Domestic Labor as a Life-Course Event: The Effects of Ethnicity in Turn-of-the-Century America

Abstract

Much of the historical literature on working women has emphasized the extent to which employment varied along racial and ethnic lines. Domestic service in turn-of-the-century America attracted by far the largest proportion of employed women, and female domestics tended to belong to specific ethnic and racial groups. Immigrant domestics, most often Irish, Scandinavian, and German, were generally from areas of the so-called European marriage pattern, and employment for these women was normally temporary and limited to the life-course phase preceding marriage. Domestic work of this sort was a product of small-scale rural economies and was associated with late marriage. It was further marked by shared productive activity among all household members and by loosely defined social roles. In contrast to immigrants and native-born white servants, black domestics were older and far more likely to combine wage labor with marriage and motherhood. Their greater proclivity for day work and separate residential patterns, although clearly southern in origin, was replicated in northern cities and represented a trend toward the application of industrial work rules to domestic service (Dudden 1983). In other words, immigrant domestics seemed to compose the informal, “help” component of the domestic labor force, while black women, although marginalized and subject to discrimination in employment, appeared to represent an expanding, semiprofessionalized segment of the nation’s servant pool.