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

Women's movements in the United States have always been plagued by class tensions. As May's new book vividly illustrates, campaigns for the rights of domestic workers most clearly highlight the conflicting goals and competing values among women. May's book deftly depicts the contradictions faced by middle-class women who championed labor protections for factory workers but who resisted similar protections for women employed in their own homes. As a consequence, domestic workers were (and still are) largely left untouched by the twentieth century's social "safety net." "Women's organizations' ambivalence about state regulation of the middle-class home," she says, "contributed to the failure to bring basic labor standards to domestic workers in the New Deal" (144).

Domestic work was the largest sector of women's employment until World War II ended, employing large numbers of immigrants as well as African Americans. Middle-class women continually debated the "servant question," but relatively few of them wanted to address the conditions of work in their own homes. The discussion of domestic service, May argues, turned the middle-class home "inside out" by converting the home into a workplace and threatening even the most intrepid women's-rights reformers' notions of what constituted the public (versus the private) realm. Mainstream women reformers, particularly during the early twentieth century, justified their claims to public participation on the basis of their special roles and duties as mothers. This "maternalism," which informed significant social-policy initiatives even into the time of the New Deal, rested on a notion of the home as a "gendered private space rather than a workplace" (145). Thus, May contends, "allowing the government to regulate domestic service would challenge progressive women's authority" to advocate for other female workers (145).

Certain Progressive Era reformers, most notably Florence Kellor, tried to address the plight of servants through government regulation. These efforts included the development of licensed employment agencies and domestic training programs, but significantly, they did not go so far as to regulate conditions within servants' actual workplace—the middle-class home. Most reform efforts aimed at transforming the behavior of domestics (combining housekeeping skills with deportment, bible classes, and grooming lessons) or the behavior of unscrupulous agents. Kellor pushed for public policies that would regulate employment agencies and mediate disputes among employers, domestics, and the agencies. Although such reforms aided some domestics, they did little to address the balance of power between employers and domestics, and they did nothing to regulate the hours, wages, and working conditions in middle-class homes. Like other Progressive reformers, May argues, Kellor cast the "servant problem" as one of "municipal management and urban reform rather than as a labor problem" (105).

One of the virtues of May's work is her attempt to give as much voice to domestic workers themselves as to their middle-class employers. Though hindered by significant source limitations, May nonetheless points to important actions on the part of domestics to define their own reform agenda. Despite the fact that they were vulnerable to patronizing employers, the sexual advances of husbands, and unscrupulous employment and "training" agencies, domestic workers formed communities (often aided by new urban transportation systems and the growth of popular entertainments) and found ways to resist exploitation, either by simply quitting or, on occasion, organizing and lobbying for state-based protections. May argues that domestic workers sought, like workers in other industries, to shape and control the conditions of their employment.

Although the focus of May's book is New York, this study addresses important questions in women's and labor history, as well as issues in public policy, social reform, and the nature of the American welfare state. It suggests that the omission of domestic service from New Deal reforms had as much to do with the attitudes of middle-class women as with the racist politics of southern congressmen...