A page of the 1840 census shows that two households—headed by James Simpson and John Keyser, respectively—listed occupants who were young free Black women (see those two tally marks way off to the right?).
In previous episodes, we have primarily focused on women who were the heads of households on Elfreth's Alley. In this week's episode, Joe Makuc looks to the literal margins of the census records to learn about the experiences of free Black women working as domestic servants.
Places to donate:
- https://www.phillybailfund.org/donate
- https://mutualaidphilly.com/
Other things to check out:
Intersectionality Matters (podcast)
Petition regarding the Murder of Breonna Taylor
The National Domestic Workers Alliance
FULL TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS SOURCES BELOW
List of Sources
African American Policy Forum, s.v. “Health Disparities.” African American Policy Forum, 2015. https://aapf.org/healthdisparities.
Beecher, Catherine Esther. Letters to Persons Who Are Employed in Domestic Service. New York, New York: Leavitt & Trow, 1842. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57985.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antriracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum: Vol. 1989: Iss. 1, Article 8. http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé and Andrea J. Ritchie. “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.” Ed. Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris. African American Policy Forum, 2015. http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/560c068ee4b0af26f72741df/1443628686535/AAPF_SMN_Brief_Full_singles-min.pdf.
Branch, Enobong Hannah and Melissa E. Wooten. “Suited for Service: Racialized Rationalizations for the Ideal Domestic Servant from the Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century.” Social Science History, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer 2012): 169-189. Cambridge University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23258091.
Gray White, Deborah. “Let My People Go.” In To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans to 1880, vol. 1. Ed. Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Jacobs, Michelle S. “The Violent State: Black Women's Invisible Struggle Against Police Violence,” 24 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 39. 2017. https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol24/iss1/4.
May, Vanessa. “Working at Home: Domestic Workers in the Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century United States.” History Compass 10, no. 3 (March 2012): 284–93. doi:10.1111/j.1478-0542.2011.00832.x.
Miller, Jacquelyn C. "The Wages of Blackness: African American Workers and the Meanings of Race during Philadelphia's 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 129, no. 2 (2005): 163-94. www.jstor.org/stable/20093783.
Roberts, Robert. The house servant's directory: or, A monitor for private families: comprising hints on the arrangement and performance of servants' work ... and upwards of 100 various and useful receipts, chiefly compiled for the use of house servants. Boston, Massachusetts: Munroe and Francis, 1827. https://d.lib.msu.edu/fa/43#page/1/mode/2up.
Rockman, Seth. Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, 1790-1840. Studies in Early American Society and Economy from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 2009.
Salinger, Sharon V. "”Send No More Women": Female Servants in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107, no. 1 (1983): 29-48. www.jstor.org/stable/20091738.
Steckel, Richard H. "The Quality of Census Data for Historical Inquiry: A Research Agenda." Social Science History 15, no. 4 (1991): 579-99. doi:10.2307/1171470.
Women’s Rights National Historical Park, s.v. “Sojourner Truth?” U.S. Department of the Interior, 2017. https://www.nps.gov/wori/learn/historyculture/sojourner-truth.htm.
TRANSCRIPT
JOE MAKUC: “There are three things that are requisite to secure good bread, viz. good flour, good yeast, and good care.
“Those who have the most success in making bread, are very particular in heating their oven exactly right.”
“Great care is needful also to put the bread in at just the right time. If the bread does not stand to rise long enough, it is too solid, either for health, or for pleasure in eating.”
These lines may sound like any googled “bread recipe,” but they’re straight from 1842, and they’re possibly lines free Black women on Elfreth’s Alley read. Catherine Esther Beecher included these lines and four more pages on breadbaking in her Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service in the hope that she would promote the “usefulness and happiness” of domestic workers. Many domestic workers in the early 1800s were Black women, including three of those on Elfreth’s Alley. But what was the relationship between domestic work like baking bread and race, gender, and class dynamics on the Alley? Join us in this episode to find out.
TED MAUST: Welcome to The Alley Cast, a podcast from the Elfreth’s Alley Museum in Philadelphia. We tell the stories of people who lived and/or worked on this street, which has been home to everyday Philadelphians for three centuries. While we start in this neighborhood, we will explore connections that take us across the city and around the globe.
Over the last few episodes we have explored the ways in which unmarried, separated, or widowed women led households on Elfreth’s Alley. Today we look to the literal edges of the census in search of the women who often found themselves at the bottom of household hierarchies--Black women working as domestic servants. Joe Makuc breaks down what we know about these women’s lives and why their stories matter today.
Episode 4: The Racial Politics of Domestic Labor
Act I - Introductions and Methodology
The history of professional domestic labor on Elfreth’s Alley stretches back to at least 1810. Margaret, a Black woman on the 1810 census, was a washerwoman in the rear apartment of 22 Elfreth’s Alley. Additionally, the 1840 census recorded two free Black women on the Alley, both between the ages of 10 and 23. To examine the household environments of Margaret and these unnamed Black women, we’ll start by introducing the demographics of domestic labor and discussing methodology for studying these people. Then we’ll examine how the particulars of these households and race and gender in Philadelphia informed how these domestic laborers worked. We’ll conclude by linking this history of domestic labor to Black women’s work today.
Our greatest piece of evidence that the unnamed women were probably domestic laborers stems from demographics. As we discussed in episode 2, economic opportunities for women were limited--and this limitation was even more compounded for Black women. While Pennsylvania’s gradual abolition act ensured that most Black people in the state were free from slavery by 1840, white people either formally or informally kept Black people from most quote-on-quote “skilled” positions. Hence, most Black people could only choose between positions that paid poorly, even if those positions were essential to society (such as dock work or sanitation). For Black women, barred from “skilled” labor by their race and quote-on-quote “masculine” labor by their gender, domestic work in some form was practically the only option available. Black women like Margaret were able to support themselves independently fairly well, performing dirty-but-fiscally-valuable tasks like laundry. Yet many other women could only find work as domestic servants, performing not just laundry, but cooking, cleaning, and child care for an entire household. For the reason that these Black women are the only Black people in the predominantly-white Simpson and Keyser households, it is likely that these women were domestic servants.
Though adoption may have led to these womens’ residence with Simpson and Keyser, adoption in the early 1800s was more often a service arrangement than not. In this view, adoption could be a convenient way for legal parents to cut costs and give the child work skills, and the adopting family to use the child’s labor. If there was any legal element to this arrangement, it would generally come in the form of an indenture contract of apprenticeship, by which the child was bound to work for the adopting family for a certain number of years and the adopting family taught the child a trade. However, for Black families in Philadelphia, apprenticeship was often better in theory than practice. Officials often forced Black children into legal apprenticeship under the claim that their parents were incapable of providing for the children, sometimes for as long as twenty-eight years--significantly later than the twenty-first birthday end date for most white children’s apprenticeships. Further, the adopting white family often neglected to educate or train the Black children in a trade, instead treating the Black children as another source of domestic labor. Legal adoption would not come to the United States until Massachusetts passed the first U.S. adoption law in 1851. So whether the unnamed women were adopted or not, it’s likely they performed domestic labor tasks.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to trace these workers (and their work) in the written historical record. The census does not include their names, and libraries, archives, and museums rarely collect the writing of domestic laborers--or the middle-class people who hired them. Additionally, although free Black people established their own schools in Philadelphia (such as the Lombard Street Primary School, run by Margaretta Forten) ”apprenticed” domestic laborers and others likely had sparse access to education. Combined, it’s hard to figure out the specifics of these workers’ lives.
The sources that we can use to study these workers, the census and the 1840 McElroy’s Directory, are fraught with issues. Census countings were all informed by the census takers’ own biases and the governmental structure that produced the census, so it’s important to read the 1840 census with a healthy wariness toward possible undercounting, overcounting, or misreporting. Indeed, controversy about the 1840 census’ large count of quote-on-quote “lunatic” free Black people--the label the product of racism and ableism--sparked the first calls for a permanent census office to produce more accurate records. As this example shows, census error was especially acute for disadvantaged groups like Black people, disabled people, and the poor city dwellers on Elfreth’s Alley. Similarly, McElroy’s Directory only counted those people who purchased a listing, so it offers little information on disadvantaged people who often had little money and may have had little reason to purchase a listing in a directory targeting literate, book-buying people. Further, the directory only directly offered information about the personal or business listing, not about the setup of the household. Both the census and the directory historically minimized people like the Black women who lived on Elfreth’s Alley.
All the same, the census and McElroy’s Directory do provide useful information. The 1840 census counted population by household divided into several age brackets, and whether the household members were white, “free persons of color,” or enslaved. McElroy’s directory occupation listings, meanwhile, can help provide rough estimates for social class and suggest some of the tasks that employers would ask of domestic servants.
Act 2 - The Households
Looking over Margaret’s household and the Black domestic servants’ households reveals some interesting differences. Margaret was listed as the head of her household in the 1810 Census, a rear apartment on 22 Elfreth’s Alley--or 130 Elfreth’s Alley today. Three other free Black people lived in the household.
One of the domestic servants lived with James Simpson, a tailor who lived and worked at 26 Elfreth’s Alley--or 122 Elfreth’s Alley today. According to the census, James Simpson’s household had eight white people. There were three children under 15, including one under 5 years old. Two male teenagers were listed between the ages of 15 and 19, and one young woman between the ages of 20 and 29 were listed. Finally, a man and woman between the ages of 40 and 50 were listed. The census data records that one of the household residents was employed in “Manufacturing and Trades”--likely James, a tailor.
The other woman lived with John Keyser, who maintained a grocery and tavern at 8 High Street (known today as Market Street) and resided at 12 Elfreth’s Alley--or 129 Elfreth’s Alley today. The Keyser household had seven white people. Of the inhabitants listed on the census as “white,” three children were listed between the ages of 5 and 9; one teenage man and woman each were listed between the ages of 15 and 19; one white man was listed as between 20 and 29, and one white woman was listed between the ages of 40 and 49. Though Ann Keyser was not listed with an occupation, her inclusion in the directory without an occupation suggests an interesting relationship between her and John. Of the white women listed at 12 Elfreth’s Alley, only one was old enough to have had children, and assuming a familial or marriage connection to John based on their shared surname, Ann was between 40 and 50 at the time of the census. She was not listed on the directory at John’s previous residence at 2 Chancery Street in 1837.
Act 3 - The City
In addition to the particulars of each household, local issues of class were also particularly salient for Black domestic labor arrangements. In the 1793 Yellow Fever epidemic, white Philadelphians had demarcated quote-on-quote “Black” people as a specific group of free people of African descent. White Philadelphians largely characterized the domestic servants who they racialized as “Black” as greedy. Though white Margaret Morris, for example, had both white and Black domestic servants, she wrote of the “Black” servants that “many of them became extortionate in their demands, exacting the sum of three, four, and five dollars a day for their attendance.” Less than 50 years after the epidemic, white household heads in Philadelphia likely carried racist family memories of distrust toward Black domestic workers like Margaret and the household servants in the 1840 Census.
White Philadelphians manifested their racist ideas about Black people through violence, which likely impacted domestic labor arrangements. White Philadelphians forcibly beat Black Philadelphians away from a Fourth of July celebration in 1805. White rage flared up again in five instances of mass violence and home-burning between 1832 and 1849, including the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838--an abolitionist center less than two miles from the Alley. Also in 1838, Pennsylvania ratified a new state constitution banning Black people from voting. Black people would not be able to vote in Pennsylvania again until 1870. White violence and bans on Black peoples’ freedom placed Black domestic workers in an even more vulnerable position. Margaret and the 1840 domestic workers may have rightly feared violence against their own families if they stood up to their employers.
Household servants like the young Black women who lived in the Simpson and Keyser households performed essential labor. Catherine Esther Beecher claimed in her Letters to Persons that “one main support of this blessed institution of family and home is, those domestics who are hired to do the chief labours of the family. Just take away from this country all the cooks, chambermaids, waiters, washers, and house cleaners, and what would be the result? The fathers could not leave their business to do the family work, the mothers would not have strength to do it, and the family state would be broken up.” Beecher exaggerated, but the bread-baking, chamber pot-emptying, laundry, and other tasks that domestic workers performed were quite literally essential to keeping their employers’ families functioning. Margaret and the 1840 domestic servants enabled households like the Simpsons and Keysers to spend more time working or relaxing.
However, domestic work came at a cost for Black women. Employers constantly told Black women that they were quote-on-quote “servile by nature,” and domestic servitude rarely led to better employment. Further, the wages of domestic labor were never high, especially not with the over-competition for servant positions in burgeoning Philadelphia.
As the free Black butler Robert Roberts wrote in his popular guide to domestic labor, the 1827 The House Servant’s Directory: “Now, my young friends, you must consider that to live in a gentleman's family as a house servant is a station that will seem wholly different from any thing, I presume, that ever you have been acquainted with; this station of life comprises comforts, privileges, and pleasures, which are to be found in but few other stations in which you may enter; and on the other hand, many difficulties, trials of temper, &c., more perhaps than in any other station in which you might enter.” “Trials of temper” were probably always present when the threat of physical violence against workers’ communities hung overhead and the wages remained poor.
With all this taken into account, what might a day in the life of these women have been like? For Margaret, her daily activities may have been somewhat self-directed, and one possible depiction of that self-direction is as follows. Upon waking, Margaret ate breakfast: a light meal generally including hardy foods like bread or cheese. Then she left for her work following a route she set for herself, heading out of narrow Elfreth’s Alley onto the bigger 2nd and Front Streets. There, Margaret found herself in the territory she serviced as a washerwoman. She walked door-to-door, asking the woman in charge of each household whether they wanted laundry done. Even if she didn’t find anyone else seeking laundry services, Margaret likely did laundry for the person in the front of Elfreth’s Alley 22. Margaret negotiated her price with each customer and likely earned a decent wage. She then took the laundry home. Away from the discriminating eyes of her employers, Margaret nevertheless had the hard work of washing textiles by hand. She applied hot water, soap, long soaks, different wooden tools, perhaps lye, and perhaps the help of the three persons living with her to clean the textiles. With the money she negotiated from her employers, Margaret and those in her household probably ate good dinners: hearty stews including protein, such as meat or beans, and even luxuries like vegetables. Margaret was able to relax at her own leisure, spend time with her household while she worked, and make her own food. However, she treaded carefully around her employers, knowing that her (majority-white clientele) might be ready to enact racist violence like that of 1805.
Indeed, a day in the life of a Black domestic servant in the Simpson or Keyser household involved a lot of careful treading. The servants may have slept at the foot of their employers’ bed, as was done in the eighteenth century. In the winter, they were required to rise before the other members of the household to stoke the fires, making warmth (and hot coffee) for their employers. As well, these servants cooked for their employers and indeed consistently baked bread, although the employers took the choicest bits. Other domestic tasks varied between employers and seasons.
In the Simpson household, the domestic servant had to help with early childcare. This possibly entailed wet nursing of the child between the ages of 0 and 4, and it definitely entailed feeding and cleaning the toddler and supervising all three children. She may also have had to supervise the two teenagers, which posed the challenge of imposing authority on people who likely had a sense of superiority to the Black servant. The servant also had to navigate a relationship with the woman in her twenties (perhaps an older daughter of the Simpsons) in addition to the older Simpsons. It’s also possible that the Black servant assisted with James’ tailoring work, polishing shoes and the like.
The servant who lived in the Keyser household also did childcare, although she focused on an older population. Managing three children between the ages of 5 and 9 was no easy task, or the other teenagers. With both John and Ann Keyser listed on the directory, the servant may have been beholden to both Keysers as employers, and to the two teenagers to a lesser extent. The servant may have also helped with Keyser’s tavern business through cleaning and other manual labor. Whatever the content of these servants’ work, the Simpsons and Keysers expected that the servants always be available to do it. The Black domestic servants who lived with these white households could not relax at their own leisure, and their position demanded constant emotional, psychological, and physical labor for which they were not well-compensated.
Conclusion: Black domestic workers in the early 1800s faced interlocking racism and sexism in their everyday lives. Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” was an early articulation of this discrete anti-black woman oppression, and understanding of this position as a unique place from which to theorize societal change. According to Francis Gage, Truth pointed out that Black womens’ experience was not accounted for in the 1851 Womens’ Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, which she attended: “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman?” Truth warned against the assumption that upper-class white ideas about womanhood stand in for Black women’s experience, which often involved hard labor because of the limited opportunities available to Black people and especially Black women like these domestic workers. Taking after Truth and the many other Black women who called out their unique oppression, legal scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw named this theory: intersectionality. Crenshaw’s 1989 article “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antriracist Politics,”” examined multiple legal cases where judges ruled that “Black women” did not constitute a discrete class (or, alternatively, could not speak on behalf of Black men against anti-Black racism). Much as Truth pointed out that white ideas about womanhood left no room to understand the oppression of Black women, Crenshaw writes that focusing “on otherwise-privileged group members creates a distorted analysis of racism and sexism because the operative conceptions of race and sex become grounded in experiences that actually represent only a subset of a much more complex phenomenon.” For Crenshaw, the oppression of Black women is best understood as a confluence of oppressive burdens, and this oppression is best understood through an analytical model considering how these oppressions interact.
As Crenshaw reminds us, the racism and sexism these Black women faced in 1840 are alive today. Consider the case of Breonna Taylor, who the National Domestic Workers Alliance highlights. On March 13, 2020, plainclothes police officers fatally shot Breonna Taylor, a Black woman and EMT, in her bed. The police had come with a “no-knock warrant” for suspects in a drug operation that they had already incarcerated. Taylor’s story is just one in a long list of Black women killed by the justice system that the #SayHerName hashtag commemorates: Sandra Bland, Tanisha Anderson, and Kayla Moore, to name a few. Black women are 2.8 times more likely to be arrested by police than white women. Meanwhile, due to the lack of health care infrastructure for Black communities, the pollution of Black communities (see the Flint health crisis), and the psychological and physical toll of racism and sexism, Black women have some of the worst health outcomes in the United States. Black women with breast cancer between the ages of 45 and 64 are 60 percent more likely to die of the disease than white women the same age. Between the biological toll of interlocking racism and sexism, and the conditions in which Black women live and work, Black women today still face similar challenges to those domestic workers on the Alley faced in 1840.
What can you do? Donate to organizations such as the Philly Bail Fund, Black Lives Matter Philly, and Mutual Aid Philly, all of which work to help Black women. Also support the National Domestic Workers Alliance, a network of organizations supporting domestic workers in the United States. The Alliance welcomes donation or membership (if you are a domestic worker). Listen to Black women--Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectionality Matters podcast, for example, explores the theory and application of intersectional analysis in far greater depth than we have here. And call for justice for Breonna Taylor through the petition: at the time of this recording, no officers who shot her have been arrested, and the government has failed to compensate her family. You can find a link to the petition in the description, as well as links to several other organizations and podcasts to support.
This episode explored domestic labor, so next time we’re talking about labor outside the home: industrial work. We’ll be following along with residents of Elfreth’s Alley who labored in factories during the 1880s. Join us next time on the Alleycast as we explore the making of the modern city!
TED MAUST: History is a group effort. This episode was researched, written, and narrated by Joe Makuc with research assistance from Ted Maust and script revisions from Isabel Steven. In addition to the sources listed by name in this episode, this episode is indebted to several other scholars’ work: Michelle S. Jacobs, Sharon V. Salinger, Seth Rockman, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Deborah Gray White, Jacquelyn C. Miller, Richard H. Steckel, Enobong Hannah Branch and Melissa E. Wooten
JOE MAKUC: Shoutout to Dr. M. Nzadi Keita and Dr. Edward Onaci, who welcomed me to the study of Black women’s intellectual history, patiently bore with me through my half-formed ideas, and taught me to be a more generous thinker.
TED MAUST: Our theme music is the song “Open Flames” by Blue Dot Sessions from the album Aeronaut, used under Creative Commons license.
Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts! Be sure to join us next week for Episode 4:
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Thank you and take care!