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Harsh, cruel, and stressful are three words to describe the life of African American women domestic workers during the Civil Rights Movement. During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, there were many contributions other than just the typical marches, speeches, and violence that everybody hears about. One of the many topics that have not been heard about frequently is the life of the colored maids during this time period. What were black domestic workers? These women worked for many white families usually in the south for practically their whole lives taking care of their employer’s children and working their houses cleaning and doing many other tasks. The life of a black maid had many responsibilities and difficulties that challenged these women on a daily basis. When discussing the background of the many women who became maids, it is often questioned where they came from and when they started working. In almost every black town there were many ladies all over who were maids. As early as 10 years old, these ladies had worked for many white families all over southern states. They started off by just doing simple tasks such as answering doorbells and sweeping the yard. When they start to become older, they learn to become cooks and then eventually are suited to be a maid to white families in the south (History Matters). Firstly, an African American maid raised white children and had many chores while doing so. An experienced black maid quoted on “History Matters” refers to the amount of work she had to do by saying, “It’s “Mammy, do this, “or “Mammy, do that,” or “Mammy do the other,” from my mistress, all the time.” The maids were required to wash, dress, and feed the children more than three times a day. Somet... ... middle of paper ... ...were that they had. Even though they were dealt with many issues, they learned to stick up for themselves knowing the consequences that they would get. Not only did they have many responsibilities, but they had several hardships to deal with. Even later on in the years there was still problems between domestic workers and white employers during the Civil Rights movement and even after it. Even today, discrimination are still going on between different races, genders, etc. To this day, people all over are still willing to fight for their rights. Works Cited History Matters. n.d. 21 April 2014 . Kilen, Mike. The Desmoines Register. 8 October 2012. 25 April 2014 . Sharpless, Vanessa May and Rebecca. UNC Press Blog. n.d. 21 April 2014 . Stockett, Kathrynn. The Help. New York: Penguin Group, 2009.
The Author of this book (On our own terms: race, class, and gender in the lives of African American Women) Leith Mullings seeks to explore the modern and historical lives of African American women on the issues of race, class and gender. Mullings does this in a very analytical way using a collection of essays written and collected over a twenty five year period. The author’s systematic format best explains her point of view. The book explores issues such as family, work and health comparing and contrasting between white and black women as well as between men and women of both races.
In the beginning of the book Hunter proceeded to tell us about the history of African-American women in a broader narrative of political and economic life in Atlanta. Her first chapter highlights the agency of Civil War era urban slaves who actively resisted the terms of their labor and thus hastened
Lillian Smith provides a description of the typical black woman and the typical white woman "of the pre-1960's American South" (Gladney 1) in her autobiographical critique of southern culture, Killers of the Dream. The typical black woman in the South is a cook, housekeeper, nursemaid, or all three wrapped up in one for at least one white family. Therefore, she is the double matriarch of the South, raising her own family and the families of her white employers: "It was not a rare sight in my generation to see a black woman with a dark baby at one breast and a white one at the other, rocking them both in her wide lap" (Smith 130). The southern black woman's duties extend far beyond rearing children, as she also serves as a family counselor, confidant, and nurse for the entire white family (Smith 129) and her own if time permits. She can do all this and more because she is strong, wise, and insightful in all areas of life (Smith 119). In short, the southern black woman is the cornerstone of the southern, domestic life. The white woman in the South has an equally important role. The southern white woman is responsible for maintaining southern social order, better known as Southern Tradition.
The two works of literature nudging at the idea of women and their roles as domestic laborers were the works of Zora Neale Hurston in her short story “Sweat”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Whatever the setting may be, whether it is the 1920’s with a woman putting her blood, sweat and tears into her job to provide for herself and her husband, or the 1890’s where a new mother is forced to stay at home and not express herself to her full potential, women have been forced into these boxes of what is and is not acceptable to do as a woman working or living at home. “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” draw attention to suppressing a woman’s freedom to work along with suppressing a woman’s freedom to act upon her
This novel also looks at social norms overseeing gender in the southern states around the 1960's. White women in the book are valued by the amount of children they can reproduce for the black women to raise. Even though getting a job is difficult for these black woman, the white women have a hard time seeking out a job as well. But these black women sacrifice their lives to be major workhorses surrendering their own families to work for white employers. Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter confront the roles put upon them by society and receive fulfillmen...
The life of a plantation mistress changed significantly once her husband left to join the Southern army. A majority of them stayed right on the land even if they were rich enough to move to a safer place. While there, the women and children would do a plethora of things: plant gardens, sew, knit, weave cloth, spin thread, process and cure meat, scour copper utensils, preserve and churn butter, and dip candles. Another important chore for a plantation mistress was caring for all the slaves. This included providing food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.1 Since money was scarce, "everything was made at home" according to one Southern woman. In a letter to her sister, she added that they "substituted rice for coffee . . . honey and homemade molasses for sugar . . . all we wore was made at home. Shoes also. You would be surprised to see how neat people looked."2 Even a ten-year-old girl wrote in her diary how she would have to go to work to help her mother: "Mama has been very busy to day and I have been trying to help her all I could." This same little girl cooked for her family and cared for her little sister while her mother was busy keeping the plantation alive. 3 Not only did the women stay busy trying to keep...
Similarly important was the role black women on an individual level played in offering a model for white women to follow. Because black men had a harder time finding employment, black women had a history of working ou...
Non-slave-owning women clung to the belief that owning slaves would relieve them of domestic chores and transform them into the figure of the Southern plantation mistress. Although wholly exaggerated, the women who did own slaves projected themselves to the rest of the South through the image of the mythical Southern mistress in order to uphold their role in society”
...brought with it discrimination of African American women, “They were targets of brutality, the butt of jokes and ridicule, and their womanhood was denied over and over. It was a struggle just to stay free, and an even greater struggle to define womanhood” (162). As the men fought the war the women who were now dependent upon themselves more than ever had to take on the role of the father. The Mammy figure now stood up for herself and would often times leave the white family, the family they left would often have feelings of remorse for their tremendous loss. Women were standing up for themselves and where now the maker of their own destiny, but with that still came the harsh reality that they would be still the most vulnerable group in antebellum America. Many single African American women were faced with poverty and had a really hard time dealing with the war and depending on themselves. Deborah Gray White’s view of slave women shows us that their role was truly unique, they faced the harsh reality that they were not only women or African American, they were both, so therefore their experience was one of a kind and they lived through it, triumphed, and finally won their freedom.
Historically, Black Women’s issues have been displaced by those of both white women and of the African American community as a whole. From the moment Africans set foot on the shores of the “New World,” the brutality they experienced was not just racialized, but gendered. Both African men and women were stripped naked, shaved, chained, branded, and inspected then sold and forced to work in the fields, plowing and picking cotton until their backs ached and their fingers bled. They also saw their family members sold away. However, their experiences diverged when it came to gender.
Moody’s position as an African American woman provides a unique insight into these themes through her story. As a little girl, Moody would sit on the porch of her house watch her parents go to work. Everyday she would see them walk down the hill at the break of dawn to go to work, and walk back up when the sun was going down to come back home. At this time in her life, Moody did not understand segregation, and that her parents were slaves and working for a white man. But, as growing up poor and black in the rural south with a single mother trying to provide for her family, Moody quickly realized the importance of working. Working as a woman in the forties and fifties was completely different from males. They were still fighting for gender equality, which restricted women to working low wage jobs like maids for white families. Moody has a unique insight to the world of working because she was a young lady that was working herself to help keep herself and her bother and sister in school. Through work, Moody started to realize what segregation was and how it impacted her and her life. While working for Mrs. Johnson and spending the nights with Miss Ola, she started to realize basic di...
The black woman in the U.S. holds a precarious role: she is a woman, she is black and she is quickly becoming the dominant force of her people. The black woman is increasingly the sole bread winner in her household because she is forced into that position because of the...
Deborah Gray White in Aren’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South theorizes that black women in the plantation south were the most vulnerable group in early America. These were black women in a white Southern society, slaves in a free American society, and women in a society ruled by men which gave them the least power and the most vulnerability in the plantation south. Their degradation was the result of American stigmas that understood black women as being promiscuous, licentious females who had high birth rates as well as a high pain tolerance. Although black women were seen as a part of the weaker sex, they were not seen as being as not seen as ineffectual. These women were sold for their abilities that include, but are not
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America, Black women were an after-thought in our nation's history. They were the mammies and maids, the cooks and caregivers, the universal shoulder to cry on in times of trouble. Often overlooked and undervalued, Black women were just ... there.
As slavery was replaced by lowly paid domestic help, female servants, particularly the young maids, were often forced to become the sexual playthings of the members of their employers' families. A domestic servant was afforded little privacy, dignity, or freedom to socialize with others. The employer expected sexual favors to go along with the rest of the duties exacted from the domestic servants. The domestic servant who became pregnant could no longer anticipate marriage. If she bore an illegitimate child, she would be dismissed from her job and shunned by society. As a last resort, unemployed dome...