Phyllis Palmer’s Domesticity and Dirt first appeared on bookshelves in 1989. Re-reading the book in 2018, I am struck by Palmer’s modern analysis of how domestic work both reflected and created American ideas about race, class, and gender. Historians writing now on domestic work agree that the occupation highlights complex and often conflicting questions about domesticity, waged labor, familial privacy, labor politics, racism, and class exploitation. These scholars continue to cite Palmer’s findings nearly thirty years after her book’s original publication date. Domesticity and Dirt is foundational, a classic in the field that still has a lot to tell us about domestic work as a kind of labor performed by both unpaid middle-class housewives and paid household workers and shaped inexorably by questions of race and class, domesticity and dirt.
Given this ongoing scholarly engagement with Palmer’s work, I was surprised to read the book’s reviews. None of the reviewers panned the book but neither did they identify it as a new kind of scholarship on women, work, race, and gender. Rosalyn Baxandall, a historian of women and gender writing in the Journal of American History, concluded that Domesticity and Dirt was “provocative” but “promises more than it delivers.”1 Both of these themes echoed in other reviews. Louise Tilly, a historian of working women, agreed that the book was “provocative and original.”2 Labor historian Richard Oestreicher, on the other hand, seconded Baxandall’s critique that “the book promises more than it delivers.”3 How could a book that has had such persistence have received such mixed reviews?
Certainly, the book’s central thesis continues to be provocative. Phyllis Palmer argued that the conditions of working-class women’s paid household labor reflected cultural expectations of white middle-class women’s domesticity as much as labor market forces. Between World War I and World War II, Palmer explained, merely maintaining a clean house and healthy children was no longer enough for middle-class white women to achieve ideal femininity. In this period, middle-class housewives (or MCHs, as Palmer calls them) felt newly responsible for creating a refined household. Added to middle-class women’s traditional responsibility for housework was now the necessity to “be efficient managers and gracious hostesses, combining professional skills with the social style of the cultivated and wealthy.”4 Middle-class white women also tried to appear “educated, a voting citizen, intelligent and independent, good fun, sexy and attractive, but also domestic, home loving, and monogamous.”5 These new gendered expectations were not easily realized. Middle-class white women’s roles now covered a vast territory of social grace, sexual enthusiasm, maternal nurturance, and gracious domesticity.
These new standards of middle-class femininity also required more labor than one woman could provide, especially if she wanted to be “good fun, sexy and attractive.”6 Middle-class women solved their labor problem by farming the housework out to poorer women, who were increasingly women of color. White, middle-class housewives now took a managerial role in their households, delegating the home’s heaviest tasks to working-class women of color. Palmer noted that this division of labor both confirmed housewives’ feelings of racial and class superiority and strengthened cultural associations between women of color, dirt, and heavy manual labor. Paid household labor, then, was not just any job. It also performed significant cultural work in both confirming and creating, as Palmer argued, interwar “notions of womanhood, of whiteness and nonwhiteness, and of middle-classness as well as working-classness.”7 Palmer demonstrated that these ideas were further reinforced by government programs that trained working-class women for domestic labor but offered middle-class women home economics classes. Unsurprisingly, middle-class women, hungry for as much labor as their money could buy, refused to support labor protections for domestic workers and, while they talked a lot about standardizing domestic work, insisted that the uniqueness of each home necessitated giving middle-class employers the prerogative in managing household labor.8
Although Domesticity and Dirt’s reviewers recognized the book’s promise, they could not have foreseen its prescience. Palmer’s argument forecasted changes in the historical discipline that scholars today take for granted. Many historians in the 1980s were still writing social histories that catalogued the lives of disempowered populations and understood race and gender as relatively fixed descriptors of personal identity. The late 1980s and early 1990s was a moment of profound change in this regard. In 1986, three years before Palmer’s book came out, Joan Scott suggested that gender not only separated women from men but constituted a “useful category of historical analysis.”9 Heeding Scott’s call, historians began to move beyond simply recovering women’s lives to also exploring how gender ordered society and created social meaning. Two years after Palmer published Domesticity and Dirt, Kimberle Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to describe how systems of power like race, class, and gender reinforced one another and shaped the experiences of white women, women of color, queer women, and working-class women in varying and ever shifting ways.10 That same year, David Roediger helped launch the field of “whiteness” studies when he argued that white people, too, had a racial identity that was historically contingent.11 Palmer’s book also emerged at the very beginning of what historians now refer to as “the cultural turn,” a methodological practice that valued cultural discourse as much as it did statistical studies and viewed the construction of identity as an ongoing process that must be explained and explored.12 All of these ideas fundamentally transformed historical scholarship and changed the way that scholars understood the nature of historical change.
This scholarship reverberates throughout Domesticity and Dirt. Palmer confronted what she called “the racialization of white womanhood” and explained how changing understandings of middle-class white femininity reinforced racial and gender hierarchies in the home.13 While scholars like David Roediger analyzed white working men’s fight for “the wages of whiteness,” Palmer showed that definitions of whiteness were also developed and elaborated through gendered domesticity.14 Previous histories of domestic service recounted the daily tasks required of workers, examined the markers of class and race that existed in household work, and catalogued workers’ and employers’ complaints.15 Although Palmer used census numbers and first-person testimony, she argued that cultural ideas about femininity and domesticity in movies and novels shaped domestic work as much as individual labor relationships, labor supply and demand, or the demographic makeup of the workforce. Domesticity and Dirt was, in short, in the forefront of changes in the historical method. The book participated in the cultural turn and understood race, class, and gender as undergoing constant construction and reconstruction, always while intertwined with one another. Sometimes, Palmer presaged changes that would be brought to fruition by other historians and theorists. No wonder the book still seems so modern.
Since Domesticity and Dirt’s publication, historians have significantly deepened Palmer’s analysis of the relationship between racial hierarchy, domesticity, labor exploitation, and domestic service. Historians like Thavolia Glymph have considered how nineteenth-century white southern notions of domesticity became interwoven with American slavery.16 Andrew Urban has demonstrated that, even when they were not slaves, domestic workers’ labor was often coerced.17 Meanwhile, Micki McElya and others have revealed how racial tropes, for example, the “Mammy” figure so beloved by late nineteenth and early twentieth-century white southerners, both hid and reinforced new racial hierarchies in the home.18 Palmer’s central insight that racial inequality helped to give white middle-class domesticity social meaning has only been confirmed by new historical scholarship.
Where historians have most expanded on Palmer’s work is in centering the perspective of women of color. These new histories have explained how women workers of color resisted domestic work’s exploitive power relationships. Writing about black southern domestic workers just after the Civil War, Tera Hunter posed working-class women of color as more than just subjects of racialized domesticity. Instead, she argued, they sought to define emancipation on their own terms by claiming labor and bodily autonomy.19 As historians writing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have shown, many domestic workers also participated in more formal protest, including forming unions.20 These historians have amplified the voices of women of color and made connections between domestic labor and working women of color’s own ideas about freedom and labor politics.
Domestic service is an occupation that begs all sorts of important questions about gender, race, class, and labor. It lays bare the racial, class, and gendered tensions between the work housewives do out of love and expectation and the work hired laborers do for pay. It forces scholars to reckon with the ways in which ideas about race, class, and gender are constructed in movie theaters, newspaper reports, legislative halls, and factories as well as in the intimate private space of the middle-class home. Palmer reveals the many connections between these national cultural norms and private household labor arrangements. For nearly thirty years, Domesticity and Dirt has helped scholars to think about domestic work in all its complexity. It still has much to teach us.
VANESSA MAY is Associate Professor of History and Co-Director, Women and Gender Studies Program, at Seton Hall University.
1. Rosalyn Baxandall, “Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945. by Phyllis Palmer,” The Journal of American History 77, no. 4 (Mar. 1991): 1396.
2. Louise Tilly, “Does Waged Domestic Work Have a Future?,” International Labor and Working-Class History 39 (Spring 1991): 69.
3. Richard Oestreicher, “Separate Tribes? Working-Class and Women’s History,” Reviews in American History 19, no. 2 (June 1991): 230.
4. Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 42.
5. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 32-33.
6. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 32.
7. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 14.
8. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 117.
9. Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” The American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1053-1075.
10. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241-1299.
11. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso Press, 2007).
12. Lawrence B. Glickman, “The Cultural Turn,” American History Now, Eric Foner, Lisa McGirr, eds., (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 224.
13. Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 14.
14. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.
15. Lucy Maynard Salmon, Domestic Service (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1911); Daniel E. Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
16. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
17. Andrew Urban, Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2017).
18. See for example Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Grace Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of the Segregation South (New York: Vintage Press, 1998), ch. 3.
19. Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
20. Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (New York: Beacon Press, 2016); Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom, ch. 4; Vanessa May, Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), ch. 5.