I have often been asked why I chose to write about domestic workers. Certainly, part of the reason can be traced to my own family history. My great-grandmother worked as a domestic in South Africa for most of her life. My mother and grandmother both worked briefly as household laborers when they were young. My great-great-grandparents traveled as indentured servants from India to South Africa around the end of the nineteenth century. There was no written family history—not one of my grandparents was literate. So much of what I know about my history was passed down orally.
It never occurred to me to ask my grandmother about her early work experience when she was alive. My father told me how, on her way to work in the home of a white South African family, she regularly passed by the home of the man who would become my grandfather. That commute was how they first met, leading to their eventual marriage. My mother told me stories about her own experience of growing up in apartheid South Africa. She attended school only through the eighth grade and then, as the oldest daughter, dropped out to care for her siblings and supplement the family income. Because her father’s wages from a job at a rubber factory were not enough to sustain the family, she washed clothes for a white family to help pay the school fees of her brothers. The patriarchal politics that privileged boys’ over girls’ education, as well as the racialized and gendered politics of apartheid that created this work opportunity, had long-term consequences for my mother. Not completing school was one of her biggest regrets. After coming to the United States and working in a factory for ten years to put my father through school, she finally upgraded to a part-time secretarial job, which enabled her to take classes at the local high school.
Equally illuminating for me was the gendered division of labor that persisted throughout my childhood, which allocated the bulk of household chores to my mother, my sister, and me (a cycle I have broken in my own family, as my children and husband will attest). But perhaps more important was seeing how my mother came to value and respect all forms of labor through the various working-class jobs she held. Similarly, my aunt, who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and has since worked as a “housecleaner,” as she calls herself, has always spoken positively of her work. So the dignity, the humanity, and the intelligence of the women I researched resonated with me because it mirrored the women in my family who labored in similar ways.
In addition to my personal connections, I have intellectual reasons for writing about household labor. This book offers an incredibly powerful, little-known story about working-class African American women told through their own words. The history of household laborers is usually told from the perspective of employers or middle-class reformers. A key point in this book is self-representation, and the domestic-worker activists profiled here offer a trove of information, through firsthand accounts of their perceptions of domestic work and their aspirations for rights. But these stories are not unmediated. The archival material consists of oral histories, interviews, newspaper clippings, public appearances, organizational papers, and legislative documents. Domestic workers didn’t write extensively or collect an abundance of material that historians might consider important. But the stories that the movement generated offer us a rare window into the lives and sentiments of these workers.
In writing about domestic-worker organizing, I have limited my focus to African American women because it was African American women who were at the forefront of these campaigns. In addition, the stories of black domestic workers gained currency in the early 1970s in part because the struggle for black freedom dominated the political landscape. But my emphasis on African American women is also a reflection of the sources that have been preserved in the public domain, the stories that were retold by journalists, and the ones that resonated in popular culture. The overwhelming quantity of material on African American women may stem from the fact that, given the historical moment, the occupation was closely associated with the struggle for racial equality and presented one path to achieving racial justice.
Although rich sources are available, there are also gaps and unanswered questions. Because of the nature of historical documentation, our knowledge of these women’s lives remains incomplete. There is a profound silence around the issue of sexual harassment, abuse, and rape, for example. We know from other research that sexual abuse was a widespread problem in the occupation of domestic service, where employees confined to their employers’ domestic spaces were often vulnerable. Yet I have found little evidence of workers who advocated reform of the occupation raising the issue of sexual violence. Perhaps that’s because in telling their stories, they refused to be seen or represent themselves as victims. The discussions of victimhood as it related to domestic work often lay, for them, in the past—in the lives of their mothers and grandmothers, on the street corners of New York in the 1930s. They were not victims seeking compensation. They were a new generation of workers deserving of and demanding their rights.
A major theme of this book is storytelling as a political strategy and form of activism. I focus on the stories that domestic workers told about their own history or their remembered history to help construct and make sense of their present. Storytelling became a means of building community, motivating participation, and shaping political perspectives; and storytelling is, of course, intimately tied to history, since it is those stories we remember or choose to remember that we tell. Storytelling became a way to construct the past and convey ideas. I found activists’ use of storytelling to be strategic. The significance of these narratives has less to do with objectivity and truth than with their explanatory power—their ability to express women’s sense of themselves and their current predicaments. So their stories are not simply interesting to read, but reflective of a particular moment. For the women I write about, what they remembered became a form of action and a way to disrupt conventional wisdom and construct new identities.
My academic training has forced me to think critically about history and the way history is told. All historians are storytellers. We decide to tell some stories and not others—albeit according to a set of criteria different from that of political actors. The stories I tell as a historian are influenced in part by gaps in the literature—narratives that marginalize and mute the voices of working-class women, archival material that has been accessed by only a handful of scholars, and circumscribed ideological categories that shape how we understand historical periods.
Since entering the academy, I have been drawn to a social justice approach to writing and teaching, meaning that I gravitate to topics that have relevance to ordinary people. I try to offer perspectives that are less likely to be a part of the academic or popular discourse—perspectives that I believe will enrich, rather than supplant, how issues are discussed. This also means that I stay connected to contemporary activists, both because I’m committed to social transformation and because I learn from their advocacy and hope to offer my skills and my support in return. Social justice education, I believe, needs a permanent space in the academy. It offers one avenue for how those inside the academy can speak to those outside the academy. At the same time, it creates an opportunity for broader engagement with ideas emerging from scholarly research. Academic ideas are not isolated from the outside world, and the academic sphere does not have a monopoly on intellectualism. My participation in grassroots organizing has also convinced me that academic scholarship matters.
I have been an ally of the contemporary struggle for domestic workers’ rights since I first learned about the vibrant movement of household workers and their frequent demonstrations on the streets of New York about ten years ago. As a scholar-activist, I simultaneously buried myself in archival material and made an effort to attend domestic-worker meetings, and was struck by the use of storytelling in both venues. Contemporary participants reminded me very much of the women who populate this book—mature women with life experience and a sharp political analysis. I aided the organizations in whatever way I could, and however I was asked.
Women like Erline Brown, Narbada Chhetri, Joyce Gil-Campbell, Allison Julien, Christine Lewis, Linda Oalican, Barbara Young, and many others helped me realize that what we were told about the decline of the labor movement was simply wrong, and that images of immigrant workers conveyed by the popular press were based on a partial truth. These women were deeply committed to an expansive vision of justice, had a clear sense of how to organize, and were critical of neoliberal economic transformations. I was, and continue to be, inspired. I watched as Domestic Workers United grew from a small, struggling organization to one that was hundreds strong and lobbied successfully for both a New York City law governing employment agencies and a state bill of rights. It is now part of both a national and an international federation of domestic workers’ rights groups.
The world, at times, seems full of despair. Yet in my reading of history and through the resurrection of voices rarely heard I don’t find despair but rather enormous hope, even when people face seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
My family history, study of history, and commitment to social change have fostered a belief that ordinary people can and must speak out and that in order to develop a vision about how to frame justice and how to engage in social change, we can and must listen.