Domestic Worker Organizing: Storytelling, History, and Contemporary Resonances

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About the Author

Premilla Nadasen is an Associate Professor of History at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of the award-winning Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States and most recently, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. She writes and speaks widely on issues of race, labor, feminism, and social policy and has been engaged with social justice activism for many years.

Notes

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Bonnie Thorton Dill, Across the Boundaries of Race and Class: An Exploration of Work and Family Among Black Female Domestic Servants (New York: Garland, 1994); Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1997); Sharon Harley, Sister Circle: Black Women and Work (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910–1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Karen Brodkin Sacks, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Donna L. Van Raaphorst, Union Maids Not Wanted: Organizing Domestic Workers, 1870–1940 (New York: Praeger, 1988); Mary Romero, Maid in the U.S.A. (New York: Routledge, 1992).

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2008); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge 2000); K. Sue Jewell, From Mammy to Miss America and Beyond: Cultural Images and the Shaping of US Social Policy (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

Geraldine Miller, interview by Debra Bernhardt, June 18, 1981, audio recording, New Yorkers at Work Oral History Collection, Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, New York University.

Dorothy Bolden, interview by Chris Lutz, August 31, 1995, Transcript L1995–12, p. 29, Southern Labor Archives, Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library, Atlanta.