JWT

Most African-American women continued to work, largely in household service occupations. Their employment supplemented the seasonal and often inadequate earnings of black male industrial workers. At the same time, rather than withdrawing from the workforce, black women themselves gradually moved into manufacturing jobs across urban industrial America, including iron, steel, meatpacking, and automobile factories, and auto parts plants and machine shops. Detroit’s A. Krolik Garment Company not only hired its first black women, but soon developed an all-black female workforce. In Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania domestic and personal service workers dropped only slightly, but a few black women nonetheless became power-machine operators at the National Shirt Factory and took other jobs at the Lockhart Iron and Steel Company.

African-American women used industrial work not only as an alternative to domestic service work, but also as a mechanism for bidding up the price of their labor in household employment. Some of these women adopted the motto, “W. W. T. K. (White Women to the Kitchen)” and urged their sisters to leave domestic service employment for new manufacturing jobs.

Women occupied an even broader range of manufacturing jobs in the South than in the urban industrial North and West. In Durham, North Carolina and Memphis, Tennessee, nearly 50 percent of black women workers took jobs in the manufacturing sector of the economy, particularly tobacco, clothing, and food production. Many of these women were hired in accord with racial stereotypes that they were physically as strong as men and could endure more heat than their white female counterparts.

In Houston, African-American women examined bales of cotton in the city’s cotton compresses and warehouses. Although they were industrial workers, they were called “cotton pickers” because they removed dirty or bad cotton from the good cotton and helped prepare it for market. But they also earned the lowest pay of all compress employees.

The precarious place of black women in the urban industrial economy also reinforced their ties to the informal urban economy, including the sex trade. Most of these women pursued their trade inside “houses of prostitution,” run by other women rather than on the streets. But the growing policing, arrest, and harassment of black women in the sex trade added another highly gendered component to the coercive dimensions of the proletarianization process. Thus, similar to African-American men, black women occupied the cellar of the industrial workforce.