Black Migration, Domestic Exploitation, and White Reproduction in the US from 1900-1940

• In Event: 50666 - The Demography of Family Inequality and Wellbeing (Co-sponsored by Section on Sociology of Population)

Abstract

Concurrent with the first wave of the Great Migration, the number of domestic workers grew and the concentration of Black women in this occupation increased. Employing a Black woman to perform the “dirty” tasks of household labor not only freed middle-class White women from performing the tasks themselves, but conferred upon them a status of racial superiority and “true” femininity. This dialectical relationship between the experiences of Black and White women in the US has been written about by feminist scholars of race, gender and class but remains understudied in quantitative social science. This paper explores whether the social and economic advantages gained by middle-class White women from employing Black domestic workers extends to the realm of family formation. That is, is there a relationship between the urban-migration of Black women, the majority of whom were siloed into domestic labor, and the decisions of White women to get married? I answer this question using full count Census data from 1900 to 1940. I find a significant, positive association between Black women's migration to cities and White women's probability of marriage. The results are robust to the inclusion of city and decade fixed effects, and controls for the migration of White and foreign-born women. The association is strongest in cities in which Black women were more heavily concentrated in the domestic labor force. This paper speaks to a growing body of work in family demography that examines the production and reproduction of advantage among racialized family forms. My results lend evidence to a causal relationship between the occupational siloing of Black women into domestic work and the reproduction of the White heteropatriarchal family via marriage.

Author

• Hero Ashman, University of California-Berkeley