Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T18:51:36.172Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Suited for Service

Racialized Rationalizations for the Ideal Domestic Servant from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Enobong Hannah Branch  and
Melissa E. Wooten
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

From the early 1800s through the 1920s the image of the ideal domestic servant varied dramatically—native white women, European immigrant women, and black women. However, at all times the racial/ethnic identity of the domestic servant played a critical role. The transition from the casualness of “help” to the formality of the “domestic servant” relationship marked the historical moment in which a subordinate racial identity became a precondition of servanthood. The semantic change from help or hired girl to domestic servant reflected a more fundamental change in the nature, organization, and expectation of the work role. Using a comparative-historical approach, we provide a sociological analysis of how shifting labor patterns and societal demands led to the decline of help, the rise of domestic service, and the centrality of a racialized identity to the performance of household work during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Summer 2012 , pp. 169 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 2012 

References

Acker, Joan (2006) Class Questions, Feminist Answers. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Beecher, Catharine E.Stowe, Harriet Beecher (2002 [1869]) The American Woman’s Home, ed. Tonkovich, Nicole. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Branch, Enobong Hannah (2011) Opportunity Denied: Limiting Black Women to Devalued Work. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Clark-Lewis, Elizabeth (1994) Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Coltrane, Scott (1996) Family Man: Fatherhood, Housework, and Gender Equity. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Coser, Lewis (1973) “Servants: The obsolescence of an occupational role.” Social Forces 52 (1): 31–40.Google Scholar
Cowan Schwartz, Ruth (1983) More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Dudden, Faye E. (1983) Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.Google Scholar
Easton, Barbara (1976) “Industrialization and femininity: A case study of nineteenth century New England.” Social Problems 23 (4): 389–401.Google Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (1980) “The dialectics of wage work: Japanese-American women and domestic service, 1905–1940.” Feminist Studies 6 (3): 432–71.Google Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (1992) “From servitude to service work: Historical continuities in the racial division of paid reproductive labor.” Signs 18 (1): 1–43.Google Scholar
Glenn, Evelyn Nakano (2002) Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hunter, Tera W. (1995) “Domination and resistance: The politics of wage household labor in New South Atlanta,” in Hines, Darlene Clark (ed.) “We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible”: A Reader in Black Women’s History. Brooklyn, NY: Carlson: 343–57.Google Scholar
Katzman, David (1978) Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Landry, Bart (2000) Black Working Wives: Pioneers of the American Family Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Laslett, BarbaraBrenner, Johanna (1989) “Gender and social reproduction: Historical perspectives.” Annual Review of Sociology 15: 381–404.Google Scholar
Licht, Walter (1995) Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Locke, Mary Lou (1990) “Out of the shadows and into the western sun: Working women of the late nineteenth-century urban far west.” Journal of Urban History 16 (2): 175–204.Google Scholar
New York Times (1872) “Domestic servants.” July 7, query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9E04EFDE153EE43BBC4F53DFB1668389669FDE&oref=slogin.Google Scholar
O’Leary, Elizabeth L. (2003) From Morning to Night. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.Google Scholar
Palmer, Phyllis (1987) “Housewife and household worker: Employer-employee relations in the home, 1928–1941,” in Groneman, CarolNorton, Mary Beth (eds.) “To Toil the Livelong Day”: America’s Women at Work, 1780–1980. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press: 179–95.Google Scholar
Palmer, Phyllis (1989) Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920–1989. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Reskin, Barbara F.Padavic, Irene (1994) Women and Men at Work. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge.Google Scholar
Rollins, Judith (1983) “The social psychology of the relationship between black female domestic servants and their white female employers.” PhD diss., Brandeis University.Google Scholar
Rollins, Judith (1985) Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Romero, Mary (1988) “Sisterhood and domestic service: Race, class, and gender in the mistress-maid relationship.” Humanity and Society 12 (4): 318–46.Google Scholar
Ruggles, StevenSobek, MatthewAlexander, TrentFitch, Catherine A.Goeken, RonaldHall, Patricia KellyKing, MiriamRonnander, Chad (2009) Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 4.0 [machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: Minnesota Population Center.Google Scholar
Schneider, Dorothea (1998) “The work that never ends: New literature on paid domestic work and women of color.” Journal of American Ethnic History 17 (2): 61–66.Google Scholar
South, ScottSpitze, Glenna (1994) “Housework in marital and nonmarital households.” American Sociological Review 59 (3): 327–47.Google Scholar
Sutherland, Daniel E. (1981) Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.Google Scholar
Thatcher, Laurel Ulrich (1991) A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Thompson, Linda (1991) “Family work: Women’s sense of fairness.” Journal of Family Issues 12 (2): 181–96.Google Scholar
Vapnek, Lara (2009) Breadwinners: Working Women and Economic Independence, 1865–1920. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Walzer, Susan (1996) “Thinking about the baby: Gender and divisions of infant care.” Social Problems 43 (2): 219–34.Google Scholar
Welter, Barbara (1966) “The cult of true womanhood.” American Quarterly 18 (2): 151–74.Google Scholar
West, CandiceZimmerman, Don H. (1987) “Doing gender.” Gender and Society 1 (2): 125–51.Google Scholar
Wrigley, Julia (1991) “Feminists and domestic workers.” Feminist Studies 17 (2): 317–29.Google Scholar