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chapter 11 Diverted Mothering among American Indian Domestic Servants, 1920–1940 Margaret D. Jacobs In the early twentieth century, many young Indian women took up domestic service in white women’s households in urban areas of the American West such as Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. The boarding school system had trained Indian girls in domesticity and then “outed” many of them to work among white families in the vicinity of the schools. After leaving boarding schools, many Indian women found few other employment prospects and used domestic service work as part of a patchwork of seasonal economic strategies. Most women found this work tedious and their employers imperious. In particular, many intensely disliked caring for white women’s children. However, despite the oppressive nature of domestic service, many Indian women gravitated to these jobs in urban areas where they formed a vibrant social network with other Indian youth and reveled in modern urban leisure pursuits. Leisure culture—the focus of many studies by women’s historians—offered greater freedom to young women who had so recently been confined to boarding schools, but it also generated new complications. While in service, many young Indian women became pregnant out of wedlock and then confronted a dilemma about how to mother their own children while earning a living as domestics and caretakers of other children. Some Indian mothers relied on extended kin while others boarded their children. Still others faced pressures by Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials, including “outing matrons,” to place their children up for adoption or to institutionalize them in boarding schools. Thus, at a time when white women reformers worked to enable single mothers to stay at home with their children through mothers’ pensions and Aid to Dependent Children, many Indian women domestic servants were diverted from mothering their own children to care instead for white middle-class women’s children. Examining the case files of ninety-seven Indian domestic servants in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1920 and 1940, this chapter considers the ways in which Indian women’s paid work as domestic servants often undermined their unpaid culturally reproductive work as mothers. Young Indian women servants in the 1920s and 30s in the San Francisco Bay Area experienced a phenomenon that feminist scholar Sau-ling Wong calls “diverted mothering,” whereby “time and energy available for mothering are diverted from those who, by kinship or communal ties, are their more rightful recipients,” to care for employers’ children instead (Parreñas 2001: 76). This phenomenon has often operated among working class women, particularly women of color, in the United States. The black “Mammy” in the plantation household represents the most well-known manifestation of this phenomenon, but it could be applied to every woman who has had to provide child care and perform domestic service for other women while diverting time and attention from her own home and children (Zimmerman, Litt, and Bose 2006: 193–284). To some extent, Sau-Ling Wong’s configuration presumes a universal family in which it is primarily the biological (or adoptive) mother who plays the central role in child-rearing. Within many American Indian communities, extended kin, particularly grandparents, aunts, and uncles had long helped to raise children. By the early twentieth century, however, government officials, missionaries, and reformers were promoting a nuclear family and a domestic role for women as part of assimilation policy. Prior methods of childrearing were under attack; in fact officials often justified the removal of Indian children to boarding schools based on supposedly deficient Indian child-rearing and aberrant family models. The BIA expected Indian women to conform to a middle-class model of home and family (Jacobs, 2009). Ironically, however, the promotion of “outing” and domestic service diverted young Indian women from this model. The entrance of large numbers of American Indian women into domestic service occurred as a direct result of the assimilation policy that the BIA implemented from about 1880 to 1935. In the late nineteenth century, many reformers, including white women affiliated with the Women’s National Indian Association, had called for a major overhaul of federal Indian policy. They had criticized the use of military forces to quell conflicts and the isolation and poverty of Indians on reservations. Instead, they believed that only through bringing Indian people into the American mainstream would the so-called Indian problem be solved. Consequently, as part of its assimilation policy, the federal government established a vast network of Indian boarding schools. The...

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