Women at Work: "Other people's kitchens" and the work of labor activist Claudia Jones

In the United States, we have a complicated relationship to communism. We spent almost a century laboring under the assumption that it was generally evil, and definitely antithetical to everything that was American, to everything we imagined the U.S. stood for. The Communist Manifesto is a very thin volume outlining a system in which workers in a society have rights, or at the very least, are invested in seeing a system succeed. They’ve taken over the ownership from the heads of industrial power.

The idea of collective ownership still brings a shiver of fear or panic for most Americans raised on ideas of an American system versus the Soviet system under the U.S.S.R., which collapsed at the end of the Cold War. Obviously this subject merits many history books already, so I will not go into it here, except to say: the Soviet experiment in socialism gave communism a bad rap. There’s a lot of positive elements that could be productively integrated with American capitalism which, by the way, ain’t doing great either and has clearly failed us. Protection for workers, universal healthcare (not attached to a persons’s employer), paid time off and maternity leave, a living wage for all working Americans, these are things that lean towards collective security that capitalism has decided aren’t important because it cuts into billionaires and investors’ dividends. But, I digress.

I’m highlighting the excellent history covered across some of the chapters of this book.

I’m here today to discuss another chapter from Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor by Jessica Enoch and David Gold. Though overall a shortfall of the book is its lack of diverse voices, there are several stunning chapters on Black women’s experience as laborers in the United States that really drive home their intersectional experience. “Intersectional” meaning, they face the world not only as a woman, with the discrimination in the work place that white women also faced, but the added discrimination for being Black too. So in my first feature about Rosie the Riveter, when the recruitment posters were looking for women to take on the jobs of men who’d gone away to war, they were explicitly not looking for Black women. Despite many working class white and Black women seeking work, they were not considered — housewives and middle class women were the desired group for those jobs. That all women do not have the same universal experience as a “woman” is exactly what we mean when we use the term “intersectional” to describe those other, compounded identities.

The slowly building feminist consciousness of the 1950s U.S. “was profoundly white” (209). Labor activist Claudia Jones observed this and wrote about it to left-leaning and communist audiences in the United States. When I read this chapter in early 2020, it was eye-opening.

“Because Black men were still paid far less than white man after the war, Black women continued to work outside of the home in far greater numbers than white women. For Black women seeking change, there were few activist groups attuned to their experiences (209).”

A really influential pamphlet, Betty Millard’s 1948 “Women Against Myth” has started to awake the consciousness of some to the idea that just as class was a relevant position in labor and agency, so was gender. However, while the pamphlet breathed possibility into a feminist movement, “it wove a racialized narrative that erased black women almost entirely” (209).

Black women were essentially left out of any efforts to unionize during this era, because their work did not look the same as industrial workers frequently represented by labor unions. Black women were working in white people’s homes (the “other people’s kitchens referenced in the title) and frequently in the homes of some of these progressives working towards class and gender advancements.

I see parallel in our world today, in 2020 and the race and class conversation that has resurfaced towards anti-racist enlightenment. White men and women who profess to be allied but continue to benefit from white supremacist systems that offer them more protection (from the law, from losing their jobs, from everyday microagressions, from the daily fear and trauma of being Black in America) while they continue to benefit from low-paid “essential workers,” in retail, restaurants, cleaning, child care.

Claudia Jones called them out. “Too many progressives, and even some Communists, are still guilty of exploiting Negro domestic workers,” she said, pointing out that “even well-meaning communist white women took advantage of black women’s labor” (215). Claudia Jones took intentional rhetorical steps to position white women with racial and gendered privilege.

Claudia Jones, secretary of the Women’s Commission of the CPUSA in New York City, Jan. 22, 1948.| Anthony Camerano / AP

When minimum wage laws were enacted, they “did not cover 90 percent of black women partially because the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act explicitly excluded domestic workers” (216). Read that again. If you’ve been doing any reading on the history of what’s happening right now, and why Black Americans are so angry, these kinds of moves in our laws should come as no surprise. Or, if it does, perhaps such a discriminatory exclusion hints at the long legacy of their anger. Why do you think the lawmakers passing this act decided to exclude domestic workers?

Jones also pointed out in her published writings of the 1950s and ‘60s that “the oppression that Americans ascribed to those living under Soviet rule also existed in the United States in ghettos across the country” (217). Oh, did your history book tell you otherwise? That all Americans live free under our capitalist system? Claudia Jones told us in no uncertain terms of the whole group of Black Americans living under the oppression more in line with an Iron Curtain Soviet society than the “land of the free” of the U.S.

“The terror and fright of state-sanctioned violence prevented the [Black American] home from being an oasis of calm, as proponents of domestic confinement asserted it was supposed to be. The white family home, if oppressive to women, was at least understood as the sanctuary in a dangerous world. Jones demonstrated that the same was not true for the Black home (218).”

That truth cuts deep at the illusory argument of an American exceptionalism that sets itself as different from Soviet Russia.

Jones’s powerful argument called for recognizing the home as as a “space of labor both in the white suburb” where Black women worked, and the Black ghetto where they still felt so much emotional and affective worry and pain. This is still an important fact of Black Americans today. So many have spoken about the low-grade fear, and long-term physical and psychological effects of being constantly on edge and feeling no protection from a higher authority. When a Black person is assumed to be criminal, when they are disregarded by the law, and we continue to ignore that this puts a huge burden on the psyche of all Black people, but especially Black women. The themes of Claudia Jones’s writing feel just as important today.

The chapter goes on to illustrate how powerfully Claudia Jones articulated these arguments, in what scholars today point to as “proto-intersectional” rhetoric. When I refer to rhetoric (which is what I’m studying for my PhD), I am referring to the intentional methods the speaker or writer took to best meet her audience and their mindset. Jones’s arguments feel eons ahead of her time, and only show me yet again how the folks before us have long been pointing out the discrepancies of class and gender and race in America. I think these debates on class, race, and gender and the intersectional experience they create for each of us feel incredibly relevant and timely. Claudia Jones’s writings in the 1950s were a call to do better for Black women.

By the way, in 1955 she was deported for “anti-American activities. She would continue to work for the voices of the oppressed to be heard in Britain.

Learning about her and the work she did to recognize domestic labor reminds me why history and feminist rhetorical history is exactly where I need to be.

Do you want to know more about feminism, Communism, and Black empowerment in the 20th century? There’s lots to read on these topics, and I’d love to hear if you’ve got a documentary, book, podcast, or other recommendation on this subject! I’m happy to share the chapter I profiled here today, on Claudia Jones, with anyone who wants to read it.

Citation:

"Keohane, Jennifer. “‘Other People’s Kitchens’: Invisible Labor and Militant Voice During the Early Cold War.” Women at Work: Rhetorics of Gender and Labor. Eds. Jessica Enoch and David Gold. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2019.

Note: Direct quotes from the text used a lowercase black when referring to Black Americans. Based on the request of scholars and activists, I refer to Black Americans by capitalizing “Black,” and so have made those editorial changes in my use of direct quotes.