From the founding of the country until the mid-twentieth century, domestic work was the largest female occupation in the United States. The number of women engaged in such work was not counted until the 1870 census, when it was reported that 52 percent of employed women worked in "domestic and personal service," probably the normal level from the time of the Revolution until the end of the nineteenth century (when 1.5 million women listed the job). The proportion declined to 28 percent of employed women in 1920 and 18 percent in 1940, the last time the job led the list of women's occupations. After World War II, the percentage declined rapidly to 5.1 percent in 1970 and 2.5 percent in 1980. Women stopped being domestics because new jobs, especially clerical work, appeared. Work once done at home, such as cooking food or tending children, moved outside to restaurants and day-care centers.
The history of domestic work reflects changes in domestic ideologies and household technologies. The American Revolution occurred at a moment when homes were beginning a century-long transformation. Colonial homes produced goods; neighborhood girls helped the housewife with her unending work of cooking, spinning yarn, sewing clothes, and making butter, cheese, and bread in return for room and board and an apprenticeship in these skills. In the new nation, a growing class of well-to-do, urban housewives bought many of the products that rural households made for themselves and typically oversaw the work of a young live-in servant, who cooked, cleaned, laundered, served meals, and helped care for children. (These young single women often faced their first sexual assaults or temptations from the men in the house where they worked as domestics.) By the end of the century, the housewife expected her single live-in servant (two, in larger homes) to master the appliances made possible by new public water, gas, and electric lines, sewer systems, and commercial laundries, freeing the mistress for civic work in temperance, literary, garden, or political clubs.
The workers who adapted from "help" to "service" were rural women seeking city wages. From the 1840s through the turn of the century, a majority of first-generation Irish teenagers worked as live-in domestics. They dwarfed the numbers of northern free black women, who were often pushed to the fringes of hard, live-out, specialized tasks like laundry or heavy spring cleaning. Irish women became so identified with the job that domestics were generically known as Bridgets or Biddys into the 1920s, but first- or second-generation German and Scandinavian single women often found employment in live-in domestic service, too.
In the pre-Civil War South, the wives of plantation owners continued to direct home production similar to that of prerevolutionary northern women and were responsible for social rituals and their slaves' health care. Much of the physical labor entailed in the mistress's jobs, however, was assigned to slaves. Slave women and children, often pulled from field labor, spun thread and wove fabric, cooked and served meals, washed dishes and clothes, swept floors, cleaned furniture, made beds, and provided deferential service available only to the wealthiest non-slave-owning families--fetching and carrying, and fanning and dressing the white family. Slave women notoriously faced sexual demands from their owners as well.
In the early twentieth century, rising higher education for women, coupled with shattered family fortunes in the South and increased consumption in the North and West, led more middle-class women to enter the job market. Although these wives needed someone to care for their home and family, fewer women felt compelled to live in as domestic workers. By the 1920s, most such workers were older women who lived in their own homes, worked by the day, and supported dependents.
Domestic work remained a low-status job, but now it was identified with women of color, whose concentration in domestic work increased as African-American, Mexican-American, and American Indian women migrated from farms to urban centers and white women moved into other occupations. In 1920, 46 percent of African-American women workers were domestic workers; in 1930, 53 percent; and in 1940, 60 percent. (Even when industrial and clerical jobs opened up further during World War II, it was mostly white women who increasingly escaped domestic work, so that by 1944, black women made up over 60 percent of all domestic workers.)
The most common form of domestic work by the 1980s was day-cleaning, often contracted for with commercial companies employing a labor force of older white and African-American women, or immigrant women from Mexico, Latin America, or the West Indies. Most white Americans who were listed as domestic service workers were teenage baby-sitters.
Throughout its history, then, domestic work was a job for the society's lowest-status women: the very young or very old; racial minorities; rural immigrants or migrants escaping poverty; single women in search of housing; and women coerced into service, first in slavery and later to obtain immigration papers. The few men working as cooks, chauffeurs, or valets were also of low status, as the predominance of African-American men, or Chinese men in late- nineteenth-century California, indicates.
Domestic workers' powerlessness, or the identification of the occupation with housework--seen as nonwork--may explain why the path to regulating this job like others was so slow. Excluded from New Deal laws, such as the Wagner Act (1935), the Social Security Act (1935), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (1937), domestic workers were denied protections for union organizing (of which there were many local examples between the 1860s and the 1960s), retirement and unemployment insurance, and maximum hour and minimum wage regulation. Domestic workers did not gain Social Security retirement coverage until 1951, and they came under Fair Labor Standards protection only in 1974. The remnants of the once huge tribe of domestic workers gained legal respect as workers at the moment of the job's virtual demise.
Bibliography:
Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (1983); David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (1981); Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945 (1989).
Author:
Phyllis Palmer
See also Housework; Indentured Servitude; Slavery; Women and the Work Force.
