Confronting the New Care Economy: Black Women, the State, and Care in 1970s Atlanta

In 1974, domestic workers won inclusion in the Federal Labor Standards Act, reversing their decades-long exclusion from federal worker protections. Local organizations advocating for domestic workers, like the National Domestic Workers Union (NDWU) in Atlanta, worked together to achieve this national win. However, at the exact moment of this momentous victory, the ground was shifting under their feet. After 1974, the broader economic context that domestic workers faced began to change significantly, especially in relation to care provision. As the 1970s progressed, what had previously been an informal market where individual employers hired individual domestic workers transformed into something closer to the current market for care we navigate today: team-cleaning companies, daycare centers, and partnerships between organizations and the state to provide home health aides and elder care.

This paper uses newspaper articles, state records, and the NDWU’s papers to explore how Black women on the frontlines of domestic labor navigated the transformation of the 1970s care economy. I argue that for working class Black women, the transformation of the care economy catalyzed a massive divergence in their economic fortunes. While approximately half of the Black women who did domestic work in the mid-twentieth century were able to move into other kinds of work, the other half constituted a mostly stable reserve army of labor for the newly re-organized care economy. Representing this less lucky half, the NDWU occupied a challenging position. On the one hand, it resisted becoming an employer that directly commodified and sold their member’s labor. On the other hand, there is some evidence to suggest that they participated in making Black women available for the development of the exploitative home health care sector in Georgia. This paper clarifies how everyday Black women confronted the institutions that shaped the late twentieth century care economy.