African-American Women Workers' Protest in the New South

Abstract

Images of African-American domestic workers in history and popular culture often conjure up acquiescent and docile employ ees content with their occupational status. Domestics usually worked in solitude in private households, unlike their peers who worked in factories, shops, or offices. Scholars have often assumed that this isolation inhibited the growth of their working-class con sciousness and solidarity. The story of Atlanta's washerwomen, however, defies this as sumption. The women organized one of the most significant strikes in the urban South during the late nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that the laundresses washed, dried, and ironed the clothing of their patrons in their own neighborhoods, which enabled autonomy rather than direct employer supervision, and allowed them to work together. They took advantage of the networks they built and nourished in their communal work to mobilize a strike. The Washing Amazons, as they were called by the Adanta Constitu tion, gained the support of the larger black community and seriously inconvenienced the majority of white households in a city dependent on their labor.