Domesticity And Dirt

Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920-1945

Author: Phyllis Palmer
ISBN: 0877229015

In the era after Suffrage, white middle-class housewives abandoned moves toward paid work for themselves, embraced domestic life, and felt entitled to servants. In Domesticity and Dirt, Phyllis Palmer examines the cultural norms that led such women to take on the ornamental and emotional elements of the job while relegating the hard physical work and demeaning service tasks to servants—mainly women of color. Using novels, films, magazine articles, home economics texts, and government-funded domestic training course manuals, the author details cultural expectations about middle-class homelife. Palmer describes how government-funded education programs encouraged the divisions of labor and identity and undercut domestic workers’ organized efforts during the 1930s to win inclusion in New Deal programs regulating labor conditions. Aided by less powerful black civil rights groups, without the assistance of trade unions or women’s clubs, domestics failed to win legal protections and the

Publisher: Temple University Press
Publish Date: 1991-08-08

Subjects: Social Science / General, Social Science / Women's Studies

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: History)