Getting What We Need Ourselves by Jennifer Jensen Wallach

Author:Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781538125250
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Even long-exploited southern domestic workers were able to use the labor shortages of the era to negotiate for better wages. For example, Anna Mae Dickson managed to quadruple her pay after leaving her job as a domestic servant in a small Texas town to work performing similar tasks at a boarding house in Houston, Texas.77 Faced with the prospect of losing their black servants, terrified white employers spread rumors about the existence of “Eleanor Clubs,” purportedly named after the First Lady who had been outspoken in support of civil rights. Allegedly, these clubs were composed of militant black women determined to agitate for better wages and working conditions or, in more extreme cases, to encourage black women to leave their domestic posts altogether. This ultimate scenario inspired terror in the hearts of the ruling class who knew that the departure of black employees would force southern white women back into the kitchen.78 Although there is no evidence substantiating the existence of organized clubs of this kind, the availability of better-paying war industry jobs actually did free many black women from the drudgery of domestic service, making it much harder for middle-class white women to hire help.

Writing in the National Urban League’s Opportunity magazine, George E. Demar explained that by 1943 for “many Negro women the idea of a ‘career’ outside the ‘cook kitchen’ loom[ed] for the first time as a reality.”79 The percentage of working African American women employed as domestic workers fell from 60 percent to 44 percent between 1940 and 1944.80 In the aftermath of this transformation, one black women famously quipped that “it took Hitler to get me out of Miss Anne’s kitchen.”81 Indeed, World War II represented a turning point in the cultural and culinary landscape of the South as white women could no longer count on benefiting from the skills of an underpaid black woman to help feed her family.82 Increasingly, only the wealthy could afford to hire domestic servants, and those who did so began, by necessity, to treat their coveted employees with a greater degree of respect than before.83

Although black domestic workers sometimes found that they had greater bargaining power than ever before, black, female agricultural workers found that their labor, long vital to the southern economy, was undervalued and sometimes even spurned. During the war years, the shortage of agricultural workers was severe due to the deployment of men overseas, the allure of high-paying war jobs in urban areas, and increased agricultural output.84 To fill this shortage, secretary of agriculture Claude Wickard, at the encouragement of Eleanor Roosevelt, agreed to support the formation of a Women’s Land Army, which placed 1.5 million nonfarm women in agricultural jobs between 1943 and 1945.85

WLA recruitment materials were aimed at white, middle-class women who could afford the luxury of serving their country this way. Recruits had to purchase their own uniforms, which consisted of overalls, a hat with a visor, and a denim jacket.86 WLA pay was far lower than that for other wartime work, paying about half the wages of an average factory worker.

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