Domestic Worker Activism: Women of Colour as Household Employees

Introduction: The Triple Exploitation

Author: Leena Hussein, MI Candidate

During the Depression era, the streets of New York’s Bronx borough were home to an underground domestic labour market. Every day, an assembly of Black women huddled together on the streets to make “their strength and energy” available for household work.1 In 1935, Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, two undercover Black female journalists, wrote ‘The Bronx Slave Market’ for The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), exposing this exploitation of Black women.2 These women, if selected by white homeowners, would work an unfixed number of hours for roughly 15-30 cents per hour, and quite often received no payment once their agreed upon time was completed.3 On September 14th, 1935, Baker and Cooke observed one woman agreeing to work for whatever price the housewife would give her, about which another woman muttered: “You see,…that’s what makes it bad for the rest of us. We got to do something about those girls. Organize them or something.”4 It is lost to history whether this unnamed woman knew that the previous year Dora Jones started the New York Domestic Workers Union, which by 1939 had recruited “350 out of 100,000 domestics in the state.”5 The many Black women of the Bronx slave market were triple exploited for being Black, for being women, and for being domestic workers.6

The history of the exploitation of racialized female domestic workers does not end on the street corners of the Bronx but rather carries on through the century and across nations. In Canada, we can trace a culture of community and resilience that workers created with one another. This blog series will look at Canada’s own history of the exploitation of women of colour for domestic household labour. Utilizing resources provided by the IRHR Library’s collection alongside those available from University of Toronto Libraries and various online resources, this series will dive into the complex histories of these women by focusing on the migration of workers from across the Caribbean in the 20th century, the discriminatory laws that surround them, and how workers fought against these trials.

Back to Top

 

Endnotes

  1. Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke, “The Bronx Slave Market,” The Crisis 42, no. 11 (1935): 330. https://archive.org/details/sim_crisis_1935-11_42_11/page/330/mode/2up.
  2. Tracey Lorraine Walters, Not Your Mother’s Mammy: The Black Domestic Worker in Transatlantic Women’s Media (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 13. https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/14bjeso/alma991107163961006196.
  3. Baker and Cooke, "The Bronx Slave Market,” 330.
  4. Baker and Cooke, 331.
  5. Angela Yvonne Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1983): 96. https://librarysearch.library.utoronto.ca/permalink/01UTORONTO_INST/blpd0s/alma991105903653606196.
  6. Louise Thompson, "Toward A Brighter Dawn," The Woman Today, April 1936, 14. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/wt/v1n02-apr-1936-women-today.pdf.

 

Back to Top

Additional Resources

Back to Top