Unprotected Labor: Household Workers, Politics, and Middle-Class Reform in New York, 1870-1940

Introduction

1 Introduction At the end of the nineteenth century, Vassar College historian Lucy Maynard Salmon suspected that something was rotten in the kitchens of America ’s middle class. Whenever she was in the company of women, talk always turned to the problem of paid household labor. At parties and in quiet social gatherings, Salmon observed, “with whatever topic conversation begins,” discussion among middle-­ class women “sooner or later gravitates towards the one fixed point of domestic service.”1 This conversation did not take place just in middle-­ class parlors. In the late nineteenth century, the popular press printed these private whisperings and invited experts on domesticity , labor, and morality to parse the labor relations of the private home for the benefit of a voracious readership.2 Then, in the late 1880s, Salmon embarked on an ambitious project. She distributed over 5,000 questionnaires to both employers and domestics, inviting recipients to discuss domestic service in general and conditions in their households in particular. As a historian with a reverence for firsthand accounts, Salmon hoped to go right to the source of the “servant problem.” 2 • introduction Salmon’s inquiries elicited a torrent of response from both workers and housewives. Household workers objected to the low wages and long hours that prevailed in private homes. Had they chosen factory work, domestic servants complained, they would have had some time to themselves at the end of the workday. In private homes, however, “you are,” one worker objected , “mistress of no time of your own.”3 Middle-­ class employers were equally unhappy. A housewife in Brooklyn decried the “numbers of untrained , discontented girls who seem to have little appreciation of a good home, but leave on the slightest provocation, disliking any supervision but wanting their own way, even if wasteful and careless.”4 Domestics, employers complained, were unfit to work in middle-­ class homes. Middle-­ class housewives, domestics retorted, were unfit to run them. Faced with these results, Salmon concluded that it was high time that domestic service cease to be a labor relationship worked out privately between household employers and domestics. Instead, Salmon argued, “reform in domestic service must be accomplished along the same general economic lines as are reforms in other great departments of labor.”5 Salmon urged women’s organizations to include domestic service in their labor reform agendas, which were beginning to coalesce at the turn of the twentieth century . Some of the responses to Salmon’s survey, however, held clues that reform would not be easy. Among the thousand or so surveys and letters that flooded Salmon’s mailbox, a few expressed household employers’ indignation at even being asked about what went on inside their homes. One Yonkers housewife replied to Salmon’s inquiry with a terse note that “the questions are so decidedly personal that I decline to answer them under any considerations.”6 Another employer, although she welcomed Salmon’s efforts to address household labor problems, declined “to give any detailed information as to my private affairs to those who have no business to be advised of them and where the good to be accomplished is exceedingly dubious.”7 Projects like Salmon’s were part of the fabric of an important public conversation about paid labor in private homes that began at the end of the nineteenth century and extended to the public policy debates of the New Deal. Although historians have tended to dismiss this discussion as middle-­ class griping, the controversy over the “servant problem” made up a political debate that would shape the largest sector of women’s employment into the 1940s. This book explores the public debate over domestic service, labor regulation and reform, and labor activism between the late nineteenth century and 1940 in New York City and its environs. I argue introduction • 3 that the public discussion of domestic service in middle-­class homes, where circumstances were usually closely guarded as private, turned the middle-­ class home inside out. Private problems became public, and widespread anxieties about urban iniquity, labor conflict, and government regulation threatened to invade the middle-­ class private sanctum. At the heart of this debate was the middle-­class home. Domestics, in a variety of public forums, argued that middle-­ class homes were workplaces. Meanwhile, employers insisted that their homes were private spaces, over which they should have complete control. This discussion among domestics, legislators, journalists , employers, and organized women’s reform groups shaped government...