Airing Dirty Laundry: Representations of Domestic Laborers in the Works of African American Women Writers

The article examines how Black Left feminists Marvel Cooke, Ella Baker, Louise Thompson, Esther Cooper Jackson, and Claudia Jones depicted the lives of domestic laborers in their activist writings. It then considers how their portrayals can be applied to an analysis of Alice Childress’s Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956) and Beulah Richardson’s A Black Woman Speaks (1951). Dissecting the agency of literary domestic workers occupies a central place in this discussion. The thoughts, actions, and speech of literary and nonliterary domestic laborers provide a multilayered appreciation of the strategies that these women employed when they encountered those who ignored their intellect. These writers, and the fictional and nonfictional domestic workers that they feature in their writings, emerge as social commentators and agitators who spotlight and rail against race, class, and gender discrepancies that are played out in- and outside the household domestic front.