The Domestic Does Her Job
Mrs. Roosevelt can [you] help talk or organize something that will cause these dear housewives whom we work for will realize we are human even if we are a Black race. . . . We do laundry for the family whom we work and have to pay to get our laundry done . . . don’t have time to work for ourselves or even to cook a decent meal of food at home for our husband untill Thursday evening [when] we get what is called one evening out of a week, get off at 2:30 P.M. stores close at 3:30 P.M., a very short time to shop, clean our own house, cook that one decent meal at home. . . .
—To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt from L.G.H., Fort Worth, Texas, 1937
Dear Madam, . . . I have been in close contact with many of the Girls and Women who were and still are housemaids, cooks and other houseworkers and can truthfully state some of the conditions are deplorable. Long hours, poor wages, poor living conditions, a regular Slave’s Existence. . . . I would you could or would write and invite all Housemaids to write to you telling of the unfair and unjust treatment they undergo, and not publish their names [so they will not get] into trouble.
—To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt from “Just a Maid,” Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1937
The domestic’s workplace was the housewife’s home, and conflicts were inherent in the culture’s dichotomous vision of work and home.1 In the period 1920 to 1945, domestics conceived of housework as a job. Like other workers, they devised schemes to make it easier and more efficient, sought employment at the best wages for the shortest hours obtainable, and sporadically organized to press for inclusion within proliferating laws regulating conditions of labor.
Unlike most other wage laborers, however, domestics were expected to feel the same interest in their jobs as in their own homes and families; indeed, throughout the period, the worker was, whenever possible, required to live at her job. Commentators recognized that many workers did not live in, but living out was a variation on the basic ethos of service and its normative structure: being present in the house and accepting room and meals as part of the salary. Since most domestics were women, this often meant that doing a good job taking care of someone else’s home required the worker to sacrifice her hopes for a home of her own or to compromise care for her family and social life with her friends. Coping with the varied demands of the employer’s family inevitably required a married domestic to set limits on the demands of her own family, or vice versa. For the unmarried worker, often a young woman, it meant fighting for time to meet friends, enjoy her youth, and perhaps meet a man to marry and set up her own household.
Domestic workers’ negative feelings about housework largely revolved around issues created by this tension. Workers complained about the job’s long and unregulated hours and about being denied recognition that they were “human,” with lives just like their employers’. Positive feelings about using skills to cook, clean, launder, and care for children in someone else’s home rarely compensated for long hours, especially in a period when working hours were decreasing in most occupations.
Other changes in the technological and social aspects of housework—notably the introduction of more equipment and the shift in middle-class manners to accept drinking and smoking as elements of entertaining at home—exacerbated the central disagreement. At the beginning of the 1920s, housewives and domestics did heavy physical labor, which electric- and gas-driven appliances gradually eased. During the 1930s, the remaining heavy household jobs shifted from housewife to domestic. Social disdain for manual labor manifest in the job hierarchies of the corporate realm now pervaded the home as well, as the middle-class wife turned over some tasks to machines and others to her servant. Exacting heavy labor from the domestic became essential to protecting the health and refinement of the housewife.
Paradoxically, social notions of glamour and sophistication now encouraged middle-class educated women to take on the typically male behavior of smoking and drinking. Housewives entertained at home and, after the repeal of Prohibition, had no excuse for not serving drinks with the cigarettes. Domestics, usually from rural, peasant, religiously observant cultures, found such employers decadent and immoral, their social life as irreligious and questionable as their child-rearing practices.2 The domestic’s picture of serving a spiritually barren home contradicted the housewife’s picture of transmitting superior cultivation to the domestic.
Generally, women who took domestic jobs in this period had no other choices; they were socially peripheral and politically powerless and took housework jobs as a last resort when other employment failed. One author constructed a racial–ethnic map of domestic employment in 1930. The southern housewife had black servants. In Arizona was found “the picturesque Indian maid, or the Mexican senorita with her great black eyes and her buxom figure. The Indians may come from almost any tribe, but Pimas, Papagos, and Hopis predominate.” Mexican women were servants in El Paso; American student girls, Scandinavians, and some Orientals in Portland, Oregon; Canadian, Scottish, and English, and blacks when the former were unobtainable in upper-class Detroit homes; Scandinavians in Minneapolis; young German farm women in Nebraska; West Indians in Connecticut; French Canadians in Vermont; Irish and “colored” in Wilmington; Poles, Slavs, Lithuanians, and Hungarians in Pittsburgh; and Irish in New York City, though employers preferred English, French, Swiss, German, Scandinavian, and Scottish.3 During the 1920s, servants were predominantly migrants from rural areas or immigrants from other countries, sometimes handicapped by lack of English, and often nonwhite. During the 1930s, significant numbers of white women desperate for income and housing took domestic jobs,4 though nonwhite workers, even more hard hit by unemployment, persisted as more than half the work force. Although domestic work offered some advantages, such as not needing to learn English, women took it when they had no other options.
Despite the diverse groups of women who found employment, during the years after World War I domestic service became more racially defined as an occupation. The proportion of white workers declined as second-generation Euro-American women found other jobs. And Afro-American workers “migrated toward the cities of the North and Middle West, . . . [which] relieve[d] the labor market in rural sections of the South [and] made available great numbers of household workers in northern cities that previously had had an insufficient supply to meet the demand, especially since the curtailment of [European] immigration.” By 1930, over 30 percent of female black servants counted in a sample of southern and northern states were working in the North.5
Black women discovered that racial discrimination in jobs occurred in the North as well as the South, which added gall to the occupation’s other hardships.6 Unlike second-generation Euro-American immigrants, black rural migrants found no job alternatives. Viewing the era of the great migration from South to North, historian Jacqueline Jones has concluded, “The white mistress-black maid relationship preserved the inequities of the slave system . . . and thus a unique historical legacy compounded the humiliations inherent in the servant’s job. In the end, a black female wage earner encountered a depth and form of discrimination never experienced by [other immigrant working women].”7 Only marriage to a man with a steady income released black women from reliance on domestic work, and because of discrimination against black male workers, even this respite was erratic.8
The increased number of black women engaged as domestic workers may have spurred the major change of the 1920s—the growing use of day work in place of full-time, resident employment. Throughout this period, workers sought to transform domestic service from a norm of full-time, resident service to a job with limited hours and clearly defined tasks, which was most easily gained through day work. The spectrum of domestic work included full-time living out, part-time, and casual hire. All these forms coexisted during the twenty-five years from 1920 to 1945. One Philadelphia study of the late 1930s found that among domestic workers interviewed, “43.3 percent were full-time workers—approximately one-half resident, the other non-resident workers—34 percent were day workers; 11.9 percent worked part-time,” and 10.8 percent were employed in other jobs. Since black workers, at 73 percent, predominated among Philadelphia domestics, the figures may have slightly overstated nonresident work, though the need for housing during the Depression had increased living in. This study also found that, though workers moved among statuses, they generally chose full-time work or day and part-time work.9
Which work form was chosen varied according to the economics of a region, demographic characteristics of the worker, and alternative occupations available to a woman worker. Nonwhite women generally sought nonresident work. Mexican-American women, like Asian-Americans and Indians, sought day work to protect themselves from “dangers of working in strangers’ homes” and to ease the barrier of not knowing English.10 Evelyn Nakano Glenn concluded in her book about Japanese-American women seeking day work in the San Francisco Bay area that day work might be a means to bring in income without first having to learn English or invest in training or equipment. These women might not know how to do housework in the American fashion, but they had cared for their own houses and were eager to learn American patterns. Native-born white women in domestic work tended to be single and either older or younger than the norm of twenty five to fourty four years and accepted living in, as did foreign-born white women. For these groups, live-in, full-time work provided substitute homes.11
Black women, whose work for white families in white neighborhoods meant isolation in a period of rigid segregation of social activities, pioneered the trend to day work. Day work allowed them time for social connections with friends and kin, especially participation in neighborhood churches. A day worker could behave like a regular worker, with her wages in a bank account instead of a mutual benefit association.12
Housewives and domestics argued chronically about hours, which to workers was the worst aspect of resident domestic service. Even more than live-out work, day work enabled workers to limit the hours they worked. Despite the coexistence of work forms throughout the period, day work became more common during the economic boom of the 1920s. In the Depression 1930s, though hundreds of thousands of workers remained in day work, housewives found it easier to uphold full-time work, living in or out, as the norm.
The 1920s
Day workers controlled their hours better than full-time workers, living in or out. One commentator noted that “the large demand for [day workers during the labor shortage of World War I] gave them the leverage of establishing for themselves an eight hour day and a wage commensurate with that in many lines of industry. Day workers have retained since the World War both the eight hour day and the advanced wages.”13 And outside the South, even black day workers earned more than those working for single families.14
Home expert Christine Frederick even advised, by 1920:
If the income provides for outside service, part of it may be spent with the greatest advantage on forms of day cleaning service. A competent cleaning woman in one day of eight solid hours of work, will go thru a seven-room house, thoroly and completely, except the fine dusting or bureau top arranging, which would take the permanent worker most of two days, and then not be done so well.15
Day workers mainly cleaned and laundered. White day workers primarily cleaned house. Laundry in such households was sent to steam laundries, which developed class-graded services by 1925, poorer homes buying “wet wash” with no drying and richer homes buying full wash, starch, iron, or fold of linens and clothes. Black day workers more often laundered, in addition to cleaning.16
Workers preferred part-time and day work because they could have Sundays off. Elizabeth Ross Haynes reported that older black domestic workers, especially, were “willing to accept a [live-in] place at a much lower wage than another if it gives them their Sundays off so that they may attend their churches.”17 Irish women must also have negotiated work hours, because one commentator reported Irish workers were unpopular because of their attendance at early mass.18
Part-time workers could arrange their work schedules around caring for their own homes and children. Christine Frederick cited the case of a
woman who comes to work at 10 A.M. and stays until 3 P.M. In this period she washes the breakfast and lunch dishes, serves lunch, bakes bread or cake, and prepares greatly toward the evening meal. . . . This arrangement has been working most successfully for about four years—the woman who has a family of her own that she sees off to school before she goes to work, and to whom she is back before they are out of school, and for whom she has the whole latter half of the day.19
Many workers had family responsibilities. The 1920 census recorded that “29.4 per cent of all the female domestic and personal service workers 15 years of age and over were married, while 70.6 per cent were classed as single, widowed, divorced, and unknown.” Many of the widowed or divorced women had dependents, of course, and Elizabeth Ross Haynes reported that a 1923 U.S. Employment Office survey in Washington, D.C., found that almost all such black women had from “1 to 5 dependents.”20 For these women, day work or living out was essential.
Domestic workers preferred the specific tasks usually assigned day workers. In one study workers ranked “preferred jobs,” with cooking at the top, followed by serving and daily cleaning. The first two, it could be argued, were relatively skilled and self-directed work, making a complete job of preparing a meal and seeing it eaten. Daily care of the house, which meant light dusting, sweeping, and straightening, also might be seen as bringing order into disorder, having the satisfaction of completed work.
Tasks this group of Chicago workers liked least were the same ones housewives liked least: washing clothes, washing dishes, and staying with children afternoons or evenings. The workers did not necessarily dislike care of children, or even of the employers’ children, but rather they disliked having the interstices of a full day’s work filled with an additional responsible job. Should the employer’s children have an oft-mentioned attitude of superiority and disdain for the domestic, any feelings of being overburdened were intensified by the children’s arrogance.
Domestics were more likely to have to do unpleasant jobs if they were regular full-time employees, and especially if living in; they were more likely to be asked
to do [a variety of tasks] they considered] no part of their job[:] Care for furnace and for fuel oil; shovel walks; clean basement; Take down screens; Clean woolen garments in naphtha; Bathe and care for dogs and cats; Carry luggage; Make appointments for employer; Manicure nails and perform other personal services; and Make child eat.21
Even in the 1920s, women who wanted to live in were primarily those looking for a home, which usually meant white women whose social life was not so rigidly segregated from employers as were those of black, Mexican, and Indian women. A 1929 YWCA survey found that workers who liked living in did so because of “good food,” “training in housekeeping and homemaking,” and “working in pleasant surroundings, among cultured people, which often meant educational advantages such as books, radio and an excellent opportunity to learn American customs and the English language” (implying that many of the group preferring live-in jobs were recent immigrants). Even for this group, the hazards of living in were lack of definite hours, “which would mean more personal freedom and time for outside interests and activities,” and restriction of “social life with its larger circle of friends and more association with people.” The general feeling was that “the hours [were] too long and the work too confining and too strenuous as a result.”22
By the mid-1920s, housewives responded to domestic workers’ push for day work, part-time work, and full-time, live-out work by mounting investigations and conducting experiments to recruit workers to become full-time, living in or out. Unwilling to accept the transformation of household service into more regularized, live-out, daily employment with hourly wages and limited hours, housewives’ groups turned their efforts to rationalizing a domestic’s full-time employment for a single family. When economic depression hit in 1929, and numerous women were forced to accept living-in or full-time work as a condition of employment, the emphasis on reforming standards within full-time housework swept away efforts to organize day and part-time work. Even though thousands of women continued to be employed as day workers, employers could more easily uphold the full-time norm that preoccupied commentators.
The 1930s and Wartime
Beset by lowered wages and higher demands during the 1930s, domestics lost ground in relation to other workers, who were gaining coverage under New Deal initiatives in hours, wages, retirement and unemployment insurance, and protections for trade union organizing. These initiatives convinced domestics that federal agencies might offer them protection against exploitation. Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt were seen as the presiding geniuses who motivated federal authorities.
From 1933 on, domestic workers wrote to agency heads, especially Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and to the Roosevelts from all over the United States. The letters, addressed to “Mr. Roosevelt,” “Mrs. Franklin,” or “Eleanor Roosevelt,” “Mrs. Perkins,” and so on represent many statuses and levels of education. Some were typed on organizations’ letterhead stationery; others were penciled on blue-lined dime-store notebook paper. Some had excellent spelling and handwriting; others showed hands cramped by age or by the unfamiliar exercise of writing. All had the purpose of telling Washington authorities about what life was like for this group of laborers and asking for information about helpful laws, or reminding officials that these workers had supported Roosevelt’s election.
The remainder of this chapter relies heavily on that correspondence to recount feelings about the work content and social arrangements of domestic work. Letters in the National Archives do not represent all experiences of the almost 2 million workers. They include only English-speakers and, usually, full-time workers, but they do come from every region of the country.23 Did only the most hard-pressed workers, or the most dissatisfied, write to Washington? These questions cannot be answered. But the letters are congruent with reports from YWCA workers’ conferences and from social reformers. And the writers’ tone is more informational than querulous. Writers constructed their pleas within a familiar, societywide vision of domestic work, trusting to familiarity for impact.
Day workers and casual hires did not send letters. One possible explanation is that day workers had gained greater control of their work so that government hours and wages legislation was not so important to them. Women who took casual jobs may also have been acting entrepreneurially or have been too oppressed to write. The notorious Bronx “slave market,” where housewives drove up to hire a day laborer, contained both groups. Some of the West Indian and southern black women evaluated prospective employers, demanded reasonable pay, and used the market to tide them over between regular work. Others, however, were the least competent and most vulnerable, often southern women lured north by dishonest employment agents who took the women’s money and found them no jobs.24
Domestic workers from all sections of the United States depicted a demanding and responsible job, usually poorly paid and nonnegotiable in content. Housewives expected infinite work performed to the direction of the wife–expert; the worker was employed, not for her skill but to execute the housewife’s desire and demand. Little or no recognition was given to the employee’s knowledge, even that presumably gained from many years on the job. Domestics sometimes echoed employers’ ideas that better training would help them and raise the respect of the job.25 But mostly they attributed poor treatment to poor organization of the job, and especially to its exclusion from wages and hour laws that regulated other occupations; housework was not treated like industrial employment.
They advertise for a housekeeper. They ought to word the ad “Wanted a slave who will give every second, minute, and hour of her life for 1.00, 1.25, 1.50 a week.” (Atlanta, Georgia, 1933)
It has reached the point where [domestic service] employment is nothing less than slavery and is bondage for those engaged in it—for the hours are from 6 A.M. till 9, 10 and later into the night. (To Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, August 1933, from Los Angeles, California)
We are honest to goodness white slaves. It was our believed [sic] that slavery had been abolished, but we are very much in doubt of it. The girls here are made to work for room and board, from 6:30 to no set hour at nite. (To Mrs. F. Perkins, January 1934, from Ironwood, Michigan)
Housewives hired domestics on terms unregulated by any public authority,26 and peer-group pressure tended to encourage sharp dealing, or at least paying the lowest wages possible for the maximum labor. The housewife had ready cash to pay wages or a home to offer workers who had no savings and no ability to hold out for a better-paying job. Also, as domestics overheard, the local market of employers, the housewives, talked about wages and standards during their social engagements and essentially set a going market rate that they all honored.
As with slavery, the issue was not having a good or bad master but the system itself. As one woman asking for inclusion in maximum hours laws wrote, “I work for the best people in my town, but even this is not enough. If I complain, just think of those who don’t have employers as nice as mine” (to Mr. Roosevelt, August 1938, Newport, New Hampshire). “There may be some [housewives] who are kind, but the average demands too much” (To Miss Perkins, December 1938, Seattle, Washington). “We have read in history books and other books about slavery of long ago, but the way the housemaids must work now from morning till night is too much for any human being. I think we girls should get some consideration as every other labor class has, even though it is housework” (“Fifteen weary housemaids” to Mrs. Roosevelt, February 1938, no place indicated).
Slavery remained part of the nation’s consciousness in the 1930s, bolstered by films like Gone With the Wind, which premiered in 1939. Slavery was the primary story about black people that was known and shared by white Americans. European immigrants with memories of quasi-feudal relations in Russia, Italy, and the Balkans may have used the term with slightly different connotations. Workers constantly used the word, and it contained racial and power meanings.
Three factors metaphorically and structurally linked housework and slavery: not treating domestics as people independent of their employers, designing housework to give domestics the physically hardest tasks, and demanding almost unlimited working hours. In addition, during the Depression, many employers offered room and board and no wages in return for work.27 Employers accepted and often stressed these inherent elements in the job’s construction; to domestics, such acceptance represented willful ignorance and exploitation.
Housewives had many reasons for ignoring the independent existence of their servants, including their own desires to be ideal wives and mothers and yet to be partially freed from the pressures of family service. Unwilling to challenge the dominant belief in housewifery as women’s most laudable existence, middle-class women upheld the virtue of homemaking and demeaned the worker who freed their time and energies. To reconcile the search for time and development separate from housework, the wife had to turn over labor to a servant and to see herself, simultaneously, as the home’s caretaker. She wanted to get some of the work done by another woman and take credit for it herself. The less said about her servant’s competence or importance the better.
Turning over the work of cleaning up intimate areas of life violated strong feelings of family privacy. Servants might gossip about family oddities in their clubs or church groups or make judgments about family behavior. Criticisms of their employers’ morality appear in many of the letters to Washington. Hiring someone of no significance, rendered as invisible as possible, mitigated employers’ fears of intrusion and revelation.28
Housewives may have sought “alienage” between themselves and the domestic, whether of race, class, national group, or age, for two additional reasons. Hiring a servant of a lower economic class, foreign origin, or stigmatized racial status increased the housewife’s power in setting the conditions of work; it also protected her sense of distance from the worker. A housewife could more easily feel herself “subject,” able to believe that her experiences constituted reality, and to deny similar capacity to her servant, the “other.”29 Organizing the work so the domestic did the heaviest jobs helped the employer to see herself as the “mind” of the job and distinct from the employee, who represented the “body.”
Domestics repeatedly complained about not being seen as human, and of housewives’ failing to recognize any commonality of capacities and needs. Assertion of need might arouse hostility. One black woman wrote, “I ask the lady whom I work for to grant me a few hours to care for some real business and bills that had to be seen after and I was sorry I spoke about it. I was answered with such grievious [sic] words” (to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 1937, from Fort Worth, Texas).
Hours of work were the major contention through the 1930s and the war years. Housewives expected servants to help them meet the demands of the 24-hour-a-day schedule, and public discussions that accepted full-time service as the norm for the job implicitly encouraged such an aspiration. Domestics argued that they were hired for specific tasks or hours like other workers; anything they could not do in that time was the housewife’s responsibility.
I am working at the rate of 13 hours per day with no days off. (Alexandria, Virginia, 1933)
I leave home quarter of 7 every morning. I finish 9:30 P.M. When I get home it is 10 o’clock. . . . The people treat me as one of their family and I suppose I should not kick. But—I certainly would like to know more about Domestic rules and laws if there be any. (To NAACP, April 25, 1931, from New York City)30
Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt
Dear madam
I have heard of your great work among the poor and decided to write you asking isn’t there any thing to be done about private family work where girls and women do the work of 4 people and earn half the pay of one. For instance I work for some people they pay $5 a week. I do all of the cooking, laundry, cleaning and stay with the child some night work every day from 8:30 untill 7 oclock except Thursday and Sunday. On those days work from 8:30 untill 1:30 or 2 oclock. Isn’t there some kind of a law that could help this dire situation among the working girl.
A Working Girl
Indianapolis, Ind
Nov. 7, 1938
Letters like the above form a litany in the correspondence files of the Women’s Bureau, various New Deal agencies, and organizations representing workers such as the NAACP and the YWCA. The complaints are ordinary and repetitious, like housework itself. They gain power from repetition and piquancy from slight variations.
To enable domestics to speak more fully, I will quote from a number of letters and intersperse workers’ comments with some daily and weekly work schedules. The following was presented at a 1942 meeting of women workers:
Schedule of a Week’s Work
7:00–8:30—Straighten living room and front rooms
8:30–9:15—Breakfast—the family eats in installments. During this time, plan the meals for the day and order from the market.
9:15–9:30—Breakfast dishes
9:30–10:15—Upstairs—beds, bathrooms
10:15–11:30—Monday: washing
Tuesday–Thursday: cleaning thoroughly one room, or scrubbing various places
Friday: thorough cleaning of house
11:30–12:30—Dessert for evening and prepare lunch
12:30–1:00—Lunch
1:00–1:30—Dishes
1:30–2:00—Odd jobs
2:00–4:30—Rest—on call
4:30–8:00—Prepare and serve dinner; dinner dishes Time off: Thursday after 1:30; Sunday after 2:00 Household: 2 adults, 2 children; 11 rooms, 3-1/2 baths. Other help, none.31
This schedule adds up to a 79-hour workweek, well within the range found in a northern Illinois YWCA survey of 1938, in which the average reported by 263 workers was “84 hours per week with a minimum of 75 hours and a maximum of 92.”32 Servants put in much longer hours than housewives doing their own work typically reported. A 1929 survey conducted by Hildegarde Kneeland for the Bureau of Home Economics of the Department of Agriculture concluded that “housekeeping seems to be housekeeping whether it’s north, south, east or west.” Typical times worked by the housewives ranged only between the shortest work week of 47-1/2 hours and the longest of 53-1/2 hours, with “food taking the largest toll of hours.” Average time allotted to jobs was similar in rural and urban households, with minor differences, as follows:
cleaning—7-1/2 hours per week
laundry—5-1/2 hours per week
mending—1-1/2 hours per week
sewing—4-1/2 hours per week
Preparing meals (rural, 15-1/2 hours per week city, 10-1/4 hours per week)
Dishwashing, clearing up (rural, 7 hours, 40 mins/wk city, 5 hours, 11 mins/wk)
Care of family and management (rural, 4-1/2 hours & 1-3/4 hours city, 6-3/4 hours and 4-1/2 hours)33
This minimalist account of tasks contrasts with the schedule of daily hours: no serving, less cleaning, and no accounting for being available during afternoon times.
How were days organized to stretch out so much longer for the domestic? How did her day differ from the housewife’s in time spent and in jobs done? One woman reporting to the Women’s Bureau described a full week’s work. On Saturday, as an example, she
got up 5:15 fixed furnace, got breakfast, made beds, polished nickle in bathroom and kitchen, polished tub and other fixtures; took floor brush, scrubed and polished tile floor in bath room, scrubed and polished floor in kitchen, washed windows, wiped woodwork, scrubed and polished steps to basement and washed banisters. swept all walks and front porch, washed silk stockings, went to grocery, helped make peanut bread; trimmed dried beef, washed vegetables, put things away, scrubed eggs, cut up vegetables to put in soup, fixed supper, made salad and desert. Washed dishes, fixed breakfast, will now fix furnace. Was naged all the time I got supper; said I had no pep was too slo.
Unusual elements in this account are the outdoor work, windows, and furnace, generally considered men’s work. In addition, husband and wife both worked outside the home so she could count on no help from the housewife. In this instance, the domestic had replaced the housewife and did not show the pep the housewife considered appropriate.34
Although many domestics worked in households where the wife was not employed, hiring a full-time domestic to substitute for an employed wife was common in some cities, especially in homes with young children. In a 1935 St. Louis study, 70 percent of households hiring domestic workers had children. In nearly one-third of these households “the employers were engaged in full time gainful occupations with an additional 5 per cent in part-time employments. This places full responsibility for decisions upon the employee—at the same time allowing the worker to work without immediate supervision.”35
Domestics worked around the perimeters of the family’s beginning and ending its work- and school day, so domestic workers’ hours began earlier and ended later than for most occupations. Whether the domestic lived in or commuted to work, her days began early and ended late.
My hours are 7:30 A.M. to 6 P.M. and they want me to look after the [three-year-old] boy two or three evenings while they go out. (To Frances Perkins, August 1933, from Plattsburg, New York)
The work consists of . . . from 7 A.M. until 8 P.M. everyday but Sunday and Thursday and of course, on those two days I arise at 5:30 A.M. in order to get through with my work by 1 o’clock in order to have the afternoon and evening off. (To Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, July 1933, from Dayton, Ohio)
Work started between 5:15 and 8:00 depending on whether domestics were on the premises to begin the day as soon as they arose or traveled to work from their own homes. Most seem to have been at work by breakfast time. Departure time for those living out was after preparing the evening dinner or after serving and cleaning up the meal. If living in, their evening hours might be spent “on call” watching children while the parents were out. If living out, servants might still be expected to child-sit two or three evenings a week: “I don’t stay where I work and have to pay for my room. If they want me to stay at nights I’m obliged to, and that makes me have to stay there almost every other night.”36
Days off were socially recognized as half a day Thursday (or Wednesday) and Sunday (a convention that protected the housewife’s Sunday lunch but denied church attendance to the domestic). Pressures for full-time service even threatened to erode these free times.
Even on your supposed to be days off have to do a days work before you leave. Gee! Whizz! you so darn tired you feel like staying there and going to bed to rest up for the next days’ 13 hour grind from 7:30 to 8:30. (To Mary Anderson, Women’s Bureau, November 1933, from Dayton, Ohio)
I put in from 72 to 76 hours a week. The only time I have off is Thursday evening and afternoon. Sunday afternoon with every other Sunday evening off. When I leave in the afternoon every thing has to be done.” (To Miss Perkins, 1933, Racine, Wisconsin)
Dishes [might] be left on the day off . . . for the worker to wash when she returns.37
My day off. I get off after lunch at 12:30 when served. I get off at 1:30 or 2 P.M. I am told by this lady to be back at 8 P.M. to turn on a flood light in yard. (To Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, January 1941, Los Angeles, California)
A servant who read about the California Day of Rest Law, which required employers to allow employees one 24-hour period a week off from work, in her YWCA Employees’ Club bulletin and asked for a full day off reported her employers’ response: “She wanted luncheon served and wouldn’t hire a girl who wasn’t willing to stay in until 1:30 P.M. on her day off. What do we do about it?”38
Another variation of the argument over hours between housewives and domestics was the question of time “on call.” Most employers did not assign specific work during the afternoon between cleaning up lunch dishes and starting dinner. But domestics were not allowed to leave the work premises and were usually expected to answer telephones and doorbells and perhaps to mind a napping child. Whether or not this time constituted work, and how much work, was debated throughout the 1930s. In legislative or voluntary limitation of hours, how was this time to be counted?
One version would count the following schedule, for instance, as a 60-hour week:
7:00 | Rise, get breakfast and eat |
7:45 | Sweep 2 piazzas, clean 2 bathrooms |
8:30 | Dishes |
9:00 | Make dessert |
10:00 | General cleaning |
11:30 | Start dinner |
12:15 | Dinner at noon |
1:00 | Dishes |
2:00 | Rest period, answer telephone and door |
5:30 | Feed animals |
6:15 | Supper and dishes |
7:30 | Free for evening |
Time off: Thursday afternoon from 2:00 | |
Sunday afternoon from 3:00 (frequently all day Sunday, especially in summer) | |
Holidays—half day; all day Christmas | |
Household: 2 adults, one school-age child; dog and cat.39 |
To count this as a 60-hour week, the daily 2 to 5:30 “rest period” was not considered work. Most housewives’ groups argued, in discussing hourly wages, that every two hours on call should be counted as one hour of work because no physical labor was required. Most domestics argued that two hours spent at a place the employer required and often serving as the employer’s message taker and doorkeeper was two hours of work. So long as the occupation remained unregulated, the vision that prevailed was the employers’.
Hours were significant because housework was physically demanding and solitary. Having to spend hours without pay further deprived the worker of a life of her own. Even when wartime competition for labor forced employers to raise wages, they did not reduce hours. As one group of domestics said during the war, “Time-off is important not only to health but also to morale. The worker . . . needs time so that she may do her share in national defense as an individual in her own right,” instead of enabling only housewives to participate.40
In general, cleaning and cooking were set tasks, and an array of other jobs might be assigned. Expectations varied by region and by the racial and ethnic background of employers, as well as by the composition of the employing household and its idiosyncratic habits. Little specialization characterized the occupation. The titles of “maid,” “general houseworker,” “cook,” and even “laundress” were used for workers who did approximately the same range of tasks. Although the laundress was more likely to be part-time and to have fewer expected tasks, all of these workers might be asked to range through “cooking, keeping house and nursing all in one job” (to Mr. President, January 1937, La Grange, Louisiana) as well as washing clothes.41 Particular tasks were not separate and unrelated jobs, but rather the cumulative work performed by a domestic during a normal workday.
Work usually began in preparation for breakfast. Baking for all meals, including breakfast, was not extraordinary. As Ellen Woodward noted in a letter about regional autonomy in Works Progress Administration (WPA) women’s training programs, cooks trained for southern households needed to know how to roll good biscuits—not a usual requirement in the North and West. Baking, of course, required a hot oven, and burns and heat were hazards. A Wichita correspondent reported, “It is nothing unusual for a girl to lose 15–20 pounds in a very short time in many of places. In summer they are shut up in hot kitchens, the oven often at 500° F. or not much better, to keep the [rest of the] house cool. The girls’ bodies are covered with the prickly heat” (to Miss Perkins, July 1934, Wichita, Kansas).
On Mondays, laundry work traditionally occupied the remainder of the morning. Even with washing machines, the work was heavy:
My sister works for five dollars a week . . . for a family of five. . . . She must wash clothes twice a week and each time washes enough to clothe a family of ten and not five. You can say the washing machine will do the washing but it is my sister who must put up, take down, and iron these clothes. (To Mrs. Perkins, July 1935, no place indicated)
Other mornings, cleaning occupied the time between breakfast and lunch. Part of the time was spent dusting, vacuuming, and clearing clutter and debris (such as ashtrays) out of the public dining and living rooms: taking “care of the general appearance of the home.” Bathrooms were scrubbed and towels cleared away. One room might be given a thorough cleaning, which could entail moving all the furniture to vacuum more thoroughly and to clean walls and even, perhaps, lifting rugs and carrying them outside to beat by hand.42
The employer often did the day’s shopping during the morning cleaning period. When she returned, there might be packages to carry in. One letter described the drudgery of working for a particularly thrifty housewife:
Often [she] buys her groceries on week-ends at bargains. She comes home with those huge paper sacks, a foot in diameter at the base and three feet high, filled with canned goods, flour and other heavy articles. These, the girl must lift out of the car and carry into the house. A protest is just ignored. Also 5 gallon water bottles must be lifted out of the car. These are only examples. (To Miss Frances Perkins, July 1934, Wichita, Kansas)
Then the domestic prepared lunch. The elaborateness of catering varied by household, but it was taken for granted that meals should be prepared, served, and cleaned up at noon and in the evening.
Afternoons had more variety than mornings. They embraced ironing, mending, child watching, silver polishing, perhaps yard work or cleaning the auto, “special” jobs added onto basic housecleaning, cooking, and laundry work. Some time was usually on call, responsible for telephone answering, message taking, and turning away salespeople from the door.
By 5:00 P.M. at the latest, dinner preparation began. The domestic-cum-cook seems to have been expected to adapt to the housewife’s wishes on all occasions. As one cynical correspondent described a possible day:
The lady goes out and returns with four extra for dinner after ordering dinner for only two—dinner ready on time—and Mrs. takes 3 or 4 cans of beer from the refrigerator out to the front porch where the six relax and drink their beer—until the dinner is ruined. And the Mrs. says Julia these potatoes are stiff, and this ice tea is as warm as if it had been on the stove. Julia dare not say who was to blame, but goes back to the kitchen and waits again for another hour—and finally finishes her evening work around nine o-clock, tired and weary from such draging along all day from 7 A.M. (To Miss Anderson, April 1942, Springfield, Ohio)
The convention of dinner service was that the family left the table before it was cleared for washing the dishes. As the same writer put it, “[they] sit at the table and smoke for half hour or so—all which held the maid at least until 8 o-clock.”
Domestics could not plan a regular end to the day because of the sociable nature of meals. Promptness at meals was not fashionable, and domestics found their workday lengthened by the family’s and guests’ lateness in coming to the dinner table. Dinner was served between 7:00 and 7:30 so that the conclusion of the meal and cleanup kept workers until at least 8:00 and perhaps as late as 9:30 or 10:00. Even though the domestic might not have worked constantly from the morning through the evening meal, she was held at the place of work for twelve or fourteen hours.
Cooks regularly complained about the presence of guests at dinner. Either they were given too short notice or too little food, or simply more work cooking for extra mouths, “with no extra money” (to Mrs. Perkins, August 1933, Raleigh, North Carolina, from “an interested colored friend”).
After cleaning up from dinner, the domestic might have to turn down beds for the household, “the last straw at the end of a 12 hour day.”43 Or she might have to mind the children. Rarely were domestic workers hired for full-time child care. Generally, domestics “looked out” for children during the day’s work. And the domestic worker was considered regularly available for baby-sitting when the housewife and her husband were out during evenings. If she lived in, “after working from 6:30 or quarter of seven in the morning till 8:30 P.M. or quarter of nine (with no rest period), [she] has to stay in ‘with the children’—sometimes actually out of bed until one or two. All this though her job be not with the children” (to Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 1937, Ilion, New York).
The question of discipline raised immense tensions. Children took the cue from their parents that the domestic was not someone of consequence. “A great many places the children will strike a person and the women will only say ‘don’t pay attention to children’” (to Women’s Bureau, November 1933, Chicago, Illinois). This domestic “person” described well the employing women’s attitude that what happened between children and the domestic was not important, except, of course, that the children were not reprimanded for treating domestics as inferiors.
You can’t scold them because they will fire you. (To Mrs. Roosevelt, November 1933, New Britain, Connecticut)
The children treated me as dirt beneath their feet, simply because I was “nobody but the maid.” To a girl of my age, such treatment, by such little children, only caused me to dislike them, and I do not want to bear malice in my heart towards anyone. (To Dear Gentlemen, NAACP, June 1934, New York)44
Hard physical labor spread over a long day with few social pleasures led to complaints of ill health that were strikingly at odds with the usual depiction of housework as healthy for the housewife because it gave her light activity. Some problems, such as being confined indoors, were unique to the domestic. One advocate of shorter hours for domestics pointed out the limitations of indoor work:
with only a few hours off once a week in the afternoon and evening. . . . The cooks and maids are thus deprived of sunshine and fresh air for a whole week although some of them are permitted to go out in the evening at times. But they are deprived of the health-giving rays of the sun. (To Mr. F. D. Roosevelt, April 1938, Chicago, Illinois)
Other problems would seem to be endemic to the work of the house itself and were avoided by any woman who could hire someone else to suffer them. Foot pains, for instance, were constant. Though home economists advised that many household tasks could be done sitting down, domestic workers often found household equipment the wrong height and position. Instead, servants spent hours on their feet, standing to clean, to cook, and to iron.
Lifting was another hazard. Model codes suggested by domestic workers advocated that
no woman engaged in this work shall do any outside work such as washing the automobile, cleaning the garage, sweeping the walks or yard or any such work. . . . No woman shall do heavy work such as waxing floors, or polishing them, washing windows, or woodwork within the house. Nor any other heavy work apt to be a physical strain to a woman.45
The normal hardships of housework became more acute for women who did the work full time and every day. One correspondent reported, “One maid I know was discharged when her hands became sore, and consequently infected from the action of strong cleaning agents which she was compelled to use” (to Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 1937, Ilion, New York). By the late 1930s, such agents as lye for dissolving grease, oxalic acid for bleaching, gasoline and benzine for cleaning, kerosene, and turpentine were in common use.46
Both work hazards and exploitation were felt to fall more heavily on very young, very old, and nonwhite workers: the less powerful the worker, the more abused she was in hours demanded and rest denied.
They are harder on the colored woman. They seem to think that a colored woman have no feeling tiredness. They put 16 and 18 hour work on them and they have to work every inch of their life to get it done and that is all day and best of the night. (To Mr. President Roosevelt, July 1933, Baltimore, Maryland)
A woman from Washington, probably black, reported the backbreaking load that seems often to have been placed on black domestics: “I cook, wash for two Rooming houses on hand. She doesn’t have a washing machine. Scrub on my hand and knees and iron, clean, wash windows, scrub wall[s]” (to Mrs. Roosevelt, January 1942, Washington, D.C.).
When researchers from the New York State Department of Labor interviewed domestic workers in 1948,
There were [still] many complaints about window cleaning and polishing floors with paste wax. . . . There were also innumerable complaints about having to scrub floors on one’s knees[:] “Washing windows hurts my arms and makes my sides sore. They want five or six floors washed on your knees, but when they [employers] do it, they use a mop.” “Windows and this knee crawling! Sometimes I come home with my knees swollen.”47
Hard work and long hours did not pay off in good wages. Throughout the period, wages seem to have had more relation to the worker’s power relative to the employer than to available supply or local living costs. In an occupation with almost completely elastic demand, wages depended upon what the housewife could pay and how many women were desperate enough to take the job at that price. Throughout the 1930s stories appeared of women taking jobs for room and board only.
Food was a source of grievance. Most workers, even if only dailies, expected at least one meal a day. Often, they claimed, so little food was provided that they ended the day hungry. Others said they were given “their old food they wouldn’t eat their-selves” (to Miss Perkins, April 1933, Chicago, Illinois). Meals were “hastily eaten, causing stomach agonies,—or in between acts, thus usually arriving at the ‘cold’ stage,—and the night meal . . . eaten at such a late hour, making the fast between the two meals of too long duration for comfort” (to President Roosevelt, March 1937, Los Angeles, California).
Room was often no better than board. One YWCA survey reported from California “examples of what has been asked of girls we have sent out on low-priced jobs in homes”:
1. Sleep on davenport in room through which family passes to go to bathroom.
2. Sleep on cot which is put in living-room at night.
3. Sleep on back porch where the wash tubs and garbage cans are kept.
4. In a room over the garage. Numerous cases of this.
6. In same bed with a child.
7. In same bed with the grandmother.
8. Maid often refused use of bathtub where there is only one bathroom in the house.48
The unregulated nature of the employment, coupled with no reasonable assessment of the value of room and board, meant that housewives could demand full-time work in return for housing. This practice was easier to justify if some tutorial purpose might be implied, and housewives talked of themselves as transmitting standards to the young, the immigrant, and the educationally deficient black and Mexican.
In general, housewives took advantage of many women’s need for housing, food, and income and the lack of alternative available jobs to pay as little as possible. Even patriotism did not diminish the search for bargain labor. As one woman reported:
There seems to be much discussion among the officers’ wives employing domestic help as to how much should be paid for twelve and fourteen hours’ work including room and board on the fort. Some of the wives have taken advantage of the fact that the poor little “private’s” wife is so anxious to remain close by her husband on the fort that she will slave all day long in a home for her room and board without pay. This has tended to reduce the morale of the little wife as she has no spending money and no free time to call her own. Officers’ wives, above all, should know better. (To Committee of Fair Employment, May 1942, from Fort Lewis, Washington)49
Low wages exacerbated health problems:
How can we poor tired of life girls make ends meet, with having teeth looked after eyes and glasses to be cared for and life insurance to pay, with this sinful wages. No wonder they girls help themselves to things when not noticed. I am over 50 and much worried about my future therefor myself as well as other girls doing housework. (To Dear Kind Father President Roosevelt, August 1933, Detroit, Michigan)
Employers paid attention to possible infections transmitted by workers but not to work hazards. By the early 1930s, the Community Employment Service, a black-sponsored and directed training program in Atlanta, sent prospective employers a health history for workers, which gave physicians’ reports on “ears, tonsils, teeth, nails, pulse, heart, lungs, urinalysis, and blood test.”50 WPA household employment programs paid for workers to get Wassermann tests for syphilis. And by the early 1940s, twenty-three commercial placement agencies in New York City were cooperating with the city health department and the child welfare committee of the county medical society to require tuberculosis testing.51
Inadequate clothing also affected health. As a woman wrote from Galveston, Texas:
Me myself when i go to work in the morning i hadter leave my house at Six thurty to get to my work for seven o’clock . . . and what so hard on we poor colored women [is] we dont make enought to ride the Bus. i walk a mile every morning to get to my work. . . . And you know we cant buy a coat to keep us warm going to work. (To Mr. President Roosevelt, December 1938)
Mistresses took the responsibility of providing uniforms, but few day workers wore them; some took pride in carrying work clothes. Workers did not have to pay for uniforms, a bonus, but they tried to avoid these marks of service.
Day and Night
I’m a cheerful little earful of “Yes,
ma’am’s” through the day;
I’m a merry (oh, yes, very!) maid at
work along the way;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Oh, I’m prim and very trim in my uniform
at night;
Dinner ended, house amended, then I’m
out of sight.
Off to dance—there’s a chance
of acquiring a beau
Who will change me to a lady with
an M.R.S., you know.52
Throughout the 1930s and the war years, domestic workers were generally depicted as young women who took housework jobs in the interlude before marriage. Images of youth sustained the notion of the houseworker as helper to and pupil of the housewife. Seeing housework as a life stage instead of lifetime employment mitigated concern about lack of regulation in the job. Young people did not have family responsibilities or need adult wages or time to spend caring for their own households. Images, however, only partially coincided with reality.
Many young women did get wages, room, and board for housework, especially to support attending school. Most houseworkers, even when described as girls, were adult women and often had families. For them full-time work generally meant living out and commuting to and from the job. Cash wages were essential because they purchased food, housing, and transportation and provided for dependents. Wages for living out were typically lower than wages for living in (adding a moderate value for room and board) and probably contributed to making the job harder for women of color relative to white women. As one woman, almost certainly white, said:
Sleep-in, you do not have to travel back and forth in cold weather. Hours are longer, but not as hard, because work is planned for a whole week. You get more pay on a sleep-in job. You save on room rent and food. It’s much easier than day work, which works you too hard.53
A major tension for domestics was the pull between an employer’s desire for full attention to her home and the worker’s need to care for her own home and family. Depression and wartime economies that deprived households of male income may even have increased the proportion of domestic workers responsible for supporting families.
During the Depression 1930s, housework was the most accessible job for adult women. “A special analysis of 1930 census data on gainfully employed homemakers [found that] 16 percent of ‘servants, waitresses, etc.’ were the sole wage earner in their family—a larger proportion than for any other occupational group.” Over a third of women homemakers working as domestics were heads of households. Families with a woman head and without regular access to male income were the most needy, but even in multi-earner families, many had substantial reliance on domestic workers’ incomes.54
Studies conducted in Baltimore and Philadelphia during the late 1930s to collect evidence in favor of domestic workers’ inclusion in Social Security retirement provide selective data that accord with anecdotal information from other parts of the country. One finding from the all-black Baltimore study and the heavily black Philadelphia study was that “the large proportion of nonresident full-time workers, in contrast to the small group of resident full-time workers, and the relatively large proportion of regular day workers, are typical of Negro household workers in general. A study of white domestic workers would probably have shown considerably more resident and fewer day workers.” The studies also found that, among black women in the prime employment years of twenty-five to fifty-four, most worked in domestic service. And, as accorded with their adult status, the majority of workers were married, widowed, divorced, or separated. More than half had dependents to support; 37 percent of the single women in Baltimore reported “other persons dependent on their earnings.”55
For these women, the return of the norm of day work in the labor shortage of the immediate postwar period represented recognition of their family and work responsibilities. By the late 1940s, however, the “job description—day worker—household” required a hard day’s work. Tasks required included
1. Cleaning—May clean entire house, including washing and waxing floors and woodwork, dusting and polishing furniture, making beds and changing linen, cleaning blinds, refrigerators and stoves, vacuuming rugs, bed, furniture, and drapes. 2. Laundry—Washing and ironing, white and colored cottons, linens, silks, rayons, children’s clothes.56
Women taking these jobs could do the work in their own homes only as a second shift of hard physical labor.
For the domestic worker, the halo around the words home and domestic seemed ironic. She gained virtue by tending another woman’s home and earning money for her own. By doing “woman’s work,” she slighted her woman’s duty to care for her own family. With only solitary wives responsible for a home’s care, the domestic’s home inevitably suffered when the bulk of her labor went into other women’s homes.
Dominant cultural images depicted servants as women without independent lives and interests. Domestics were envisioned as single women, young or old, cut off from any attachments except those to the employer’s family. Domestic workers’ families were not assumed to need care or to engage in the same relationships as their employers. When the domestic worker sought to defend her time and energies for her own home life, ironically she appealed to an image that justified her labor in another’s home but not her protection as a worker.