static. Change began around World War I, when international migration to the US came to a halt and African-Americans started moving to the northern part of the country to take jobs that would have been filled by white immigrants. This movement, called the Great Migration, brought black domestic workers to the cities of the North. Little changed except the location, however, for circumstances there resembled those in the South. Wages and working conditions remained stubbornly poor throughout the 1920s.
to the new jobs, preferring regular hours and wages to the caprices of their earlier employment. They actively encouraged their daughters and other younger relatives to find different occupations. Even before the Civil Rights Movement, almost two-thirds of African-American women had found employment other than being domestics. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 sealed the fate of household work for African-Americans, making discrimination illegal in the workplace on the basis of race, color, or sex.
‘AS OPPORTUNITIES IN MANUFACTURING AND OTHER TYPES OF INDUSTRIAL AND COMMERCIAL EMPLOYMENT GRADUALLY BEGAN OPENING DURING WORLD WAR I AND AFTER, DOMESTIC WORKERS FLOCKED TO THE NEW JOBS...’ Government programs during the Great Depression brought small relief, as southern legislators insisted that domestic workers be left out of minimum wage laws and the pension plan known as Social Security. The percentages of African-American women employed as domestics peaked in the early twentieth century, when seven out of ten new jobs in Atlanta were for servants. As opportunities in manufacturing and other types of industrial and commercial employment gradually began opening during World War I and after, domestic workers flocked
1963 An African-American woman being carried to police patrol wagon during a demonstration in Brooklyn.
By 1980, only 7 percent of African-American women worked in other women’s homes. While most AfricanAmericans today had a grandmother who worked as a domestic, virtually none of them do those jobs themselves. The door from the white employer’s house finally went in only one direction, and that was out. Rebecca Sharpless Professor of History at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, is the author of Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960.
August 28, 1963 The civil rights march on Washington.