Before a national convention of domestic workers in 1972, Shirley Chisholm, the first 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.” The daughter of a household laborer, she exhorted, “Hold meetings and rallies. Talk to the local press. Let everyone know that you are first-class citizens and that you will not settle for anything less than a fair and equal chance to share in the fruits of this country.”Footnote 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.

The 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.Footnote ² Others were, in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” They 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 choices. They were often underpaid, frequently overworked, and excluded from key labor laws. Now they were acting to claim their rights.

This article examines the national campaign by domestic workers in the 1970s for coverage under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which assured minimum wage protections and overtime pay to many workers. Phyllis Palmer has persuasively argued that the civil rights movement and the women’s movement were politically influential and helped reconstruct cultural ideas of work, race, and gender regarding agricultural and domestic labor. I build upon Palmer and other previous scholarship on this campaign to discuss the normative racial and gender assumptions that profoundly shaped understandings of domestic work and undergird congressional debates about the amendments. In doing so, I highlight a neglected set of actors, domestic workers themselves.Footnote ³ How African American women domestic workers made their claim to social citizenship through lobbying for amendments to the FLSA in the 1970s—their policy arguments—is as significant as the policy process itself to understand the position of domestic labor under the law. Domestic workers had an expansive definition of labor that challenged fundamental assumptions about work enshrined in the New Deal. Since the 1930s, labor legislation, such as the FLSA, constituted differences of race and gender through its exclusions as well as actual provisions, creating a hierarchy within the category of citizenship derived from labor.

Domestic worker activists forged a feminist alliance of working women and housewives, professionals and domestics, to revalue women’s household labor and claim it as legitimate work. Through their campaigns, they sought to remake the meaning of citizenship for African American women and to expand the definition of “worker” that had been circumscribed in the 1930s. If the civil rights campaigns were intended to de-racialize American political citizenship, then the domestic worker rights movement aimed to de-racialize and de-gender the meaning of work embedded in American social policy.

Despite the fact that this campaign spoke to the needs of some of the most marginalized African Americans, domestic workers’ pursuit of social citizenship rights is an often overlooked part of the struggle for African American equality in the postwar period. After World War II, African Americans mobilized to dismantle the structures of Jim Crow segregation, to attain full and unhindered access to the ballot, and to fight for fair and equitable hiring practices.Footnote ⁴ In their struggle for full citizenship rights, African Americans achieved some notable successes that opened educational and job opportunities for the African American community and enhanced its electoral power. The FLSA amendments belonged to this expansion of rights. Yet, at the same time, the campaign for FLSA coverage reveals the limitations of the meaning of citizenship and illustrates how race, class and gender defined those limitations. For poor African American women, laboring under a triple jeopardy, the 1974 amendments fell short of ensuring substantive social citizenship.

RACE AND CITIZENSHIP IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Social citizenship is a concept developed by scholars to examine not only political and civil rights but also social rights—defined by British theorist T. H. Marshall as ranging from “the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.”Footnote ⁵ Social citizenship has included access to education, medical care, and housing and theoretically could ameliorate some of the worst inequalities of the class system. In the twentieth century, even as the United States seemed to embrace a more robust citizenship through the expansion of social welfare policy, legislators embedded stratification in the category of “social citizenship” by linking it to one’s position within the labor market.

The New Deal, perhaps the most important extender of social citizenship, offered to many working people guarantees of a minimum wage, unemployment compensation, and Social Security, as well as the right to organize and bargain collectively. But the New Deal also fostered inequality within the working class. Although it granted rights of social citizenship to some American workers, it was also exclusionary, consequently reinforcing and re-creating the racialized and gendered hierarchy of the labor market.Footnote ⁶ It linked the benefits of social citizenship to contributions made through employment. Those outside the labor market in need of economic assistance were either the dependents of full-time wage earners or were relegated to second-tier, less generous and more stigmatized public assistance, such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children or Old Age Assistance. Women performing unpaid household labor were denied the benefits of economic citizenship, as were part-time and intermittent workers. But even among those who worked full time, not all contributions to the labor market were equally valued.Footnote ⁷ Southern congressmen, insisting on control over the African American labor force, and northern policymakers, who prioritized the needs of the white male industrial worker to ensure a stable and expanding economy, advocated circumscribed coverage of work-related benefits.Footnote ⁸ The white male industrial employee became the prototypical worker and that model informed assumptions about what constituted legitimate work.

Much of the paid work performed by women and African Americans, including agricultural and domestic work, did not receive the benefits of social citizenship, establishing what historian Eileen Boris calls the “racialized gendered state.”Footnote ⁹ Thus, the way that the law drew upon the conflation of domestic work with women’s labor of social reproduction and the racialized composition of the workforce, predominantly immigrant and African American, reinforced paid household work as a degraded occupation.Footnote ¹⁰ Feminist scholars now understand the way in which state policies have contributed to race- and gender-based inequalities. The exclusionary citizenship established by New Deal policymakers had a profound impact on the campaign of domestic workers for rights.

Law and social policy thus structured citizenship rights to afford some people, but not others “respect, rights, and protection.”Footnote ¹¹ To illuminate the contestation behind this inequality, I rely both on the concept of differentiated citizenship that recognizes inequalities within the body politic and on the idea of “negotiated citizenship.” Sociologist Abigail Bakan and political scientist Daiva Statiulis argue that citizenship is not static but is subject to change and is acted upon collectively.Footnote ¹² That is, citizenship should not be understood as simply the granting of rights to a passive citizen. It has a history of flexibility and elasticity, responding to demands from the excluded. The inequalities and hierarchies embedded in the practices of American citizenship—generating what sociologist Saskia Sassen calls “incompleteness”—have made this a vibrant arena for political conflict, creating openings for the marginalized to assert their rights.Footnote ¹³ Through grass-roots struggle, poor African American women, like other excluded groups, fought for and won greater access to the rights of citizenship.

DOMESTIC WORK, RACE, AND RIGHTS

Those with the power to define have always placed domestic work outside the boundaries of labor. Its association with women’s unpaid labor and its location in the privacy of the home—not recognized as a site of work—often made it hard for others to see domestic work as “real work.” Unpaid domestic labor that is performed by women for their families has no monetary value, is not calculated into the Gross Domestic Product, and does not show up in government statistics of “hours worked.” It is, in the words of sociologist Judith Rollins, “invisible” work.Footnote ¹⁴ In addition, that women of color and immigrant women performed paid domestic labor led to its degradation. Most mainstream labor unions never identified domestic workers as part of their constituency and labor laws either specifically or incidentally excluded domestic workers.Footnote ¹⁵

Employers especially failed to accord domestic workers the rights and respect afforded to other workers. They treated domestic workers simultaneously as invisible and as their personal property. In the minds of some employers, the racial makeup of the workforce—which encouraged employers to construct their employees as racially different—justified low wages and poor working conditions. The “othering” of domestic workers reconciled for abusive employers their own sense of fairness and the less-than-human treatment they meted out to workers. At the same time, the intimate nature of the work fostered a fiction of familiarity where employers claimed their household help as “one of the family” and used this claim to extract additional work without pay or to offer second-hand goods in lieu of pay. Although domestic workers were expected to fulfill familial responsibilities, they were rarely accorded familial rights–even such basic rights as sitting at the dinner table. Live-in workers in particular were often at the beck and call of their bosses, with little time to themselves and no clearly defined job description. For many employers, hiring a domestic worker was not limited to hiring their services or their time—it was conflated with purchasing their very bodies.Footnote ¹⁶

The domestic workers rights movement aimed to transform this marginalized status of the occupation through a broad agenda of public education, legislative change, professionalization, and mobilization of workers themselves. It initiated programs to train domestic workers in housekeeping and child care and established codes of standards that called for a decent wage, paid sick leave, holidays, vacations, and other benefits. It outlined the specific rights and responsibilities of domestic workers in model contracts but also fought for the right to organize and bargain collectively. The movement received invaluable support and guidance from the National Committee on Household Employment (NCHE). Formed under the auspices of the Women’s Bureau, the NCHE was a group of liberal professional women—many of whom employed household workers—concerned about upgrading the occupation. Over the course of the 1960s, the NCHE became less an employer’s organization and more of an advocate of the rights of domestic workers.Footnote ¹⁷

When black feminist Edith Barksdale-Sloan became head of the NCHE in the late 1960s, she made the needs of domestic workers the focus of the organization.Footnote ¹⁸ The NCHE brought together local domestic-worker organizations in 1971 to form the Household Technicians of America (HTA), a name that reflected their concerns with respect and professionalization. HTA organizers traveled around the country in order to build a mass base for the movement and educate the public about difficulties associated with domestic labor. At its peak, HTA had a full-time staff and a membership of twenty-five thousand.Footnote ¹⁹ In the 1970s, the HTA became the national voice of domestic workers and worked hand in hand with the NCHE to reform the occupation and push for legislative change.

The origins of the campaign for full inclusion of domestic workers into labor law lay with labor feminists who attended the 1963 Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, the same women who were instrumental in the formation of an all-new NCHE.Footnote ²⁰ So even before the formation of the HTA, middle-class activists in the NCHE pushed for changes in the FLSA. But many domestic workers themselves saw the minimum wage as the first, and perhaps, most important battle. An increased wage, they believed, would raise the status of the occupation and make their lives more comfortable. They built a broad-based alliance with labor unions and other women’s groups to support legislation for minimum-wage rights.

For many domestic workers, their marginalization as workers signaled second-class status and their citizenship rights hinged fundamentally on a decent salary. According to one domestic workers’ group in New York City, with the telling professionalized name of Household Management, Inc., “Minimum Wage is to be the first step of the committee to improve, upgrade and dignify the reliable, skillful and knowledgeable keeper of OUR Children and OUR homes.”Footnote ²¹ In claiming the right to a minimum wage, domestic workers challenged conventional wisdom that household labor was not legitimate work.

Domestic workers’ claim for social citizenship largely came from the idea that household work was like any other work performed and that it ought to be treated as such. Advocates first had to convince Congress that such labor was real work. Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Labor, Barksdale-Sloan framed domestic work as one of a number of choices available for those entering the labor market. She argued that were it not for low wages, domestic work would be a better occupational choice than factory work: “We are convinced that one of the major reasons why many men and women choose monotonous assembly line positions in factories is that they have little choice. A more rewarding, interesting job caring for an infant or toddler or elderly person simply does not command a decent, living wage.”Footnote ²² It is unclear whether or not higher wages alone actually would have attracted new recruits to the field of domestic service, given the low status, servile character, and demanding time commitments of the job.Footnote ²³ Nevertheless, Barksdale-Sloan’s comment is important because of her characterization of domestic work as inherently superior to “monotonous assembly line positions.” It reflected a widespread belief among domestic worker activists that the work they performed was valuable and gratifying. For Barksdale-Sloan, the degradation of domestic work had less to do with the work itself than with low wages.

Barksdale-Sloan reinforced the idea that domestic work was a job and it ought to be afforded the same rights of social citizenship as other occupations and the same New Deal benefits to which other workers were entitled: “Pay must be increased to provide a livable wage. Second, workers must receive the so-called ‘fringe benefits,’ which long ago stopped being ‘fringes’ in every other major American industry. At this time, household workers usually do not receive paid sick leave, vacations, or holidays. Coverage under unemployment and workmen’s compensation is extremely limited and varies widely from state to state.”Footnote ²⁴ For Barksdale-Sloan, the rights of social citizenship were precisely that—rights—rather than privileges or benefits. And domestic workers were entitled to the same economic rights as other American workers.

Such arguments allied the domestic worker rights movement with the labor movement. Although never a union movement per se—they had no legally protected right to form a union—domestic workers managed to receive endorsements from labor officials such as George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO.Footnote ²⁵ Union representatives not only supported the legislation, but they also reinforced the domestic workers’ movement’s central argument that domestic work is work and deserved the same rights and protections as other workers. Thomas Donahue, vice president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), argued that private household workers often performed the same labor as other workers who were protected by federal legislation: “We represent tens of thousands of women who clean the boss’ office and who are covered by law and contract, and we don’t see why the women who clean the boss’ home shouldn’t be similarly covered and provided for.”Footnote ²⁶

For three years, from its founding until the passage of the amendments in 1974, the HTA, along with the NCHE, lobbied hard for passage of a congressional bill that would expand coverage of minimum-wage legislation to domestic workers. The initial 1971 congressional bill was part of a broader minimum wage package. In the same summer when domestic workers were holding their first national convention, both Edith Sloan of the NCHE and Josephine Hulett, a former domestic worker who was the chief organizer for NCHE, testified on behalf of the bill. They and other feminists, labor activists, and union representatives all favored inclusion of domestic workers. Although the House and Senate worked out a compromise bill, President Nixon vetoed the measure in 1972. The next year another version came before Congress. This time, domestic workers, who had already mobilized on a national level, played a greater role in the legislative debates and the public dialogue about domestic worker rights.

RACE, GENDER, AND WORK

During the early 1970s, as debates about the coverage of domestic workers under the Fair Labor Standards Act reached their peak, the racial and gender discourse emerging in the legislative discussion exposed the hidden assumptions about women, housework, race, and class. Congressmen and policymakers who had the power to make the decision cast minimum wage for domestic workers in terms of the rights of domestic workers versus the rights of housewives.Footnote ²⁷ Legislators suggested that passing such a bill would be tantamount to “bringing the federal bureaucracy into the kitchen of the American housewife.”Footnote ²⁸ Male politicians and policymakers often justified their opposition to extending the FLSA to domestic workers in terms of protecting the domain of white middle-class women, who they identified frequently as their wives.Footnote ²⁹ Robert Thompson of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raised concerns about “irate housewives.”Footnote ³⁰ He also opposed the legislation because he believed it would impede the ability of women to hire domestic workers because of increased costs.Footnote ³¹

But domestic workers themselves understood the underlying gender logic behind such claims. They were the ones observing interactions within the homes of the more affluent. As HTA leader Geneva Reid explained to a House committee in 1973, if the shortage of domestic workers continued apace, “it may come to this, the affluent and Congressmen cleaning up after themselves because the women of the household have become liberated and have joined the work force and will not have time to cook, clean, wash, iron, and take care of the children.”Footnote ³²

By relegating the rights of domestic workers to “women’s sphere,” male politicians employed a rhetorical strategy that absolved them of any responsibility for the legal rights of domestic workers. They used the cloak of gender to dismiss the class and race politics that were central to the exclusion of domestic workers from labor legislation. They placed responsibility for low wages and poor treatment squarely on the shoulders of middle-class female employers—their “wives”—and framed domestic work as an occupation that took place in the privacy of the home, outside the public realm. The assumption that domestic work occurred in the privacy of the home further reinforced the artificial construction of the home as a personal space of refuge. Compounding the home/business distinction, policymakers also claimed that housewife-employers were incapable of complying with the law and keeping records, thus making the legislation impractical because housewives had no business knowledge. Peter Brennan, secretary of labor, explained: “Homemakers are not engaged in business in the traditional sense with experience in maintaining business records.”Footnote ³³

But a closer reading of the FLSA legislative debate underscores the underlying concern of some congressmen. They were fearful not only of “irate” housewives but also a disruption of the gender division of labor and its consequences. Clearly defining and recognizing domestic work posed a particular problem for male politicians, who quickly realized that raising the status of domestic workers also meant raising the status of unpaid household work performed by many women. Senator Pete Dominick, in his exchange with Secretary of Labor Brennan, expressed concern about the difficulty of defining domestic work and the practicality of including domestic workers in the legislation. He argued that an expansive definition may include someone who cuts your lawn and that “the services provided by the householder ought to be included in the definition of what is or is not a minimum wage.” Brennan elaborated on the problem this recognition might pose: “Yes . . . you open the door to a lot of trouble. Your wife will want to get paid. I think we are going to be in trouble here because, as we say in here, there are many cases the wife cannot afford it; she will have to do it herself or someone in the family will have to. That means that you or I or we have to pay her. So we have to be very careful unless we are ready to do dishes.”Footnote ³⁴

The legislative debates are striking because, although congressmen rhetorically framed domestic work as an abstract and distant issue out of their domain, the question of domestic labor and FLSA coverage for household employees was deeply personal for some of them. Rather than arguing that domestic work was not really work, this discussion reveals how they were quite clear that the home was a site of work and the labor of household workers was work—work that they, as congressmen, did not want to perform. Their reactions reflected their own privileged location in terms of class, race, and gender. The amendments potentially affected their relationships with their wives, the running of their household, and their ability to function professionally. Domestic worker advocates exploited this weakness. They claimed that failure to pass the amendments—rather than their passage—would result in a shortage of domestic workers because women would leave the occupation. But, they claimed, this would not lead to double duty for housewives in the home, particularly in light of the women’s movement’s demands to be unshackled from household work and for greater employment opportunities outside the home. Instead, they predicted the burden would fall on congressmen.

BUILDING ALLIANCES

Although congressmen used the notion of housework as women’s work to oppose amendments to the FLSA, domestic workers relied on the idea of housework as women’s work to develop a broad base of feminist support for their campaign. Building a cross-class, cross-race gender alliance was a central strategy for the HTA and NCHE. Domestic workers had always had strained relationships with their employers, who tended to be women. It was not self-evident that employers and employees could work together to improve legal protections for domestics. The mistress of the household was often the target of domestic workers’ ire. They were responsible for the day-to-day supervision of household chores, determined the responsibilities and working hours of their employees, and, in most cases, set their wages.Footnote ³⁵ Historian Phyllis Palmer has suggested that domestic work divides women by race and class by defining women who engage in paid domestic work as “dirty” and defining the women who benefit from their labor as “clean.”Footnote ³⁶ The purity of nineteenth-century Victorian womanhood required that somebody else did the drudgery of household labor. In many ways, the status and opportunities of middle-class women were inextricably bound up with having an available pool of domestic workers.

As increasing numbers of middle-class women entered the labor force in the mid-twentieth century, and as the mainstream women’s movement began to define liberation in terms of paid employment outside the home, disdain for domestic work became more commonplace. Betty Friedan described housework as boring and repetitious. In a much quoted phrase in The Feminine Mystique, she explained: “Vacuuming the living room floor—with or without makeup—is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity.”Footnote ³⁷ Domestic workers believed that middle-class women’s low opinion of domestic work contributed to the marginalized status of their employment. The NCHE drew links between the degradation of domestic work and middle-class women’s entry into the labor force: “Underlying many difficulties that household workers face in trying to improve pay and working conditions is a more subtle and pervasive problem of the household worker’s image in our own eyes and the eyes of our employers. This image is deeply rooted in Americans’ attitudes toward women and their traditional functions and toward the service professions generally. . . . Ironically, the changing attitudes that are giving many American women a new sense of their own worth and dignity, is working against the professional dignity of household workers. As women enter the work-force finding careers outside the home, they look on housework as demeaning drudgery.”Footnote ³⁸

Despite the tensions inherent in the employer-employee relationship and the vast social and economic gulf between middle-class women and poor women, domestic workers and their employers had a common interest in reforming the occupation. Indeed, middle-class employers were often at the forefront of campaigns to improve working conditions and raise wages primarily because they wanted to ensure a stable and content group of workers. Since the early twentieth century, employers formed associations to consider training, wages, and working conditions for the purposes of expanding the supply of domestic workers and improving the quality of the work. Employers frequently lamented the scarcity of “good help” and searched far and wide for solutions. These early twentieth-century campaigns did not always speak to the particular needs of African American domestic workers.Footnote ³⁹

But in the 1970s, the voices of black domestic workers were an important component of reform efforts. The mass mobilization of domestic workers, the formation of the HTA, and the ways in which domestic workers had begun to speak out publicly made them indispensable to the political debate. Their particular understanding of the gendered nature of their employment prompted them to seek allies who would help ameliorate their race- and class-based exploitation as women. Domestic workers saw middle-class women as some of the most important participants in the campaign for regulation of domestic work. These activists collaborated with feminists to frame the issue in terms of the common gender experiences of employer and employee. Geraldine Miller, a founder of the Household Technicians Union in the Bronx, who worked closely with the HTA and the National Organization for Women (NOW), reflected on the campaign for minimum-wage legislation: “We really and truly needed the help of the other women who were of different nationalities to help us push for that, and that’s the reason why we got under the Federal Minimum Wage.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Miller joined the National Women’s Political Caucus for the explicit purpose of developing a feminist alliance around the FLSA legislation.Footnote ⁴¹

HTA activists also drew parallels between the plight of domestic workers and the dilemmas of the middle-class women who hired them. Both were responsible for housework. Both understood what maintaining a household entailed. Both experienced the ways in which housework was undervalued in the larger society. Carolyn Reed, a domestic worker from New York who helped found the HTA, appealed to women and placed the opposition of male politicians in context when she said: “This is a gut woman’s issue. The reason we haven’t gotten our rights as a paid person in the labor force is because men think they can get their wives or girlfriends to do the job without pay.”Footnote ⁴² The domestic workers’ rights movement employed gender in a very different way from congressmen. They framed gender solidarity in terms of support of privileged women for the work that poor women did and suggested that advocacy by middle-class women of domestic worker rights would benefit all women.

Employer women responded and used their access to Congress to support domestic workers. In 1971, for example, Lucille Shriver, the director of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Inc., reiterated the positions of domestic workers themselves, which included problems of low wages and poor working conditions. She advocated for FLSA inclusion by pointing out how the lack of protection afforded to these workers had a negative impact on middle-class women who worked. She tied the fate of working women to the treatment of domestic workers: “There are over 29 million [women] in today’s labor force, usually at full-time occupations. As three out of five of these working women are married and have the responsibilities of home and family in addition to work outside the home, there is a great need for expert, experienced domestic workers. . . . A sufficient supply of domestic employees will not be available if the prevalent low wages, long hours and demeaning conditions of labor in that field continue.”Footnote ⁴³

Shirley Chisholm was a key figure behind the passage of the 1974 congressional FLSA amendments. She brought on board all members of the black caucus and nearly all members of the women’s caucus in support of the legislation, symbolically uniting the women’s movement and the black freedom movement.Footnote ⁴⁴ The NCHE similarly recognized how this legislation joined together key sectors of the progressive community when they explained in a 1976 internal document: “This victory follows four years of effort by a strong coalition of labor, civic, women’s and church organizations.”Footnote ⁴⁵ By forging this kind of coalition, domestic workers prevailed in 1974 and won federal minimum-wage protections. While clearly a milestone in terms of labor protections for this sector of workers, the legislation excluded important categories of domestics, including live-in workers and home health-care aides, who, along with babysitters, were defined as providing “companionship” services.Footnote ⁴⁶

THE MEANING OF CITIZENSHIP

Over the course of the postwar period, the rights of domestic workers were gradually expanded and they gained many of the benefits of social citizenship. In 1950, they won the right to Social Security assistance. In 1974, they came under minimum-wage laws. And in 1976, they obtained access to unemployment benefits. Even with the winning of formal rights, the significance of these citizenship rights needs to be probed. As Evelyn Nakano-Glenn has argued, there is a distinction between formal and substantive citizenship, which includes peoples’ ability to exercise rights of citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁷

Did the inclusion of domestic workers in the FLSA in 1974 translate into full citizenship for African American women? Although the campaign in the 1970s was critically important and represents an overlooked strain of black political activism, the FLSA amendments did little to achieve substantive social citizenship for African American women. First, was the problem of enforcement. After passage of the amendments, domestic workers had to educate employers about the law and, once they were aware, persuade them to comply with the new regulations. The HTA and NCHE identified enforcement as the most important task regarding the inclusion of domestic workers in the legislation. In 1976, Ann Turpeau of NCHE proposed a massive education program to educate employers about the new rules, “to increase knowledge of and compliance with fair labor standards among household employers and the general public.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The extent of follow-up is difficult to determine, but evidence suggests it was limited.

In addition, the 1974 legislation did not affect large numbers of African American women because they were rapidly leaving the occupation. Domestic workers won inclusion into the FLSA at a transformative moment in the history of domestic work. The victories of the black freedom movement, changing ideas about race and formal equality, and increasing educational opportunities for African Americans enabled African American women to move out of the occupation of domestic service. Long a symbol of white racial oppression, domestic work became the occupation of last choice for African American women. Although in 1970, domestic work was the most common occupation for African American women, this was not true by 1990.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the 1970s, at a rather rapid pace, they moved into the service sector and, in some cases, professional jobs.Footnote ⁵⁰ Other African American women, with less education and fewer employment prospects, ended up on welfare and were relegated to “second tier” public assistance benefits. This bifurcation characterized the shifting employment prospects of African American women, where some moved up and others simply moved out of employment and were further marginalized.Footnote ⁵¹

Perhaps even more important in assessing the movement’s victories was the expanding pool of women available to serve as domestic workers. An increase in the number of undocumented immigrants, as well as the passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965, which removed some of the restrictions on immigration, led to greater competition within the field of domestic service by the 1970s. Organizers in the NCHE and HTA viewed the new immigration as an obstacle to bettering the status of domestic workers. In outlining their priorities in 1976, the organization highlighted the complicated problem of immigration, including the reluctance of immigrants to defend their rights: “When household workers are trying to improve their working conditions and pay, unfair competition from illegal aliens is a serious problem. . . . Immigrants working illegally undermine our efforts to improve pay and working conditions because their illegal status makes them afraid to complain to their employers or to see help from any government agency.”Footnote ⁵² With these shifts, domestic labor and immigration policy became inseparable.

The NCHE analyzed the influx of immigrant domestic workers as altering the balance of supply and demand and giving greater leverage to employers. The availability of undocumented immigrant workers in many ways undermined the substance of the FLSA. A 1975 study by NCHE showed that “employers in many areas offered wages well below the legally established minimum wage, and that these employers could easily obtain persons willing to work for less than the law demands.” According to then-NCHE head Anita Shelton in 1976, “It becomes an employer’s market and a worker’s nightmare.” She argued, “‘The rule of supply and demand which governs the production and sale of apples and oranges cannot be allowed to apply to human beings and their labor. The sole purpose of NCHE’s existence is to see that household workers take their rightful place in the economy and society.’”Footnote ⁵³

Despite the tangible way that immigration empowered employers and weakened the bargaining position of domestic workers, the leaders of the NCHE refused to buy into a larger discourse promoting deportation. Domestic workers’ advocates could have taken a xenophobic position. They did not. Instead, they insisted, “Humanly, it is hard to say that illegal aliens in great numbers should be deported so that U.S. citizens can have their jobs.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Domestic workers devised alternative solutions, which included education of both employees and employers. They also committed the organization to bringing into the fold the new immigrants: “We will make special efforts to expand the Committee to include the national groups most affected by household employment issues, e.g., Spanish-speaking, Caribbean and Vietnamese groups.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The NCHE’s response to immigrant workers reflects their understanding that the rights of labor citizenship for which they were fighting was not confined to those who had formal citizenship. Their vision was one in which all domestic workers, regardless of legal status, would be equally rewarded for their labor.

Both its victories and the changing political landscape put the domestic workers rights movement on the cusp of a new era, but one in which it was unable to flourish. By the late 1970s, the movement ceased much of its day-to-day activities. But their closing epilogue would become the prologue for a new generation of activists. Contrary to the social scientific predictions of domestic work as a dying occupation, in the 1980s household and child-care demands on middle-class and working-class families increased dramatically. The growing number of poor women joining the ranks of home health-care aides met some of this need, and many of them began to unionize.Footnote ⁵⁶ In addition, increasing numbers of private household immigrant workers filled a growing “care gap.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In the 1990s, this reconstituted workforce took up the unfinished struggle of the domestic workers of the 1970s. This new generation of domestic worker activists has continued the push for enforcement of Social Security benefits, minimum wage, and unemployment insurance. They also have addressed the most egregious instances of abuse of workers who are increasingly vulnerable because of language barriers and lack of legal papers. They have organized across racial and ethnic lines and lobbied for inclusion into labor rights from which they are still excluded, such as the National Labor Relations Act, Civil Rights laws, and Occupational Health and Safety regulations.Footnote ⁵⁸ In this new context with a different set of workers, questions of citizenship and social rights have assumed a new character. If domestic workers in the 1970s campaigned for equality and social rights as citizens within a national context, then the more recent efforts by domestic workers have fostered a new definition of both state and citizen in a neoliberal context. They have argued for citizenship rights in a globalized/transnational world where national borders are less important in daily work choices but more important in terms of granting rights and privileges.Footnote ⁵⁹