A little known yet largely successful job action waged in 1881 by black women in Atlanta is credited with helping to set the stage for a century of labor and civil rights struggles.
During the Reconstruction era, black men found work in a variety of occupations. Most worked as laborers, but many were hired by the Post Office or Treasury Department.
For black women, however, virtually the only option was domestic work: In Atlanta in 1880, 98 percent of black working women cooked, cleaned, or cared for children, mostly for white households, according to historian Drew Gilpin Faust.
Although these workers could bring the work home, where they were their own supervisors, doing laundry in the 1880s was perhaps the least desirable of domestic jobs. In the North, commercial laundries handled a lot of the work.
But in the South, where post-Civil War technology wasn’t as advanced, “washerwomen” were hired. They created their own soap from homemade lye and starch, and cut wooden barrels in half to make tubs. They had to gather wood to feed fires to heat the water they carried from wells or ponds in order to boil, wash, and rinse clothes, linens, and diapers.
The workweek typically began early Monday morning, for many with a walk of several miles to collect heavy bundles of laundry, and, of course, a similar walk back home. The week ended on Saturday, with the return of the clean laundry, which they had pressed with heavy irons heated from the same hearths they used to cook for their own families.
In July 1881, 20 laundresses formed The Washing buy viagra gel online Society and announced that their membership would strike unless they were given a raise to a uniform rate of $1 for each dozen pounds of wash. They went door to door to build their ranks and used church meetings to spread the word, seeking solidarity among washerwomen and organizing to win community support.
Within three weeks of its formation, the society held amass meeting and called a strike. At the time the group had swelled to more than 3,000 members, including some white women. Within a month, authorities began arresting and fining the strikers for “disorderly conduct” while canvassing the city to increase their ranks.
The city council proposed a $25 fee on members of any washerwoman’s organization, and then offered tax breaks to businesses that expressed a willingness to start commercial steam laundries. Even though $25 was the equivalent of several months of wages, the striking laundresses were not deterred.
The show of resolve in the face of arrests, fines, and fees that could so dramatically alter their future inspired other domestic workers. Fearing further labor unrest among cooks, maids, and nurses, as well as a disruption to an international fair that the city was planning, Atlanta’s town fathers withdrew their proposed fees on organized washerwomen.
The city’s business elite were trying to attract outside capital, and the uprising contrasted sharply with the appealing image of a complacent workforce. “In the end,” an AFL-CIO tribute notes, “the strike not only raised wages, it established laundresses — and black women workers — as instrumental to the New South’s economy.”