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In response to the poor working conditions suffered by domestics struggling to survive the Depression, middle-class women's organizations initiated various legislative reforms aimed at tackling the problems they believed plagued the occupation. Throughout these years, organized women debated three key pieces of reform related to domestic service: efforts to suppress street-corner markets, health requirements for prospective domestics, and state-level wage and hour reform. These reforms were united by the rhetoric of privacy, which clubwomen used both to oppose wage and hour reform and to support requirements that domestics have physicals before applying for work. This article examines the fine distinction that middle-class women's organizations drew between public and private in the appropriate application of government power and the resulting conflict between progressive women's gender ideology and their most deeply-held reform ideals. In doing so, it reveals organized women's struggle to reconcile their humane ideals with the reality in their kitchens.
In January 1938, approximately 150 members of the Women's City Club met to discuss bills pending in the New York legislature, which would provide domestic workers with a sixty-hour week, minimum wage, and inclusion in worker's compensation laws. First, the would-be reformers made their pitch. Emily Sims Marconnier, chairwoman of the City Club's own Committee on Labor and Industry and associate general secretary of the National Consumers' League, Blanche Freedman, a New York Women's Trade Union League (WTUL) lobbyist, and Dora Jones, president of the American Federation of Labor-affiliated Domestic Workers Union, each rose to make a case for the legislation. The room then exploded in outrage. According to one journalist, audience members "appeared unable to distinguish between legislation and unionization."1 Another reported that, even though Marconnier had pointed out that "enlightened housewives" had nothing to fear from either legislation or the union, speakers from the floor conjured images "of union inspectors grilling them on hours their help spent with the baby or the vacuum cleaner."2 Members stood up, "one after another," to voice concern that legislation and unionization would bring public labor disputes into their private homes. One woman declared that "no union was going to regulate" her "home routine," while another complained that her "'husband has enough troubles with unions in his business without having union trouble at home.'"3 Government regulation and...