Chicanos in all facets of NCHE’s operations.” The formation of the HTA, she suggested, “makes the immediate identification and inclusion of workers from the Mexican American community of the utmost concern to us.” The NCHE, she explained, was considering sponsoring an Autumn Southwest Regional Conference on Household Employment, “the bulk of whose participants will be either American Indians or Mexican Americans.”46 In 1973, the NCHE translated the Code of Standards, Model Contract, and pamphlet on “How to Organize Household Workers” into Spanish.47 In addition, the NCHE Western Regional field officer, Curt Moody, in 1973 developed an ongoing relationship with Ding Ho, a household training program for Chinese-speaking women in San Francisco. Ding Ho never became an NCHE affiliate, but did collaborate with the organization, and its members attended some national conferences.48
It is not clear that anything tangible resulted from these efforts. The sentiment was significant nonetheless. Organizers in the NCHE and HTA understood immigration issues and racial division as complicating their effort to better the status of domestic workers. Curt Moody wrote to Edith Sloan about the situation in southern California: “Families seeking slave labor are importing and hiring Mexican Nationals at the rate of $25.00 per week with no benefits.”49 Geraldine Miller also explained employer preference for an immigrant workforce: “Immigrants were coming in and [employers] were hiring them instead of the African American because they were cheap labor and they could get by with it. You know, they could threaten the woman with deportation and they can’t threaten us, we’d a been threatened already, and we’re still here.”50 In outlining its priorities in 1976, the NCHE reflected on the complicated problem of immigration, including the perceived reluctance of immigrants to defend their rights: “When household workers are trying to improve their working conditions and pay, unfair competition from illegal aliens is a serious problem . . . immigrants working illegally undermine our efforts to improve pay and working conditions because their illegal status makes them afraid to complain to their employers or to seek help from any government agency.”51
The NCHE saw the influx of immigrant domestic workers as altering the balance of supply and demand and giving greater leverage to employers. The availability of immigrant workers and the reluctance of those workers to claim their rights, in many ways, undermined the substance of the FLSA. A 1975 NCHE study concluded that “employers in many areas offered wages well below the legally established minimum wage, and . . . these employers could easily obtain persons willing to work for less than the law demands.”52 Anita Shelton, executive director of the NCHE, explained in March 1976 before the annual convention, “Thus it becomes an employer’s market and a worker’s nightmare.”53 “The rule of supply and demand, which governs the production and sale of apples and oranges, automobiles and motorboats, or stocks and bonds,” she argued, “cannot be allowed to apply to human beings and their labor.” And she promised that the NCHE would “see that household workers take their rightful place in the economy and society.”54
Despite the way that immigration empowered employers and weakened the bargaining position of domestic workers, the leaders of the NCHE refused to buy into the larger discourse circulating about deportation. Domestic workers’ advocates could have taken a xenophobic position. They did not. NCHE’s “Program Priorities,” adopted and ratified in 1976, declared: “Humanly, it is hard to say that illegal aliens in great numbers should be deported so that US citizens can have their jobs.”55 It also committed the organization to bringing into the fold the new immigrants: “We will make special efforts to expand the Committee to include the national groups most affected by household employment issues, e.g., Spanish-speaking, Caribbean and Vietnamese groups.”56 Carolyn Reed was also a stalwart supporter of cross-race cooperation and considered ways to bring nonblack women into the organization: “In household work, it is not just Black women that are being exploited, and how do I set up an atmosphere so that white women will feel comfortable about coming into the organization. The only way that I can do that is by example of what we do, as an organization, and how we set it up. How do we get more Hispanic women who are doing it to feel comfortable within the organization. The only way that I can do that is by example—and saying, ‘Okay. Why don’t I take the effort to do this newsletter in English and in Spanish?’”57
By the late 1970s, the HTA had established a few more immigrant affiliates. In Washington, DC, the Asociación Internacional de Tecnicas del Hogar (International Association of Household Technicians) emerged out of the Spanish Catholic Center in 1977. Sister Manuela, the nun who ran the center, spoke highly of Carolyn Reed, but also believed “our problem is more complicated” because many of the two hundred members worked for diplomats and were live-ins.58 These employers had diplomatic immunity, which made protecting workers against labor law violations very difficult. As the Sister explained, workers in her organization struggled for “the right to not be a prisoner in the employer’s home.”59 In another case, Carolyn Reed trained Haitian refugee women as household technicians and taught them their rights “as a way of helping Haitian women in New York City get jobs to help them become self-sufficient and financially independent—making the way for a better life.” She wanted to ensure their “ability to function properly in their new home by knowing their rights and getting paid for what they are worth.”60 The HTA’s and NCHE’s concerted effort to reach out to immigrant workers reflected an awareness that the constraints of the occupation were similar regardless of ethnic and racial background or citizenship status. And this extended beyond national borders. The HTA had an ongoing relationship with organized domestic workers in South Africa. After a visit with Madame Leila Tutu of the Domestic Workers Project of South Africa in 1982, the organization wrote in the newsletter, “We found that household workers in their country had much in common with workers here in the United States.”61 So even though household-worker organizers rooted their analyses in the particular racial history of African Americans, they were able to transcend the particularity of their experiences and make, or attempt to make, connections with other workers.
In a draft article for Ms. magazine in 1972 that was later revised and published, Josephine Hulett wrote about the cross-racial experience of household work: “The problems are similar for the 1.5 million people engaged in this field, the Blacks, the Chicanas, the white ethnics.”62 She recounted going to a meeting where a Chicana worker explained that every Monday morning she was given for lunch the “doggy” bag from the employer’s Saturday night out. She told of an Italian American household worker who had never received a paid vacation. Geraldine Miller similarly drew parallels between African American migrants from the South and immigrant workers from abroad. “I feel as though these people are being brought in as a workforce to be exploited, as we were to begin with. It’s the same vicious cycle over and over again regardless of where the person is coming from whether it’s out of the country or from the South and if they don’t know their rights then they’re going to be exploited.”63 By embracing undocumented immigrant workers, household-worker activists expressed an understanding that labor rights were not confined to those with formal citizenship. Their vision was one in which all domestic workers, regardless of legal status, would be equally rewarded for their labor.
Bringing together household workers of different racial backgrounds proved to be a tough task. In early 1974, Washington, DC, Household Technicians reported a “certain degree of latent animosity” between the immigrant household workers and the native-born household workers. Despite hopes that the two groups would “work harmoniously together,” the Jamaican leadership of the group concluded that “maintaining a truly bi-cultural organization may be unrealistic and impossible.”64 Geraldine Miller acknowledged the lack of real integration in the movement: “If we had more groups of various nationalities fighting for the same thing, I think that we’d be much further along, but as it is, it’s been the black woman fighting for the rights of household workers when there are many Irish women, many Polish women . . .”65 Despite the difficulty of bringing African American and immigrant workers together as household technicians, the HTA’s strategy was politically important because it illustrates the commitment to interracial organizing on the part of African American domestic workers. As the organization outlined in a press release in 1978: “It is in low-paying jobs that brown and black women are pitted against each other by unscrupulous employers thereby creating an employer’s market because the workers have no means of uniting for mutual benefit.”66 They believed there was potential for domestic workers of whatever racial, cultural, or linguistic background to find common cause as workers. Similarly, Geraldine Roberts was committed to supporting and working with women of all backgrounds: “We have attorneys standing by that we can contact at any time if we discover any domestic employees whether she’s a member here or not that’s been abused. Whether she’s from an island or from Europe. It doesn’t make any difference. If she’s been abused we immediately become concerned, and begin to do something and take actions immediately on this.”67
In addition to reaching out to domestic workers of all racial, ethnic, and national backgrounds, the NCHE launched campaigns that more broadly addressed low-wage women’s work. In 1975 the organization planned a testimonial, “‘Speak-Out for Economic Justice’: Poor Women in the Economy,” before a congressional panel that included, among others, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York, Senator Alan Cranston of California, and Representative Yvonne Brathwaite Burke of Los Angeles. As NCHE explained: “The purpose of the Speak-Out is to focus public attention on the deplorable situation of women who are left out of the mainstream of the nation’s economic concerns and are confined to the backwaters of the country’s economic and social life.” The event brought together “women workers who have been particularly hard hit by the economic recession coupled with inflation.”68 Domestic workers, sugarcane cutters, farm workers, hotel workers, office workers, cafeteria workers, and hospital workers testified. Phoenix resident Antonia Diaz, for example, spoke of waitresses earning only a dollar an hour, and female farm workers who “during the rainy season . . . cannot work and have no compensation at all.” Gil Foon Hong, a fifty-seven-year-old San Francisco household worker and widowed mother of six from Hong Kong, spoke about her low pay and lack of benefits. In 1974, she joined the Ding Ho Housekeeping Training program. Speaking through a translator, she stated, “If my employer decides to take three months in the summer for a vacation, I don’t get paid. I’m out of a job for three months. . . . I am a woman. . . . I don’t know English, I’m too old to learn a new skill.”69 Edith Sloan, in her keynote address, lamented the declining status of these workers in a tight labor market and the ways in which their concerns were neglected: “Those in the heady world of economics tell us that it’s what’s on the bottom line that counts. They are wrong, we are the bottom line and, clearly we don’t count.”70 Two years later, in 1977, NCHE made the theme of its fifth national conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, a “Practical Workers’ Congress,” which included household technicians, hotel and restaurant employees, porters, school aides, health aides, migrant workers, and janitors. The conference was deemed a “national salute to the practical workers of America, who are the backbone of the American economy.”71
Household workers’ embrace of other low-wage women workers was a strategic move that enabled domestic workers to build coalitions, but it also represented a critical perspective about “women’s issues” at a moment when feminism was gaining worldwide currency. In 1975 the United Nations declared the first International Women’s Year and dubbed 1976–85 the United Nations Decade for Women. Edith Barksdale Sloan and Josephine Hulett attended, and Sloan presented on a plenary on Women and Trade Unions at the 1975 international gathering in Mexico City. Two years later twenty thousand women gathered in Houston to develop a US National Plan of Action around the UN Declarations. NCHE participated in that convening and endorsed the plan, but had some criticisms. “NCHE firmly supports the 26 planks of the National Plan of Action for the International Decade for Women . . . but also believes the National Plan does not effectively represent the interests of the nation’s low income women.” In 1978 the organization issued its own “Low Income Woman’s International Woman’s Year Action Plan” endorsed by the NCHE national membership. It agreed on the need “to end discrimination based on sex” but also wanted to “restate, expand upon, and supplement the recommendations” and consider the “special impact upon low income women . . . [who] bear the triple jeopardies of sex, poverty, and ethnicity.” NCHE suggested that including the problems of disability, rural residence, age, child care, and health would deepen the analysis of “women’s issues.”72
Domestic workers’ alliance with other low-wage workers opened up a dialogue between domestic workers and other workers who were also outside the mainstream of labor organizing and had been denied basic labor protections. By building an alliance among marginalized workers, the NCHE highlighted the bigger gulf between less privileged and more privileged workers, between those who were unionized and those who were not. It also spoke to the growing importance of low-wage women service workers in a deindustrializing economy. The DC Household Technicians changed its name to the DC Professional Service Workers Association, with the motto: “Working to better the lives of all unorganized workers in service occupations.”73 Drawing attention to the way in which low-wage women workers had difficulty making ends meet for themselves and their families, it overturned assumptions that women workers were “secondary earners” who didn’t play a substantial role in supporting the family. This alliance of low-wage workers foreshadowed efforts in the first part of the twenty-first century to form a national coalition, an “Excluded Workers Congress” (later renamed the United Workers Congress)—taxi drivers, domestic workers, restaurant workers, guest workers, farm workers, and formerly incarcerated workers—that built bridges among workers in different occupations outside the formal labor movement.
The institutional legacy of the NCHE and the HTA was relatively short lived. The HTA never achieved the independence it hoped for, and over time its goals and leadership merged with the NCHE. In 1975 the NCHE became a membership organization for household workers and constituted a new board made up of household workers. This change was an acknowledgment of the ineffectiveness of HTA to operate independently but also reflected the new orientation of the NCHE as an organization run and represented by workers.74 But even the NCHE was unable to sustain itself, encountering difficulties with fund-raising and administration. In 1976, Edith Sloan left the organization and Josephine Hulett was let go as field officer because of financial constraints. That year, the Ford Foundation, the primary financial backer of the NCHE, insisted that its grant be handled through a third party because of the organization’s inability to raise funds from other sources. The NCHE board voted to affiliate with the National Urban League, a move of desperation considered “the only way to save the organization.”75 The membership of NCHE stood at ten thousand in 1980—still substantial, but well below its peak a few years earlier.
By the time the formal movement of household workers began to wane, the occupation had shifted dramatically since the early twentieth century, when “Mammy” reigned as the most recognizable domestic worker. Annie Love, household worker and head of the Miami Household Technicians, testified about this change: “Back not so long ago we worked just like slaves. They always made us use a separate plate and fork to eat from and a separate glass to drink out of. It was degrading. Now I tell our women they have a profession to be proud of. We provide an important, necessary service—no different from a secretary. We expect to be treated no different than any employer would treat any employee.”76 It is hard to quantify exactly how much domestic-worker organizing can be credited for this transformation. Undoubtedly, broader economic and political trends, from consumer innovations to changing household structure, account for some of the changes in the status of household workers. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1970s a very different sensibility about African American household workers had entered the public consciousness.
Perhaps this was most evident with the hugely popular television sitcom The Jeffersons, which originally aired in 1975. The show centered on an affluent African American couple and their outspoken and wisecracking African American household worker, Florence. In one episode Florence decides to form a union, “The United Sisterhood of Household Technicians,” advocating for health insurance, higher wages, paid sick days, and pension plans for the racially diverse group of women working in the building. The Jeffersons are good employers, and when Florence seeks to have a meeting at their apartment, Louise Jefferson, a former maid herself, is fully supportive. Her husband, George, initially reluctant, is won over when a white employer insults Louise as she explains the importance of the union. So, both the racial politics of domestic work and household workers’ need for labor protection and rights take center stage in this episode, in many ways reflecting the orientation of the HTA. Marla Gibbs, the actress who played Florence on The Jeffersons, was an ally of household workers. She attended the 1978 NCHE annual conference in Washington, DC, and was honored at a special Saturday-evening banquet.77 And whereas Alice Childress was a member of the black left writing for a largely black audience in the 1950s, The Jeffersons was a mainstream show on network television, enjoyed by people of all racial backgrounds. Perhaps, more than anything else, the episode about household workers forming a union illustrates how popular perceptions of black household workers had shifted so dramatically in a period when race relations were being redefined.
In addition to contributing to new attitudes about household workers, the significance of the movement in the 1970s was its distinctive model of organizing. Poor African American women who overcame obstacles of inadequate education and limited opportunity were committed to organizing poor women of all racial backgrounds for dignity and justice. Moreover, they had a sense that their struggle was not about them as individuals, but about a larger movement for change. Geraldine Roberts explained years later her views of leadership: “An individual should not be the life of an organization or be the life of the people . . . if it was just Geraldine Roberts then the cease of my activities would mean the organization would be over.”78 Similarly, Carolyn Reed discussed stepping back from her role as leader in the movement in order to give someone else a chance: “I never want things to be centered around an individual, but I see some people who won’t let go—the Roy Wilkins complex.”79
The domestic-worker-rights movement holds other lessons for labor organizers. Mainstream approaches to union organizing established in the early twentieth century were premised on a worker’s long-term association with a single employer, often in the manufacturing sector. The decline in manufacturing—a process that began in the 1950s but accelerated in the 1970s—the rise of the service sector, increasing women’s employment, and a greater reliance on immigrant labor transformed employment. And the mainstream labor movement was not well equipped to address the needs of this new workforce. As powerful as the mid-twentieth-century labor-organizing models were, they were less effective at mobilizing a workforce of women service workers in nontraditional settings.
The domestic workers’ rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s prefigured a model of labor organizing that would go on to become one of the most promising strategies of the labor movement. African American domestic workers’ approach to organizing—their use of public spaces as recruiting venues, one-on-one negotiation, legislation that would protect all workers, not only those who were organized, a focus on women of color, the inclusion of workers of diverse nationalities and legal statuses, and push for professionalization—spoke to the specific realities of their occupation. Household labor, where work was always uncertain and labor protections minimal, foretold the shifting realities of a new economy that was not yet full blown. As other forms of employment emulated the character of domestic work—with its lack of security, uneven benefits, and largely women-of-color workforce—the models of organizing pioneered by African American women in the 1960s and 1970s became increasingly important. HTA’s victories and the changing political landscape put the domestic workers’ rights movement on the cusp of a new era, one in which they were unable to flourish. But their closing epilogue would become the prologue for a new generation of activists.
Contrary to public declarations about the inevitable demise of domestic work in the 1970s, the occupation began to expand in the 1990s. The new norm of the dual-earner household in conjunction with neoliberal economic restructuring created a “crisis of social reproduction” that resulted in fewer institutional supports for care work and household responsibilities. Declining public support for single mothers, fewer preschool and after-school programs, cuts in health programs, and limited elder-care programs, made day-to-day living more taxing. And many families relied on hiring someone to assist with household chores and caring for those needing assistance. These broad economic trends—women’s employment outside the home, declining state support for families, and lower wages—which hit most Americans hard, were mitigated by the employment of low-wage workers who could help maintain a semblance of domestic social order. With their help, the basic tenets of the nuclear family could remain intact.
Neoliberal restructuring also led to economic impoverishment in Third World countries. Markets were flooded with cheap foreign products, which undermined local industry. International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies demanded cutbacks in state services. And large-scale World Bank development projects resulted in massive displacement of poor and rural populations. Immigrants came to the US from a wide range of places including the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, and Central America. The abundance of low-wage immigrant labor inhibited state-based or even market-based solutions to the problems of who would clean the house and take care of the kids, resulting in what Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo has called the “new world domestic order.”80
These new immigrant domestic workers, like the earlier generation of workers, didn’t remain silent. They came together outside the formal labor movement, often in community- or neighborhood-based associations or workers centers to challenge the conditions under which they labored.81 Barbara Young is one of these women. Born Barbara Cumberbatch in Barbados in 1947, she, her parents, brother, and two sisters were tenants on a plantation. Upon finishing high school, she took a hotel training course and worked as a hotel maid and in a knitting factory. Then she landed a well-paid position with the state-run Barbados Transport Board as a bus conductor, collecting money from passengers and totaling receipts at the end of the day. She worked for the board for twenty years, but was laid off in 1992 after the IMF mandated, through its structural adjustment policies, that government services be cut back and conductors replaced by fare boxes. Young received unemployment for a while, but found it hard to pay for her house and support her three children.82
The following year, in 1993, Young went to New York hoping to find a job. In her Queens neighborhood, she met a Jamaican woman employed in a hospital who told her about a patient being discharged and needing a caretaker. Young worked forty-five to fifty hours a week for $250 a week. She received no benefits and no paid overtime. Her second job, which she got through an agency, was a live-in nanny position on Long Island for $225. For seven years, she cleaned, cared for two children, did laundry, and cooked. Young was on duty in the evenings when the couple went out, and thus had no guaranteed time to herself. Her salary eventually increased to $370. Her next job, which she started in 2001, was in Tribeca. Young slept in the same room with the baby and got up at night when the child needed soothing, essentially working twenty-four hours a day. She also cleaned and did the child’s laundry. Her pay: $500 a week. Young worked for the family for only ten months before they moved. But it was at this job that she first learned of Domestic Workers United (DWU), a newly formed New York City–based rights group for household workers.
Young was in a park with the child she cared for when another household worker, Erline Brown, approached her. Erline had a stack of newsletters from DWU and told her about a training session being offered at Hunter College. Barbara politely declined, saying that she didn’t need training. Erline persisted, explaining that through the session Barbara could earn a CPR certificate. Barbara was convinced. When she attended her first DWU meeting in Brooklyn, made up largely of women from the Caribbean, she explained: “People were telling the stories about the work that they were doing, not getting vacation, not getting paid for holidays. It was the first time I was hearing stories from workers coming together.” One woman, for example, explained that she didn’t get holidays on Labor Day, the Fourth of July, or Thanksgiving. Her employer told her that these were “American” holidays, and since she is not “American,” she was expected to work. “It was heartbreaking to hear. All of those stories . . . was very, very painful to listen to and to hear people one after the other.” DWU mobilized women of different racial, ethnic, linguistic, and national backgrounds, women from Central America, the Philippines, and South Asia, as well as women from Africa. Despite the diverse origins, all the stories seemed to resonate with one another. As Barbara Young put it: “Some people had different stories but similar stories.”
Although this was Young’s first foray into household-worker organizing, she had a history of labor organizing. Almost all her jobs in Barbados were unionized and she served as a grievance officer in the Barbados Workers Union. In addition, while employed for the bus company, she attended a three-week residential college course on labor history and organizing, which provided her with an intellectual background that would serve her well as she became involved in DWU.
In those early DWU meetings, Young learned about the history of the occupation and made a link between the history of slavery and the exclusions of household workers from labor protections: “The work that domestic workers were doing in the home . . . working for the slave masters and farm laborers were working in the fields. And these were the two categories of workers that were excluded from labor protections in this country.” All leaders of DWU were required to take a leadership course, which covered the history of African Americans, Irish immigrants, and Mexican Americans as household workers.83 The history enabled Young to place her struggle in a broader historical context, understand how different women experienced the occupation, but also recognize the continuities. “This is a different era . . . but people . . . are still working in slave-like conditions.”
Young and other DWU organizers also took note of and were inspired by the history of organizing. The contemporary struggle for domestic-worker rights draws on historical examples to build a movement of household workers. As Young explained: “We looked back on the history of domestic worker organizing. . . . We learned of the success of Dorothy Bolden in Atlanta.” Those earlier instances of organizing “gave me hope that we would eventually succeed. We even look back as far as Rosa Parks. . . . The resistance of Rosa Parks gives us strength. . . . It was a movement behind her that caused her to say, well, this is enough.”84
Young was hired by the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) in March 2011 as a full-time organizer. NDWA formed in 2007 when thirteen local domestic-workers’ rights groups—including DWU—came together to establish a national organization. Young provides support for local chapters and serves as a liaison with the national organization. Today she is one of the leaders, traveling around the world to share the work of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She went to Amsterdam for an international gathering of domestic workers rights groups and to Geneva, Switzerland, to advocate for the 2011 International Labor Organization’s Convention on Domestic Work. The convention established global standards for household labor, such as a written agreement of terms of employment, freedom from discrimination, violence, and harassment, collective bargaining rights, abolition of child labor, and decent working and living conditions. Countries that ratify the convention are obligated to enforce it, although only a handful of countries have thus far ratified.
Like their predecessors, household workers in the twenty-first century adopted distinctive organizing strategies rooted in their particular social location. Local groups very often emerged out of ethnic and community-based organizations. They reached out to other workers in public spaces and advocated legislative protections or “bills of rights” for household workers. They drew public attention to egregious violations of the rights of workers to shame employers and insisted on model contracts and detailed agreements about rights and responsibilities. And they organized employers as well as employees. Storytelling was an important component of their strategies: As Ai-Jen Poo, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, explained in 2010: Organizing “taught us the ways in which workers’ stories can play a crucial role in drawing people into a struggle.”85 Because domestic workers still lack the right to organize and bargain collectively, are often not paid minimum wage, have few benefits, work in precarious occupations with little job security, and in many cases have multiple employers, they have come to signify the prototype of the modern-day worker. Their employment conditions and circumstances resemble what an increasing number of working people—both men and women—are experiencing. And to the extent that that is true, both their example and that of the earlier generation of organizers offer instruction on how workers can begin to tackle and transform this new political climate.86
History has always been important in the struggle for domestic workers’ rights. As the struggle of the 1970s illustrates, the family lore passed down in household workers’ families, the collective memory crafted from African American women’s history, and workers’ shared personal histories facilitated the development of a mass movement. If their personal experiences were the building blocks of the movement, the process of sharing, of storytelling, was the cement that fused those blocks into a larger whole. Stories of the “slave markets,” stories of Rosa Parks, and stories of struggle and empowerment circulated among household workers in the 1970s. By 1980, the NCHE began to more consciously acknowledge the importance of the history of organizing among household workers and embrace the example of working-class black women’s resistance. These household workers seemed acutely aware of the historical significance of their organizing and how it fit into a broader trajectory of activism among domestic workers. In addition, as the academic field of black women’s history emerged, they attempted to shape the larger narrative and carve out a space for a distinctive working-class perspective on African American women. Although not scholars, they claimed and had an investment in scholarly interventions.
The powerful example of Rosa Parks that inspired Georgia Gilmore and Dorothy Bolden continued to resonate with household workers. Anita Shelton, in her executive director’s report in 1976, invoked the model of Rosa Parks: “May I recall for you the name of a pioneer in the movement, Rosa Parks, who one day . . . decided she just was not going to move to the back of the bus anymore. On that day, that one woman by a single act breathed a new life into the civil rights movement. And beyond that, she gave women of whatever color everywhere, a new dimension. Had it not been for Rosa Parks, some of us may still be satisfied being one husband away from poverty.” Shelton analyzed Parks’s struggle through a feminist lens and went on to draw a parallel between Parks’s bravery and a contemporary household worker, who in her mind exhibited similar courage: “Jesse Mae Wooten is a household worker in Raleigh, N.C., who stood up for her rights to a minimum wage when her employer failed to pay her the rate she is entitled to by law. This past summer her employer was found guilty of violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.”87 (Italics in the original.)
In 1979 the NCHE appointed Carolyn Reed as its new executive director—the first time a domestic worker had ever held this position. One of Reed’s first projects in this role was to present a formal history of African American women and household labor. Reed was well positioned to do so, as her organizational work increasingly intersected with the emerging field of women’s history. In November 1979 the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) organized a conference, directed by Bettye Collier-Thomas, entitled “Black Women: An Historical Perspective, The First National Scholarly Research Conference on Black Women.” During her presentation at the conference, Reed made a claim for inclusion of the voices of black working-class women and insisted that documentation needed to include “all women and all of the truth.” In 1979 a reporter observed of Reed: “Her reading about labor and social history combined with her background and experience . . . form [her] into a socialist of the oldest and most utopian of schools.”88 Coinciding with the conference was the opening of the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Museum, which housed the newly established National Archives for Black Women’s History in Washington, DC. It was around this time that Reed donated the papers of the NCHE to the National Archives for Black Women’s History.89
The NCNW conference was part of a growing attention to women’s history and black women’s history specifically as an area of scholarly study. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Angela Davis, Darlene Clark Hine, Sharon Harley, Paula Giddings, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, among others, were writing about black women’s history and shaping it as a discipline. Just one month before the NCNW conference, the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) was formed, and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn served as the first national director for the first four years. The ABWH would become the most important institutional voice for black women’s history.
In 1977 Reed and other household workers participated in a Sarah Lawrence College conference, “The Future of Housework.” Two years later Reed attended a two-week Institute on Women’s History at Sarah Lawrence College. The Sarah Lawrence Institute was an intensive learning experience—a crash course that included lectures, seminars, workshops, and independent study—designed to provide leaders of women’s organizations with a deeper understanding of women’s history. The goal was “to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of feminism.” Household workers were deeply interested in both the theory and practice of feminism. As Geraldine Miller explained: “Having a theory and doing something with it are two different things. . . . It’s the thinking about it, the theory, putting it down on paper, and doing nothing about it means nothing. But having a theory and then trying to see how it will work is different.”90 The forty-five attendees of the institute examined the history of families, sexuality, the domestic sphere, and collective action. At the conference, Reed met Bettye Collier-Thomas, Gerda Lerner, Barbara Omolade, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Amy Swerdlow, all of whom were considered pioneers in the field of women’s history. Participants of this conference, including Carolyn Reed, resolved to launch a National Women’s History Week to be celebrated in March. And after much persistence, the group succeeded when President Jimmy Carter signed a proclamation in 1980 declaring a National Women’s History Week.91
While she was at Sarah Lawrence, Carolyn Reed also met Bonita Johnson, a history graduate student. Johnson was deeply influenced by Gerda Lerner’s pathbreaking 1972 collection of primary source documents about African American women, Black Women in White America, which included an interview with Dorothy Bolden. Lerner had founded and was directing the master’s program in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence, the first of its kind. Lerner’s influence convinced Johnson that the history of household workers was central to the academic study of black women, and she subsequently enrolled in the Sarah Lawrence master’s program in women’s history. Reed and Johnson developed a collaborative relationship, with Reed helping her with her thesis on the history of household workers, but also suggesting ways for Johnson to contribute to the movement.92 Reed was thrilled about “meeting a person like Bonnie Johnson, who’s really into history, and saying to her, ‘Gee, I really want you to do a history project for us, because I feel it’s most important.’ And really having that sistership with her that has developed with working with her, so that I take her to conferences with me and let people hear her ideas about household work.”93 Reed eventually recruited Johnson to launch an NCHE history project called “Our Right to Know.”
“Our Right to Know” consciously integrated black women’s history of labor and resistance into current organizing efforts by both assuring the presence of household workers in black women’s history and thinking of history as a component of organizing. The project was designed in part to address the paucity of historical studies about household labor. As Johnson explained: “Until very recently, historians have ignored household employment as a topic of research. For the most part, women have been left out of history and women working in traditionally female occupations have been totally bypassed.” Examining that history brought value and respect to their work and also exposed the ways in which black working-class women had wielded power and agency as workers. Speaking before an NCHE advisory board meeting, Johnson stated, “I believe that every household worker has a right to know the part she has played in the history of the United States. Household workers have helped to build this nation.”
Johnson opened the October 1980 NCHE national conference at Memphis State University with a lesson about African American women’s history and domestic labor. She encouraged the 125 attendees to share the stories of their mothers and grandmothers and advised them that “history can be used as an organizing tool.”94 Carolyn Reed underscored this point about family and community when she closed the conference. They were meeting, she noted, “not in some fancy Hyatt-Regency but where your roots are—in a church in the heart of Memphis’ black community.”95 The “Our Right to Know” project centered the experiences of African American household workers and hoped to “gather and record their own history,” including documents and photographs and “family stories passed down from generation to generation.” As Johnson had written in the organization’s newsletter just a couple of months earlier about the history project: “The most important part of the project are household workers themselves. Each and every technician has a lifetime of experiences that individually and collectively make up a rich history that deserves documentation. These life histories will draw a picture of household employment today. They will also connect us with our past and guide us in the future!”96