Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  For Black women under slavery, there was no “home” that was free of the demands of the enslaver. Their very reproduction was controlled as a source of profit; their biological families were regularly torn apart and sold away; and the enslaver’s opulent home was the site of their unfree work. Black women, even as they fought to create a home that might be a space of love, saw white femininity defined against them, as something far too delicate for work. In order to exploit Black women’s labor to the utmost, Angela Davis noted, the enslaving class had to release them from “the chains of the myth of femininity,” yet such release did not include freeing them from the perception that they were naturally good at caring for (white) children.6

  During the Civil War, sensing the end of slavery approaching, enslaved people stepped up myriad forms of resistance, from the small and domestic—challenging white women’s monopoly on feminine beauty by wearing their enslavers’ accessories or cosmetics—all the way up to running away to Union lines in what W. E. B. Du Bois characterized as a massive general strike. White women may have found themselves having to do more housework, but after the war they quickly resumed handing that work over to Black women, even if they had to pay them this time around. This historical tension—between the wealthy employers of domestics and the women who did the work—has continued to divide women and women’s movements right up to the present, giving well-off women a material investment in ignoring divisions of race and class.7

  Freed from slavery, Black women fought to control the conditions of their labor. Just as importantly, they fought for time away from work—“to ’joy my freedom,” as historian Tera Hunter wrote in her book of the same title. They refused work conditions not to their liking—notably, despite the wishes of employers, many refused live-in domestic work—and quit jobs that didn’t suit. They rejected anything that smacked of slavery, even as employers desperately tried to re-create it. Any time away from work that formerly enslaved people had was seen, by the white still-ruling class, as idleness, laziness, and “vagrancy,” and they began writing such beliefs into law. Vagrancy, wrote historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman, “was a status, not a crime. It was not doing, withholding, nonparticipation, the refusal to be settled or bound by contract to employer (or husband).” And when the law was insufficient to discipline Black workers, groups like the Ku Klux Klan were always happy to use extralegal violence.8

  Such limitations meant that the work options open for Black workers were limited mainly to domestic work for women and farmwork for men—the same forms of work associated with dirt and nature that whites considered beneath them. In Atlanta in the 1880s, some 98 percent of Black women wage-earners did domestic work of various kinds, from child care to general housework to cooking and laundering. Laundry, before the days of automatic washing machines, was a tremendous chore, but the women who worked as laundresses preferred it because they could do it at their own pace, in their own spaces. It gave them some freedom—and even the opportunity to again resist white women’s monopoly on femininity, by “borrowing” some clothing. And it could be done communally, which made it easier to organize to protect their hard-won working conditions; it’s not surprising that some of the earliest strikes of domestic workers were laundry workers’ strikes. By striking, the laundry workers asserted not only the need for a minimum wage for their work, but also the notion that they were not that work.9

  It was a struggle they had to continually wage. The idea that Black women deserved any non-work time was not one that former enslavers accepted easily. Slavery may have ended, but they still considered it “natural” that Black workers were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Indeed, Black women were paid so little that even the poorest white worker could usually afford some domestic help. Black workers’ pleasure was actively threatening to such a hierarchy. Dance, in particular, something deeply important to Black people as a form of enjoyment and of resistance, was something whites tried to forbid, arguing that it took physical energy that should have been solely focused on work. Yet, Hunter wrote, “dancing hard, like laboring hard, was consistent with the work ethic of capitalism.” It was anything but lazy—but it was “work” that the employer couldn’t capture.10

  The process of criminalizing Black workers through vagrancy laws and other Black Codes was an unveiled attempt at coercing labor and forcing people into socially prescribed roles—one woman was arrested and put in the stockade because she worked as a domestic for a Black family. “It was not enough to work as a servant if one did not labor for whites,” Hunter observed. Two young women who were arrested for refusing to work as servants shattered windows in the jail, declaring, “You cannot make us work.” They were sentenced to sixty days working in the prison laundry. In New York, women sent to reformatory were released only to labor as domestics in the upstate homes of white families, separated from the freedom the city had offered. The prison, then, served as the final punishment for women who were, in Angela Davis’s words, marked as “undomesticated and hypersexual, as women who refuse to embrace the nuclear family as a paradigm.”11

  Meanwhile, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the nuclear family was solidifying around a conception of the middle-class white housewife. She would presumably have a domestic servant or two to help maintain the illusion of the home as a space of love and free of work. White women might work outside the family until they were married, but once wed they were expected to stay home. The majority of women, in surveys of the US population, listed themselves as “housewife” up until 1980, but many women were still working in other women’s homes—“Personal Service: Private Household” remained the largest category of outside-the-house labor for women until 1950. Gender roles might have been calcifying in this time, but within those gender roles there was an equally calcified race and class divide.12

  Tensions between employers and domestics were particularly high around child care. Children, unlike other aspects of housework, required constant attention and made emotional demands; employers expected that their hired workers would shower their children with as much affection as possible and find the job pleasurable. “You gave as much love to their children that you would give to yours almost,” said Dorothy Bolden, a longtime domestic worker. Yet the worker seldom received such love in return. And if she did, it was often expected to be accepted in lieu of cash wages.13

  While child-care workers were expected to pour their love into their work, many of them had families of their own at home who were neglected while they cared for others. The “second shift” was a reality for them long before the term was coined, and they did the same grinding work at home unwaged that they did elsewhere for pay. At a time—the 1930s and 1940s—when the demands of organized industrial labor and the inception of the New Deal meant that most other workers were making gains in wages and successfully shortening their working day, domestic workers’ schedules remained grueling, with workweeks of up to eighty or ninety hours. As a result, like Seally, they spent much more time with their employers’ families than with their own.14

  DOMESTIC WORKERS’ RESISTANCE WASN’T A NEW THING, BUT IN THE wake of the New Deal and with the rise in worker organizing that it brought, domestic workers, too, began to consider unionizing. Like Seally, they wanted firmer boundaries between work and home, they wanted to draw limits on what their employers could demand, and they wanted to make clear that the labor they did in others’ homes was work, not something they did out of love.

  Because the New Deal was constructed as a compromise between crusading liberals and racist southerners within the Democratic Party, domestic work, along with farmwork—the two kinds of work done mostly by Black workers—were carved out of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which set minimum wages and overtime, as well as from Social Security. The New Deal’s Depression-relief programs, meanwhile, continued to place Black women in domestic service and care, upholding the idea that this was their natural role. Domestic workers hoped for some sort of enfor
ceable protections under the National Recovery Administration (NRA), but they remained on the outside. There were some reformers among the employing classes, but even they mostly balked at the idea of government regulations intruding on private homes. In response to calls to regulate paid domestic work, A. R. Forbush, the NRA’s correspondence chief, wrote, “The homes of individual citizens cannot be made the subject of regulations or restrictions and even if this were feasible, the question of enforcement would be virtually impossible.”15

  And so the workers began to organize. The roots of such organizing can be traced back to those early washerwomen’s strikes, when laundry workers demanded recognition for their work and its value. The domestic workers also sought the right to be separated from their work, to be seen as people with lives apart from the floors to be scrubbed and children to be minded. They deliberately evoked the legacy of slavery when demanding better conditions, and that legacy was never far away. In New York, women stood outside at street corners that were dubbed “Bronx Slave Markets,” waiting for employers to come by and pick out a worker for the day’s labor. Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke wrote of the market, “Not only is human labor bartered and sold for slave wage, but human love also is a marketable commodity. But whether it is labor or love that is sold, economic necessity compels the sale.” The degrading conditions inspired women to organize, and to insist that they no longer be treated like chattel.16

  Their work went hand in hand with civil rights organizing. Domestic workers were key to the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and 1956, raising funds, organizing their neighbors, and of course trudging to and from work rather than taking the bus. They led, as historian Premilla Nadasen explained, by mobilizing other workers to boycott, and they developed a notion of “collective community” that “became absolutely essential to the ways in which household workers could then challenge their employers.” The questions of dignity at the heart of the bus boycott were also at the heart of their conflicts at work. And the buses, across the South, were centers where they could also meet to agitate for change on the job.17

  Through organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Union, which Dorothy Bolden created in 1968 in Atlanta, the workers rallied around the idea that their work was skilled labor, not just their “natural” role. They fought for minimum wages, yes, but they also demanded to be called household technicians, a term of respect for their work, rather than maids; they built training programs to further emphasize (and improve) their skills. They listed chores they would not do—scrubbing on their knees among them. Training for household labor wasn’t new: the home economics movement had always seen itself in part as a way to teach future domestic workers to uphold certain standards. But the workers’ control of training sent a very different message about respect.18

  By insisting that they were skilled employees, the domestic workers emphasized that the home was a workplace and that they were not simply “part of the family.” This claim had always been a double-edged sword for household employees. They were not treated like equal family members—they were expected to use the back door, and to make themselves scarce, or to quietly serve, when company came. Said domestic worker Carolyn Reed, “I don’t want a family. I need a job.” Yet in order to improve their conditions, domestic workers often had to negotiate individually—a task that itself took considerable skill, and a skill that domestic worker organizations worked to teach.19

  They won, too, through their organizing and political lobbying, some legal recognition for their work, such as some inclusion in labor protections under the FLSA. But the industry would remain largely unregulated, and Black women left it as soon as other job options opened up to them, opting for waged work that wasn’t shot through with all the intimate conflicts of the family.20

  Those intimate conflicts, after all, were blowing up—as domestic workers quit, middle-class women began to understand just how hard housework was, and to make such recognition political. The National Organization for Women, launched by Betty Friedan of Feminine Mystique fame, supported the extension of the FLSA to household workers, arguing that it would increase the supply of domestic workers—a necessary thing so that more middle-class women could get fulfilling careers.21

  Housework, and who should do it, was a fraught question. For decades, for the housewife, keeping a tidy, loving home had been a task deeply tied up with her identity. To fail to keep a good home was to fail to be a good woman. It was therefore difficult to admit that the lion’s share of that work was being done by someone else. The intimacy, too, of inviting a stranger into the home—the possibility that the employee would learn deeply personal secrets—had always seemed threatening. All of this, historian Phyllis Palmer noted, contributed to the need for employers to see their employees as lesser, as non-people. Hiring Black or immigrant women helped the employer to do this, but it’s worth pointing out that this is more or less how all management appropriates the proceeds of labor. And the middle-class housewife did see herself as management; she was the “mind” while her employee was the “body.” She needed to see herself as the ultimate performer of all the work, even if just as overseer.22

  Cleaning was dirty work for dirty women. The conscription of working-class women to do it allowed the housewife’s hands to stay clean. As sociologist Erin Hatton wrote, “narratives of immorality and privilege” painted housewives as non-workers because of their purity, their blessedness. And meanwhile, the people who cleaned up after them were assumed to be themselves impure—as in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries, where, in the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, women who misbehaved were punished by being put to work doing laundry for strangers—an assumption that affects the women who now serve as personal care attendants for the ill and elderly.23

  Home care work, like the broader field of domestic work, remained associated with both intimacy and dirt, and wrapped up in changing ideas about womanhood and care. In the early New Deal days of state-funded home care, most home care workers were seen as a sort of “substitute mother,” doing general housework and care. But their services soon became more focused on caring for the elderly, even as they themselves were excluded from Social Security coverage that could have supported them in old age. After World War II, historians Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein wrote, the job was reshaped into something that “took place in the home but performed the public work of the welfare state,” and as countries face an “elder boom” in the coming decades, these jobs will continue to proliferate.24

  The work of caring for the ill and elderly was something that, before the Depression, had been done in the family, by private charity (often the church), or relegated to the workhouse or poorhouse. New Deal relief programs turned such care into a distinct profession, as much to create work for women as to fulfill needs. The War on Poverty in the 1960s expanded the program, and then it grew further in the 1970s, as the disability and elder rights movements organized for home-based assistance as an alternative to institutions. Funding, bumped up in the 1960s, began to be sliced back in response to economic crises in the 1970s, however.25

  For many years, home care was dominated by Black women, and they had to constantly struggle against the assumption that they were simply state-funded maids. On the other side, they were also squeezed by registered nurses, whose defined standards allowed them to portray themselves as skilled laborers and reinforced the idea that home care workers were “unskilled.” Despite this perceived lack of skill, as Ai-jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), wrote, home care workers “often served as nutritionists, teachers, physical therapists, psychotherapists, emergency responders, drivers, personal organizers, and nurses.” They also provided the all-important (and taxing) emotional support of listening to their clients and offering compassion. The definition of “skill,” though, continued to have more to do with who the workers were than what they did. Black women were considered “unskilled” no matter how much training they had, or how many lives had rested in their h
ands. As immigrant women began to fill the ranks of home care and domestic work during the 1980s and 1990s, similar assumptions were made of them.26

  In 1974, just after organized domestic workers won inclusion in FLSA protections, the US Department of Labor revoked that coverage from “persons employed in domestic service employment to provide companionship services for individuals who (because of age or infirmity) are unable to care for themselves.” Such workers, even if they were employed through a private agency and had previously been protected by the law, now were exempt from minimum wage and overtime. Despite the fact that home care and other domestic work had long been done by the same people—and public perceptions of both kinds of labor were wrapped up in the same stereotypes—many home care workers were now being stripped of the title of worker. Now they were not only “unskilled” laborers—their work wasn’t considered work at all.27

  US policy continues to assume that family will be the primary caregivers or assistants for people with disabilities or elders. Medicaid now pays for such services for low-income recipients who qualify; when Medicaid won’t pick up the bill, families are stuck finding the money to pay private carers or agencies. Ronald Reagan, proclaiming an official Home Care Week in 1988, declared that the “death of the family ha[s] been greatly exaggerated,” and his official statement noted that “in the home, family members can supply caring and love.” Such association with “family responsibility” was further solidified by Bill Clinton’s welfare reform program passed in 1996. When former AFDC recipients were forced into paid work, many of them wound up doing home care.28