NYTimes | This underclass status can be traced as
far back as the 1800s, historians say, and is squarely rooted in racism.
Domestic work was then one of the few ways that Black women could earn
money, and well into the 20th century, most of those women lived in the
South. During the Jim Crow era, they were powerless and exploited. Far
from the happy “mammy” found in popular culture like “Gone With the
Wind,” these women were mistreated and overworked. In 1912, a
publication called The Independent ran an essay by a woman identified only as a “Negro Nurse,” who described 14-hour workdays, seven days a week, for $10 a month.
“I live a treadmill life,” she wrote. “I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets.”
In
1935, the federal government all but codified the grim conditions of
domestic work with the passage of the Social Security Act. The law was
the crowning achievement of the New Deal, providing retirement benefits
as well as the country’s first national unemployment compensation
program — a safety net that was invaluable during the Depression. But
the act excluded two categories of employment: domestic workers and
agricultural laborers, jobs that were most essential to Black women and
Black men, respectively.
The few Black
people invited to weigh in on the bill pointed out the obvious. In
February 1935, Charles Hamilton Houston, then special counsel to the
N.A.A.C.P., testified before the Senate Finance Committee and said that
from the viewpoint of Black people, the bill “looks like a sieve with
the holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”
The
historian Mary Poole, author of “The Segregated Origins of Social
Security,” sifted through notes, diaries and transcripts created during
the passage of the act and found that Black people were excluded not
because white Southerners in control of Congress at the time insisted on
it. The truth was more troubling, and more nuanced. Members of Franklin
D. Roosevelt’s administration — most notably, the Treasury secretary,
Henry Morgenthau Jr. — persuaded congressional leaders that the law
would be far simpler to administer, and therefore far more likely to
succeed, if the two occupations were left out of the bill.
In
the years that followed, Black domestic workers were consistently at
the mercy of white employers. In cities like New York, African-American
women lined up at spots along certain streets, carrying a paper bag
filled with work clothes, waiting for white housewives to offer them
work, often for an hour or two, sometimes for the day. A reporter,
Marvel Cooke, and an activist, Ella Baker, wrote a series of articles in
1935 for The Crisis, the journal of the N.A.A.C.P., describing life in
what they called New York City’s “slave markets.”
The
markets’ popularity diminished in the ’40s after Mayor Fiorello La
Guardia opened hiring halls, where contracts were signed laying out
terms for day labor arrangements. But in early 1950, Ms. Cooke found the
markets in New York City were bustling again. In a series of
first-person dispatches, she joined the “paper bag brigades” and went
undercover to describe life for the Black women who stood in front of
the Woolworths on 170th Street.
“That is the Bronx Slave Market,” she wrote in The Daily Compass in January 1950,
“where Negro women wait, in rain or shine, in bitter cold or under
broiling sun, to be hired by local housewives looking for bargains in
human labor.”
That same year,
domestic work was finally added to the Social Security Act, and by the
1970s it had been added to federal legislation intended to protect
laborers, including the Fair Labor Standards Act. African-American women
had won many of those protections by organizing, though by the 1980s,
they had moved into other occupations and were largely replaced by women
from South and Central America as well as the Caribbean.
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