Black Women, Domestic Work and Expanding Resistance: 1909-1945

I set out to analyze the various ways that black female domestic workers exercised agency over their conditions, particularly the workplace. However, it gradually became obvious that confining the project exclusively to domestic workers was not entirely practical, since people move in and out of occupations quite frequently. A woman who was doing domestic work in 1933 may have been a farm worker in 1925 and might become a defense worker in 1942. For that reason, the project is centered on working-class black women, the majority of whom were engaged in domestic work during the early 20th century. In addition, as the project came to focus more on resistance than on working conditions, I began to see workers leaving domestic service not as a challenging aspect of the sources but as another potential strategy they employed. At its core, this project is about activism, a term that takes various forms and can have a number of meanings. For the purposes of this essay, I will define activism as efforts to challenge broader societal restrictions. Activism took place within the workplace, as workers contested the racial hierarchy by pushing for more equal relations with the employer and thus a greater say in labor conditions. However, over time workers increasingly employed this definition of activism outside the domestic workplace, in new arenas such as public policy discussions and even broad societal conditions like public segregation. Some distinctions between forms of activism, such as individual strategies versus collective strategies, are self-explanatory. Others are not, including the term “protest,” which is used frequently in chapter 3. I use protest to describe a particularly assertive, usually public and collective form of activism that proposes a radical change. For example, striking to challenge segregated facilities in a factory is protest, but one person’s migration is simply an individual strategy or initiative. These distinctions are helpful to clarify and understand exactly how the nature of working-class black women’s efforts changed over time.Bachelor of Art