1. Patrice O’Shaughnessy, “Long Island Case Turns Spotlight on Hundreds Trapped as Slaves,” New York Daily News, June 28, 2008; Corey Kilgannon, “Long Island Couple Convicted of Enslaving Two Domestic Workers for Years,” New York Times, December 18, 2007; Paul Vitello, “From Stand In Long Island Slavery Case, A Snapshot of a Hidden US Problem,” New York Times, December 3, 2007.
2. For more on contemporary domestic workers, see, for example, Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Tamara Mose Brown, Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
1. Alice Childress, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 2.
2. Mary Helen Washington, “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones: Black Women Write the Popular Front,” in Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism, and Twentieth-Century Literature, ed. Bill V. Mullen and James Edward Smethurst (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
3. For more on Childress, see Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 111–33; Kathlene McDonald, Feminism, the Left, and Postwar Literary Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), chapter 3; Cheryl Higadisha, Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
4. Letter to Trudier Harris, January 7, 1980, cited in Mary Condé, “Some African American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,” Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 212.
5. See, for example, Bonnie Thornton Dill et al., “For the Good of Family and Race: Gender, Work, and Domestic Roles in the Black Community, 1880–1930,” Signs 15, no. 2 (Winter 1990): 336–49.
6. Faye Duddan, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Andrew Urban, “Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy,’ and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1890,” Gender and History 21, no. 2 (August 2009): 263–86.
7. Mary Romero, Maid in the USA (New York: Routledge, 1992), 27.
8. Duddan, Serving Women; Katzman, Seven Days a Week. According to Vicki Ruiz, domestic labor was the most common form of employment for Mexican and Mexican American women in the first half of the twentieth century, especially during the open-border period prior to the 1930s. See Vicki L. Ruiz, “By the Day or Week: Mexicana Domestic Workers in El Paso,” in To Toil the Livelong Day: America’s Women at Work, 1780–1980, ed. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 269–83, and Women on the US-Mexico Border: A Response to Change, ed. Vicki Ruiz and Susan Tiana (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987). See also Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Romero, Maid in the USA; Kyle E. Ciani, “Hidden Laborers: Female Day Workers in Detroit, 1870–1920,” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era 4, no. 1 (2005): 23–51; Daniel T. Hobby, “We Have Got Results: A Document in the Organization of Domestics in the Progressive Era,” Labor History 17, no. 1 (1976): 103–8.
9. Lucy Maynard Salmon, Domestic Service (orig., c. 1897; New York: Arno Press, 1972); Lara Vapnek, Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Linda Martin and Kerry Segrave, The Servant Problem: Domestic Workers in North America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1985).
10. Susan B. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Ba1061–74, “Major Occupational Groups—Females: 1860–1990,” table Ba1103–16, “Major Occupational Groups—White Females: 1860-1990,” and table Ba1117–30, “Major Occupational Groups—Nonwhite Females: 1860–1990.”
11. Vanessa May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
12. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States, tables Ba1061–74, Ba1103–16, and Ba1117–30. For more on demographics of the occupation, see Mignon Duffy, Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), chapter 2.
13. Danielle Phillips argues that “constructions of blackness also played a critical role in demarcating the domestic workplace as a site where the boundaries of race and citizenship were imagined and contested daily.” See Danielle Taylor Phillips, “Moving with the Women: Tracing Racialization, Migration and Domestic Workers in the Archive,” Signs 38, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 379–404. See also Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Mahnaz Kousha, “African American Private Household Workers, White Employers and Their Children,” International Journal of Sociology and Family 25, no. 2 (1995): 67–89.
14. K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993).
15. Cheryl Thurber, “The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology,” in Southern Women: Histories and Identities, ed. Virginia Bernard (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 87–108; Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999); Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in 20th Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). See also Elizabeth Ross Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States: Introduction,” Journal of Negro History 8, no. 4 (1923): 384–442.
16. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 106. Wallace-Sanders uses the phrase “mammy prism” to illustrate how the mammy figure reflected the broader politics of race.
17. Joan Marie Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone’: African American Women’s Clubs, Frederick Douglass, and the Black Mammy Monument,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 1 (2005): 62–86.
18. Mary Church Terrell, Washington (DC) Evening Star, February 10, 1923. Quoted in Johnson, “‘Ye Gave Them a Stone,’” 62.
19. Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Slave Market,” Crisis 42 (November 1935): 330–31.
20. Alana Erickson Coble, Cleaning Up: The Transformation of Domestic Service in Twentieth-Century New York City (New York: Routledge, 2006).
21. See Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
22. Louise Thompson Patterson, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” Woman Today, April 1936.
23. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!,” Political Affairs, June 1949, reprint, National Women’s Commission, CPUSA.
24. Washington, “Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, and Claudia Jones,” 195.
25. Other domestic-worker unions emerged during the 1930s as well. In 1942, United Domestic Workers formed in Baltimore as CIO Local 1283 and managed to increase the wages and reduce working hours for its members. The union also attempted to include sick leave and vacation pay as part of its member benefits. By the end of the war, however, it had stopped functioning. Domestics in El Paso, Texas, like black women in New York City, formed a domestic workers association to demand higher wages. See Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, “Survival Strategies Among African-American Women Workers: A Continuing Process,” in Women, Work, and Protest: A Century of US Women’s Labor History, ed. Ruth Milkman (London: Routledge, 2013), 139–55; Vicki Ruiz, “By the Day or By the Week: Mexican Domestic Workers in El Paso,” in Women on the US-Mexico Border: A Response to Change, ed. Vicki Ruiz and Susan Tiana (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1987).
26. May, Unprotected Labor, 158.
27. Esther Victoria Cooper, “The Negro Woman Domestic Worker in Relation to Trade Unionism” (MA thesis, Fisk University, 1940), 54.
28. May, Unprotected Labor. See also Stephen H. Norwood, “Organizing the Neglected Worker: The Women’s Trade Union League in New York and Boston, 1930–1950,” Labor History 50, no. 2 (2009): 163–85.
29. Mary Helen Washington coined the term “black left feminism.”
30. Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom, 192.
31. Of the 10,005 black women workers in Montgomery in 1955, 5,087 worked as domestics in the homes of white families. All but 47 were live-out workers. Robert Heinrich, “Montgomery: The Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacies” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2008), 28. See also Susan Tucker, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).
32. Mary Fair Burks, “Trailblazers: Women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” in Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965, ed. Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 71–83; David Garrow, ed., The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), discusses women’s role as bridge leaders, linking the formal leaders and the community. On women’s leadership in the civil rights movement, including the participation of working-class women, see Bernice McNair Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class,” Gender and Society 7, no. 2 (June 1993): 162–82.
33. Mrs. Allean Wright, age forty-five to fifty, cook, interview by Willie M. Lee, January 24, 1956, box 4, folder 3, Preston and Bonita Valien Papers, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University (hereafter ARC).
34. Mrs. Beatrice Charles, maid, age forty-five, interview by Willie M. Lee, January 20, 1956, box 4, folder 3, ARC.
35. “Statement in Response to Question As to Why the People in Montgomery, Alabama Walk?,” March 15, 1956, interview by J. Harold Jones, box 4, folder 2, ARC.
36. Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer, and Sarah Flynn, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1991), 25–26.
37. Irene Stovall, cook and maid, age thirty-five to forty, interview by Willie M. Lee, February 1, 1956, box 4, folder 3, ARC.
38. A domestic of about forty years old working in a white retail area, interview by Willie M. Lee, January 1, 1956, box 4, folder 3, ARC.
39. Beatrice Charles interview.
40. Dealy Cooksey, domestic, about age forty, interview by Willie M. Lee, January 24, 1956, box 4, folder 3, ARC. For the sake of clarity, I have corrected misspellings in the transcription that reflect bias or seem to emphasize pronunciation unnecessarily.
41. See Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013), and Danielle McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Vintage, 2011).
42. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, 75.
43. McGuire referred to the boycott as a “women’s movement for dignity” (ibid., 108).
44. Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, “‘Dress modestly, neatly . . . as if you were going to church’: Respectability, Class and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” in Gender in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Peter J. Ling and Sharon Monteith (New York: Garland, 1999), 69–100.
45. Robin D. G. Kelley makes an argument about the militancy of black working-class bus riders. See Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History (June 1993): 75–112.
46. Willie Mae Wallace, store maid, age thirty to thirty-five, interview by Willie M. Lee, January 27, 1956, box 4, folder 3, ARC. Again for the sake of clarity, I have corrected misspellings in the transcription that reflect bias or seem to emphasize pronunciation unnecessarily.
47. Mrs. H. N. Blackwell, interview by Anna Holden, February 2, 1956, box 3, folder 13, ARC.
48. Mrs. Lydia S. Prim, interview by Anna Holden, January 27, 1956, box 3, folder 13, ARC.
49. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 136.
50. Willie Mae Wallace interview.
51. Irene Stovall interview.
52. Virginia Foster Durr, Outside the Magic Circle: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985). For more on the relationship between white employers and black domestics in the South, see Katherine Von Wormer, David W. Jackson III, and Charletta Sudduth, The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); and Tucker, Telling Memories.
53. Gilmore also worked as a tie changer for the railroad.
54. Interview with Georgia Gilmore, Blackside Films and Media, February 17, 1986, for Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (1954–1965), Washington University Libraries, Film and Media Archive, Henry Hampton Collection.
55. Georgia Gilmore, Montgomery bus boycott trial transcript, March 19, 1956, Alabama Department of Archives and History, Montgomery, 351–52.
56. Ibid., 353.
57. Ibid., 350–51.
58. Nikki Silva and Davia Lee Nelson, Hidden Kitchens: Stories, Recipes, and More From NPR’s The Kitchen Sisters (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2005), 199. Georgia Gilmore was thirty-five at the time.
59. Hampton, Fayer, and Flynn, Voices of Freedom.
60. Johnnie Carr, quoted in Hidden Kitchens, 205.
61. Vernon Jarrett, “Raised Funds for Blacks: ‘Club From Nowhere’ Paid Way of Boycott,” Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1975.
62. Ibid.
63. Gilmore interview, Blackside Films.
64. Ibid.
65. Jarrett, “Raised Funds for Blacks.”
66. Silva and Nelson, Hidden Kitchens, 199.
67. “The Club from Nowhere: Cooking for Civil Rights,” National Public Radio Special Series, Hidden Kitchens: The Kitchen Sisters, March 4, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4509998.
68. When her son Mark was beaten up by police for walking through a whites-only park on his way to the hospital where he worked, Gilmore, aided by movement leaders, sued the city (Gilmore v. City of Montgomery) and won.
69. Hidden Kitchens, 202.
70. Robert Heinrich, “Montgomery: The Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacies” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2008), 77.
71. Thomas Jordan, quoted in Hidden Kitchens, 206.
72. Jarrett, “Raised Funds for Blacks.”
73. See Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (October–December 1986): S14–S32.
74. Barnett, “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders,” 212. See also Vernon Jarrett, “‘Club from Nowhere’ Paid Way of Boycott,” Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1975.
75. Hazel Carby, “White Women Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood,” in The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1982).
76. Childress, Like One of the Family, 140–41.
1. Dorothy Bolden, interview by Chris Lutz, August 31, 1995, Transcript L1995–12, p. 22, Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. The historical literature on domestic service work is extensive. See, for example, Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen, “Domestic Workers Organize!,” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society (December 2008): 413–37; David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Mary Romero, Maid in the USA (New York: Routledge, 1992); Donna Van Raaphorst, Union Maids Not Wanted: Organizing Domestic Workers, 1870–1940 (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 1988); Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Cecilia Rio, “‘On the Move’: African American Women’s Paid Domestic Labor and the Class Transition to Independent Commodity Production,” Rethinking Marxism 17, no. 4 (October 2005): 489–510; Bonnie Thornton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Garland, 1993); Peggie R. Smith, “Regulating Paid Household Work: Class, Gender, Race, and Agendas of Reform,” American University Law Review (1999): 851–918; Soraya Moore Coley, “And Still I Rise: An Exploratory Study of Contemporary Black Private Household Workers” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1981). For sources on the National Domestic Workers Union of America (NDWUA), see Premilla Nadasen, “Power, Intimacy, and Contestation: Dorothy Bolden and Domestic Worker Organizing in Atlanta in the 1960s,” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement; Elizabeth Beck, “The National Domestic Workers Union and the War on Poverty,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 28, no. 4 (December 2001): 195–211; Lars Christiansen, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union: The National Domestic Workers Union of America” (PhD diss., College of Social Sciences, Florida State University, 1999).
5. The domestic workers’ rights movement fits into the scholarly trajectory of black working-class activism. Recent scholarship on the black freedom movement has examined how campaigns for economic justice were part and parcel of the civil rights movement. Civil rights campaigns, such as Operation Breadbasket in Chicago and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, included an economic component. In addition, black workers participated in a number of unionization efforts in the public sector and in the tobacco and textile industries, where they fought for inclusion and equal treatment.
6. Dorothy Bolden resumé, box 1624, folder 31, National Domestic Workers Union Records (hereafter NDWU Records), Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University, Atlanta.
7. In 1930, 90 percent of employed black women in Atlanta were domestic workers. Julia Kirk Blackwelder, “Quiet Suffering: Atlanta Women in the 1930s,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 61, no. 2 (Summer 1977): 116.
8. Bolden, interview by Lutz, 4.
9. Bolden attended David T. Howard Junior High School. Dorothy Cowser Yancy, “Dorothy Bolden, Organizer of Domestic Workers: She Was Born Poor but She Would Not Bow Down,” Sage 3, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 53–55; Dorothy Bolden, interview by Gerda Lerner, September 1978, Transcript, box 6, folder 218, Papers of Gerda Lerner, 1924–2006, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
10. Carole C. Marks, “The Bone and Sinew of the Race: Black Women, Domestic Service and Labor Migration,” in Families on the Move: Immigration, Migration, and Mobility, ed. Barbara H. Settles, Daniel E. Hanks, and Marvin B. Sussman (New York: Haworth Press, 1993).
11. Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage, 2010); Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Joe Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1992). For a discussion of African American domestics and migration, see Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration (New York: Kodansha, 1996).
12. Bolden, interview by Lutz, 11.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Bolden resumé, NDWU Records.
15. Dorothy Bolden, “Organizing Domestic Workers in Atlanta, Georgia,” in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage, 1972), 234.
16. Bolden, interview by Lerner.
17. Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003).
18. Tomika Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
19. Winston A. Grady-Willis, Challenging US Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).
20. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom.
21. Kathryn L. Nasstrom, “Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women’s Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” Gender and History 11, no. 1 (April 1999): 124; Julia Kirk Blackwelder, “Quiet Suffering: Atlanta Women in the 1930s,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 61, no. 2 (1977); Karen Jane Ferguson, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
22. Bolden, quoted in Christiansen, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union,” 159.
23. Louise Bradley, quoted in Christiansen, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union,” 149.
24. Bolden, interview by Lutz, 28.
25. NDWUA Minutes, November 7, 1968, box 1633, folder 173, NDWU Records; Christiansen, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union,” 165.
26. Ransby, Ella Baker; Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); Carson, In Struggle.
27. For more on SNCC’s Atlanta Project, see Grady-Willis, Challenging US Apartheid, chapter 4.
28. Bolden, interview by Lutz, 28.
29. Christiansen, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union,” 160–61.
30. Dorothy Bolden, “National Domestic Workers, Inc.,” in Nobody Speaks for Me: Self Portraits of American Working-Class Women, ed. Nancy Seifer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 156–57.
31. Bolden, interview by Lutz, 28.
32. “Board Considers New Site for Vine City High School,” Atlanta Daily World, June 11, 1964; Dorothy Bolden biography, box 1624, folder 31, NDWU Records.
33. George M. Coleman, “Domestic Work Now a Virtue Because of Dorothy Bolden,” Atlanta Daily World, March 23, 1975.
34. Bolden resumé, box 1624, folder 31, NDWU Records.
35. Bolden, “National Domestic Workers, Inc.,” 146.
36. Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage, 1972), 235.
37. Bolden, interview by Lutz, 17.
38. Ibid., 31.
39. Yancy, “Dorothy Bolden.”
40. Julian Bond, quoted in Christiansen, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union,” 163–64.
41. “In Town Extra,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 6, 1983.
42. Bolden, interview by Lerner, 2.
43. NDWUA Minutes, September 19, 1968, box 1633, folder 173, NDWU Records.
44. NDWUA Minutes, September 26, 1968, and October 3, 1968, box 1633, folder 173, NDWU Records.
45. NDWUA brochure, box 1, Dorothy Lee Bolden Thompson Collection, Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, Atlanta, GA.
46. NDWUA Minutes, October 3, 1968, box 1633, folder 173, NDWU Records.
47. Bolden, interview by Lutz, 30.
48. Ibid., 15.
49. Ibid., 12.
50. Ibid., 14.
51. Ibid., 29.
52. Geraldine Roberts, interview by Donna Van Raaphorst, March 30–June 29, 1977, Cleveland, Program on Women and Work, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Michigan, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, 37.
53. Ibid., 37.
54. Ibid., 41–42.
55. Ibid., 42.
56. US Commission on Civil Rights, A Time to Listen, A Time to Act: Voices from the Ghettos of the Nation’s Cities (Washington, DC: US Commission on Civil Rights, November 1967).
57. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 77.
58. Ibid., 42–43.
59. Ibid., 56.
60. Ibid., 46.
61. Ibid., 45–46.
62. Geraldine Roberts, interview with Malaika Lumumba, August 1, 1970, Ralph J. Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection (MSRC), Howard University accession no. 593, p. 10.
63. For more on bridge leaders such as Turner, see Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long? African American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
64. Rhonda Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Jeanne F. Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, ed., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Donna Murch, Living for the City: Migration, Education, and the Rise of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2010).
65. Harry Margulis and Todd Michney, “Constrained Communities: Black Cleveland’s Experience with World War II Public Housing,” in Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century, ed. Andrew Wiese (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Todd M. Michney, “Race, Violence, and Urban Territoriality: Cleveland’s Little Italy and the 1966 Hough Uprising,” Journal of Urban History 32, no. 3 (March 2006): 404–28.
66. Lewis Robinson, The Making of a Man: An Autobiography (Cleveland: Green and Sons, 1970).
67. Ruth Turner, interview by Robert Penn Warren, May 7, 1964, Transcript and Digital Audio File, Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries, http://nyx.uky.edu/oh/render.php?cachefile=03OH32RPWCR21_Turner.xml; Leonard Nathaniel Moore, “The School Desegregation Crisis in Cleveland, Ohio, 1963–1964: The Catalyst for Black Political Power in a Northern City,” Journal of Urban History 28, no. 2 (January 2002): 135–57.
68. “The Scars of Hough,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 20, 1966.
69. Turner, interview by Warren; Moore, “The School Desegregation Crisis in Cleveland, Ohio.”
70. Cleveland was also the city where, in 1961, the Revolutionary Action Movement was founded by Herman Ferguson, Max Stanford, and others. Stanford attended Cleveland CORE meetings. Robert Williams’s Negroes with Guns was published in 1962 and may also have helped the shift to self-defense. There were also rent strikes in Cleveland in January–February 1964.
71. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 44. Henry Hampton, Steve Fayer, and Sarah Flynn, Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1991), chapter 22.
72. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 60.
73. Ibid., 82.
74. Ibid., 50.
75. Ibid., 94.
76. Ibid., 44–45.
77. Ibid., 50.
78. Ibid., 46.
79. Faith Corrigan, “Domestic Workers Organize Group to Help Themselves,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 16, 1965.
80. Roberts, interview by Lumumba, 11.
81. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 98.
82. Corrigan, “Domestic Workers Organize Group.”
83. “Maids Ask Clean Sweep of Job Benefits,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 22, 1967.
84. “Clothing Drive Is Under Way,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 4, 1966. CORE and the NAACP offices were drop-off points.
85. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 99.
86. Roberts, interview by Lumumba, 7.
87. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 49.
88. Ibid., 52.
89. Ibid., 51.
90. Ibid., 71.
91. Ibid., 52.
92. Ibid., 47.
93. Ibid., 62–63. See also “10 NAACP Members Return Happy from Mississippi March,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 28, 1966.
94. Roberts, interview by Lumumba, 8.
95. Corrigan, “Domestic Workers Organize Group.”
96. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 94.
97. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Robin Kelley has applied this concept to African American struggle: Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994). See also Mahnaz Kousha, “African American Private Household Workers and ‘Control’ of the Labor Process in Domestic Service,” Sociological Focus 27, no. 3 (August 1994): 211–28.
98. For more on connections between the civil rights movement and the domestic-worker rights movement, see Premilla Nadasen, “Power, Intimacy, and Contestation: Dorothy Bolden and Domestic Worker Organizing in Atlanta in the 1960s,” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Lars Christiansen, “The Making of a Civil Rights Union: The National Domestic Workers Union of America” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1999); Elizabeth Beck, “The National Domestic Workers Union and the War on Poverty,” Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare 28, no. 4 (December 2001): 195–211.
99. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, and Dorothy Sue Cobble, “‘A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm’: Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women’s Service Jobs in the 1970s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (Fall 1999): 23–44.
1. Edith Barksdale Sloan, “NCHE: Gaining Respect for Household Workers,” Essence, July 1974, 67.
2. Ibid.
3. Edith Barksdale Sloan, “Statement for the First Black Woman’s Institute,” 1972 Hunger Convocation, April 21, 1972, National Archives for Black Women’s History, Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site, Landover, MD, DcWaMMB; National Committee on Household Employment Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 11, folder 31 (hereafter NCHE Records).
4. “Edith Barksdale Sloan,” Washington Post, February 27, 1977.
5. Sloan, “NCHE,” 67, 69.
6. Jolie A. Jackson-Willett, “Edith Barksdale Sloan,” in The African American National Biography, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
7. See Peggie R. Smith, “Regulating Paid Household Work: Class, Gender, Race, and Agendas of Reform,” American University Law Review (1999): 851–918.
8. US Department of Labor, American Women: Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963), 34–35.
9. For more on labor feminists, see Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Stephen H. Norwood, “Organizing the Neglected Worker: The Women’s Trade Union League in New York and Boston, 1930–1950,” Labor History 50, no. 2 (2009): 163–85; Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex During World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); Nancy Felice Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United Auto Workers, 1935–1975 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Dennis Deslippe, Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
10. Orleck, Common Sense; Norwood, “Organizing the Neglected Worker.”
11. Frieda Miller, “Household Employees in the United States,” International Labour Review (1951): 319–20.
12. Frieda Miller, “Can We Lure Martha Back to the Kitchen?” New York Times, August 11, 1946.
13. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, chapter 7; Dorothy Sue Cobble, “Friendship Beyond the Atlantic: Labor Feminist International Contacts After the Second World War,” Worlds of Women, International Material in ARAB’s Collections (2012), http://www.arbark.se/publikationer/worlds-of-women/.
14. Dorothy Height, Open Wide the Freedom Gates: A Memoir (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 8. Mary Romero also discusses the consequences of being a maid’s daughter. See Mary Romero, The Maid’s Daughter: Living Inside and Outside the American Dream (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
15. NCHE, “Second Annual Meeting,” October 4, 1967, p. 7, box 12, folder 253, Frieda S. Miller Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter Miller Papers); Frieda Miller, “Women in the Labor Force,” Annals of the American Academy 251 (May 1947): 35–43.
16. Bureau of Labor Statistics, US Department of Labor, “Changes in Men’s and Women’s Labor Force Participation Rates,” TED: The Economics Daily, January 10, 2007, http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2007/jan/wk2/art03.htm.
17. Elizabeth Waldman, “Labor Force Statistics from a Family Perspective,” Monthly Labor Review (December 1983): 16–20.
18. Mignon Duffy, Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011).
19. See Anne McLeer, “Practical Perfection? The Nanny Negotiates Gender, Class, and Family Contradictions in 1960s Popular Culture,” NWSA Journal 14, no. 2 (Summer 2002).
20. Mary Romero, Maid in the USA (New York: Routledge, 1992); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration (New York: Kodansha, 1996).
21. C. Arnold Anderson and Mary Jean Bowman, “The Vanishing Servant and the Contemporary Status System of the American South,” American Journal of Sociology 59, no. 3 (November 1953): 215–30.
22. “The Servant Problem: Trials, Triumphs on the Servant Trail of a Working Mother with Her Maids,” Life, April 7, 1961, p. 109. See also Ebony editorial, “Goodbye Mammy, Hello Mom,” Ebony, March 1947, 36–37.
23. “Help Wanted!” Woman’s Day, July 1967.
24. Beatrice Vincent, “One Party After Another,” Cleveland Press, December 20, 1966, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 17, folder 04.
25. Mary D. Schlick, “Taking the Dust off Household Jobs,” Manpower Magazine, July 1969, 25, box 58, folder 1118, Esther Peterson Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (hereafter, Peterson Papers). For more on the history of welfare, see Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Marisa Chappell, The War on Welfare: Family, Poverty, and Politics in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Routledge 2005); Felicia Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights: Politics and Poverty in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesar’s Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Jennifer Mittelstadt, From Welfare to Workfare: The Unintended Consequences of Liberal Reform, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Rhonda Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
26. In May 1967, on the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, the NCHE cosponsored a conference on the status of household employment with the Women’s Bureau and the Chicago YWCA. Mary Dublin Keyserling, “Summary—Our Task Ahead,” Consultation on the Status of Household Employment, Conference Proceedings, May 20, 1967, p. 1.
27. Women’s Bureau and NCHE, “If ONLY I Could Get Some Household Help!,” pamphlet, 1969 (reprint), box 58, folder 1118, Peterson Papers.
28. Keyserling, “Summary—Our Task Ahead,” 3.
29. Carolyn Lewis, “Panel Told Skill Makes Housekeeping a Profession,” Washington Post, February 25, 1966, box 57, folder 1111, Peterson Papers.
30. Esther Peterson, “Household Consultations,” speech transcript, May 20, 1967, box 57, folder 1113, Peterson Papers.
31. Elizabeth Duncan Koontz, “Household Employment: The Quiet Revolution,” speech transcript, Northern Virginia Conference on Household Employment, Alexandria, VA, April 14, 1969, p. 3, reprinted by US Department of Labor, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 12, folder 15.
32. NCHE, Improving the Status of Household Employment: A Handbook for Community Action, revised October 1969, box 199, folder 12, Gloria Steinem Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
33. Carolyn Lewis, “Uncle Sam Dons Apron for Sweeping Study,” Washington Post, February 24, 1966, box 57, folder 1111, Peterson Papers.
34. NCHE, Improving the Status of Household Employment.
35. “Homemaker Service Demonstration Project—Kansas State University,” May 8, 1968, box 57, folder 1113, Peterson Papers.
36. Myra MacPherson, “Proper Diction Is Part of Program to Elevate Status of Domestics,” New York Times, April 5, 1968, National Archives for Black Women’s History, Series 003, Subseries 04, box 1, folder 8.
37. NCHE, “Second Annual Meeting,” October 4, 1967, p. 6 F, box 12, folder 253, Miller Papers.
38. Edith Barksdale Sloan, “NCHE: Gaining Respect for Household Workers,” Essence, July 1974, p. 66.
39. The NCHE also wanted fifteen “minority group members” to serve as board members. Edith B. Sloan, memorandum to Task Force on Committee Development, September 22, 1969, box 58, folder 1118, Peterson Papers.
40. Anna Halsted to Esther Peterson, May 8, 1970, box 58, folder 1119, Peterson Papers.
41. Frieda Miller, “Household Employees in the United States,” International Labour Review (1951): 336–37.
42. For examples of other literature on identity formation in the African American community, see Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Walter Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); Arlene Keizer, Black Subjects: Identity Formation in the Contemporary Narrative of Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
43. Josephine Hulett, interview by Janet Dewart, “Household Help Wanted: Female,” Ms., February 1973, pp. 46–48, 105–7.
44. Ibid., 47.
45. Ibid., 105.
46. Ibid.
47. Josephine Hulett, “Profiles in Household Work,” June 20, 1972, draft article for Ms. (published in revised form February 1973), Ms. Magazine Records, series 7, box 39, folder 12, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
48. Hulett, Ms. Magazine, 48.
49. Ibid., 106.
50. Ellen Graham, “Home Work: To Household Help, Difficult Times Are a Normal Way of Life,” Wall Street Journal, February 13, 1975.
51. Auburn Household Technicians, Progress Report, March 1971–October 1972, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 02, folder 04.
52. Hulett, Ms. Magazine, 46.
53. Josephine Hulett to Anna R. Halsted, November 3, 1970, box 58, folder 1120, Peterson Papers.
54. Jessie Williams of Auburn, AL, was there. There is no indication that Geraldine Roberts and Dorothy Bolden attended.
55. Jeannette Smyth, “Union Maid: A Two Way Street,” Washington Post, July 17, 1971.
56. Edith Barksdale Sloan, “Keynote Address,” July 17, 1971, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 02, folder 06.
57. “Farewell to Dinah,” Newsweek, August 2, 1971.
58. Susan Fogg, “Domestics Meet for ‘First Step,’” Sunday Canton (OH) Repository, August 1, 1971, box 2, folder 6, Mary Upshaw McClendon Papers (hereafter McClendon Papers), Wayne State Labor Archives, Wayne State University, Detroit.
59. Jacqueline Trescott, “600 Domestics Confer,” Washington (DC) Evening Star, July 17, 1971, box 2, folder 6, McClendon Papers.
60. “Domestics Fight for a New Way of Life,” Chicago Defender, August 21, 1971. Four days after the conference, Fauntroy introduced a minimum wage bill into Congress.
61. Ibid.
62. Trescott, “600 Domestics Confer.”
63. Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, Living with Jim Crow: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 154–56.
64. North Carolina Fund Records, 1962–1971, series 6, subseries 6.7, folder 7035, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
65. Fogg, “Domestics Meet for ‘First Step.’”
66. “The Annual Meeting of the National Committee on Household Employment,” Minutes, November 10, 1971, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 01, folder 06.
67. Minutes, first meeting of committee on the formation of a national association of household workers, 1971, p. 2, box 8, folder 19, National Archives for Black Women’s History, series 003, subseries 01.
68. NCHE, “Proposal to Sachem Fund,” June 9, 1972, p. 1, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 03, folder 02.
69. Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement; and Phyllis Palmer, “Housework and Domestic Labor: Racial and Technological Change,” in My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me: Everyday Trials and Triumphs of Women Workers, ed. Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 80–91.
1. NDWUA brochure, p. 18, NDWU Records.
2. Proclamation by Governor Gilligan, March 28, 1974, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 12, folder 26.
3. “Maids’ Honor Day Nomination,” box 1627, folder 79, NDWU Records.
4. Feminist scholars have debated the impact of commodification of care work and have disagreed about the supposed tension between “love and money”—or the imperatives of the market versus the nurturing aspects of care work. Viviana Zelizar has argued against the assumption that love and money are incompatible or hostile worlds. Similarly, Nancy Folbre suggests that both love and money can be motivating factors. See Deborah Stone, “Caring by the Book,” in Care Work: Gender, Labor, and the Welfare State, ed. Madonna Harrington Meyer (New York: Routledge, 2000); Nancy Folbre and Julie Nelson, “For Love or Money—or Both?,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, no. 4 (2000): 123–40; Viviana Zelizar, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Nancy Folbre, For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012).
5. Josephine Hulett, “Profiles in Household Work,” June 20, 1972, draft article for Ms., Ms. Magazine Records, series 7, box 39, folder 12, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
6. See for example, Rollins, Between Women, Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
7. Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
8. Faye Duddan tracks the shift from task-based work to time-based work, which occurred with the emergence of employer women’s efforts in the nineteenth century.
9. Mrs. E. T. Barwick, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Leola King, April 1973, box 1627, folder 87, NDWU Records.
10. Mrs. Ralph Toon, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Jeannette C. Everhart, May 1976, box 1628, folder 90, NDWU Records.
11. Mrs. E. T. Barwick, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Mrs. Amanda Rebecca Jones, May 1973, box 1627, folder 87, NDWU Records.
12. Mrs. James W. Coody, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Sophie Duncan, May 1973, box 1627, folder 87, NDWU Records.
13. Anne T. Winston, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Rosie Lee Powell, May 1972, box 1627, folder 87, NDWU Records.
14. Betty Talmadge, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Lucille Kelley, May 30, 1974, box 1628, folder 89, NDWU Records.
15. J. Wallace Rustin Family, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Mary Williams, April 1971, box 1627, folder 80, NDWU Records.
16. “Maids’ Honor Day Nomination,” box 1627, folder 79, NDWU Records.
17. Elizabeth Runyan to National Domestic Workers of America, May 25, 1976, box 1628, folder 90, NDWU Records; Flo Anne Menzler to National Domestic Workers of America, May 24, 1976, box 1628, folder 90, NDWU Records; Evelyn and Alton Reeves to National Domestic Workers of America, May 24, 1976, box 1628, folder 90, NDWU Records.
18. Sue Sturges, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Mrs. Jewel Adams, May 1971, box 1627, folder 81, NDWU Records.
19. Dorothy Bolden, “Message from the President,” Maids’ Honor Day, 1972, box 1628, folder 97, NDWU Records.
20. Frances X. Clines, “About New York: Cleaning Women: Why Sit and Cry?” New York Times, June 22, 1978. Soraya Moore Coley argues that members of domestic-worker-rights groups had a more positive view of the occupation than nonmembers. See Soraya Moore Coley “And Still I Rise: An Exploratory Study of Contemporary Black Private Household Workers” (PhD diss., Bryn Mawr College, 1981).
21. Vivian Castleberry, “Maids Organize for Better Image and Benefits,” Dallas Times Herald, July 26, 1976, box 443, folder 13, National Urban League Records (hereafter NUL Records), Library of Congress.
22. Two-part interview of Geraldine Miller filmed at Saint Peter’s College, Jersey City, NJ, April 18, 2000, available on the website of Neighborhood Women Williamsburg-Greenpoint, http://neighborhoodwomen.org/category/nwwg/nwwg-media/movies-nwwg/.
23. Hazel Garland, “Early Morning TV Can Be Very Informative,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 9, 1980. Feminist scholars have debated the impact of commodification on care work. See, for example, Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Deborah Stone, “Caring by the Book,” in Care Work: Gender, Labor, and the Welfare State, ed. Madonna Harrington Meyer (New York: Routledge, 2003), 89–111; Mona Harrington, Care and Inequality: Inventing a New Family Politics (New York: Routledge, 2000); Nancy Folbre, ed., For Love and Money: Care Provision in the United States (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2012); Viviana Zelizar, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
24. Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982).
25. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Small, Maynard & Co, 1898).
26. Geraldine Roberts, interview by Donna Van Raaphorst, March 30–June 29, 1977, Cleveland, Ohio, Program on Women and Work, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Michigan, Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University, p. 46.
27. Pat Burstein, “A Convention on Domestic Policy,” Newsday, March 20, 1973.
28. Vanessa May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
29. Alice Childress, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 42–43.
30. Maids’ Honor Day Nomination, box 1627, folder 79, NDWU Records.
31. Maids’ Honor Day Nomination, box 1627, folder 79, NDWU Records.
32. Vivian Gornick, “There Once Was a Union Maid/Who Never Was Afraid,” Village Voice, November 29, 1976, Ms. Magazine Records, series 7, box 39, folder 12, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.
33. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: The Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
34. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 71.
35. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–20. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985).
36. Josephine Hulett, interview by Janet Dewart, “Household Help Wanted: Female,” Ms., February 1973, p. 48, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 11, folder 17.
37. Gornick, “There Once Was a Union Maid/Who Never Was Afraid.”
38. Several scholars have discussed the issue of naming and deference. See Bonnie Thorton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Garland, 1994); Susan Tucker, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Katherine Van Wormer, The Maid Narratives: Black Domestic and White Families in the Jim Crow South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); Mary Romero, Maid in the USA (New York: Routledge, 1992); Rollins, Between Women.
39. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 53.
40. EBS, “Keynote Address,” July 17, 1971, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 02, folder 06.
41. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 70.
42. Leslie Maitland, “They Still Call Us Girl,” New York Times, February 15, 1976.
43. Carolyn Reed, interview by Robert Hamburger, 286, Robert Hamburger Transcripts and Research Materials, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
44. Geraldine Miller, interview by Loretta Ross, transcript of video recording, p. 30, October 14, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
45. NDWU, “Proposal to Implement a Training Program for Household Management Technicians in Metro-Atlanta,” June 26, 1974, p. 4, box 1625, folder 52, NDWU Records.
46. Charlotte Robinson, “Organizing Household Workers,” n.d. (c. 1975?), Detroit Free Press, box 2, folder 8, McClendon Papers.
47. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 53.
48. Judith Rollins et al., “African American Private Household Workers and ‘Control’ of the Labor Process in Domestic Service,” Sociological Focus 27, no. 3 (August 1994): 211–28.
49. NDWU, National Domestic Workers of America, Inc., booklet, n.d. (c. 1977?), NDWU Records.
50. The code was established before formation of the Household Technicians of America (HTA) under NCHE in 1967 and was patterned after the Minnesota Commission on the Status of Women. Mary Dublin Keyserling, “Summary—Our Task Ahead,” Consultation on the Status of Household Employment, Conference Proceedings, May 20, 1967, p. 6.
51. “NCHE: Gaining Respect for Household Workers,” Essence, July 1974, p. 35.
52. DC Household Technicians, “A Code of Standards,” 1974, p. 2, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 06, folder 12.
53. Dorothy Bolden, “Statement Before the Democratic Platform Committee,” June 9, 1972, p. 4, box 1625, folder 44, NDWU Papers.
54. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 55.
55. Geraldine Roberts, interview with Malaika Lumumba, August 1, 1970, Ralph Bunche Oral History Collection, Moorland-Spingarn Research Collection, accession no. 593, p. 14.
56. Geraldine Miller, interview by Debra Bernhardt, June 18, 1981, audio recording, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University.
57. NDWU, “Proposal to Implement a Training Program for Household Management Technicians in Metro-Atlanta,” June 26, 1974, box 1625, folder 52, NDWU Records.
58. NDWUA, “A Manpower Development, Training and Placement Program,” 1975, box 1625, folder 53, NDWU Records.
59. NDWUA, “A Proposal: To Research Techniques of Assistance in Developing a Training Program for Household Employees,” n.d. (probably late 1968), box 1625, folder 52, NDWU Records.
60. “Household Workers Organization,” leaflet (minimum wage), n.d. (probably 1973), box 2, folder 4, McClendon Papers. The meeting took place at 8245 Linwood Ave.
61. Mary McClendon, autobiography, box 1, folder 1, McClendon Papers.
62. Cassandra Spratling and Patrice Williams, “Obama on the Ballot: They Never Thought They’d See the Day: Rise of Black Senator Symbolizes a Dream Realized,” Detroit Free Press, October 31, 2008.
63. Mary McClendon (probably), speech, “Household Workers Organization,” n.d. (probably late 1972 or early 1973), box 1, folder 3, McClendon Papers.
64. Cassandra Spratling, “Black Women Who Cleaned Whites’ Houses Look Back,” Detroit Free Press, August 14, 2011.
65. Author telephone interview with Mary McClendon, October 2013.
66. Jeannette Smyth, “Union Maid: A Two Way Street,” Washington Post, July 17, 1971.
67. Ibid.
68. Household Workers Organization (HWO), proposal, “Household Workers, Inc., Job Descriptions for Household Technicians,” June 18, 1970, box 2, folder 19, McClendon Papers.
69. “Appendix II,” Training Proposal, n.d., box 2, folder 23, McClendon Papers.
70. HWO, “Household Workers, Inc., Job Descriptions for Household Technicians.”
71. Helen May, “Household Workers Push Wage Battle,” May 26, 1972, Detroit Free Press, box 2, folder 6, McClendon Papers.
72. You and Your Household Help, pamphlet, 1971, box 2, folder 28, McClendon Papers. The wage recommendations came from the Michigan Employment Securities Commission.
73. Unnamed author, “Letter to Mary McClendon,” June 29, 1973, box 2, folder 17, McClendon Papers.
74. Charlotte Robinson, “Organizing Household Workers,” n.d. (1975?), Detroit Free Press, box 2, folder 8, McClendon Papers.
75. HTA, minutes, board of directors meeting, April 12, 1972, p. 4, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 8, folder 18.
76. Judith Rollins argued that the social and psychological components of domestic-service work perpetuated notions of inequality. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987). Dorothy Sue Cobble explained: “Dismantling the ‘mammy’ stereotype with its expectations of self-sacrifice and deference required an assault against multiple ideologies of domination.” Dorothy Sue Cobble, “‘A Spontaneous Loss of Enthusiasm’: Workplace Feminism and the Transformation of Women’s Service Jobs in the 1970s,” International Labor and Working-Class History 56 (Fall 1999): 23–44.
77. Dorothy Bolden, Nobody Speaks for Me: Self Portraits of American Working-Class Women, ed. Nancy Seifer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 167.
78. Philip Shabecoff, “To Domestics, a Minimum Wage Is a Raise,” New York Times, June 6, 1973.
79. Alan Wolfe argues that boundaries and distinctions are not always bad and can function to enhance group solidarity. See Alan Wolfe, “Democracy Versus Sociology: Boundaries and Their Political Consequences,” in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, ed. Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
80. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 71.
1. Geraldine Miller, interview by Debra Bernhardt, June 18, 1981, audio recording, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University.
2. Geraldine Miller, interview by Loretta Ross, transcript of video recording, p. 26, October 14, 2004, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
3. Two-part interview of Geraldine Miller filmed at Saint Peter’s College, Jersey City, NJ, April 18, 2000, available on the website of Neighborhood Women Williamsburg-Greenpoint, http://neighborhoodwomen.org/category/nwwg/nwwg-media/movies-nwwg/.
4. Peggie Smith, “Organizing the Unorganizable: Private Paid Household Workers and Approaches to Employee Representation,” 79 North Carolina Law Review 45 (2000).
5. Geraldine Miller, “Geraldine Miller: Household Technician and Social Activist,” in Untold Glory: African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement, ed. Alan Govenar (New York: Harlem Moon, 2007), 293.
6. Miller, interview by Ross, 24.
7. Miller, interview by Bernhardt.
8. Geraldine Miller, interview by Tamar Carroll, transcript, 12, August 16, 2002, Brooklyn, NY, courtesy of Tamar Carroll. See also Miller, “Geraldine Miller: Household Technician and Social Activist,” 295.
9. Quoted in Francis X. Clines, “About New York: Cleaning Women; Why Sit and Cry?,” New York Times, June 22, 1978.
10. Miller, “Geraldine Miller: Household Technician and Social Activist,” 298.
11. Clines, “About New York: Cleaning Women.”
12. Miller, Saint Peter’s College interview.
13. Miller, interview by Ross, 23.
14. Miller, interview by Carroll, 3.
15. Miller, Saint Peter’s College interview.
16. Miller, interview by Ross, 32–33.
17. Ibid., 27.
18. Miller, “Geraldine Miller: Household Technician and Social Activist,” 299.
19. Miller, interview by Bernhardt.
20. Josephine Hulett, “Profiles in Household Work,” June 20, 1972, draft article for Ms., Ms. Magazine Records, series 7, box 39, folder 12, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
21. Carolyn Reed, interview by Robert Hamburger, 273, Robert Hamburger Transcripts and Research Materials, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
22. Elizabeth Runyan to NDWUA, May 25, 1976, box 1628, folder 90, NDWU Records.
23. Dorothy Bolden, “Organizing Domestic Workers in Atlanta, Georgia,” in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage, 1972), 237.
24. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 94.
25. Bolden, “Organizing Domestic Workers,” 237.
26. Ibid.
27. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 119–20.
28. Susan B. Carter et al., Historical Statistics of the United States: Earliest Times to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Ba1033-1046, “Major Occupational Groups—All Persons: 1860–1990.” This figure is based on Census Bureau data, which likely undercounts the number of household workers.
29. Miller, interview by Ross, 29.
30. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, As Interviewed by Martha Sandlin, April 15, 1980, transcript, 32, Columbia Center for Oral History, Butler Library, Columbia University, NY.
31. Miller, interview by Ross, 55.
32. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 32.
33. Ibid., 18–19.
34. For more on class relations and domestic service in Orangeburg, see Kibibi Voloria Mack, Parlor Ladies and Ebony Drudges: African American Women, Class, and Work in a South Carolina Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999).
35. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 4–5.
36. Ibid., 7.
37. Ibid., 14.
38. Ibid., 10–11.
39. Ibid., 8–9.
40. Ibid., 10.
41. Ibid., 2.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 14–15.
44. Ibid., 16.
45. Reed, interview by Hamburger, 270.
46. Gornick, “There Once Was a Union Maid/Who Never Was Afraid.”
47. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 13.
48. Ibid., 17.
49. “Housemaid’s Lib Is on the Move,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 2, 1974.
50. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 2.
51. Reed, interview by Hamburger, 276–77.
52. Gornick, “There Once Was a Union Maid/Who Never Was Afraid.”
53. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 38–40. Mrs. Clayburgh died after Carolyn worked for the family for fourteen years.
54. Gornick, “There Once Was a Union Maid/Who Never Was Afraid.”
55. Donald R. Katz, “Carolyn Reed and the Backstairs Revolt,” New York, June 11, 1979, pp. 45–50, NUL Records, p. 50, part 3, box 449, folder 2.
56. Ibid.
57. Ron Chernow, “All in a Day’s Work,” Mother Jones, August 1976, 11.
58. The literature on the manufacturing model of union organizing is extensive. See, for example, David Brody, Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).
59. For example, see Ava Baron, ed., Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Ruth Milkman, LA Story: Immigrant Workers and the Future of the US Labor Movement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006); Karen Brodkin Sacks, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994); Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006); Laurie Green, Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Michael K. Honey, Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign (New York: Norton, 2007); Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Dennis A. Deslippe, Rights, Not Roses: Unions and the Rise of Working-Class Feminism, 1945–80 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000); Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Beth Tompkins Bates, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-20th-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
60. See Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), and Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013).
61. Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Herbert Hill, “The Problem of Race in American Labor History,” Reviews in American History 24, no. 2 (1996): 189–208.
62. Dorothy Bolden, Nobody Speaks for Me: Self Portraits of American Working-Class Women, ed. Nancy Seifer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977), 162–63.
63. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 66–68. By 1970 she was a grandmother of seven, six boys and one girl.
64. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 44.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., 45.
67. Ibid., 46.
68. Gornick, “There Once Was a Union Maid/Who Never Was Afraid.”
69. Mary McClendon (probably), “Household Workers Organization,” speech, n.d. (probably late 1972 or early 1973), box 1, folder 3, McClendon Papers; “No Union for Dial-A-Maid,” People’s Voice, newspaper article, November 1972, p. 11, box 1, folder 23, McClendon Papers.
70. They met with Benjamin McLaurin and others on August 20, 1970. “Memo: re: Household Workers,” folder 26, Workers’ Defense League Papers, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, Detroit.
71. McLaurin explained, in a 1971 memo to the attendees of the Convention of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, that “due to the loss of membership in the brotherhood over the last several years [organizing household workers] would activate and stimulate [the brotherhood] into a bold direction which everyone agrees is long overdue.” Benjamin McLaurin, “Memo to Officers, Delegates, and Members of the International Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,” September 2, 1971, box 74, folder 7, Workers Defense League Papers.
72. Ruth Benjamin served as executive director of the Professional Household Workers Union. Other representatives were Marjorie Archibald and Eartha Ashkar; Mary C. Strayhorn, president; Ollie Stackhouse, vice president; and Ophelia Fulwood, secretary.
73. “Resolution,” Professional Household Workers Union Local #1, April 8, 1971, box 73, folder 27, Workers Defense League Papers. It is not clear if the union got concrete support from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP). “Proposal to Unionize Professional Household Workers,” April 12, 1972, box 74, folder 9, Workers Defense League Papers.
74. Miller, interview by Bernhardt.
75. Gornick, “There Once Was a Union Maid/Who Never Was Afraid.”
76. “Are You Listening: Household Technicians,” unedited transcript, 1977, presented by the Ford Foundation, distributed by Martha Stuart Communications, Martha Stuart Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
77. Boris and Klein, Caring for America.
78. Julie Yates Rivchin similarly argues that the exclusions of some workers from the National Labor Relations Act fostered new kinds of labor organizing, emphasizing grassroots participation and a community orientation that has ultimately strengthened the labor movement. See Julie Yates Rivchin, “Colloquium: Building Power Among Low-Wage Immigrant Workers: Some Legal Considerations for Organizing Structures and Strategies,” NYU Review of Law and Social Change (2004): 397.
1. Carolyn Reed, interview by Robert Hamburger, 285, Robert Hamburger Transcripts and Research Materials, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
2. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, interview by Martha Sandlin, April 15, 1980, transcript, 23, Columbia Center for Oral History, Butler Library, Columbia University, NY.
3. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press, 1992); Premilla Nadasen, “Citizenship Rights, Domestic Work, and the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Journal of Policy History 24, no. 1 (January 2012): 74–94.
4. Phyllis Palmer, “Outside the Law: Agricultural and Domestic Workers Under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Journal of Policy History 7 (1995): 416–40. See also Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 128–51; and on feminist organizing in the South, Katarina Keane, “Second Wave Feminism in the American South” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2009).
5. Phyllis Palmer has argued persuasively that both the civil rights movement and women’s movement helped reconstruct cultural ideas of work, race, and gender regarding agricultural and domestic labor. See Palmer, “Outside the Law.” See also Nancy Naples, Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing Across Race, Class, and Gender (New York: Routledge, 1998).
6. Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1994); Barbara J. Nelson, “The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen’s Compensation and Mothers’ Aid,” in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 123–51; Mimi Abramovitz, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy from Colonial Times to the Present (Boston: South End Press, 1988).
7. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Vicky Lovell, “Constructing Social Citizenship: The Exclusion of African American Women from Unemployment Insurance in the US,” Feminist Economics 8, no. 2 (2002): 191–97; Ellen Mutari et al., “Neither Mothers Nor Breadwinners: African American Women’s Exclusion from US Minimum Wage Policies,” Feminist Economies 9, no. 2 (July 2002): 37–61; Erica C. Morgan, “Invisible Workers: The Exclusion of Domestic Workers from Protective Labor Legislation,” 2008, ExpressO, http://works.bepress.com/erica_morgan/1.
8. Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2014), argues that white southerners played a critical role in shaping New Deal politics. See also Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For more on the racial politics of the campaign to regulate domestic work in this period, see Peggie R. Smith, “Regulating Paid Household Work: Class, Gender, Race, and Agendas of Reform,” American University Law Review (1999): 851–918; Palmer, “Outside the Law.”
9. Eileen Boris, “The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States,” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State, and Society 2 (Summer 1995): 161–80; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
10. Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration (New York: Kodansha, 1996); Bonnie Thornton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Routledge, 1993); Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
11. Vivien Hart, Bound by Our Constitution: Women, Workers, and the Minimum Wage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. chapter 8.
12. See Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity; Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security; Katznelson, Fear Itself.
13. Martin Tolchin, “Mrs. Chisholm Led Fight for Domestics’ Base Pay,” New York Times, June 21, 1973.
14. Geraldine Miller, “Geraldine Miller: Household Technician and Social Activist,” in Untold Glory: African Americans in Pursuit of Freedom, Opportunity, and Achievement, ed. Alan Govenar (New York: Harlem Moon, 2007), 300.
15. Shirley Chisholm, “Address Before Second Annual Conference of Household Technicians,” transcript, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 02, folder 10. See also “Domestics at Session Ask Gains,” New York Times, October 10, 1972; Jeannette Smythe, “Hard Act to Follow,” Washington Post, July 19, 1971.
16. For more on Chisholm, see Zinga A. Fraser, “Catalysts for Change: A Comparative Study of Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2014); Julie Gallagher, Black Women and Politics in New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Barbara Winslow, Shirley Chisholm: Catalyst for Change (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013).
17. Willis J. Nordlund, The Quest for a Living Wage: The History of the Federal Minimum Wage Program (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, 1997).
18. “House Vote Kills Legislation Raising Minimum Wage,” CQ Almanac 1972, 28th ed. (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1973), http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal72–1250683.
19. Statement of Mrs. Edith Barksdale Sloan, executive director, National Committee on Household Employment, Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, March 15, 1973, p. 3, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 11, folder 04.
20. David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
21. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 24.
22. Statement of Mrs. Edith Barksdale Sloan, executive director, and Mrs. Josephine Hulett, field officer, NCHE, Hearings Before the General Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, on HR 10948, August 13, 1970, p. 3, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 11, folder 06.
23. Mary McClendon, “Household Workers Organization,” informational leaflet, n.d., box 2, folder 13, McClendon Papers.
24. Patricia Mulkeen, “Private Household Workers and the Fair Labor Standards Act,” Connecticut Law Review 5 (1973): 626.
25. Ibid.
26. Statement of Barksdale Sloan and Hulett.
27. Robert T. Thompson, US Chamber of Commerce, Statement Before the General Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, 1973, p. 228.
28. Peter Brennan, Secretary of Labor, Statement Before the General Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, April 10, 1973, p. 264.
29. Peter Brennan, Secretary of Labor, US Senate, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Labor of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, June 1973, pp. 330–31.
30. Geneva Reid, Household Technicians of America, Statement Before the General Subcommittee on Labor, Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, 1973, p. 205.
31. Miller, interview by Ross, 35.
32. Reed, interview by Hamburger, 284. See also Anastasia Hardin, “‘Making the Dignity of Our Labor a Reality’: Household Worker Organizing in New York City, 1960–1980” (MA thesis, Rutgers University, 2013).
33. Mary McClendon, “Meaningful Work and Adequate Compensation,” August 1975, box 2, folder 13, McClendon Papers.
34. Aletha Vaughn, interview by Mary Yelling, in Susan Tucker, Telling Memories Among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and Their Employers in the Segregated South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 207.
35. Judith Rollins, Between Women; Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt.
36. Dorothy Roberts, “Racism and Patriarchy in the Meaning of Motherhood,” American University Journal of Gender and Law 1, no. 1 (1993): 1–38. Judith Rollins, Phyllis Palmer, and Mary Romero call the reliance on domestic workers a “contradiction” in feminism because of the way paid household labor re-creates the system of race, class, and gender oppression.
37. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton: 1963), 121.
38. Donald R. Katz, “Carolyn Reed and the Backstairs Revolt,” New York, June 11, 1979, p. 50, NUL Records, part 3, box 449, folder 2.
39. National Leadership Convention, “NCHE Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977,” May 1976, p. 1, box 58, folder 1124, Peterson Papers.
40. Premilla Nadasen, “Expanding the Boundaries of the Women’s Movement: Black Feminism and the Struggle for Welfare Rights,” Feminist Studies 28, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 271–301; Robyn C. Spencer, “Engendering the Black Freedom Struggle: Revolutionary Black Womanhood and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area, California,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (March 2008): 90–113.
41. NYRF Newsletter 3, no. 11 (November 1973), flyer, “Speak-Out on Jobs of Working-Class Women,” October 1973, https://archive.org/details/NewYorkRadicalFeministsConsciousness-raisingAboutWork3Of3.
42. Pat Mainardi, “The Politics of Housework,” in The Politics of Housework, ed. Ellen Malos (London: Allston and Busby, 1980): 99–104; Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (London: Zed Books, 1998); Sylvia Federici, “The Restructuring of Housework and Reproduction in the United States in the 1970s,” in Sylvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).
43. Selma James, “A Woman’s Place,” in her Sex, Race, and Class, the Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings, 1952–2011 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012).
44. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 28.
45. For a critique of the Wages for Housework movement, see Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981), chapter 7.
46. Gail Sheehy, “A Woman Who Took Control of Her Life,” Boston Globe, March 25, 1980.
47. Betty F. Edwards, Maids’ Honor Day Nomination for Lula Morrison, May 1976, box 1628, folder 90, NDWU Records.
48. Davis, Women, Race, and Class, 243.
49. Pierrette Hondagnue-Sotelo makes the argument that domestic workers enabled wealthier women to “purchase release from their gender subordination in the home.” Pierrette Hondagnue-Sotelo, Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 22–23. See also Joan Tronto, “The ‘Nanny’ Question in Feminism,” Hypatia 17, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 34–51. For more on efforts to end discrimination in the workplace, see Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Pursuit of Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
50. Ellen Roberts, “Women and Work: The Household Workers Fight,” Essence, April 1974.
51. Mary McClendon (probably), “Household Workers Organization,” speech, n.d., box 1, folder 3, McClendon Papers.
52. As Phyllis Palmer has so persuasively argued, the FLSA victory was in large part due to feminist activism that drew attention to the home as workplace.
53. Josephine Hulett, interview by Janet Dewart, “Household Help Wanted: Female,” Ms., February 1973, 46.
54. Ron Chernow, “All in a Day’s Work,” Mother Jones, August 1976, 16.
55. Hulett, interview by Dewart, 106.
56. Ibid.
57. Anne B. Turpeau, “NCHE Resource Development Proposed Work Plan,” September 28, 1976, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 06, folder 05.
58. NCHE, “Fair Labor Standards Campaign,” December 7, 1977, box 446, folder 1, NUL Records.
59. Reed, interview by Hamburger, 289.
60. Sam Roberts, “One Who Shaped Domestic Issues,” New York Times, April 12, 1993.
61. NDWUA, “A Proposal: To Research Techniques of Assistance in Developing a Training Program for Household Employees,” n.d. (probably late 1968), box 1625, folder 52, NDWU Records.
62. NCHE, “NCHE Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977,” May 1976, box 58, folder 1124, Peterson Papers.
63. NDWUA, “Training Program for Domestic Workers,” n.d. (probably 1977), box 1, NDWU Records.
64. NCHE, “Minimum Wage Coverage for Domestics: At Last!!!,” press release, April 8, 1974, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 11, folder 7.
65. William Forbath, “Civil Rights and Economic Citizenship: Notes on the Past and Future of the Civil Rights and Labor Movements,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law 2, no. 4 (2000): 697–718; Nancy MacLean, Opening of the American Workplace.
66. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs 18, no. 1 (Autumn 1992): 1–43; Venus Green, “Flawed Remedies: EEOC, AT&T, and Sears Outcomes Reconsidered,” Black Women, Gender, and Families 6, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 43–70; Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity, chapter 6; Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement, chapter 6; Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 140 (1989): 139–47.
67. Eileen Boris, “Where’s the Care?,” Labor 11, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 43–47.
68. Nadasen, Welfare Warriors; Orleck, Storming Caesars’ Palace; Kornbluh, The Battle for Welfare Rights.
69. Margaria Fichtner, “Household Help Seeks New Status,” Miami Herald, July 21, 1971, box 2, folder 9, McClendon Papers.
70. This strategy enables the rethinking of notions of equality in terms of care work rather than the political sphere, as Eva Kittay calls for in Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (New York: Routledge, 1999).
71. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 102.
72. Eileen Boris, Home to Work (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
73. Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, “Making Home Care: Law and Social Policy in the US Welfare State,” in Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care, ed. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 187–203.
74. For more on the critique of state regulation and institutionalization, see Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
75. Statement of Barksdale Sloan and Hulett, 8.
76. NCHE News 5, no. 10–11 (October–November 1974), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
1. Lewis A. Coser, “Servants: The Obsolescence of an Occupational Role,” Social Forces 52, no. 1 (September 1973): 31–40.
2. See Suzanne M. Bianchi, Melissa A. Milkie, Liana C. Sayer, and John P. Robinson, “Is Anyone Doing the Housework? Trends in Gender Division of Household Labor,” Social Forces 79, no. 1 (September 2000): 191–228.
3. Geraldine Roberts, interview by Donna Van Raaphorst, transcript of oral history project, p. 114, Program on Woman and Work, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of Michigan–Wayne State University, 1978.
4. Matthew Sobek, “US Historical Statistics: New Statistics on the U.S. Labor Force, 1850–1990,” Historical Methods 34, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 71–87. See table 8, “Labor-Force Participation Rates, by Sex, Race, and Marital Status, 1850–1990,” 78.
5. Robert Self, All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012).
6. For a history of how child-care policies evolved, see Sonya Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child-Care Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Ruth Schwartz Cohen, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
7. John Leonard, “About New York: Cleaning-Woman Syndrome,” New York Times, August 18, 1976.
8. Sherry Suib Cohen, “Suburban Women and Their Maids,” Westchester Illustrated, n.d. (probably late 1970s), 22–29, Ms. Magazine Papers, series 7, box 39, folder 12.
9. Ibid.
10. See Mary Romero, Maid in the USA (New York: Routledge, 1992); Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica; Julia Wrigley, Other People’s Children (New York: Basic Books, 1995); Cecilia Rio, “‘On the Move’: African American Women’s Paid Domestic Labor and the Class Transition to Independent Commodity Production,” Rethinking Marxism 17, no. 4 (October 2005): 489–510.
11. Martha J. Bailey and William J. Collins, “Wage Gains of African-American Women in the 1940s,” Journal of Economic History 66, no. 3 (September 2006): 737.
12. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Women’s Work,” Signs 18, no. 1 (1992): 1–43.
13. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 102.
14. Angela James, David M. Grant, and Cynthia Cranford, “Moving Up, But How Far? African American Women and Economic Restructuring in Los Angeles, 1970–1990,” Sociological Perspectives 43, no. 3 (2000): 399–420; Vicky Lovell, “Constructing Social Citizenship: The Exclusion of African American Women from Unemployment Insurance in the US,” Feminist Economics 8, no. 2 (2002): 191–97.
15. NDWUA, “A Manpower Development, Training, and Placement Program,” 1975, p. 14, box 1625, folder 53, NDWU Papers.
16. Dorothy E. Roberts, “Spiritual and Menial Housework,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 51 (1997); Mignon Duffy, Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “Cleaning Up/Kept Down: A Historical Perspective on Racial Inequality in Women’s Work,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1333–56.
17. Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein, Caring for America: Home Health Workers in the Shadow of the Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
18. Mary McClendon v. City of Detroit, Circuit Court for the County of Wayne, no. 77 704 376, April 18, 1980, p. 20, box 2, folder 30, McClendon Papers.
19. Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
20. Margo Fischer, “How to Hire a Maid,” Saturday Evening Post, June 8, 1957, 64. See also Evan McLeod Wylie and Robert Paul Sagalyn, “The Flood of Innocents from Abroad,” Life, May 5, 1961.
21. See Maura I. Toro-Morn, “Gender, Class, Family and Migration: Puerto Rican Women in Chicago,” Gender and Society 9, no. 6 (December 1995): 712–26; Carmen Theresa Whalen, From Puerto Rico to Philadelphia: Puerto Rican Workers and Post-War Economies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Carmen Theresa Whalen and Victor Vasquez Hernandez, eds., The Puerto Rican Diaspora (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Mérida M. Rúa, A Grounded Identidad: Making New Lives in Chicago’s Puerto Rican Neighborhoods (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
22. Leonard C. Lewin, notarized statement, December 20, 1946, section 4, Presidente del Senado, series 2, Gobierno Ensular, subseries 9B, Employment and Migration Bureau, folder 277, document 17, Archivo Histórico Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
23. Elena Padilla, “Puerto Rican Immigrants in New York and Chicago: A Study in Comparative Assimilation” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1947).
24. They earned fifteen dollars a week; African American women earned twenty-five dollars a week and white women domestics earned thirty-five to forty dollars a week.
25. Lewin, notarized statement.
26. See, for example, “Maid Problem,” New Republic, April 28, 1947, 116.
27. Carmen Isales, draft, “Report on the Cases of Puerto Rican Laborers Brought to Chicago to Work as Domestics and Foundry Workers Under Contract with Castle, Barton and Associates,” March 22, 1947, section 4, Presidente del Senado, series 2, Gobierno Ensular, subseries 9B, Employment and Migration Bureau, folder 277, document 16, Archivo Histórico Fundación Luis Muñoz Marín. See also Nicolas De Genova and Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, “Latino Rehearsals: Racialization and the Politics of Citizenship Between Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 8, no. 2 (June 2003): 18–57; Edwin Maldonado, “Contract Labor and the Origins of Puerto Rican Communities in the United States,” International Migration Review 13, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 103–21; Lilia Fernandez, “Of Immigrants and Migrants: Mexican and Puerto Rican Labor Migration in Comparative Perspective, 1942–1964,” Journal of American Ethnic History 29, no. 3 (Spring 2010); Maura I. Toro-Morn, “A Historical Overview of the Work Experiences of Puerto Rican Women in Chicago,” Centro Journal 13, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 24–43.
28. The Bureau of Employment and Migration was formed in 1947 and initiated this program in conjunction with the Office of the Governor of Puerto Rico. In 1952 the bureau became part of the Puerto Rican Department of Labor.
29. Emma Amador, “Training Migrant Domestics: Migrant Household Workers, Labor Reformers, and the Puerto Rican Government After 1930,” Conference Paper, Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians, 2014, Toronto, Canada, courtesy of Emma Amador. See also “Puerto Rican Maids to Get Aid on English,” New York Times, March 2, 1948.
30. Frances Green Employment Agency, information about hiring policies, n.d. (circa 1967), box 57, folder 1114, Peterson Papers.
31. Ibid.
32. HWO, Household Workers Employment News, n.d. (probably 1970), box 1, folder 31, McClendon Papers.
33. This involves depersonalization and dehumanization. Shellee Colen, “‘Just a Little Respect’: West Indian Domestic Workers in New York City,” in Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 176. For more on the early history of Caribbean women’s migration, see Terry A. Repak, Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation’s Capital (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Rhacel Parrenas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Tamara Mose Brown, Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Linda Carty, “Not a Nanny: A Gendered, Transnational Analysis of Caribbean Domestic Workers in New York City,” in Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies, ed. Carole Boyce Davies (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003): 269–82; Irma Watkins-Owens, “Early Twentieth-Century Caribbean Women: Migration and Social Networks in New York City,” in Islands in the City: West Indian Migration to New York, ed. Nancy Foner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 25–51.
34. Mary Romero, Maid in the USA (New York: Routledge, 1992). See Vicki L. Ruiz, “By the Day or Week: Mexicana Domestic Workers in El Paso,” in To Toil the Livelong Day: America’s Women at Work, 1780–1980, ed. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987): 269–83; Vicki Ruiz and Susan Tiana, eds., Women on the US-Mexico Border: A Response to Change (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Chad Richardson and Cruz C. Torres, “‘Only a Maid’: Undocumented Domestic Workers in South Texas,” in Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados: Class and Culture on the South Texas Border, ed. Chad Richardson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999).
35. Betty Liddick, “Plight of the Foreign Domestic: A Critical Game of Hide and Seek,” Los Angeles Times, June 8, 1973, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 09, folder 07.
36. Ibid. See also Romero, Maid in the USA; Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica; Michael J. Wishnie, “Emerging Issues for Undocumented Workers,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Labor and Employment Law 6, no. 3 (2004): 497–524; Keith Cunningham-Parmeter, “Redefining the Rights of Undocumented Workers,” American University Law Review 58 (2009): 1361–1415.
37. Isabel Eaton, “Special Report on Negro Domestic Service,” Supplement to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (New York: Schocken Books, 1967), first published 1899, p. 485.
38. Andrew Urban, “Irish Domestic Servants, ‘Biddy” and Rebellion in the American Home, 1850–1890,” Gender and History 21, no. 2 (August 2009): 263–86; Danielle Phillips, “Who Wants to Be an ‘English’ Mother? Irish and Southern African American Domestic Workers in New York, 1865–1935,” Journal of Motherhood Initiative 2, no. 1 (2011): 226–41; Margaret Lynch-Brennan, Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2009).
39. NCHE, “The Low Income Woman’s IWY Action Plan,” Report Prepared for the Sixth Annual Conference, October 1978, p. 13, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 03, folder 04; Julianne Malveaux, “From Domestic Worker to Household Technician: Black Women in a Changing Occupation,” in Black Women in the Labor Force, ed. Phyllis A. Wallace, 85–98 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980); Vertamae Grosvenor, Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).
40. Ellen Roberts, “Women and Work: The Household Workers Fight,” Essence, April 1974. See also Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Abigail Bakan and Daiva Stasiulis, Not One of the Family: Foreign Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Geraldine Pratt, “Stereotypes and Ambivalence: The Construction of Domestic Workers in Vancouver, BC,” Gender, Place, and Culture 4, no. 2 (1997): 159–77.
41. Danielle Taylor Phillips, “Moving with the Women: Tracing Racialization, Migration and Domestic Workers in the Archive,” Signs 38, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 379–404.
42. Charles Grutzner, “City Puerto Ricans Found Ill-Housed,” New York Times, October 4, 1949. Only a small percentage of Puerto Rican migrants were ever employed as domestic workers. In 1960 most Puerto Rican women worked in garment or needle trades or in agricultural sectors. For more on how Puerto Ricans were cast by the media as better workers than African Americans, see Gina Perez, The Near Northwest Side Story: Migration, Displacement, and Puerto Rican Families (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
43. Carty, “Not A Nanny,” 275; Wrigley, Other People’s Children, 10.
44. All box 58, folder 1119, Peterson Papers: NCHE press release, February 10, 1970; Elva Ruiz, “Memo to the Board of Directors,” n.d.; Various Mexican-American Organizations, Statement, “For Immediate Press Release,” n.d.; Anna R. Halsted, “Memo to Members of the Board of Directors” March 19, 1970.
45. Household Technicians of America, minutes, board of directors meeting, April 12, 1972, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 08, folder 18.
46. Edith B. Sloan to Mrs. Francisca Flores, September 8, 1971, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 15, folder 08.
47. Various translated items in folder as well as a letter verifying translation from Maria de la Luz Moreno to Edith Sloan, November 9, 1973, box 449, folder 10, NUL Records.
48. Memo from Curt Moody, NCHE Western Regional field officer, to NCHE executive board, February 2, 1973, “Re: Report of the Western Field Operations,” and Curt Moody, “September Narrative of Activities,” 1972 (?), box 444, folder 5, NUL Records.
49. Curt Moody, NCHE Western Regional field officer, to Edith Sloan, November 28, 1972, box 444, folder 5, NUL Records.
50. Miller, interview by Ross, 26.
51. NCHE, “Legal and Illegal Immigrants,” program priorities for 1976 and 1977, adopted and ratified at the Fourth National Leadership Convention of NCHE, May 28–30, 1976, St. Louis, p. 1, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 03, folder 01.
52. NCHE, “Household Employment: Employer’s Market—Worker’s Nightmare,” press release, May 29, 1976, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 03, folder 01.
53. Shelton, a graduate of Howard University who worked previously with the National Council of Negro Women and the National Urban League, replaced Edith Barksdale Sloan as NCHE executive director in 1976.
54. Anita Shelton, speech transcript, NCHE’s Fourth National Conference, May 28–30, 1976, St. Louis, box 445, folder 1, NUL Records.
55. NCHE, Program Priorities for 1976 and 1977, May 28–30, 1976, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 03, folder 01; “Legal and Illegal Immigrants,” p. 1.
56. Ibid., 3.
57. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 43.
58. Household Employment News 13, no. 1 (March 1981), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
59. Janet Ochs Wiener, “Careers: Standing Up for Household Technicians,” Washington Post, September 30, 1980.
60. Household Employment News (September/October 1982), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
61. Household Employment News (April/May 1982), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
62. Josephine Hulett, “Profiles in Household Work,” June 20, 1972, draft article for Ms., Ms. Magazine Records, series 7, box 39, folder 12, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
63. Miller, interview by Bernhardt.
64. “Bi-Weekly Report of the Special Programs Officer,” January 28–February 22, 1974, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 15, folder 20.
65. Miller, interview by Bernhardt.
66. NCHE, press release, no title, September 27, 1978, box 445, folder 3, NUL Records.
67. Roberts, interview by Lumumba, 14; Lisa Materson writes about a similar transnational, cross-racial solidarity in an earlier period. See Lisa Materson, “African American Women’s Global Journeys and the Construction of Cross-Ethnic Racial Identity,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009): 35–42.
68. Edith Barksdale Sloan, Memo to Affiliates of NCHE, August 22, 1975, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 15, folder 10.
69. Testimony of Gil Foon Hong, September 5, 1974, box 449, folder 11, NUL Records; Marlene Cimons, “Bottom of the Ladder, No Place to Go,” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1975; NCHE News 6, no. 8 (Fall 1975), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
70. Edith Barksdale Sloan, Statement Transcript, Speak-Out for Economic Justice, September 5, 1975, p. 3, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 15, folder 11.
71. National Committee on Household Employment, NCHE News 8 (October 1977). NUL Records, part 3, box 3, folder 449.
72. NCHE, “The Low-Income Woman’s IWY Action Plan,” Report Prepared for the Sixth Annual Conference, October 1978, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 03, folder 04.
73. DC Professional Service Workers Association, informational leaflet, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 01, box 06, folder 12.
74. “Report of the Executive Director to the Annual Meeting of Members,” December 18, 1975, NCHE Records, series 003, subseries 03, box 01, folder 05.
75. NCHE News 9 (April 1978).
76. “Upstairs, Downstairs Revisited: The Dwindling Ranks of Domestics Gain New Respect,” Time, November 13, 1978, p. 112, box 449, folder 2, NUL Records.
77. NCHE, press release, September 27, 1978, box 445, folder 3, NUL Records.
78. Roberts, interview by Van Raaphorst, 113.
79. Reed, interview by Hamburger, 294.
80. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica; Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000); Parrenas, Servants of Globalization; Maria De La Luz Ibarra, “Mexican Immigrant Women and the New Domestic Labor,” in Women and Migration in the US-Mexico Borderlands: A Reader, ed. Denise Segura and Patricia Zavella (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 286–305; Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Terry A. Repak, Waiting on Washington: Central American Workers in the Nation’s Capital (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). See also Christina Mendoza, “Crossing Borders: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work at the Texas-Mexico Divide” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2009); Sharon Harley, ed., Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Monika Batra, “Organizing in the South Asian Domestic Worker Community: Pushing the Boundaries of the Law and Organizing Project,” in The New Urban Immigrant Workforce: Innovative Models for Labor Organizing, ed. S. Jayaraman and I. Ness, 119–41 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2005); Linta Varghese, “Sites of Neoliberal Articulation: Subjectivity, Community Organizations, and South Asian New York City” (PhD diss., University of Texas, 2007); Luis L. M. Aguiar and Andrew Herod, eds., The Dirty Work of Neoliberalism: Cleaners in the Global Economy (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 2006); Doreen Mattingly, “The Home and the World: Domestic Service and International Networks of Caring Labor,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 2 (2001): 370–86; Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez, “Hidden Side of the New Economy: On Transnational Migration, Domestic Work, and Unprecedented Intimacy,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 29, no. 3 (2007): 60–83.
81. See Janice Fine, Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), and Jennifer Gordon, Suburban Sweatshops: The Fight for Immigrant Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Ai-Jen Poo and Eric Tang, “Domestic Workers Organizing in the Global City,” in The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism, ed. Vivien Labaton, Dawn Lundy Martin, Rebecca Walker, and Wilma Mankiller (New York: Random House, 2004); Vanessa Tait, Poor Workers Unions: Rebuilding Labor From Below (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005); Saskia Sassen, “Incompleteness and the Possibility of Making: Towards Denationalized Citizenship,” Cultural Dynamics 21, no. 3 (2009): 227–54; Charles Lee, “Tactical Citizenship: Domestic Workers, the Remainders of Home, and Undocumented Citizen Participation in the Third Space of Mimicry,” Theory and Event 9, no. 3 (2006); Christiane Harzig, “Domestics of the World (Unite?): Labor Migration Systems and the Personal Trajectories of Household Workers in Historical and Global Perspective,” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, nos. 2/3 (2006): 48–73; Gendered Citizenship: Transnational Perspectives on Knowledge Production, Political Activism, and Culture, ed. Kia Lilly Caldwell, Reyna K. Ramirez, Kathleen Coll, Tracy Fisher, Lok Siu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Bridget Jane Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London: Zed Books, 2000).
82. Information based on author interview with Barbara Young, October 2, 2014, New York City.
83. For more on this, see Harmony Goldberg, “Our Day Has Finally Come: Domestic Worker Organizing in New York City” (PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2014), chapter 4.
84. Young, interview by author.
85. Ai-Jen Poo for Domestic Workers United, Organizing with Love: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights Campaign (Ann Arbor: Center for the Education of Women, University of Michigan, June 2010), p. 10, http://www.cew.umich.edu/sites/default/files/Organizingwithlove--FullReport-Cover_0.pdf.
86. For more on contemporary organizing, see Harmony Goldberg, “Our Day Has Finally Come: Domestic Worker Organizing in New York City” (PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2014); Sheila Bapat, Part of the Family? Nannies, Housekeepers, and Caregivers in the Battle for Domestic Worker Rights (New York: Ig Publishing, 2014); Monisha Das Gupta, Unruly Immigrants: Rights, Activism, and Transnational South Asian Politics in the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Hondagneu-Sotelo, Doméstica; Hina Shah and Marci Seville, “Domestic Worker Organizing: Building a Contemporary Movement for Dignity and Power,” Albany Law Review 75, no. 1 (2012): 413–47; Eileen Boris and Premilla Nadasen, “Domestic Workers Organize!” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 12, no. 1 (2009): 413–37; Premilla Nadasen, “Sista’ Friends and Other Allies: Domestic Workers United,” in New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid, ed. Leith Mullings (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 285–98; Fine, Worker Centers; Terri Nilliasca, “Some Women’s Work: Domestic Work, Class, Race, Heteropatriarchy, and the Limits of Legal Reform,” Michigan Journal of Race and Law 16 (2011); Ai-Jen Poo, “A Twenty-First-Century Organizing Model: Lessons from the New York Domestic Workers Bill of Rights,” New Labor Forum 20, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 50–55.
87. NCHE News 7, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1976), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
88. Katz, “Carolyn Reed and the Backstairs Revolt,” 46.
89. Videotape, Bethune Museum opening, 1979, National Council of Negro Women Records, National Archives for Black Women’s History, 001, Series 15, Subseries 7, Folder 09, Item 256.
90. Miller, “Geraldine Miller: Household Technician and Social Activist,” 307.
91. See Gerda Lerner, Living with History: Making Social Change (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 52–69.
92. Bonita Johnson, “‘There’s No More Gettin’ on Their Knees’: An Historical Overview of Household Employment in the US,” MA thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 1982.
93. Reminiscences of Carolyn Reed, 42.
94. “Linking Household Workers,” Off Our Backs 11, no. 1 (January 31, 1981): 15; Household Employment News 12, no. 2 (August 1980), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
95. Janet Ochs Wiener, “Self-Help: Dusting Off New Priorities in the Union of Household Workers,” Washington Post, November 19, 1980.
96. Household Employment News 12, no. 2 (August 1980), Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.