Premilla Nadasen

Is It Time to Jump Ship? Historians Rethink the Waves Metaphor

The waves metaphor to delineate feminist activism in the United States is troublesome, to say the least. Despite its problems, the waves model has tremendous staying power when it comes to understanding, analyzing, writing about, and teaching the history of U.S. feminism. In this collection of essays, historians revisit this model, highlighting the efficacy of feminist waves as we know them, but also challenging this model for eliding the experiences of women of color, men, young people, and others whose activist work falls under a capacious definition of feminism.

Citizenship Rights, Domestic Work, and the Fair Labor Standards Act

Before a national convention of domestic workers in 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the fi rst black woman in Congress, urged them to action: “Organize and work together with the women’s groups and labor and civil rights groups in your community.” Th e daughter of a household laborer, she exhorted, “Hold meetings and rallies. Talk to the local press. Let everyone know that you are fi rstclass citizens and that you will not settle for anything less than a fair and equal chance to share in the fruits of this country.” 1 Chisholm was speaking to the already mobilized. In the 1960s and 1970s, private household workers around the country organized to improve working conditions, raise wages, professionalize their occupation, and claim their rights to social citizenship. Inclusion in labor law became a major goal. Th e domestic worker rights movement, which came together as the Household Technicians of America in 1971, consisted of dozens of locally based organizations made up largely of poor African American women. Some of them had direct ties to the civil rights movement. 2 Others were, in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” Th ey were responding to the conditions of an occupation with a long history of exploitation and abuse, one in which employers had overwhelming power and much of the mistreatment took place behind closed doors. Most domestic workers were poor women of color who had few occupational

Domestic Worker Organizing: Storytelling, History, and Contemporary Resonances

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of writing the history of poor black women’s labor is the nature of the archive. As Ann Stoler has reminded us, the archive is implicated in unequal power relations. Archival sources collected about poor black women tend to document the ways in which black women have been disciplined, controlled, exploited, or imagined by dominant white society. More elusive is black women’s agency and how they challenged, resisted, made sense of their labor, and developed alternative images of themselves and their work. The muted voices of poor and working-class black women—two categories that have significant overlap—and the consequent marginalization of their self-defined stories have shaped the field of black women’s studies as well as the unfolding of labor history more broadly. While scholars such as Tera Hunter, Robin Kelley, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Bonnie Thorton Dill, Karen Sacks, Angela Davis, and others have laid the foundation for an exploration of working-class black women’s resistance, there is still much to be done. My research and writing has centered on organizing and activism as a way to illuminate the voices of women, such as welfare recipients and household workers. Their political engagement offers an opportunity to analyze their critique of power and their aspirations for social transformation. Their public declarations, writing, speeches, papers, and oral histories offer a wealth of information about women who often remain under the radar. Organized women are not representative of the vast majority of workers in a given occupation—they were clearly a minority. And their views cannot be extrapolated to other workers. But studying their movements

Sista’ Friends and Other Allies

The cavernous church was packed. All the chairs were occupied and people had begun to line up along the outer wall. The commotion of children playing in the next room, in combination with the low murmur of translators and the architecture of the old building, made it difficult to hear the speaker with the microphone at the front of the room. Despite the imperfect acoustics, the message came across loud and clear: more than one hundred fifty poor women of color had gathered to discuss a domestic workers’ bill of rights that was being debated before the New York State legislature.