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The Negro Washerwoman,
a Vanishing
Figure
By Carter G. Woodson
The Negroes of this country
keenly resent any such thing as the mention of the Plantation
Black Mammy, so dear to the hearts of those who believe in the
traditions of the Old South. Such a reminder of that low status
of the race in the social order of the slave regime is
considered a gross insult. There is in the life of the Negro,
however, a vanishing figure whose name every one should mention
with veneration. She was the all but beast of burden of the
aristocratic slave-holder, and in freedom she continued at this
hard labor as a bread winner of the family. This is the Negro
washerwoman.
This towering personage in the
life of the Negro cannot be appreciated today for the reason
that her task is almost done. Because of the rise of the race
from drudgery and the mechanization of the industrial world the
washerwoman is rapidly passing out. Confusing those women
employed in laundries with those washing at homes, the Bureau of
the Census in 1890 reported 151,540 washerwomen, 218,227 in
1900, and 373,819 in 1910. In 1920, however, there were actually
283,557, but this number has comparatively declined.1
Through machinery and the
division of labor the steam laundry has made the washing of
clothes a well organized business with which the toiler over the
wash tub cannot compete. The price required for this laundry
service is not always lower than the charges of the washerwoman,
but the modern laundry offers so many other conveniences and
advantages that the people are turning away from her to the new
agency. Only the most unfortunate and the most inefficient
washerwoman who is unable to do anything else and must work for
the lowest wages remains to underbid or obviate the necessity
for introducing the steam laundry system. The Negro washerwoman
of the antebellum and the reconstruction periods, then, has
passed from the stage. For her, however, an ever grateful people
will have a pleasant memory, and generations unborn may honor
her in brass and stone.
And why should the Negro
washerwoman be thus considered? Because she gave her life as a
sacrifice for others. Whether as a slave or a free woman of
color of the antebellum period or as a worker in the ranks of an
emancipated people, her life without exception was one of
unrelenting toil for those whom she loved. In the history of no
people has her example been paralleled, in no other figure in
the Negro group can be found a type measuring up to the level of
this philanthropic spirit in unselfish service.
The details of the story are
interesting. When a slave she arose with the crowing of the fowl
to sweat all but blood in the employ of a despotic mistress for
whose household she had to toil often until late in the night.
On return home she had to tax her body further to clean a
neglected hut, to prepare the meals and wash the clothes of her
abandoned children, while her husband, also worn out with the
heavier burdens of the day, had time to rest. In addition to
this, she often took in other work by which she saved sufficient
money to purchase her freedom and sometimes that of her husband
and children. Often she had compassion on a persecuted slave and
used such savings to secure his liberation at a high cost only
to let him go free for a nominal charge.2
As a slave, too, the washerwoman was the head
of the family. Her husband was sometimes an uncertain quantity
in the equation. Not allowed to wed according to law, they soon
experienced that marriage meant living with another with the
consent of the owners concerned and often against the will of
the slaves themselves. Masters ordered women to take up with men
and vice versa to produce numerous slave offspring for sale.
When the slave hesitated because of the absence of real love the
master's will prevailed. Just as such matches were made
according to the will of the master they were likewise broken by
the selling of the man or the woman thus attached, and in the
final analysis the care of the children fell to the mother while
the father went to the bed of another wife on some remote
plantation.3
To provide for her home the
comforts which the custom of slavery did not allow she had to
plan wisely and work incessantly. If the mother had not
developed sufficiently in domestic art to earn a little money at
leisure she usually fell back on "taking in washing."4
When free during the antebellum period the drudgery of the
Negro washerwoman was not much diminished. The earning power of
her husband was not great since slave labor impoverished free
labor, and the wife often had to do something to supplement the
income of her unprofitable husband. Laboring, too, for those who
were not fortunately enough circumstanced to have slaves to
serve them, the free Negro woman could earn only such wages as
were paid to menial workers. In thus eking out an existence,
however, the washerwoman was an important factor. Without her
valuable contribution the family under such conditions could not
have been maintained.5 In the North during these
antebellum times, the Negro washerwoman had to bear still
heavier burdens.
In the South, her efforts were
largely supplementary; but, in the North, she was often the sole
wage earner of the family even when she had an able-bodied
husband. The trouble was not due to his laziness but to the fact
that Negro men in the North were often forced to a life of
idleness. Travelers of a century ago often saw these black men
sitting around loafing and noted this as an evidence of the
shiftlessness of the Negro race, but they did not see the Negro
washer-woman toiling in the homes and did not take time to find
out why these Negro men were not gainfully employed. Negro men
who had followed trades in the South were barred therefrom by
trade unions in the North,6 and the more enlightened
and efficiently trained Irish and Germans immigrating into the
United States drove them out of menial positions.7
In many of the Northern
cities, then, Negro men and children were fed and clothed with
the earnings of the wife or mother who held her own in
competition with others. In most of these cases the man felt
that his task was done when he drew the water, cut the wood,
built the fires went after the clothes, and returned them.
Fortunate was the Northern Negro man who could find acceptance
in such a woman's home. Still more fortunate was the boy or girl
who had a robust mother with that devotion which impelled her to
give her life for the happiness of the less fortunate members of
an indigent group. Without the washerwoman many antebellum
Negroes would have either starved in that section or they would
have been forced by indigent circumstances to return to slavery
in the South, as some few had to do during the critical years of
the decade just before the Civil War.8
The Negro washerwoman, too,
was not only a breadwinner but the important factor in the home.
If the family owned the home her earnings figured in the
purchase of it. When the taxes were paid she had to make her
contribution, and the expenses for repairs often could not be
met without recourse to her earnings. When the husband could not
supply or showed indifference to the comforts of the home it was
she who replaced worn out furniture and unattractive decorations
and kept the home as nearly as possible according to the
standards of modern times. She could be depended upon to clean
the yard, to decorate the front with flowers, and to give things
the aspect of a civilized life. In fact, this working woman was
often the central figure of the family and the actual
representative of the home. Friends and strangers calling on
business usually asked for the mother inasmuch as the father was
not always an important factor in the family.9
This same washerwoman was no
less significant in the life of the community. The uplift worker
sought her at home to interest her in neglected humanity, the
abolitionist found her a ready listener to the story of her
oppressed brethren in chains, the colonizationist stopped to
have her persuade the family to try life anew in Liberia, and
the preacher paid his usual calls to connect her more vitally
with the effort to relieve the church of pecuniary
embarrassment. While burdened with the responsibility of
maintaining a family she was not too busy to listen to these
messages and did not consider herself too poor to contribute to
the relief of those who with a tale of woe convinced her that
they were less favorably circumstanced than she. Oftentimes she
felt that she was being deceived, but she had rather assist the
undeserving than to turn a deaf ear to one who was actually in
need.10
The emancipation of the
Negroes as a result of the Civil War did not immediately elevate
the status of the Negro washerwomen nor did it bring them
immediate relief from the many burdens which they had borne. In
their new freedom certain favorably circumstanced Negroes were
disposed to assume a haughty attitude toward these workers.
After emancipation Negro men rapidly withdrew their wives and
daughters from field work and restricted their efforts largely
to the home; but the washerwomen who went out occasionally to do
day work or had the clothes brought home, remained for several
generations. There was yet so much more for them to do in the
reconstruction of a landless and illiterate class that the
importance of this role could not be underrated. For a number of
years thereafter, then, certainly until 1900 or 1910 there was
little change in the part which these women played in the
economic life of the Negro.11
Why should the Negro washerwoman have to
continue her unrelenting toil even after emancipation? This
makes an interesting story. In the first place, the Negro was
nominally free only. The old relation of master and slave was
merely modified to be that of landlord and tenant in the lower
South. The wage system established itself in the upper South,
but soon broke down in certain parts because there was no money
with which to pay; and the tenant system which followed with
most of the evils of slavery kept the Negro in poverty.
With such a little earning power under this
system it was a godsend to the Negro man to have a wife to
supplement his earnings at some such labor as washing. She did
not always receive money for her services, but food and cast-off
clothing and shoes contributed equally as much to the comfort of
her loved ones. White employers and black employees were all
hard put to it while the South was trying to recover from its
devastation and the whole country was undergoing a new
development, but one class could help the other, and both
managed in some way to live.12
In the course of time, too, when the problem
of eking out an existence had been solved there came to the
ambitious program of the freedmen other demands which made the
services of the Negro washerwoman indispensable. In the first
place, the freedmen were urged to buy homes, and they could
easily see the advantage of living under one's own vine and fig
tree and of thus forming a permanent attachment to the
community. Land was cheap, but money was scarce. To make such a
purchase and at the same time carry the other burdens did not
permit the withdrawal of the washerwoman from her arduous task.
Often she was the one who took the initiative in the buying of
the home, for the husband did not always willingly assume
additional responsibilities.13
Then when the home had been purchased the
children had to be educated. Negroes were ambitious to see their
children in possession of the culture long since observed among
the whites; and they were urged by the missionary teachers from
the North to seek education which, as a handmaiden of religion,
would quickly solve their problems. This often meant the
education of the whole family at once; for, since the
indifference and the impoverished condition of the South
rendered thorough education at public expense practically
impossible, the washerwoman had to come to the front again to
bear more than her share of the burden. The missionary schools
established by teachers from the North required the payment of
tuition as well as board and room rent. Many things now supplied
to students free of charge, moreover, had to be purchased in
those days by their parents.14
Sometimes, too, when there were no children to
educate, the husband was ambitious to become a teacher or
minister, and he had to go to school to qualify for the new
sphere. The wife usually took over the responsibility of the
home which she often financed through the wash tub. The Negro
teacher or minister who did not receive such support in
obtaining his education was an exception to the rule. Without
this particular sacrifice of the washerwoman the Negro
professional groups would be far less undermanned than what they
are today. Many of the prominent Negro teachers, ministers,
business men, and professional workers refer today with
pardonable pride to sisters, mothers, and wives who thus made
their careers possible.15
In not a few cases the earnings of the Negro
washer-woman went to supplement that of her husband as capital
in starting business enterprises. This effort today is not
easily estimated because most of such enterprises never
succeeded. For lack of experience and judgment these pioneers in
a hitherto forbidden field soon ran upon the rocks, and the
highly prized savings of their companions together with their
own accumulations sank beneath the wave only to discourage a
people who had to grope in the dark to find the way. As a rule,
however, the woman bore her losses like a heroine in a great
crisis, being the last to utter a word of censure or to despair
of finding some solution of a difficult problem. Often when the
man at his extremity was inclined to give up the fight it was
his courageous companion who brought a word of cheer and urged
the procession ouward.16
In cooperative business, this worker was a
still larger factor. The Negro washerwoman, continuing just as
she had been before the Civil War in social uplift and religious
effort, served also in the capacity of a stockholder in the
larger corporations of Negroes. Being already the main support
of the school and church, she could easily become interested in
business. At the same time the Negro teachers and
professional classes, who in being taught solely the superiority
of the other races had developed an inferiority complex, could
not have confidence in the initiative and enterprise of the
uneducated Negroes who launched these enterprises.
The Negro working women who had not been
misguided by such theories had no such misgivings. The only
thing they wanted to know was whether it was something to give
employment, prestige, and opportunity for leadership. They
believed in the possibilities of their own group and willingly
cooperated with any one who had a high sounding program. They
were not the ignorant and the gullible, but the true and tried
coworkers in the rehabilitation of the race along economic
lines.17
Some of the leading enterprises like the St.
Lukes Bank in Richmond, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance
Company of Durham, and the National Benefit Life Insurance
Company of Washington still count among their stockholders noble
women of this type. These businesses have developed to the point
that the well-to-do and educated Negroes now regard them as
assets and participate in their development, but the first dimes
and nickels with which these enterprises were launched came
largely from women of this working class.
C. G. WOODSON
1U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro
Population in the United States, 1790 to 1915, p.526; Fourteenth
Census of the United States, Vol. V, p.359.
2 Woodson, Free Negro Owners of
Slaves in the United States in 1830, p. VI
3 Journal of Negro History,
XIV, p.236-237.
4 This was always a possible resort
because this sort of work was looked upon as too menial for the
whites.
5 To appreciate how washerwomen
figured in the life of the Negroes see Williams, History of the
Negro Race in America, II, 136
6 During the thirties and forties
the trades unions barring Negroes were beginning to make
themselves felt.
7 Woodson, A Century of Negro
Migration, pp.41, 82.
8 Some of the Northern States had
laws barring Negroes who were not self-supporting. See Hickok,
The Negro in Ohio, pp. 41, 42; and Harris, Negro Servitude in
Illinois, pp. 10, 24, 121, 138, 148, 157, 162, 233-236
9 Certain fathers, however, were
equally as conspicuous. See Journal of Negro History,
XIV, 239.
10 Church workers, understanding
this weakness of the Negro women, have exploited them as a class
known to he generous to a fault.
11 The United States' Census
figures are confusing because at one time launderers and
laundresses in and outside of laundries are reported together,
but in other cases they are separate.
12 Many poor whites of that day
were not any better off than the Negroes, but they were too
proud to work.
13 Biographical treatments in the
Journal of Negro History, passim; and data in questionnaires
filled out for the Association for the Study of Negro Life and
History.
14 Because of rapidly diminishing
income the missionary schools are not as well equipped as they
were in those days, and public institutions better equipped are
taking their places.
15 Data in the files of the
Association for the Study of Negro Life and History
16 Dabney, Maggie L. Walker,
passim; Andrews, John Merrick, passim; and The Modern Jack and
the Beanstalk, passim.
17 The Negro as a Business Man, p.
90 et seq
Source: The Journal of Negro History, Vol. XV,
July 1930, No. 3
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posted 22 June 2008
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