“A code for maids! I hope it fails. . . . I work far harder now than my maid does, and longer hours. Besides, no home that is a home, with children and frequent guests, can run strictly by the clock.”—Mid-twentieth-century employer of domestic workers1
“We mean business this week or no washing.” This was the no-nonsense message from laundry workers to their employers in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1881. The women had just formed the Atlanta Washing Society and announced that their members would strike unless given a raise to one dollar per dozen pounds of laundry.2 Though the workers washed clothes inside of homes—sometimes inside their own homes—in isolation from other workers, the members of the Atlanta Washing Society evangelized their cause in churches, seeking solidarity among other washerwomen. (The group would grow to as many as three thousand members.)3 Within three weeks of its formation, its demands unmet, the Atlanta Washing Society began a strike.
The city of Atlanta responded to the strike and the group’s recruitment of new members by arresting and fining Washing Society members for disorderly conduct, taxing the group’s membership, and encouraging local businesses to stop hiring women who belonged to the society.4 Despite this pressure, the society pushed on, telling the city:
We are determined to stand to our pledge and make extra charges for washing, and we have agreed and are willing to pay $25 or $50 for licenses as a protection, so we can control the washing for the city. We can afford to pay these licenses, and will do it before we will be defeated, and then we will have full control of the city’s washing at our own prices, as the city has control of our husbands’ work at their prices. Don’t forget this. We hope to hear from your council Tuesday morning. We mean business this week or no washing.5
Eventually, the Atlanta city council rejected the idea of imposing fees on the society. Ultimately, as historian Tera W. Hunter of Princeton University has written, the strike resulted in “a greater appreciation for the fact that these women should not be taken for granted because of the role they played in the city’s economy.”6
In the decades that followed, domestic workers organized unions and associations to improve their working conditions and to generate solidarity. From 1870 to 1940, there were twenty domestic workers’ unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, in various parts of the country.7 Domestic workers also joined the Knights of Labor and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). One of the most successful efforts to unionize domestic workers during this time was led by Jane Street and the Domestic Workers’ Industrial Union, IWW Local No. 113, founded in 1916 in Denver, Colorado. Street’s vision for the union was larger than the traditional demands for better wages and shorter hours; she saw the union as a vehicle to “rebalance the power dynamic between mistress and servant.” With its innovative strategies, including the creation of an alternative placement agency, the IWW Local made real gains in increasing wages and improving working conditions.8 Similarly, in Harlem, New York, Dora Lee Jones created the Domestic Workers’ Union, organizing seventy-five thousand African American domestic workers in the area.9 The group secured a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per week and a maximum workday of ten hours. Jones’s organizing inspired the formation of similar groups in New Jersey and Washington, DC.
One of the more well-known efforts of this period was that of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). At the time, the notion that one couldn’t find “good help” was becoming widespread. In response, the YWCA—comprised primarily of white, middle-class women who wanted to professionalize the industry rather than necessarily be worker advocates—sought, according to Hina Shah and Marci Seville of the Golden Gate University School of Law, to “re-conceptualize the mistress/maid relationship from a feudal one to a modern business contractual relationship, hoping to make the job more desirable for white working women.”10 The YWCA convened a national conference in 1928, which resulted in the formation of the National Council on Household Employment (NCHE), the goal of which was to “coordinate educational and research activities in the hopes of educating employers and workers, and to gradually work out standards for household employment.”11 The “code for maids” that the NCHE developed—which included overtime, paid time off, and limits on work hours—spread across the country during the 1930s and 1940s. The YWCA also attempted to bring domestic workers’ issues to the attention of the Roosevelt administration, writing proposals to support New Deal protections for domestic workers. The National Recovery Administration, a preeminent New Deal agency, declined, stating that “the homes of individual citizens cannot be made the subject of regulations or restrictions and even if this were feasible, the question of enforcement would be virtually impossible.”12
A major flaw in the YWCA’s overall strategy was that its membership and leadership was not comprised of domestic workers. Instead, it was spearheaded by social workers and social scientists. In addition, the NCHE did not garner enough support among employers of domestic workers.13 Though, according to Shah and Seville, the organization did begin to “[lay] the groundwork for justifying labor protection in the home as it changed the public’s perception of the home as a place that could not be regulated and standardized,” by 1945 the organization had fallen away.14 Nevertheless, many of the YWCA’s strategies and end goals are still relevant to today’s movement, including the pursuit of overtime, days of rest, paid time off, and limits on work hours.15
The New Deal and the Exclusion of Domestic Workers
The New Deal ushered in a progressive ethical and legal framework for the treatment of the American worker, along with a host of federal and state laws regulating minimum wage, overtime, hiring practices, child labor policies, and other working conditions. Beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932 and ending in the early 1970s, the New Deal era was an outlier from the laissez-faire economics of the 1920s and the neoliberalism and economic deregulation that would follow it beginning in the 1980s.16 William L. Niemi and David J. Plante of Western State College of Colorado argue:
At its core, the New Deal regime aspired to a political economy with public (i.e., democratic) accountability in the financial system, in the corporate economy more generally, greater citizen equality with a real increase in life opportunities for the poor, women, and minorities (looking forward toward the politics of the 1960s), and hence, greater freedom as equal access to the political, economic, and cultural resources necessary to self-development.17
Unfortunately, the “life opportunities” the New Deal offered resulted mainly in protections for white workers. Most of the regulations explicitly or implicitly excluded domestic as well as agricultural workers, many of whom were African American. John P. Davis, founder of the National Negro Congress, testified before Congress in 1935 that the decision to exclude particular employees from New Deal legislation would leave black Americans helpless in the face of employers’ abuses and discrimination:
There is not a single thing [in the New Deal legislation] that will prevent the same type of ruthless exploitation of Negro workers. . . . [New Deal legislation] is supposed to be intended to help those workers whose lack of collective bargaining power renders them capable of exploitation by employers. As it stands, it does no such thing. . . . The economic crisis has not lifted for the Negro people. Because they are largely unskilled workers, reemployment for them has been slight. Negro domestic and agricultural laborers—representing the bulk of Negro labor—have had no benefits from the...protective legislation.18
Domestic workers even made a direct plea to Eleanor Roosevelt, when “Fifteen Weary Housemaids” wrote to the first lady about the Fair Labor Standards Act: “We have read in history books and other books about slavery of long ago, but the way the housemaids must work now from morning till night is too much for any human being. I think we girls should get some consideration as every other labor class has, even though it is housework.”19
Thus, the New Deal’s commitment to improving conditions for workers did not include all workers, but only a subset whose lives were deemed worthy of protection, regulation,