White women’s freedom from domestic duties rests on Black women’s coerced labor

Evidence

Whether talking with black domestics or nonprofessional black women, I find that the overwhelming perceptions of white women are negative. Many of the black women who have worked as servants in white homes, particularly during the times when white women were not gainfully employed, see white women as maintaining childlike, self-centered postures of innocence and irresponsibility at the expense of black women. Again and again, it was pointed out that the degree to which white women are able to turn away from domestic reality, from the responsibilities of child care and housework, whether they are turning away for careers or to have greater leisure, is deter mined by the extent to which black women, or some other underclass group, are bound to that labor, forced by economic circumstance to pick up the slack, to assume responsibility. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 194

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s interest in how privilege and class are unequally distributed through invisible labor chains, echoing themes from earlier projects on unacknowledged labor. — connects to: White women’s lady-status depended on keeping black women legally unmarriageable. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 186; Cross-racial colonial intimacies licensed women’s relative privilege and power — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1325; Black women’s domestic-service legacy sustains distrust and rivalry with white women — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 195 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Black women’s domestic-service legacy sustains distrust and rivalry with white women #expands (0.80) — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 195
• Slavery forced black women into work independence, not voluntary choice #expands (0.78) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 238
• Cross-racial colonial intimacies licensed women’s relative privilege and power #expands (0.75) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1325
• Black slave gender roles replicated white patriarchal divisions of labor #qualifies (0.72) — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 144