Winner of the 2020 Sarah A. Whaley Book Prize from the
National Women's Studies Association Putting Their
Hands on Race offers an important labor history of 19th and
early 20th century Irish ...immigrant and US southern Black migrant
domestic workers. Drawing on a range of archival sources, this
intersectional study explores how these women were significant to
the racial labor and citizenship politics of their time. Their
migrations to northeastern cities challenged racial hierarchies and
formations. Southern Black migrant women resisted the gendered
racism of domestic service, and Irish immigrant women strove to
expand whiteness to position themselves as deserving of labor
rights. On the racially fractious terrain of labor, Black women and
Irish immigrant women, including Victoria Earle Matthews, the
"Irish Rambler", Leonora Barry, and Anna Julia Cooper, gathered
data, wrote letters and speeches, marched, protested, engaged in
private acts of resistance in the workplace, and created women's
institutions and organizations to assert domestic workers' right to
living wages and protection.
By the 1920s, Irish immigrant women had become whiter and gained greater access to jobs outside of domestic service while Black women became the majority of workers employed in the ...once-Irish-dominated occupation in the U.S. northeast by the 1930s. In this chapter, I document the racialization of Irish immigrant women and the activism of Black women in the early twentieth century to initiate further research and discussion about how working-class white women experienced race and ethnicity in their occupations and how Black women developed a discursive foundation for addressing long-lasting labor struggles rooted in race and gender. Black and Irish
