Domination and resistance: The politics of wage household labor in new south atlanta

Labor History

Volumn 34, Issue 2-3, 1993, Pages 205-220

  Hunter, Tera W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

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EID: 84963287675     PISSN: 0023656X     EISSN: 14699702     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00236569300890131     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. Tera Hunter teaches Southern and Labor History at the Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is working on a study of the politics and culture of wage household labor in A tlanta, 1865-1920.
2. An earlier version of this paper was first presented at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Louisville, Kentucky, April 1991. Thanks to Stephanie Shaw and Robin D. G. Kelley for their generous comments. Kelley along with Elsa Barkley Brown, Leon Fink, Jacquelyn Hall, and Elizabeth Faue provided incisive critiques of the latest version. I am also grateful to Julius Scott, III, David Montgomery, and Nancy Cott for their insightful readings of the many incarnations of the larger project that this essay is drawn from. The writing was supported by a grant from the Institute for Research in Social Science of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
3. Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 3, 1881.
4. See Jackson Daily Clarion, June 24, 1866, reprinted in Philip S. Foner and Ronald Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times To the Present, (Philadelphia, 1978-84), II, 345; Galveston Daily News, 1, 2, 5, 7, and 16 Aug. 1877. For a full account of all the strikes, see Tera W. Hunter, “Household Workers in the Making: Afro-American Women in Atlanta and the New South, 1861 to 1920,” unpublished Ph.D. diss. Yale Univ., 1990).
5. This essay relies on the following works on resistance: James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Rebellion (New Haven, 1985); Domination and the Arts of Resistance: The Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990); Rosalind O'Hanlon, “Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies, 22(1988), 189-224: John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston, 1989).
6. See O'Hanlon, 199-200; and Scott, 289-303.
7. On Atlanta as a leading city in the New South see James Michael Russell, Atlanta, 1847-1890: City Building in the Old South and the New (Baton Rouge, 1988), passim
8. Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910 (Chapel Hill, 1990), passim
9. Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (NY, 1978), passim
10. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 124.
11. Tor a comparison of rates of employment of domestic workers in various cities, see David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service and Industrializing America (NY, 1978), 61, 286.
12. On rates of married women in the work force, see Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations 1870 to 1920 (Washington, DC, 1929), 334-336.
13. U.S., Dept. of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census. Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, DC, 1904), 486-489.
14. On laundry work, see Sarah Hill, “Bea, the Washerwoman,” Federal Writer's Project Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
15. Jasper Battle, “Wash Day in Slavery,” in George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, CT, 1972-1978), II, pt. 1, 70; Katzman, 72, 82, 124
16. Daniel Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge, 1981), 92
17. Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America (Middletown, CT, 1983), 224-225
18. Patricia E. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850-1930 (Urbana, 1986), 11-43.
19. On live-out arrangements see Katzman, 87-91.
20. See, for example, testimony of Albert C. Danner, U. S. Senate, Committee on Education and Labor, Report Upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital (Washington, DC, 1885), 105 (hereafter cited Labor and Capital).
21. See Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie After the War: An Exposition of Social Conditions Existing in the South during the Twelve Years Succeeding the Fall of Richmond (Boston, 1906; reprint ed., 1937), 192; entries for 17 June through 2 Dec, 1866, Samuel P. Richards Diary, Atlanta Historical Society; entries for May 1865, Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas Journal, Duke University Archives
22. Emma J. S. Prescott, “Reminiscences of the War,” 49-55, Atlanta Historical Society.
23. Alexa Wynell Benson, “Race Relations in Atlanta, As Seen in a Critical Analysis of the City Council Proceedings and Other Related Works, 1865-1877” (unpublished MA essay, Atlanta Univ., 1966), 43-44.
24. On the crisis of free labor see Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (NY, 1978), 97-125. On Black Codes see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Business, 1863-1877 (NY, 1988), 109-202.
25. David Katzman speculates on the basis of the ratio of workers to employers that there were enough laundresses in Atlanta for every white household and even some black. See Katzman, 91-92 and table 2-6.
26. On George Brown's campaign see Atlanta Constitution, 8, 15, 28, and 29 Sept. 1912.
27. For example see H. McHatton, “Our House and Our Servant.' Mfanta Journal-Record of Medicine, 5 (July 1903), 212-219; Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 19, 1909
28. William Northen, “Tuberculosis among Negroes,” Journal of the Southern Medical Association, 6 (Oct. 1909), 415
29. H. L. Sutherland, “Health Conditions of the Negro in the South: With Special Reference to Tuberculosis,” Journal of the Southern Medical Association, 6 (Oct. 1909), 399-407; Daily Times, n.p., Sept. 7, 1912, in Tuskegee Institute News Clip file (hereinafter TINF).
30. On the social and political implications of Atlanta's geography see James M. Russell, “Politics, Municipal Services, and the Working Class in Atlanta, 1865 to 1890,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 66 (1982), 467-491
31. Jerry Thornberry, “The Development of Black Atlanta, 1865-1885” (unpublished PhD diss., Univ. of Maryland, 1977)
32. Dana F. White, “The Black Sides of Atlanta: A Geography of Expansion and Containment, 1870-1970,” Atlanta Historical Journal, 26 (Summer/Fall 1982-1983), 199-225.
33. Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 15, 1912.
34. For other discussions associating domestic workers with disease and proposals to regulate them, see Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 11, Mar. 11, 12, 25, 1910, Oct. 2, 1912; and Atlanta Independent, Feb. 19, 1910.
35. Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 15, 1912; 1914 campaign literature, Joseph M. Brown Papers, Atlanta Historical Society.
36. For example see Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 31,1910; Ruth Reed, Negro Women of Gainesville, Georgia (Athens, GA, 1921), 46. Canadian working-class women's mutual aid organizations operated similarly: see Varpu Lindstrom-Best, Defiant Sisters: A Social History of Finnish Immigrant Women in Canada (Toronto, 1988), 56-60.
37. Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 15, 1912.
38. campaign literature, Joseph M. Brown Papers, Atlanta Historical Society. Also see Atlanta Constitution, Mar. 31, 1910. The white trade unionists vehemently denied the charges by reminding their supporters that “the ‘nigger’ question is generally the last and most desperate resort of demagogues to win votes.” While they admitted the importance of black workers organizing in separate unions to prevent undercutting white workers, they opposed integration and social equality. “ ‘Little Joe’ knows that there is not a single white labor unionist in Georgia, or the South, who would stand for that sort of thing,” they insisted. Journal of Labor, July 24, 1914.
39. 1914 campaign literature, Joseph M. Brown Papers, Atlanta Historical Society
40. Dewey Grantham, Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1958), 270-273.
41. David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (NY, 1980), 269
42. David Montgomery, Workers' Control in America (Cambridge, 1979), 127-134.
43. Charles Crowe, “Racial Violence and Social Reform: Origins of the Atlanta Riot of 1906,” Journal of Negro History, 52 (1968), 247
44. John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the Progressive Era 1900-1920 (Urbana, IL, 1977), 87-88.
45. Walter F.White, “'Work or Fight' in the South,” The New Republic, 18(Mar. 1,1919), 144-146.
46. See U. S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of the Census, Report of the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, DC, 1897), pt. II, 634-635
47. U. S. Dept. of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, DC, 1904), 486-489
48. idem, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910, vol. IV, “Population Occupational Statistics” (Washington, DC, 1914), 536-537
49. idem, Fourteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1920, vol. IV, “Population, Occupations” (Washington, DC, 1923), 1053-1055.
50. Macon News, Oct. 18, 1918, in TINF. The federal government also made similar appeals to black women through war propaganda. See, for example, the Portsmouth, Virginia, Star, Oct. 21, 1918, in TINF.
51. Quoted in Baltimore Daily Herald, Sept. 10, 1918, Group 1, Series C, Administrative Files, Box 417, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Papers, Library of Congress (hereinafter NAACP, LC).
52. For instances of violence against women, see Walter F. White, “Report of Conditions Found in Investigation of'Work or Fight' Laws in Southern States,” Group 1, Series C, Administrative Files, Box 417, NAACP, LC.
53. Walter F. White, “Report of Conditions Found in Investigation of ‘Work or Fight’ Laws in Southern States,” NAACP, LC
54. Chicago Defender, July 13, 1918, and New York Age, Nov. 19, 1918, in TINF.
55. New York Age, Nov. 19, 1918, in TINF.
56. One outcome of the NAACP's involvement in this campaigning was that it increased the interests of black Southerners in joining the organization. Thus, “work or fight” laws became a critical galvanizing issue for the growth of local NAACP chapters in the South. See for example, Atlanta Constitution, July 10-Aug. 25, 1918; Rev. P. J. Bryant, Remarks to the 10th Annual Conference of the NAAP, June 24, 1919, Group 1, Series B, Annual Conference Files, Box 2, NAACP, LC.
57. On “hidden transcripts” see Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, passim.
58. See Rabinowitz, 74-76; Katzman, 196-197
59. William H. Harris, The Harder We Run: Black Workers Since the Civil War (1982), 37
60. Dudden, 232; Dorothy Sterling, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (NY, 1984), 357-358
61. Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women Work and the Family from Slavery to Freedom (NY, 1985), 148-149
62. Donna Van Raaphorst, Union Maids Not Wanted: Organizing Domestic Workers, 1870-1940 (NY, 1988), 200. My own interpretation is closest to the only other study that considers most of the available evidence: Thornbery, 215-220. Rabinowitz's account has prevailed as the definitive one, often cited uncritically by other historians. But in the haste to force the event to conform to a thesis that emphasizes white attitudes and black inefficacy in the face of white power, he ignores significant evidence and overstates the known reprisals made against the women.
63. Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 3, 1881.
64. Atlanta Constitution, July 24, 1881.
65. Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 3, 1881. The women may have been counting on resources from individual savings and mutual aid organizations to help defray the costs of the fees. Nonetheless, the cost still would have been exorbitant.
66. Atlanta Constitution, July 21, 1881.
67. Alanta Constitution, Sept. 6, 1881.
68. See epigram above. Scott, 45.