Abstract

"Maid’s Honor Day, Race, and the Business of Domestic Labor in 1970s Atlanta"

Eshe Sherley , Wake Forest University (sherleye@wfu.edu)

Held from 1970-1979, Maid’s Honor Day brought together employers, largely members of
Atlanta’s white political elite, Back and white politicians, and domestic workers to publicly
recognize the value of Black women’s domestic labor. Ahead of the event, employers sent
in nominations explaining why their employee should be chosen as Maid of the Year. Using
the nominations submitted by employers, this paper asks: How is the business of
consuming Black women’s domestic labor simultaneously a window into the changing care
economy in the U.S. south and an intimate portrait of how the business of domestic work
reinforced and remade racial identities, hierarchies, and boundaries in the 1970s?

While histories of Atlanta tend to center bi-racial histories of men in political leadership or
histories of white or Black women, this paper analyzes how Black women and white
women navigated their relationship to each other as women, workers, and Atlantans to
shed light on how race, the care economy, and gender shaped 1970s Atlanta.

Ultimately, I suggest that Maid’s Honor Day reveals how white women reworked the
narrative of domestic workers as “part of the family” to maintain their identities as southern
liberals while continuing to expect unfettered access to Black women’s labor. White
women employers recast working motherhood as a unifying status across difference,
framing black and white women as working mothers collaborating to manage employers’
households.

Black women’s strategic navigation of the tropes that shaped their unjust labor conditions
lived alongside their role in the development of Black political power in Atlanta. While
Maid’s Honor Day did reinforce the paternalism of employers, it also served as a forum
where Atlanta’s domestic workers asserted themselves as a powerful political
constituency who needed to be recognized by both employers and elected officials.