“The Old Order Changeth”: A Favorite Servant Contest and the Debate about Domestic Work in Washington, D.C.

Abstract

The Progressive Era was characterized by debates about the future of the United States and the role of individuals, households, and organizations in shaping that future. These debates included those about domestic work, sometimes specifically referred to as the “servant question” or the “servant problem.” This discourse considered not only paid household labor, but also the nature of race, gender, and American life after slavery. This article reviews the servant question in Washington, D.C., and reveals how commentators engaged with modernity and nostalgia to understand the contradiction between their sense of white and African American women’s failures and their belief that both groups of women belonged in white households. The servant question is key cultural context for a 1917 “favorite servant contest.” The second half of the article examines the clubwomen who organized the contest and the experiences of an elderly, formerly enslaved woman named Theresa Harper. The organizers responded to the D.C. servant question with an effort to carry racial hierarchies into the twentieth century, a vision of the future of household labor very different from that of Black domestic workers.

In January 1917, a group of white women announced that they had chosen an elderly African American woman, Theresa Harper, as the winner of their “favorite servant contest.” Over a series of months in Washington, D.C., newspapers had reported the names, addresses, and lengths of employment of nominated workers. The contest then culminated with singing, souvenir calendars, and cash prizes awarded in the “white parlor” of the Ebbitt Hotel, just a few blocks from the White House. ¹ At this meeting, event organizers, members of the District of Columbia Federation of Women’s Clubs, emphasized Harper’s lifelong labor for the same family as an enslaved child in Charles County, Maryland, as a young woman enslaved in D.C., and, since 1862, as an emancipated woman.

To make sense of this contest, its organizers, and the experiences of Harper herself, this article considers the “servant question” in Washington, D.C. Also called the “servant problem,” this self-referential genre of complaint peaked between 1880 and 1920 and featured newspaper writers, employers, workers, politicians, and clubwomen who debated the behavior, pay, and availability of domestic workers. The servant question, born from nineteenth-century ideas about race, home, and gender, was intertwined with essential characteristics of the Progressive Era: free labor, increased education and public roles for women, and a preoccupation with what the new century would hold. It was one of many nineteenth-century political issues formulated as questions. People in the United States and in Europe spoke of, for example, the Eastern question, the woman question, and the slavery question. ² Historian Holly Case argued that this rhetoric of questions created an “emancipationist agenda” of “progressive ideals,” which “pointed” toward “a more just, healthy, discerning, efficient, and knowledgeable society, culture, and international system,” often with considerably less idealistic results. ³ Questions, including the servant question, “came into being where conditions begged expeditious redress; where something was wrong and badly needed fixing.” ⁴

Black workers constantly contested the terms of their labor and fueled employers’ sense of crisis and desire for change. Scholars have shown that with small acts such as intentionally completing tasks slowly, claiming leftovers through “pan-toting,” or refusing to use honorifics like “sir” or “ma’am,” household laborers protected their autonomy and denied employers the compliance and control they sought. ⁵ White Americans often interpreted this quotidian resistance as evidence of immorality or incompetence. ⁶ In fact, with these actions, African Americans contested what historian Jennifer Ritterhouse described as a “chief form of everyday social control”: “racial etiquette.” ⁷

Progressive Era Washington had its own patterns of resistance. Most domestic workers in D.C. were Black women, often migrants from the rural South; there was not a significant population of immigrant domestic workers. As Elizabeth Clark-Lewis demonstrated, many of these African American household laborers rejected live-in domestic work and its grueling demands. ⁸ Historians Treva Lindsay and Mary-Elizabeth Murphy have revealed how Black women, some of whom were members of Washington’s African American middle class, advocated for more equal citizenship through political and cultural movements, as well. ⁹ White women in the capital also often stepped outside accepted bounds, as suffrage activists, political spouses, or reformers. These everyday and organized efforts unsettled white supremacist patriarchal norms in D.C. ¹⁰ Washington commentators responded by blaming Black women workers and, to a lesser extent, white women employers for the servant problem.

Across the globe, middle-class and elite employers and commentators expressed discontent with the autonomy and mobility of domestic workers. ¹¹ Nationally, some participants in the servant question spoke in terms of immigration, especially of Chinese men and Irish women. Others, including some African American Washingtonians and Northern white women reformers, placed domestic science and worker training at the center of the servant question. ¹² In Washington, as this article shows, writers revealed a nostalgia for slavery, especially the mammy figure, as well as concerns about modernity as they argued that racial and gender norms were key to ruining or redeeming paid household labor. Sections one and two review a broad array of complaints about domestic work in newspapers, including coverage of policy and reform movements; advertisements; humorous anecdotes; and interviews. In section one, I establish the basics of the capital city’s servant question, especially commentators’ focus on women as failing at gendered responsibilities. Section two considers how servant question writers referenced the past and future to make sense of the contradiction between this failure and ideas that white and Black women were destined for domesticity. Section three builds on this cultural and intellectual context to examine the contest and its organizers. Here, I establish Harper’s biography to highlight the limits of white commentators’ perspective.

The contest is one way to understand how white women – whose reputations as capable managers of the Black working class were threatened by the servant question – invested in and promoted what Karen Cox calls a “Confederate Culture” as they sought to hold African American workers, rather than white employers, responsible for deteriorating conditions in domestic work. ¹³ Scholars have shown that white women were crucial for the maintenance of white supremacist racial norms. ¹⁴ This article shows how domestic work acted as a bridge that brought white women from quotidian to organized racial politics. In response to the Washington servant question, members of the District of Columbia Federation of Women’s Clubs sought to carry a racial hierarchy of household labor into the new twentieth century.

Women in the Servant Question

White Washingtonians at the turn of the twentieth century were the primary participants in the servant question. African American Washingtonians also discussed and debated domestic work. However, because in D.C. the terms “servant question” and “servant problem” invoked an approach to race and labor that championed slavery, Black commentators generally eschewed them. In the Washington Bee and the Colored American, both papers for an African American audience, the phrases “servant problem” and “servant question” appeared far less frequently than in the Evening Star, a white D.C. newspaper. ¹⁵ In a 1902 speech, Washingtonian Nannie Helen Burroughs, a prominent Black educator and national religious leader, chose not to use these phrases as she outlined how domestic work was crucial to her vision of racial and economic progress. To an African American audience in Atlanta, Burroughs pointedly defined “the domestic problem” as “that peculiar condition under which women are living and laboring without the knowledge of the secrets of thrift, or of true scientific methods in which the mind has been awakened, and hands made capable thereby to give the most efficient services.” She went on to argue that a lack of domestic science education led to low wages for Black women. To Burroughs, making training available, ensuring that employers valued educated workers, and generally improving the lives of household laborers, were “prime factor[s] in the salvation of Negro womanhood” and “absolutely necessary” for “the salvation of the race,” as well. Only after she had established this perspective on domestic work, very different than mainstream white thought, did Burroughs evoke the servant problem in a concluding summary of her “solution of the servant girl problem.” ¹⁶ Like Booker T. Washington and Mary McLeod Bethune, in this speech Burroughs promoted industrial education as a solution to the problem of unprepared employees. ¹⁷ Like domestic workers who sought to unionize later in the twentieth century, she saw professionalization as crucial for improving conditions. ¹⁸

Among white commentators, on the other hand, servant question discourse was not concerned with low pay or poor working conditions. Instead, these conversations focused on the problems facing middle-class and elite white families as they tried to find and maintain satisfactory employees. Women, whether Black employees or white employers, were typically at the center of these anecdotes, which contrasted women’s supposed domestic natures with widespread reports of disfunction in household labor. One senator’s wife, speaking to a female journalist, asserted that “as a general thing I understand that the men of the colored race make much more reliable servants than the women.” She went on to claim that Lucy Webb Hayes hired an African American man who acted as both valet for Rutherford Hayes, the former president, and maid to the former first lady. The journalist then quoted another senator’s wife, who argued that men were better managers of servants than women with a reference to a different first lady. She explained that Julia Dent Grant “was continually being annoyed by first one servant and then another refusing to perform certain duties.” However, “when the state of affairs became apparent to the General,” he gathered the employees “and with military precision apportioned to each his separate duties, demanding unquestioning obedience in all respects upon pain of instant dismissal.” ¹⁹ Like the valet who also acted as a maid, in this anecdote, Ulysses S. Grant did women’s work better than a woman. In similar fashion, other articles urged women to operate their homes like “the affairs of life with which men have to do.” ²⁰ Perhaps, these articles suggested, the solution to the servant problem was women becoming more like men.

A 1911 satirical article even more explicitly blamed women for the servant question. A man, “almost ashamed of himself” for wondering about the servant question, asked his doctor if there was any “remedy” to it. The doctor responded that he had “given up. It’s due to the innate incompatibility of two women when brought into contact. I see no solution.” The doctor then continued, “I have studied the thing in all its aspects, and I don’t see how it can be remedied, unless you can change the organic nature of woman.” ²¹ In these cases, writers portrayed women employers as incapable of solving the servant question because of innate gendered shortcomings. In other cases, they portrayed women employers as distracted by politics and uninterested in solving the servant question. According to some authors, white and Black women had failed to execute properly the gendered, racialized, and classed demands of household management or service.

To believe that African American women were not uniquely suitable for domestic work in white houses was incompatible with widespread views among whites. In order to resolve this contradiction—to assign blame to these women while also affirming their association with white homes—Washington writers emphasized “the rush of modern life” and contrasted it with a nostalgic view of slavery. ²² Ideas about enslaved women, particularly those who evoked the characteristics and physical appearance of a mammy figure, were key to white commentators’ narratives about an earlier era of domestic work. ²³ Such a discourse affirmed key ideas for white employers and commentators: that household labor was in crisis, which white employers might have seen in their own daily lives, and that, despite this, African American women belonged in domestic work and white women in domestic management.

The Past, Present, and Future in the Servant Question

While some saw new developments such as ready-made food, apartments, and electricity as possible solutions to the servant problem in D.C., most saw change from the past as a cause of these problems. Modernity became a key explanation for the servant problem. As Case argued about many of the long nineteenth century’s questions, by connecting past conditions (real and imagined), present policies and norms, and possible times to come, participants in questions sought to conjure futures that aligned with their interests. ²⁴ The rhetoric of the servant question turned a nostalgic vision of the past into a guide for the new century.

Past conditions of enslavement, in the minds of some commentators, had created the best workers, whom they called mammies. A senator’s wife spoke wistfully about a former servant of hers “whom she secured at the close of the war.” This formerly enslaved woman had been a good worker, according to this employer, because of her enslavement. She had been “instructed almost from infancy in the essential rudiments of her art.” ²⁵ In this way of thinking, the growing distance from slavery was one cause of the servant problem. One article, titled, “The South’s Trouble with Domestic Servants,” concluded simply that “the old order changeth.” ²⁶ Dehumanizing descriptions of the mammy figure also served to portray domestic workers as outside of modern society. In 1910, Mary Overman, a senator’s wife, compared her Salisbury, North Carolina, employees, whom she called mammies, to “magnolia trees or giant rose bushes.” Associating Black women with inanimate nature, Overman argued that they were inextricably tied to the Southern environment itself. ²⁷ A different writer referred to African American women as “raw material.” Those women who were not domestic workers were “lying all about us [the implied white audience], unused.” ²⁸ Overman explained that in her hometown, unlike other places, “We have no servant question … We still have a race of ‘old mammies.’ … Nowhere do they exist so numerously and in the primeval type.” ²⁹ Older generations of African American women, who were closer to slavery, were seen by white employers and commenters as better workers. Servant question commentators referred to mammy figures to make sense of how things had gone wrong between an idealized past and a troubled present day.

In Washington, D.C., specifically, those anxious about African American political power highlighted it as a central factor in troubles with household labor. The capital’s experience of national politics in day-to-day life, as well as the robust Black Republican presence at the turn of the century, emerged as a possible cause of the servant problem. In an 1890 article in the Evening Star, an anonymous writer asserted that D.C. politics prevented African Americans from being efficient domestic workers. The piece focused on three (likely fictional) people: “a certain active and energetic member of Congress” whom the author called Mr. Blank; his wife, Mrs. Blank; and Maria, a Black woman who worked for the Blank family. Maria had recently moved to the capital from the Shenandoah Valley. The Blanks were mostly happy with her work, but after a morning where she was rushed to produce breakfast, because “Mr. Blank is in a hurry to get away and see some people before going to the Capitol,” Maria quit and decided to take the train back “to her beloved valley” that day. This anecdote expanded on a common challenge that many domestic workers and employers faced – producing a meal so early in the day – and interpreted it through the lens of the Washington servant question, specifically. ³⁰ According to the article, Maria’s decision stemmed from the presence of politics in the home. The author wrote Maria’s explanation in a stylized, exaggerated dialect: “I ain’ useter dishyer mixin’ vittles wid ‘fai’s ob state an’ iladleums ob our liberties an’ conschusins an’ all dem dar fixins dat de cunnel is busy wid.” The choice to present Maria’s words in this way emphasized her race and rural background, which supposedly made her unable to work in a modern, urban Washington. ³¹ The “problem” with her as a worker was external to her: increased politics in the Washington, D.C., home.

A similar portrayal appeared in an 1892 issue of the same paper. African American workers were again depicted as being made “worse” by the presence of politics. A popular white novelist and Washington native Emma Nevitte Southworth, under the penname Capitola Converse, wrote a (likely invented or heavily embellished) account of several women she employed and considered how politics shaped their labor. ³² She divided African American workers in D.C. into two groups: “the ideal darkey servant we all have in mind, but rarely get into our kitchens” and domestic workers disliked by employers because of “incompetence and arrogance.” One of the author’s workers was a member of the first group, “the most intelligent and faithful of colored servants.” Employing exaggerated dialect to emphasize the speaker’s race, Southworth presented this “intelligent and faithful” worker’s opinion of Black Washingtonians: “Dis yer city is jes’ chuck full o’ lazy, no account n---ahs that doan want to do nothin’ but set an’ look at de Capitol and treasury and ’flect what a mighty fine thing it is to live in Washington.” ³³ In this depiction, which Southworth laundered through a fictional Black worker, proximity to and interest in political power created bad workers. Under the subtitle “Domestic Insurrections,” the author framed African Americans’ connections to the federal government, a defining aspect of the Black Washington middle class, as a distraction from manual labor and a factor in D.C.’s servant question. ³⁴ Notably, African American workers’ actual political commitments or engagements did not appear in this anecdote, and Southworth instead characterized attention to the federal government as laziness. This portrayal and the story of the Blank family argued that African Americans belonged in hierarchical labor relations, but not in modern politics.

Writers in white newspapers pointed to education, in addition to politics, to explain why so-called mammies were difficult to find. In a 1907 issue of the Washington Herald, Frederic Haskin, author of a syndicated informational column, asked whether the servant question was more the fault of workers or employers. To answer, he shared possibly fictitious anecdotes about workers ruined by education. In one, he described an African American woman as having “just enough education to spoil her taste for work.” The woman listed “quadratic equations” and “logarithms,” alongside “cooking, cleaning, and serving,” as her qualifications for a position. Later, her employer found her “in the privacy of the pantry reading Laura Jean Libbey,” an author who wrote romances about young working women. ³⁵ In another newspaper report, one Black woman, while dressed nicely, was not hired at all because she gave a bad impression to a potential employer, who thought “from all her airs and graces, she might have been a graduate of a seminary.” ³⁶ In the D.C. servant question, in contrast to the perspective of Burroughs and other reformers, the best workers were uneducated and not associated with those middle-class African Americans who threatened white Washingtonians’ sense of racial superiority. In these depictions, commentators decentered the agency of Black women and focused instead on changing racial norms, perhaps allowing white commentators to invest in the mammy figure as an ideal worker, despite what they experienced with actual D.C. domestic workers.

Comparisons with slavery and the mammy figure made up much of commentators’ concerns about modernity. White women also came under scrutiny from time to time. Participants characterized the growing visibility of women’s clubs, professional women, and women-led political movements as evidence of middle-class and elite white women’s neglect of the home. An author explained in Harper’s Bazaar, reprinted in the Washington Times: “If women have failed, and failed lamentably, in coping with the only vexed question with which they are habitually brought into contact – the servant question – what probability is there that they can settle larger questions ably?” ³⁷ The headline of this article was even more direct: “Here’s a Problem: Women Who Cannot Manage Servants Want to Vote.” This author argued that white women had fallen short in the aspects of civic life to which society entrusted them and that their interest in broader politics would only serve to hamper their duties to their husbands, children, employees, and homes. As Brooklyn-born journalist, poet, and novelist Kate Masterson wrote in 1909, “the modern woman seeks to run Governments and show man how to clean politics – while the spoons and forks tarnish. She abdicates the cornerstone of her home and does not even find herself able to get a substitute.” Masterson excoriated women for neglecting homes in order to “be free for her suffragetting, tall thinking, and canned living.” ³⁸ The servant question destabilized white women’s already-limited authority in the public sphere by questioning these women’s ability to discharge their domestic responsibilities.

This cultural context is key to understanding the distinct set of ideas that motivated the organizers of the favorite servant contest. Members of the District of Columbia Federation of Women’s Clubs (DCFWC) were vulnerable to accusations that they neglected their homes in favor of public engagements. The favorite servant contest, then, was an opportunity to protect their image as capable homemakers. In this contest, as in the servant question, instead of being a relic of the nineteenth century, the mammy figure became a proposal for the future of domestic work.

Theresa Harper and the Favorite Servant Contest

The DCFWC sought to connect Washington employers to their vision of household labor through the favorite servant contest. They solicited nominations of excellent servants, eventually choosing Theresa Harper for a top prize. Harper’s award at the Ebbitt Hotel was not a moment of recognition or reparation for her decades of labor. The clubwomen latched onto Harper’s experience of enslavement and her physical appearance and situated her lifetime of labor, much of it coerced, as ideal for all domestic workers. Despite an earlier DCFWC report that recommended worker training, the contest emphasized emotion, racial stereotypes, and nostalgia for slavery as keys to functional household labor. ³⁹ Notably, this focus affirmed white, middle-class women’s authority without uplifting gendered constraints that would affect the clubwomen. ⁴⁰ At the January 1917 event, meanings of race and status, likely familiar for white Washingtonians and southerners since childhood in the Civil War era, would have been established anew. This section begins with the biography of Theresa Harper, to highlight the woman herself, apart from the representations of her presented in the contest.

Theresa Harper was born in Maryland in March 1830, the child of an enslaved woman named Cecy. ⁴¹ A white woman named Elizabeth Reeves enslaved about thirty individuals in Charles County, including Theresa Harper, her mother, and her siblings, Robert and Ally. ⁴² In 1840, Reeves died without any direct descendants. Her will divided her human property among nieces, nephews, and a friend. Reeves’s great niece, Susanna Boarman, attained ownership of ten-year-old Harper. Harper’s mother, Cecy, perhaps deceased, escaped, or sold, was no longer counted among Reeves’s property. Then, in the early 1850s, as a young woman, Harper moved to Washington with Susanna’s brother, Sylvester Boarman. Legal documents described her as light-skinned, just over five feet tall, and “not fleshy, but of muscular form.” According to Susanna Boarman, Harper was “a fine cook, washer, and ironer, and in every respect a natural house servant.” ⁴³ Harper was alone in an unfamiliar urban setting and vulnerable to abuse and assault in the home where she lived and worked.

When Harper was in her early thirties, in 1862, Congress emancipated enslaved people in the District of Columbia. Susanna Boarman, who had retained legal possession of Harper as she worked for Sylvester, reacted by petitioning for $1,000 as reimbursement for Harper’s emancipation. ⁴⁴ For her part, Harper continued to work for Sylvester Boarman until his death in 1890. ⁴⁵ Then, she labored for and lived with his son, George, and George’s wife, Emily, into her old age, when they eventually nominated her for the favorite servant contest in 1917.

Harper’s legal status had changed with emancipation, but, as she continued to work for the Boarmans, her daily life might have largely stayed the same. Harper’s desires, ambitions, and the factors that influenced her choices are absent from archival records of her life. The organizers of the favorite servant contest understood her tenure with the Boarmans as evidence of their good management and of her loyalty, but her years with the same family do not necessarily speak to attachment or dedication. Harper’s choices can perhaps be better understood as a result of the hostility and limits facing an unmarried woman with few options for wage-earning in the Civil War and Reconstruction Era capital city. Harper had no real safety net should the Boarmans turn her out or should she leave and fail to find a position. Furthermore, in 1862, the year of her emancipation and three years before the defeat of the Confederacy, she could not be certain that slavery would remain illegal. The pull toward freedom that Harper surely felt was likely countered by a pragmatic understanding of her circumstances and the risks of choosing an unknown fate away from the Boarmans. As historians such as Tamika Y. Nunley have shown, women like Harper strategically made choices toward liberty and survival within harsh and constraining circumstances, often while concealing their true feelings from people around them, such as white employers. ⁴⁶ (Figure 1)

Figure 1. The Evening Star published this dark and unclear photograph of Theresa Harper along with its coverage of the contest. “Homage is Paid to Old Servants,” Evening Star, January 24, 1917. From the Library of Congress, Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers.

The clubwomen did not engage with the complexities of Harper’s biography. In a time when employers resented workers who could easily come and go, Harper’s decades with one family, as well as her enslavement, were, to the clubwomen, a guide for how to address the Progressive Era servant question. The DCFWC organized the favorite servant contest along with the Evening Star and the Association of Oldest Inhabitants, a D.C. civic group formed after the Civil War. Representatives of the Washington-based Women’s National Press Association (WNPA) attended the December 1889 General Federation of Women’s Clubs inaugural meeting in New York City. Five years later, WNPA members brought together ten women’s clubs to create a D.C. federation. As the group grew, literary organizations, unions, the Council of Jewish Women, and women’s suffrage groups became member organizations. ⁴⁷ By 1913, twenty-seven different groups were part of the DCFWC. Together, they advocated for progressive causes including the Americanization of immigrant children; partially enclosing streetcars to protect the conductors; and “modesty, simplicity and sanity in dress.” ⁴⁸ Despite repeated votes among members on the issue, the DCFWC intentionally excluded African American women’s clubs. ⁴⁹ The DCFWC engaged in the servant question alongside their other causes. In 1905, years before the contest, a member of the DCFWC named Mrs. Peppers presented a paper on “Women & Their Interest,” in which she recommended two books on the servant problem. ⁵⁰ The federation had previously used contests, especially essay prizes, to develop interest in the topic. ⁵¹

In addition to constituent organizations, the DCFWC was made up of committees such as the philanthropy committee, “industrial and social conditions committee,” and the “Children of the Republic Committee.” The Home Economics committee, led by fifty-nine-year-old Anna L. Briggs, organized the favorite servant contest. Briggs lived with her husband, John, a member of the Association of Oldest Inhabitants, and some of their five children. John Briggs, son of well-known reporter Emily Edson Briggs, made a living from real estate holdings, as well as a post in the Treasury Department. ⁵² While many participants in servant question rhetoric drew on their own experience, according to census records, Briggs did not employ live-in domestic workers. She also did not have deep ties to the South; although she was born in Virginia, her parents were from New Hampshire. ⁵³ She was, though, an active clubwoman: a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution; a supporter of the National League to Conserve Food Animals; the Vice President of the Sunshine and Community Society; a fundraiser for the Congressional Union for Woman’s Suffrage; and a member of the League of Republican Women of the District of Columbia. ⁵⁴ Briggs, who did not work for wages, planned events and organized meetings for all these various causes. She brought her vast experience with logistics and leadership to the favorite servant contest.

Over several months in late 1916, organizers urged club members and newspaper readers to nominate their servants for honors. The intent was “to discover and reward longtime employees and offer encouragement, through diplomas, to those who will remain in domestic service in one place for a specified number of years.” ⁵⁵ Reports claimed that “nearly 800” employers nominated workers, some of whose names were published in the Evening Star along with the names and addresses of their employers. ⁵⁶ The vast majority of nominees were African American women. ⁵⁷ Eventually, organizers distributed cash prizes and 1,000 certificates, which were imagined to have “an essential economic value, as constituting unrivaled recommendations.” ⁵⁸ The DCFWC members thought of their well-publicized efforts as the start of “a movement of clubwomen to study the servant problem in Washington with a view to bettering conditions of domestic service.” Members of the DCFWC also hoped to increase workers’ morale and, therefore, produce “greater zeal for service” among them. ⁵⁹

Newspaper coverage of the contest did not always describe Harper as a worker, even as they highlighted her as a part of the servant contest. Instead, writers vaguely explained that she was “in the house of George Clifford Boarman” and had “been in the Boarman family since she was a child.” ⁶⁰ These descriptions echoed paternalistic ideas of enslaved people and of domestic workers as “one of the family.” ⁶¹ Census enumerators, also, had their own ideas about Harper. In 1870 and 1880, she was a “servant.” ⁶² In 1900, she was a “lodger,” in 1910 she was an “old servant,” and in 1920 she would be a “roomer.” ⁶³ There are a few documented cases of employers providing for workers into their old age, but Harper did not characterize her experience in this way. ⁶⁴ She insisted to a reporter that “she could still sew, bake and cook.” ⁶⁵ Harper focused more on her labor and her skills than on any relationship she may have had with the Boarmans.

In her letter nominating Harper, reproduced in part in newspaper accounts, Emily Boarman gave another perspective on Harper’s work. In Boarman’s telling, Harper “darns the stockings, patches and sews on the buttons” in the household, and sometimes fills in for other employees. Boarman also explained, “Last summer, when the cook was absent, [Harper] cooked dinner for two weeks in a true southern style.” Throughout the letter, Boarman referred to Harper as “Mammy” or “Mammy Theresa.” She wrote: “Mammy is quite superior in her opinions and manners. The fact that Mr. Boarman and I have arrived at middle age does not seem to impress her. When the servants tell her that Mr. Cliff and Miss Emily want certain work done a certain way, she says: ‘Oh, the chilluns don’t know anything.’” ⁶⁶ This portrayal matches historian Micki McElya’s characterization of the mammy stereotype as “endearing in her gruff demeanor and unrefined features.” ⁶⁷ Boarman’s description of Harper does not necessarily tell us anything about Harper herself; instead, it allows us insight into the ideas held by the Boarmans and people like them. As theologian Jacqueline Grant writes, “the story of the black mammy is in fact the story of the white owner/employer storytellers.” ⁶⁸

A dark, grainy photograph of Harper was published in the Evening Star’s coverage of the contest. In it, she wears a dark dress with long sleeves and a white apron. Harper dressed similarly at the Ebbitt Hotel, where she wore a “neat maid’s costume and clean bandana handerkerchief [sic] around her head.” ⁶⁹ Inside the parlor, Harper’s attire would have sharply distinguished her from the gathered clubwomen. Alaveta Mitchell, interviewed by historian Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, confirms that Harper’s specific uniform was common: “Years ago for some you had to have a black uniform and a white apron and a white bag [rag] round your head.” ⁷⁰ A bandana linked Harper to enslaved women, especially those laboring in fields. In cultural representations of the mammy figure, such as Aunt Jemima, a bandana was essential. ⁷¹ The visual appearance of Harper was important to the clubwomen. They used a photograph of her, standing in front of the Boarman’s townhome where she lived and labored, to create calendars as gifts to their leaders.

To mark the end of the contest, the clubwomen met at the Ebbitt Hotel. The white clubwomen had a far different experience of that space than did Black, working-class women in Washington. For white Washingtonians, the Ebbitt was a frequent meeting place, an option for lodging out-of-town guests, and a prominent landmark two blocks east of the White House. By contrast, like most hotels in D.C., the Ebbitt did not rent rooms to African Americans. ⁷² The hotel did employ Black men, who organized into a fairly visible, all-male New Ebbitt Waiters Association. ⁷³ Any African American women who may have worked there were not as celebrated as these waiters in the press and, further, would have been fired when, in 1918, D.C. hotels replaced their Black women employees with white women in response to a new minimum wage law. ⁷⁴ If any African American hotel workers witnessed the contest, perhaps it served as a reminder of why they preferred hotel labor to labor in family homes. When Theresa Harper arrived for the event in January 1917, it was likely the first time she had stepped foot inside the Ebbitt Hotel. In fact, Harper later shared with a reporter that she had not been south of M Street, to the downtown area and government center of Washington, in forty years. ⁷⁵ The contest thus brought Harper into elite public spaces while reinforcing her position as subordinate employee. The event began before Harper, the purported guest of honor, arrived. (Figure 2)

Figure 2. The Ebbitt Hotel, site of the favorite servant contest, pictured at some point between 1909 and 1923.

“Ebbitt House, hotel at 1344 F Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. with Fourteenth Street at right,” LC-F81- 162, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Evening Star’s description of the contest peaked when Harper was given $10, the equivalent of several weeks’ wages for a typical Washington domestic worker at this time, or about $270 in 2024. ⁷⁶ The newspaper writer listed Harper’s years of work as eighty-seven, the same as her age, counting her years spent enslaved as evidence of loyalty and faithfulness, despite her lack of freedom or choice. ⁷⁷ Fifty-five years after Harper’s legal emancipation, Emily Boarman responded to the district federation’s call for nominations and submitted Harper’s name.

So how did Theresa Harper feel about this? Accounts of the event in newspapers present some possibilities. According to one account, when Harper accepted her prize, “the applause of the audience was so loud that perhaps only Mrs. Patten [who presented the money] could hear ‘Mammy’ Theresa voice her thanks.” ⁷⁸ There are several ways to parse this sentence. In one interpretation, the reporter chose not to record Harper’s words and denied Harper a single uttered word recorded for posterity. The fact that the article itself repeatedly quoted employers, but not Harper, reinforces this understanding. In a different analysis, it was the clubwomen who organized the event, rather than the reporter, who denied Harper a voice. They read aloud employers’ letters, but no one invited the workers in attendance to the podium. It is easy to imagine that while white clubwomen were comfortable and chatty among friends in the parlor, the workers felt stiffer, less welcome, and less inclined to spout remarks a newspaperman could scribble down.

We can read the quotation, “the applause of the audience was so loud that perhaps only Mrs. Patten [who presented the money] could hear ‘Mammy’ Theresa voice her thanks,” in a third way. In this reading, the newspaperman readied his pen, perching on the edge of his seat, as Theresa Harper accepted the award from the clubwoman. In this reading, there was an empty space, a silence, between Patten’s words of congratulations and an audience expecting an audible response from Harper. In this reading, the applause, painted as overwhelmingly loud in the article, only began when it became clear that Harper had no intention of opening her mouth in front of the gaping clubwomen. In this reading, Harper’s silence was her choice. Perhaps Harper denied her voice to all the people staring at her as she accepted $10 for her eighty-seven years of labor.

Harper attended, wearing what white employers expected her to wear, but she did not perform for the clubwomen. Even the article’s author registered the uncertainty of his interpretation. Recognizing the narrative gap that the lack of Harper’s voice created, he edged into speculation: “perhaps only Mrs. Patten could hear ‘Mammy’ Theresa voice her thanks.” Gratitude from Harper was unvoiced and, possibly, unfelt. In Harper’s deliberate silence, it is possible to sense hints of other choices and strategies that she could have pursued to navigate the likely fraught relationship with the Boarmans. If the clubwomen sought to use Harper’s life to make an argument about African Americans’ place in society, Harper refused to collaborate on such a narrative.

African American women who were not inside the Ebbitt Hotel parlor that day vehemently opposed the glorification of slavery and the mammy figure. Neither local nor national Black newspapers appear to have covered the favorite servant contest. However, six years later, local and national African American newspapers intensely opposed a scheme from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to establish a monument to the “faithful colored mammies of the South” in D.C. ⁷⁹ One Black newspaper promised that, if such a statue was built, “we will put a bomb under it.” ⁸⁰ Individual African American women, including D.C. resident Mary Church Terrell, and Washington-based women’s organizations, such as the Phyllis Wheatly YWCA and the National Association of Colored Women, also protested the mammy monument. ⁸¹ In a 1923 letter to the editor in the Evening Star, Terrell explained that the proposed monument was “abhorrent to the womanhood of the whole civilized world” and assured readers that if it was built, “thousands of colored men and women … will fervently pray that on some stormy night the lightning will strike it and the heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground.” ⁸² Although the favorite servant contest did not provoke such public outrage, Black Washingtonians likely found it similarly “abhorrent.”

The favorite servant contest ended with the singing of “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia” by “the white audience and brilliantly dressed women,” which further linked this contest to a wider cultural nostalgia for the Old South. ⁸³ The Evening Star reporter wrote that “something about the scene—the faithful old servants, headed by ‘Mammy’ Theresa, type of a character which is all but passed away in the life of America … smote the heart chords of all.” ⁸⁴ The clubwomen used the imaginary figure of the mammy to establish racialized power structures not as “passed away in the life of America” but instead as essential to functioning domestic work in the rapidly modernizing twentieth century.

Conclusion

Black resistance shaped the Progressive Era. Segregation and legal violence, as well as everyday negotiations of domestic work and the efforts of white women’s clubs, were evidence of white Americans’ responses to Black men and women’s assertions of liberty. The capital city’s servant question was no exception.

The servant contest emerged from servant question discourse, which blamed white women employers and, even more so, African American women household laborers. The publicized and much-discussed inability of white women to supervise workers effectively cast doubt on ideas that white women belonged in places of domestic authority. The increasing impossibility of ignoring how Black women were redefining and refusing the terms of domestic work complicated the perspective that African American women were well-suited for labor in white households. Discussions of contemporary issues led commentators to dwell on past conditions and future possibilities; the contest itself was a collision between a modern organization and a backward-looking sensibility. A focus on what made the past different from the present allowed commentators to continue to believe that the two groups of women who they saw as failing also, paradoxically, belonged in these household positions.

With their gendered and racialized authority in question, the DCFWC sought to displace blame onto workers, rather than employers. As a women’s club, the group would be vulnerable to accusations of distracting members from household responsibilities. The favorite servant contest can be seen, then, as a defensive reaction not only to African American resistance in D.C., but also to gendered critiques of white women. The organizers framed white women in public life as a solution, rather than a cause, of the servant question. Emphasizing Theresa Harper’s life, labor, and appearance situated Black women workers as the origin of domestic work’s problems and the target for solutions. Such a portrayal cast the ideal future as a place with white women as feminine authorities in public and African American women as controlled workers within white women’s households.

In the early twentieth century, the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised monuments across the South, intended, as Karen Cox wrote, to “signal that white men were firmly in control of the southern legal system.” ⁸⁵ The DCFWC organized the favorite servant contest to assert that white women were firmly in control of the southern domestic system. With her silence, Harper refused this vision of household labor. Similar everyday efforts to resist subjugation would, over the course of the twentieth century, build into movements that transformed the United States. Despite the efforts of the DCFWC and others, domestic work in the twentieth century became something fundamentally different from the model promoted in the favorite servant contest.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their crucial suggestions and generous guidance.