Based on recorded and transcribed oral history interviews and personal written reports, this work can be considered a source book on black lives that, too, continue to matter. The work constitutes a cooperation between Katherine van Wormer, a sociologist who grew up in a white family with black domestics, David W. Jackson III, a historian many of whose family members through the generations worked as domestics in white homes, and Charletta Sudduth, an early childhood consultant with compassion for the biographical work and family narratives she helped to bring together in this volume. While political activism on the part of narrators also figures in the materials recorded, the goal of the volume is to place value on the role of black women’s work as domestics and on the relationships formed and recalled as part of work including childcare arrangements. The research emanated from the University of Northern Iowa, and interviews began particularly in Waterloo, Iowa, to which many of the field consultants had come during the Great Migration. What makes the work unusual is its effort to place next to one another the recollections of black women who worked as domestics and those of white women and men who remember being cared for by such women as they grew up in the post-WWII decades.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part contextualizes the narratives historically, emphasizing the experience of women in the Great Migration. Part II and Part III are organized analogously. Under the heading “In Their Own Words,” the recollections of the interviewees and writers are provided, followed by an analysis of narrative themes. Domestic work is always a complex arrangement, even in situations where race relations are not involved. Domestic laborers free up the time of the employers, be this to go work elsewhere themselves or, obviously more the case in the work places recalled here, to undertake leisure or other social endeavors. In the post-slavery US, segregation was nonetheless in place, which, within the intimacy of a home, manifested itself in efforts to draw lines regarding front and back door entrances and hygiene regimes as well as transgressions committed unwittingly by children and wittingly by the white men. The recollections of the women interviewed for Part II vary, though a constant remains the unregulated, minuscule pay. The resilience and occasional laughter resounding through the memories of the black women stands in contrast to the ambiguity in evidence in the materials of the white interlocutors in Part III, most of whom opted to offer written recollections. Their remembrance is that of children experiencing daily care and the company of black maids for part or all of their childhood, and it is more than appropriate that the first common theme discussed in the analytic section of this part concerns cognitive dissonance. Experiencing care and feeling affection for individuals who may have been more present in the everyday life of a child than the parent, children nonetheless also witnessed the segregating practices, such as not eating together with the person who had cooked the meal, or finding that this often beloved person is forced to leave for reasons that cannot be explained to the child. The authors detect both defensiveness and denial of having been involved in “a social institution of oppression” (261). They see in this also a reason for the fact that many of the individuals approached did not wish to participate in the study or else wished to have their names kept anonymous—in contrast to all of the black interviewees.
The "demographic" that comes into view through this volume seems historically important for the troubling present we live in. One encounters here narrators who worked as black maids for white families who were also poor, but who somehow, due to the socioracial stratification continued in everyday as much as in political habitus, nonetheless could feel themselves to be better than those whom they employed sometimes for as little as hand-me-down clothes. That misplaced sense of an entitlement to superiority practiced in those settings wafts through parts of current populist sentiment. Domestics, not just in the USA, often continue to be of a different race or ethnicity. While the present corpus of texts intends to shed light on a particular configuration within US history, many of the experiences and sentiments voiced by the domestics and the children they cared for point to structures of feeling that linger in the ways in which housekeeping and childcare are handled today.
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[Review length: 743 words • Review posted on January 30, 2019]