Abstract
In 1871, an anonymous “colored woman” wrote a letter of rhetorical inquiry to the Philadelphia Post. “I take the liberty of asking you to explain to me why it is that when respectable women of color answer an advertisement for a dressmaker, either in families or with a dressmaker, [they] are invariably refused.” In lieu of preferred jobs they are offered “a place to cook or scrub, or to do house work,” she stated. She described the subterfuge used by shop owners and garment and textile manufacturers to rebuff the employment of African American women. Despite the advertisements in newspapers publicizing openings, black women were turned away repeatedly with advice to call again” or to “return later” at some illusory time when they would be needed. “There are many respectable women of color competent to fill any of the above named positions,” she reiterated. Yet these women “eke out a scanty livelihood sewing at home,” wait for a more receptive job market in vain, or resort to domestic work. “The ‘brotherly love’ for which this city is proverbial should extend to all, irrespective color, race or creed,” she insisted.1
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Notes
Philadelphia Post, November 1, 1871, in We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dorothy Sterling (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 423–24.
Joseph A. Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1929), p. 115.
For an in-depth analysis of women in Atlanta, see Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
For an important critique of Salmon’s flawed methodology and the influence of Progressive thinking on her book and the subsequent literature on domestic work, see Bettina Berch, “‘The Sphinx in the Household’: A New Look at the History of Household Workers,” Review of Radical Political Economics 16 (Spring 1984): 105–21.
Nathaniel Burt and Wallace E. Davies, “The Iron Age, 1876–1905,” in Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, ed. Russell F. Weigley (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 471–83; Roger Lane, The Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 7–13; James Michael Russell, Atlanta, 1847–1890. City Building in the Old South and the New (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press); Don Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860–1910 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), pp. 1–21, 136–58; Jonathan McLeod, Workers and Workplace Dynamics in Reconstruction Era Atlanta (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989).
Burt and Davies, “Iron Age,” pp. 488–94; Russell, Atlanta, pp. 152–53; Doyle, New Men, pp. 11–14.
Burt and Davies, “Iron Age,” pp. 491–92; Lane, Roots of Violence, pp. 20–21; James Michael Russell, “Politics, Municipal Services, and the Working Class in Atlanta, 1865–1890,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 66 (Winter 1982): 467–91; Doyle, New Men, 143–47; Jerry Thornbery, “The Development of Black Atlanta” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1977), pp. 7–12; Dana F. White, “The Black Sides of Atlanta: A Geography of Expansion and Containment, 1870–1970,” Atlanta Historical Journal 26 (Summer/Fall 1982–83): 199–225; John H. Ellis, “Businessmen and Public Health in the Urban South During the Nineteenth Century: New Orleans, Memphis, and Atlanta,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 44 (May–June 1970): 197–371; John H. Ellis and Stuart Gallishoff, “Atlanta’s Water Supply, 1865–1918,” Maryland Historian 8 (spring 1977): 5–22; Michael Leroy Porter, “Black Atlanta: An Interdisciplinary Study of Blacks on the East Side of Atlanta, 1890–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1974).
Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., Theodore Hershberg, and John Modell, “Origins of the Female-Headed Black Family: The Impact of the Urban Experience,” in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century, Essays Toward an Interdisciplinary History of the City, ed. Theodore Hershberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 438–46; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Random House, 1976); Andrew Miller, “Social Science, Social Policy, and the Heritage of African-American Families,” in The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 254–92; Antonio McDaniel, “The Power of Culture: A Review of the Idea of Africa’s Influence on Family Structure in Antebellum America,” Journal of Family History 15,2 (1990): 225–38.
It is important to stress here the assessment DuBois made of his own data. Recent scholars, however, have questioned the reliability of census statistics on black widows. The extremely high rate of black male mortality notwithstanding, it appears that the number of black widows was overreported by women or that errors were made by census enumerators. I thank Antonio McDaniel for calling this issue to my attention. See Samuel H. Preston, Suet Lim, and S. Philip Morgan, “African American Marriage in 1910: Beneath the Surface of Census Data,” Demography 29 (February 1992): 1–15.
Furstenberg, Hershberg, and Modell, “Origins of the Female-Headed Black Family,” 435–54; Miller, “Social Science,” pp. 254–92; Stewart Tolnay, “Black Fertility in Decline: Urban Differentials in 1900,” Social Biology 27 (Winter 1980): 256–57; Michael B. Katz, “The Urban ‘Underclass’ as a Metaphor of Social Transformation,” in “Underclass” Debate, pp. 3–26.
On DuBois’s influence on Frazier and Moynihan see the following: Elliot Rudwick, “W. E. B. DuBois as a Sociologist,” in Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 25; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 209–10; Anthony M. Platt, E. FranklinFrazier Reconsidered (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 111–20, 133–42.
Furstenberg, Hershberg and Modell, “The Origins of the Female-Headed Black Family,” pp. 439–42; Kathryn M. Neckerman, “The Emergence of ‘Underclass’ Family Patterns, 1900–1940,” in Katz, “Underclass” Debate, p. 200. Southern black women were three times mote likely to participate in the labor force than southern white women, and married black women were nearly six times more likely than married white women. See Claudia Goldin, “Female Labor Force Participation: The Origin of Black and White Differences, 1870 and 1880,” Journal of Economic History 37 (March 1977): 94; Janice L. Reiff, Michael R. Dahlin, and Daniel Scott Smith, “Rural Push and Urban Pull: Work and Family Experiences of Older Black Women in Southern Cities, 1880–1900,” Journal of Social History 16 (Summer 1983): 39–48; Thornbery, “Black Atlanta,” p. 34; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow. Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 113; Gutman, Black Family, pp. 442–50, 624–42.
Tolnay, “Black Fertility Decline,” pp. 249–60. For a misinterpretation of low fertility to bolster a black family “pathology” thesis, see Roger Lane, Roots of Violence, p. 158. Lane concluded that the small family size can be attributed to a large percentage of black women prostitutes and infertility caused by gonorrhea. This claim is made without providing any evidence of the incidence of gonorrhea, by exaggerating the number of prostitutes and by ignoring live birth, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates. Lane dismissed other factors for low fertility, such as the possibility that black women had fewer children voluntarily, either through birth control or abstinence. For an explicit rejection of the correlation between low fertility and venereal disease, see Tolnay, “Black Fertility in Decline.” Lane continued this line of thought, slightly modified, in a subsequent study. He argued that low rates of marriage, high rates of infant mortality, and diseases from prostitution accounted for small black family sizes—except for “the most distinguished” black Philadelphians. The small family sizes of the elite can be attributed “not as the result of disease or desperation but of decision.” See Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia and Ours: On the Past and Future of the Black City in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 305. According to Tolnay’s data from the 1900 census, better-off families had fewer children than did the poor among black urbanites. If Lane accepts this data, his conclusions are inconsistent, since poor women had more children and he associates infertility, prostitution, and venereal disease with poor women. DuBois’s conclusions concur with Tolnay. See Philadelphia Negro, p. 319.
Faye Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), p. 64; Nash, Forging Freedom, pp. 146, 150; Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, pp. 77–80.
Hill, Women in Gainful Occupations, pp. 334–36; David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 87–91.
Frances A. Kellor, Out of Work: A Study of Employment Agencies, Their Treatment of the Unemployed, and Their Influence upon Homes and Business (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905 ); Dorothy Salem, To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (New York: Carlson Publishing, 1990), pp. 45–46; Charles Ashely Hardy III, “Race and Opportunity: Black Philadelphia During the Era of the Great Migration, 1916–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1989), p. 450; Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 81.
See for example entries for 1880–99, Edwin Edmunds Account Book, 1838–92, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Berch, “Sphinx in the Household,” pp. 114–15; Dudden, Serving Women, pp. 87–93.
Susan Strasser, Never Done: The History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982).
A Negro Nurse, “More Slavery at the South,” New York Independent 72 (January 25, 1912): 196.
Strasser, Never Done, pp. 36–46; Kathleen Ann Smallzried, The Everlasting Pleasure. Influences on America’s Kitchens, Cooks, and Cookery, from 1565 to the Year 2000 (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1956), pp. 93–102.
Quoted in Elizabeth Ross Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service in the United States,” Journal of Negro History 8 (October 1923): 411.
See for example, Polly Stone Buck, The Blessed Town: Oxford, Georgia, at the Turn of the Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 16.
Strasser, Never Done, pp. 105–2 1; Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), pp. 65,98.
Katzman, Seven Days a Week, pp. 185–87; Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era (1908; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1964), p. 53; Walter L. Fleming, “The Servant Problem in a Black Belt Village,” Sewanee Review 8 (January 1905): 14, W. E. B. DuBois, “Negroes of Farmville, Virginia,” Bulletin of the Department of Labor 14 (January 1898): 21; Dolores Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), pp. 43–44, 127–29.
Katzman, Seven Days a Week, pp. 60–62; U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1904), pp. 486–89.
For descriptions of laundry work, see Sarah Hill, “Bea the Washerwoman,” Federal Writers Project, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereinafter FWP, SHC); Jasper Battle, “Wash Day in Slavery,” in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972–79), vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 70; Buck, Blessed Town, pp. 116–20; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, pp. 72, 82, 124; Daniel Sutherland, Americans and Their Servants: Domestic Service in the United States from 1800 to 1920 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 92; Dudden, Serving Women, pp. 224–25; Patricia E. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), pp. 11–43; Strasser, Never Done, 105–21.
See Don L. Klima, “Breaking Out: Streetcars and Suburban Development, 1872–1900,” Atlanta Historical Journal 30 (Summer-Fall 1982): 67–82; Testimony of Albert C. Danner, in U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, Report upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing office, 1885), 105 (hereinafter Labor and Capital).
David McBride, Integrating the City of Medicine. Blacks in Philadelphia Health Care, 1910–1965 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), pp. 34–35; Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom.
Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, p. 8 1.
Atlanta Journal, March 3, 1883; Testimony of Mrs. Ward, Labor and Capital, pp. 328,343; Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 195–97; Tera W. Hunter, “Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in Atlanta,” Labor History 34 (Spring-Summer 1993): 208–11.
For comparison of vails and customary rights in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 250–55; Roger Lane argues that black domestics had some legal recourse when falsely accused of stealing in Philadelphia or when employers invaded their privacy by opening their mail, though he also acknowledges that only a few who were mistreated made formal complaints. William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, p. 79.
For the controversy on pan-toting see Negro Nurse, “More Slavery at the South,” p. 199; “The Negro Problem: How It Appeals to a Southern White Woman,” Independent 54 (September 18, 1912): 22–27; Fleming, “Servant Problem,” p. 8; Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service,” pp. 412–13; Testimony of Mrs. Ward, Labor and Capital, p. 343; Elizabeth Kytle, Willie Mae (New York: Knopf, 1958), pp. 116–17; E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (February 1971): 76–135. For an insightful discussion of “social wages” see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 116–52.
Testimony of Mrs. Ward, Labor and Capital, p. 343. On resistance see Hunter, “Domination and Resistance,” pp. 205–20; James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).
Lane, William Dorsey’s Philadelphia, 78.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of the Census, Report of the Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897), pt. 2, p. 634; McLeod, Workers and Workplace, pp. 41, 100; Gretchen Maclachlan, “Women’s Work: Atlanta’s Industrialization and Urbanization, 1879–1929” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1992), pp. 13–20.
See Atlanta Constitution, May 15 and June 18, 1900, November 30, 1902; Atlanta Journal, April 12 and August 12, 1901; Atlanta Independent, September 22, 1906; “Condition of the Negro in Various Cities,” Bulletin of the Department of Labor 2 (May 1897): 257–359.
Maclachlan, “Women’s Work,” 203–25; “Reports of the Martha Home,” 1913–15, in Christian Council Papers, Men and Religion Forward Movement, Atlanta History Center; Minute Book, 1908–18, Neighborhood Union Papers, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Clarke Atlanta University; Ruby Owens, tape-recorded interview by Bernard West, January 23, 1976, Living Atlanta Collection, Atlanta History Center.
Though Roger Lane acknowledged that there are no direct figures on black women prostitutes, he made questionable calculations nonetheless. He derived the estimate of 2,000 to 2,500 black prostitutes (20 to 25 percent of the total presumed number) by arguing that black women accounted for 29 percent of prosecutions for infanticide, 40 percent of known deaths from abortion, and 20 percent of official deaths caused by syphilis. How all of these morbidity and mortality measures, problematic in themselves, are linked to prostitution and prostitution alone is never substantiated or explained. Lane overreached his evidence even further to claim that “perhaps” as many as 25 percent of all black women in Philadelphia (e.g., over 5,000 women in 1890), by the end of their childbearing years “had at some time had exposure to the disease and habits associated with prostitution.” There is no evidence presented here or elsewhere to sustain this conjecture—he cites two newspaper articles from 1863 and 1880. See Roots of Violence, pp. 107–9, 122–33, 159.
See “Bea the Washerwoman,” p. 4; Julia. Campbell Buggs, Mary Campbell, and Dinah Campbell, “Three Sisters,” pp. 5, 9, FWP, SHC.
See Thornbery, “Black Atlanta,” 210; Strasser, Never Done, 16–31.
On women’s neighborhood networks and subsistence strategies see Neckerman, “Emergence of ‘Underclass’ Family Patterns,” pp. 197–205; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1986), pp. 41–62; Ellen Ross, “Survival Networks: Women’s Neighborhood Sharing in London Before World War I,” History Workshop 15 (spring 1983): 4–27; Jeanne Boydston, “To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence,” Radical History Review 35 (1986): 7–25.
Maclachlan, “Women’s Work,” 163–85; Neckerman, “Emergence of ‘Underclass’ Family Patterns,” 197–205.
DuBois, ed., Efforts for Social Betterment Among Negro Americans (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1898), pp. 11–16; Porter, “Black Atlanta,” pp. 68–75; Thornbery, “Black Atlanta,” pp. 147–69.
U.S. Department of Treasury, Register of Signatures of Depositors in the Branches of the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company, Atlanta Branch, 1870–74 (microfilm) National Archives, College Park, Maryland; DuBois, Efforts for Social Betterment; American Missionary (October 1889): 292; Porter, “Black Atlanta,” 75–76.
Testimony of Mrs. Ward, Labor and Capital, p. 344; Ma [Margaret Cronly] to darling Rob [Cronly], June 29, 1881, Cronly Family Papers, William R. Perkins Library, Duke University.
This tactic of resistance evoked much controversy among employers in Atlanta as demonstrated by the attention it received in Joseph E. Brown’s antiblack and antilabor U.S. Senate campaign in 1914. See 1914 campaign literature, Joseph M. Brown Papers, Atlanta History Center; Atlanta Constitution, March 31, 1910. Brown vowed to ease the burdens of “helpless” white housewives by eradicating domestic workers’ organizations.
Atlanta Constitution, July 20, 1881; Porter, “Black Atlanta,” pp. 254–61; Lane, Roots of Violence, 109–25.
Recent literature on black migration indicates that more African Americans had prior urban experiences than previously assumed. Blacks usually migrated incrementally from rural areas to southern cities, rather than moving directly from the rural South to the urban North. DuBois discussed the urban origins of many migrants from the upper South in The Philadelphia Negro, but his descriptions of southern migrants as a group usually depicted them as rural peasants inexperienced in urban life. See Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 23–30; Joe William Trotter, ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone. The Great Black Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
See for example, Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia’s African Methodist and Southern Migrants, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 3–5, 109–11; Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color. The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 18801920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Lewis, DuBois, pp. 189, 205. Too little research has been done on how the working class defined, challenged, or embraced “racial uplift” ideology. “Uplift” ideals were not necessarily limited to the black middle or upper classes, as many working-class people participated in the popular discourse about race advancement by attending public lectures, debates, and sermons, and by reading and discussing novels and serialized fiction and nonfiction in newspapers, such as the AME Church Review, published in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia Negro makes explicit DuBois’s many recommendations for changing policies, institutions, and individual behaviors. As Rudwick argued, DuBois enthusiastically embraced the double role of social scientist and social reformer. See Rudwick, “W. E. B. DuBois as a Sociologist,” pp. 28, 38; Lewis, DuBois, pp. 183–210; Mary Jo Deegan, “W.E.B. DuBois and the Women of Hull-House, 1895–1899,” American Sociologist 19 (Winter 1988): 301–11.
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© 2004 Joe Trotter, with Earl Lewis and Tera W. Hunter
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Hunter, T.W. (2004). The ‘Brotherly Love’ for Which This City is Proverbial Should Extend To All” the Everyday Lives of Working-Class Women in Philadelphia and Atlanta in the 1890S. In: Trotter, J.W., Lewis, E., Hunter, T.W. (eds) African American Urban Experience: Perspectives from the Colonial Period to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403979162_5
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