Unprotected Labor by Vanessa H. May

Author:Vanessa H. May [May, Vanessa H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Women's Studies, Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations
ISBN: 9780807834770
Google: H0MaBCnrdukC
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-01-15T03:58:37+00:00

Protecting the Middle-Class Home from Disease

This conflict between women's reform ideals and their gender ideology did not always produce political inertia. Domestic service lacked neither regulation nor reform in the 1930s. Activists may have been slow to address domestics’ working conditions, but they quickly embraced measures requiring household workers to appear for physical examinations before going to work in middle-class homes. These laws were mostly local ordinances, enacted by city councils and local health departments in towns and cities in suburban New Jersey and New York. These ordinances, which many women activists vocally supported, reflected the expansion of women's organizing power from the city to the middle-class suburbs in the mid—twentieth century. Once again, the idea of the home as a place that was fundamentally different from other workplaces resurfaced in these reformers’ arguments in favor of health examinations. In the eyes of the women reformers who lobbied for health regulations, housework's intimacy required that its workers be monitored in ways that industrial workers were not. The case of health regulations shows the ways in which progressive women activists viewed the middle-class home as an object of state protection but not as a target of labor reform. It therefore also reveals the tangled path along which organized women drew the line between the proper role of government in industry and in the middle-class home.

One of the earliest initiatives in the North to protect the middle-class home from diseases purportedly borne by domestic workers began in Newark, a New Jersey city ten miles west of New York City. In 1930, Thomas V. Craster, Newark's health officer, noted that domestics made up a large percentage of visitors to the city's venereal disease clinic. Craster was known for facing health issues head—on, no matter how unpopular, having waged “an unsuccessful campaign against kissing,” along with a presumably equally futile attempt to convince dog owners that their pets were unsanitary.105 After concluding that domestics posed a threat to his community's health, Craster passed an ordinance in 1931 requiring Newark's household workers to submit to twice—yearly Wasserman blood tests for syphilis. By 1939, the law had been amended, mandating that domestics file with the Health Department a physician's certification that they were free from “tuberculosis and any other contagious or communicable disease.”106 For domestics found to be in violation of the law, the fine for the first offense was twenty—five dollars. Thereafter, domestics who refused to be examined would have to pay a fine of fifty dollars.107

Thus, food handlers underwent physical exams only once a year but domestic workers in Newark would be examined twice as often. Food handlers, Craster explained, tested positive for syphilis only 2 percent of the time, while “approximately 20% of our domestics are under treatment for syphilis.”108 Furthermore, Craster argued, household workers posed a greater danger to Newark's middle-class citizens than did the city's restaurant cooks. In contrast to a short—order cook, a domestic, “by the nature of his or her employment,” came “even more directly in contact with the family circle.

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