A Brief History of the Domestic Work Industry in the US
Domestic work was part of the founding of the United States of America, and domestic work was
women’s main occupation for most of this country’s history. It all started in 1492, when the land
which would become the United States was colonized by Britain and Spain. Thousands of European
settlers moved here, stealing land and killing the Native people who lived here. Some of the earliest
domestic workers in the United States were Native women who were forced to serve as maids for
the European settlers.
In the South, European settlers built huge cotton and tobacco plantations. They stole hundreds of
thousands of people from Africa to work as slaves on these plantations. These slaves worked in
brutal conditions; they faced serious overwork and intense violence. The masters’ wives were
supposed to be treated as “ladies” who should not dirty themselves with housework. Slave women
did the housework to maintain the huge plantation mansions, and they did most of the work to raise
the masters’ children. The housework was hard. Often, these slave women were not given time to
raise their own children, and many of their children were sold away to other plantations. Because
these women often had to stay in the masters’ houses to sleep, they were the most vulnerable to rape
and sexual violence by the masters.
One slave woman shared the story of what her life was like. She said, “When I was nine years old,
they took me from my mother and sold me. Massa Tinsley made me the house girl. I had to make
the beds, clean the house, and other things. After I finished my regular work, I would go to the
mistress’s room, bow to her, and stand there till she noticed me. Then she would say, ‘Martha, are
you through with your work?’ I’d say, ‘Yes ma’am.’ She’d say, ‘No you ain’t. You haven’t lowered
the shades.’ I’d then lower the shades, fill the water pitcher, arrange the towels on the washstand,
and anything else mistress wanted me to do. Then she would tell me that was about all to do in
there. Then I would go to the other rooms in the house and do the same things. We weren’t
allowed to sit down. We had to be doing something all day. Whenever we were in the presence of
any white folks, we had to stand up.”
Meanwhile, huge factories were being built for the first time in the Northeast of the United States.
Conditions in the factories were hard: long hours, dangerous working conditions, low pay. At first,
women worked in factories next to men, but they were eventually pushed out of the factories based
on the idea that “a women’s place is in the home.” Women’s role in the home started to lose its
value in society. Because women were not permitted to work in many other occupations, domestic
work remained one of their only options. Middle class people in the cities started to hire domestic
workers, seeing them as status symbols. The demand for domestic workers in the cities began to
grow. Between 1870 and1910, the number of domestic workers doubled from 960,000 to 1.8
million.
Slavery was finally ended in 1865, after the Civil War. However, many African American people
remained poor because - after slavery ended - they were not given any land or resources to build a
new life. The former slave masters developed a new set of laws – called segregation – to keep Black
people and white people separate and to keep Black people poor. Many of the former slaves who
stayed in the South became sharecroppers, continuing to grow and pick cotton on the old
plantations. Differently from when they were slaves, they were paid a little bit for their work, but
they were never paid enough to get ahead. Once slavery ended, many Black women continued to
work as domestic workers in the South. This is the story of a free Black woman who continued to
work as a domestic workers after the end of slavery, “For more than thirty years – since I was ten
years old – I have been a servant in white families. I frequently work from fourteen to sixteen hours
a day. I am compelled by my contract, which is oral only, to sleep in the house. I am allowed to go
home to my own children only once in two weeks, every other Sunday afternoon. Even then I’m
not permitted to stay all night…You might as well say that I’m on duty all of the time – from sunrise
to sunrise, every day in the week. I am the slave, body and soul, of this family. And what do I get
for this work – this lifetime bondage? The pitiful sum of ten dollars a month! Tho today we are
enjoying nominal freedom, we are literally slaves.” Some Black women were able to gain a level of
independence from domestic service by working as laundresses. They still did laundry for white
people, but they controlled their own schedules, and they could make a little more money. In 1880,
Black domestic workers and laundresses in Atlanta launched the first organizing drive among
domestic workers in the United States. They launched a three-day strike for higher wages in Atlanta.
During this period, times were hard for many poor people in Europe because of things like the Irish
Potato famine. Many European immigrants came to the United States looking for a better life.
Many of the European immigrant women became domestic workers in Northeastern cities.
Domestic work agencies would come out to greet the incoming boats. These women would send
remittances home to their families who were still in Europe. Here is the story of one European
immigrant domestic worker, an Irish cook. “I grew up in a peat cabin. There were seven of us
children. What did we eat? Well, just potatoes. My sister came to work in America, and she saved
money enough to bring me out. I got a place for general housework with Mrs. Carr. I got $2 till I
learned to cook good, and then $3 and then $4. I was in that house as cook and nurse for twentytwo years. How did I keep my place so long? Well, I think I was clean in my work. I took better
care of her things than she did herself, and I loved the children as if they was my own. Me and my
sister saved till we brought our brothers over, and they worked in the mills as weaver and spool boy
and then they saved, and we all brought out my mother and father. My brother coaxed me to give
up work at Mrs. Carr’s and to open my house for boarders here in Kensington. His wife didn’t like
to hear it said I was working in somebody’s kitchen.” But as factories start to open up employment
opportunities for immigrant white women, these women started to leave the industry. Even when
their new jobs paid less, those women wanted to leave domestic work because it was looked down
on.
The invention of the mechanical cotton picker led to mass unemployment for Black sharecroppers
in the South. African American people started the “Great Migration” to Northern cities in search of
jobs and to escape Southern segregation. Black women became the primary domestic workers
nationally. Most white women only did domestic work before marriage; once they were married they
became housewives. For Black women, the domestic work industry was not a stepping-stone out.
Black women were likely to remain domestic workers after marriage. Domestic work was an
occupation that Black women took on for generations: grandmothers, mothers and daughters all did
domestic work.
There was a huge wave of workers’ struggles in the early part of the 20th century. Because the
factories were growing, there were more workers than ever before, and they knew they had power.
The negative impacts of the Great Depression meant that people had to fight. Workers went on
strike all over the country, and they won huge victories like the National Labor Relations Act that
protected workers’ rights to organize. Domestic work and farm work – the two industries most
connected to the history of slavery – were not included in the National Labor Relations Act and
other worker rights and protections. Those industries remained unprotected.
The Civil Rights Movement fought for an end to segregation in the South and for equal rights for
Black people nationally. The Civil Rights Movement won important policy changes, like opening up
jobs that had previously been closed to Black people and to women. . Domestic workers fought for
their rights as part of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1968, Dorothy Bolden built the National
Domestic Workers Union, which organized black domestic workers. Through their efforts, the Fair
Labor Standards Act was expanded to include most domestic workers in its minimum wage and
overtime protections. Most African American women left domestic work, but moved to other parts
of the care industry and into other service work after the 1960s. They did not want to work in an
industry that was so connected to the history of slavery. Many of these women took jobs in service
and caring industries - like cleaning and elder care work - where they continued to face difficult
working conditions.
In response to the victories of workers movements in the 1930s and the Civil Rights movement of
the 1960s, corporations developed new strategies to increase their profits. They shut down factories
in the United States and moved them to Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean where they could
pay the workers lower wages. They also developed a set of governmental policies called neoliberalism that made conditions worse in those same nations, forcing many people to migrate to the
United States and Europe in search of jobs and better opportunities. When immigrants arrived, the
only jobs that were available to them were low-wage jobs in the service industries.
Because of these changes, wages have been dropping in the United States since the 1970s. More and
more families had to have two income earners in order to maintain their standard of living, and thanks to the women’s movement of the 1970’s - more and more women started working full-time
outside of the home. As a result, much of the work that used to be done in the home by families like cleaning, cooking, child care and care for the elderly - started to be done in the marketplace by
restaurants, child care centers, rest homes, laundries and domestic workers. At the same time, the
Baby Boomer population started to reach old age, driving up the demand for care work. Jobs in
elder care are growing faster than almost any other occupation. Many of these jobs in the service
and care industries are paid poorly, and they offer few benefits or protections. It is mainly African
American and immigrant workers who do this labor. Today, it is immigrant women from Latin
America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia who have become the main domestic workers in the United
States.
What is your story today? How does it connect with the stories of the domestic workers who
came before us?