Making Care Count: A Century of Gender, Race, and Paid Care Work

Chapter 2-Domestic Workers: Many Hands, Heavy Work

20 Chapter 2 Domestic Workers Many Hands, Heavy Work In her well-known fictional portrayal of nineteenth-century family life, Home, Catharine Maria Sedgwick explains that the family “did not regard their servant as a hireling, but as a member of the family, who, from her humble position in it, was entitled to their protection and care.”1 Maria W. Stewart, an African American women’s rights activist who had worked as a domestic servant from a young age, described service very differently: “Tell me no more of southern slavery; for with few exceptions . . . I consider our condition but little better than that.”2 Taken together, these two voices capture many of the profound contradictions of domestic service in the nineteenth century, when servants could be described, depending on one’s perspective, as family members or as slaves. These workers performed a whole range of nurturant and nonnurturant tasks in perhaps the most intimate venue—private homes. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of domestic service in the United States during the second half of the 1800s, both to women workers and to reproductive labor. During this time period, nearly every middle- and upper-class family employed at least one domestic servant, and some wealthier families employed an entire staff to carry out the daily functions of their households. Ninety percent of these workers were women, and until 1870, at least 50 percent of employed women in the United States were domestic servants. In 1870, there was one servant for every eight U.S. families, and in some cities the ratio was as high as one to four.3 Paid reproductive labor in the twentieth century has its roots in the nineteenth century with these workers who represent some of the earliest and most ubiquitous paid care workers in U.S. history.4 Domestic Workers: Many Hands, Heavy Work 21 From Ubiquity to the Underground: The Shifting Economic and Cultural Context of Domestic Service The context for private household work at the dawn of the twenty-first century is certainly different from the world of servants 150 years ago, and yet some patterns of gender and racial-ethnic inequality have shown remarkable persistence. From the emergence of domestic service as a rigidly hierarchical occupation to its precipitous numerical decline to its more recent incarnations , its story provides a critical foundation for understanding the development of paid care work in the United States. the domestic service model takes hold: 1800–1900 The work of maintaining a household in the agricultural economy of the nineteenth century has been described as “exhausting, backbreaking, [and] unceasing.”5 Food preparation often began with tending a garden and caring for animals, and involved laborious and time-consuming tasks such as canning and preserving, churning butter, and baking bread. Cooking was done on coal stoves or woodstoves that required constant tending. Laundry was so labor intensive that in many households an entire day of the week was devoted to boiling clothes in huge tubs, scrubbing them on the washboard, wringing them out, and hanging them to dry. Floors had to be scrubbed, water collected, and heating fires maintained.6 In a large number of families—even those not considered particularly well-off—hired domestic servants worked alongside the women and children of the house to accomplish these daunting tasks.7 In addition to the physical maintenance of the home, domestic servants were involved in many other aspects of reproductive labor. It was common for families to hire servants to care for children, sit with ill family members, or help with a new baby.8 While the twentieth century would see a shift of some of this type of care to institutions like hospitals and preschools, in the 1800s most care happened in private homes. And for families who could afford to hire servants, paid workers were a big part of providing that care. For much of the nineteenth century, the term “servant” was used far less frequently to describe these workers than the term “hired girl.” These workers were overwhelmingly young women, old enough to be helpful but not yet married. Families often hired the daughters of neighbors or friends and saw their role as part employer and part mentor. Young women who had helped their own families with household tasks perfected their domestic skills as hired girls to prepare themselves for marriage. These young women may have lived in the homes of their employers at least temporarily but often came from homes nearby and...