Intimate Labor: Household Workers, Middle-Class Reformers, and Public Health Laws

In cities and towns in and around New York in the late 1930s, a long simmering tension between domestics and their employers came to a head. The conflict arose over proposed local and state laws that would require domestics to submit to invasive physical examinations for venereal disease, including syphilis and gonorrhea, before coming to work in middle-class homes. In city council meetings and state legislative chambers, in meetings of unions and women’s reform organizations, discussions that had long been private—over the conditions of work in middle-class homes—became public and political. Domestic workers, employers, and women industrial reformers all weighed in on the issue. In the process, they laid bare the ideological, material, and class struggles taking place in Depression-era working-class homes.

Despite the public venue of the disputes, the rhetoric of each group was infused with the language of privacy. Middle-class women, both ordinary employers and some of the New York area’s most progressive and powerful reformers, insisted that health tests were vital to protect unsuspecting residents of the middle-class home from a veritable invasion of diseased employees. Although many of these women were prominent supporters of the New Deal expansion of government power, they remained ambivalent about extending wage and hour protections to the workers in their homes. In contrast, domestics argued with varying levels of success that it was they who risked infection in the course of laboring in close contact with their employers’ families and possessions. Again and again, they tied wage and hour legislation to protecting the health and safety of domestic workers. Thus, this paper will reveal the ways in which domestic service turned the middle-class home inside out, making private problems public and bringing problems like class conflict and government regulation into the middle-class private sanctum.