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Every Moment, This One Now
Emma Poldervaart’s decision to resist the Nazis began when she heard, a young woman, barely in her 20’s hiking in Switzerland, a full account of the Anschluss in Austria. Upon her return to Holland and Germany’s subsequent occupation of Holland, she went immediately to work in dangerous clandestine activities. Her first efforts involved finding hiding places for Jews and others wishing to escape Nazi deportations. In October 1943 she became deputy commander of an association of resistance groups, the Raad Van Verzet, for the Utrecht-Eemlanden-Gooi district. Her work for the RVV included coordinating communications among various branches of the resistance, rescuing political prisoners from Nazi jails, delivering Allied-supplied munitions, caring for Jews and others in hiding, receiving and helping resistance efforts. Twice during that time she was arrested and each time she escaped. In a report written after the war on her various roles during the occupation, she said, “Every time I was someone else. I was almost invisible and did not leave traces.” What were my politicizing experiences? The summer I was fifteen years old, 1967, I and one other Jewish kid from Buffalo represented the local Unitarian youth group at a conference in Boston. I don’t remember the official topic of the conference. No doubt it was something meaningful to the overall organization, “Liberal Religious Youth,” which had sent us there. At that time the hippie movement was just beginning to emerge alongside protests against the war as a promise of radical rebellion for white, middle class kids in the high school I attended. At the same time, the integrationist rhetoric of the civil rights movement was evolving into the theories and strategies of Black power. Out of the whole weekend conference I remember only one moment. Ivanhoe Donaldson from SNCC had come to talk to us. We were sitting outside. It was spring and a light breeze swept up a winter’s worth of carbon and rust. There were a couple of white kids sitting to the side on a retaining wall, blowing bubbles. I remember the question Ivanhoe Donaldson snapped at those kids: “What are you doing blowing bubbles when there is work to be done?” Second, I remember Donaldson’s answer to the plea of one white boy, dismayed at being excluded from a good deal of the work Donaldson described. To the question, “But how can we help?” Donaldson’s answer: “Organize yourselves.” By the time I met Emmie it had been thirty years since I heard those words. Thirty years I’d been living as a middle class white woman, married to the other Jewish kid with whom I represented the Unitarians that 60’s summer in Boston. I may not have been blowing bubbles, but neither had I been organizing on race among Jews, among ourselves. It was early November, 1942. My Aunt Maussi and Uncle Johnny were among the first Jews in The Hague to be called for “work in the East.” Not concentration camp. No one said, concentration camp. Aunt Maussi and Uncle Johnny were promised, with Eddie, their three year old son, a train ride and relocation for work. Reservations courtesy of the government. Aunt Maussi and Uncle Johnny were among the first Jews in the Hague to be called. Their last night at home, the neighbors came to say good-bye and bring them things. A comb, writing paper, small things they could carry, gifts. Aunt Maussi thanked them and told them good night. She sat down on the steps, her head in her hands. That’s the moment she decided. She called Emmie Poldervaart, whose offer of hiding she had previously declined. Within hours, Eddie was whisked away. His parents told him, off to America on a big boat. Tell the captain to wait for us. Of course, it wasn’t true. They couldn’t tell him what was true. He was only three years old. He would have spoken it, the truth. They couldn’t know where he’d been taken. No ship, no captain. And the little boy, that night in a stranger’s bed, in a stranger’s house, thought his parents had thrown him away, had taken the boat themselves. The idea for fiction developed as a result of my desire to honor Emmie and my understanding that I couldn’t do so via biography. It was my hope to remain true to the spirit of Emmie’s integrity, true to her refusal to summarize history, true to her grand humor and to her ecstatic understanding of the universe.: He was crying. The child was not shaking. The child is quiet. He is sleepy, strapped behind me on my bike, the hood of his coat pulled down over his eyes. The child is still. Only his head bumps against my back. I assure you the child is not crying. You stuffed a sock in his mouth.
Now you stop it.
You don’t remember.
Mist. Mold. Moldy clothes, moldy food, tulip bulbs cooked on the plate instead of potatoes. Moldy bulbs, moldy lungs, moldy eyes. Everywhere the stumps of trees. After a time the people burn even their furniture to keep warm. Frozen feet, frozen arms. What I knew I taught myself to forget. I don’t remember every child. At the beginning of the occupation, if Jews weren’t allowed to sit on the benches, Emmie wouldn’t sit. If Jews couldn’t drink at the fountain, Emmie wouldn’t drink. She wouldn’t do anything the Jews couldn’t do. She didn’t ride on the trolley. She wouldn’t go into the park. You saved them. You hid them. It wasn’t I. You saved them.
Save them? I leave them. And when I leave them, I leave them. I find for them an address. I tell them, never, never come back. They are leaves at the side of the road. Once I tell them good-bye, quickly and without affection, in the damp cellar, in the coal shed, in the hay, from that moment they are alone. I hide no one. I am alone. They are alone. From the first breath, alone. I’ve lived as a mostly late 20th century American Jewish adult in relative economic ease. As a matter of choice I became the stay-at-home Mom that my single working mother wasn’t. Later, and again as a matter of choice, I took a graduate degree in the arts. Now I teach in a local college half time. During my married life, my husband and I owned and lived in two houses. We started out in a log cabin we built, together, in part from trees we cut on our hillside lot in rural Vermont. After our third child was born, we wanted to be closer to other Jews, so we moved to Montpelier, near the synagogue, right in town. We looked at a house that had three stories, three bathrooms, plenty of bedrooms, a living room, a front room, a dining room, a huge kitchen. I was worried about cleaning all that. But, I agreed we could hire someone. Tell me more about the prison.
Every year, when I go to Jewish high holiday services, on Rosh Hashanah there is a d’var, a lesson, prepared by one of the synagogue members, on the portion of the Torah in which Sarah and Abraham cast out Hagar with her young son, Ishmael. Most often, the subject of the d’var assumes Sarah’s interest in protecting her son’s inheritance against the likely claims of Abraham’s elder son, Ishmael, as the reason she demands that Abraham cast Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert. As we know, the fates of the Jews and the Muslims go on from there. However, the meaning I have come to make of that Torah portion casts me not so much into a discussion of that historic splitting of two peoples, but squarely into the American history of immigration and its relationship to America’s legacy of slavery. It is a question that responds to Ivanhoe Donaldson’s charge: organize yourselves. Once, I was about eight years old, I went swimming with a group of girls. We were at Jewish Community Center camp, outside of Buffalo. There was a raft in the water and some boys came over to tease us. They climbed up onto the raft and all the boys ran together to one side. When the raft started to tip, all the girls fell off. A fat girl fell on top of me. We fell deeper into the water. I couldn’t get out from under. I panicked. I reached up with my fingers and scratched the fat girl on the back. She didn’t move. She just kept sinking, farther and farther down on top of me. I reached around and scratched harder, all down the soft sides of her big belly. Then it was over. She stopped sinking. Within seconds we were all bobbing in the sunshine, fat, thin, all the same, all smiling. What I’d done to the fat girl was completely unnecessary. She just stopped sinking after a while and then she moved off. She never found out who scratched her. I knew then, I’d do anything to survive. I liked the (white) woman we hired to clean our new house. She and I had long talks. We were both in therapy. Some of the same things went wrong in our lives. Her son was the same age as my oldest son. One day, we talked longer than usual. We stared into each other’s eyes, turn by turn revealing each to the other, identical terrors. At that moment, I saw there was only one difference between us: She had shaken her hand moments before, out of my toilet. Suddenly, it became unbearable to me that we two women, although suffering in similar ways, had very unequal resources available to us for dealing with it. Although we both understood our problem as stemming from a very widespread social injustice affecting women, we both also understood the value of personal therapy. However, I could afford therapy, for instance, two days a week, while she could afford it, if at all, only off an on. I spent all day while my kids were at school thinking through the changes I could make in my life and making art. She cleaned other people’s toilets. Soon after the day of our talk, I gave her two weeks notice. This is not a story I’m proud of. The woman I fired was not happy, to say the least, without warning, and with little explanation, to lose her job. What made me do it? I was wrong; there’s no doubt in my mind. But when I think of my foremother, Sarah, I think, maybe she wasn’t really afraid her son would lose out on an inheritance. Maybe she was afraid, maybe she was furious to be part of a household in which Hagar and Ishmael could work for her and not be given an inheritance. Maybe Sarah’s decision, albeit poorly, even cruelly managed, was not a grubbing after more power for Isaac, but a rejection of the very institution of handmaids and householders that put Hagar and Ishmael under her power, a system that gave Ishmael good reason to resent Isaac, Sarah’s son. Since that time, I have been thinking about the ways I grew up and the ways I’ve lived as a white householder and a Jewish woman in America at this time. What would it be like, not to blame the victim because her pain points to my complicity in it, but to ally myself with those who are subject to injustice? Put them out. Put them out in the street. That’s what I told my mother to do if any of the Jews in hiding came back. It’s too dangerous. Two days after I put them into hiding your aunt and uncle knocked at my mother’s door. The good citizens who agreed to shelter them can no longer stand the fretting of your aunt and uncle, their pacing in the halls of the house. Those Jews have nowhere to go. They are leaves at the side of the road. They return to my mother who cannot turn anyone down. The police are now following me, sniffing with their dogs at my heels. I trail death behind me. Your aunt and uncle bring their burden of danger back to my house, to my mother. I tell my mother, put them out. I don’t care where they go. A few years ago, in order to grapple more responsibly with my expanded sense of heritage, I began to solicit writing by Jewish women who were raised in households employing Black domestic workers. I was looking for pieces that would reflect an awareness of having been born into a system of racial and economic injustice, and that would provide models for disentangling from race and class domination. The method I used to solicit writing was to send invitations over the Internet to Jewish listservs and newsgroups, to Jewish feminist Internet groups, to humanities Internet groups, and to general feminist groups. I also placed print advertisements in a Jewish feminist magazine and a writer’s trade journal. All of the writing I received in response, from approximately sixty women, contained heartfelt struggles with the injustices contained in such a heritage. Some of that writing contained paradigms beyond guilt, beyond anger at parents, particularly anger at mothers, paradigms for thinking that incorporate a complex understanding of the forces that shape American ethnic and racial assignment, paradigms that address a complex understanding of the meanings of personal and collective responsibility. There’s an award. It’s a huge ceremony.
I am aware that my question arises within a larger framework of whiteness in America and of class privilege, a discussion and a set of circumstances involving many other groups besides Jews and Black Americans. I’m also aware that a discussion related to domestic labor must take into account the role of men in establishing the definitions of housework and personal services. Why, then, did I ask a question limited to Jewish women and Black women domestic workers? I am a Jewish woman. There are not other aspects of my identity that have greater importance for me in describing myself than those two factors. Whatever good I am able to do in my life, I will do, first and foremost, as a Jewish woman. I want to know more about the possibilities for Jewish women who were raised in households employing Black domestic workers to divest ourselves of white privilege, to unlearn racism and classism and to help form an American Jewish culture that continues to ally itself with social justice. It is of the utmost importance to me, therefore, to examine what it means, socially and politically, to be a Jewish woman, here, where I live, in America. The place I learned most about being a Jewish woman was in my own house, where, among other things, I observed my mother employing Black domestic workers. At the beginning of the war I thought at least half the people will join with us. After three months I told myself, perhaps a quarter of the people. After six months I still hoped one in ten will go with us. After that I knew. The people turn away from the Jews. They say, “We must not interfere.” Then, at the end of the war, when it was clear who will win, suddenly together, the whole country joins the great Dutch Resistance. That Resistance is very loud, very busy. They blow up buildings just to make a big noise. Everyone can see who is in that Resistance. They blow up bridges even when all it did was keep the Nazi soldiers from going quietly home. And they knew those of us who were in the old resistance. They knew we knew what they were doing just a few months before. Do you follow? Some of us in the old resistance began dying suddenly in car accidents. It was not safe anywhere in the country for those of us who had been in the resistance from the beginning. At the same time that I sought the personal narratives of other Jewish women raised as I was, I looked for literature on Black/Jewish relations as it pertained to domestic work. I found mainly male authors and editors of books on Black/Jewish relations, including Cornel West, Jack Salzman, Seth Forman, Murray Friedman and others whose books discuss mainly the relationships between Black and Jewish men. Although Letty Cottin Pogrebin, in her essay, “Blacks, Jews and Gender: The History, Politics and Cultural Anthropology of a Women’s Dialogue Group” (Salzman 385-400) describes the history of a group of professional Black and Jewish women who met in dialogue over a period of ten years, domestic work was absent from her report of topics discussed. Pogrebin’s group also consciously made the decision to eliminate differences in class from their membership (386). Adams & Bracey’s Strangers and Neighbors addresses Jewish employment of Black domestic labor in several contributing essays (Hacker, Williams Jr., Hertzberg, Baker & Cooke, Capeci Jr., Weisbord & Stein, Wedlock, Reddick). Those essays refer to or describe historical patterns of domestic employment, but don’t attempt proposals for Jewish women seeking to create a responsible social ethic, given that personal history. As far as I know there are no existing statistics on the numbers of living Jewish adults who were brought up in households employing domestic workers. However, the youth of my peers in the post-WWII Baby Boom generation, now the middle aged makers of social policy and the generation currently driving the U.S. economy, took place during a time in which Jews, along with other white Americans, enjoyed an enormous economic expansion (Brodkin 3). At the same time that white American families were enjoying an economic boom from which Black families were excluded (44-47), the number of Black women employed as domestic workers was growing and the status of domestic work was declining (Jones 256). Moreover, domestic work was excluded from national worker legislation. In the1950’s forty-one percent of employed Black women worked in private households where their jobs were not included in minimum wage or hour legislation, nor were their jobs covered by unemployment compensation or social security (257). In proposing a focused discussion on the political possibilities for Jewish women raised in households employing Black domestic workers, I assume the presence and the importance during their growing years, of the social contexts described above and of their specifically racist values. In her research on domestic work in America, described in Between Women: Domestics And Their Employers, Judith Rollins wrote of the women she interviewed who employed domestic help: When and how did they come to employ help? The answer to this points to the importance of class background, of tradition and of modeling. For the employers I interviewed, the single most important element in their decision to enter into this arrangement was the role of their mothers – both as models and as instigators . . . All of my interviewees’ mothers had employed domestic help while my interviewees were growing up. Every employer of domestics had had the opportunity to observe her mother in the role of an employer of domestics. (94-99) It seems to me not only odd but also dangerous that such a huge influence on our lives should go unexamined. In my experience, Jewish identity is a frequent topic of conversation among Jews. Jewish women’s identity is a frequent topic of conversation among Jewish women. Domestic duties are often a topic of conversation among feminists. Yet, perhaps because of guilt, or confusion, or perhaps simply because it’s possible to continue living comfortably without looking at it, the circumstances of having been brought up as a Jewish girl by Jewish parents employing Black domestic workers is not a frequent topic of conversation among Jewish feminists. And, in among that possible guilt, that confusion, that callousness, was also for some, though it’s difficult to define its limits carefully, love. How could anything having to do with the vulnerabilities, the hope, the betrayals of love, of love given and received in spite of injustices, love mourned and defended, be ignored by feminists, by Jews, as a topic for full, careful, cultural and ethical analysis? In wishing to address and focus on this subject, I am seeking a complex acknowledgement of the experiences and the choices of Jews, and of Jewish women in America. Of course that acknowledgement must include an awareness of the antisemitism which is currently operational in America and an awareness of the impact of the Nazi Holocaust on Jewish population and security in the world. It must also include an awareness of the ways Jews have been incorporated into an American “whiteness” which has offered American Jews opportunities for power, both economic and interpretive. “Essential as it is for women to explore our particular oppression, I feel keenly the limitations of stopping there, of not filling in the less comfortable contours of a more complete picture in which we might exist as oppressor as well as oppressed” (Bulkin 99). Power as such does not preclude the ability of people of good will from working against the unjust distribution of power (hooks 152-153). As Jews, and as women, we may have an experiential knowledge of injustice that propels us to identify with other victims of injustice, but that does not have to be the only basis upon which we act. Calling upon the positive and weighty history of our people, we can decide that no matter our state of comfort, it is a moral imperative to ally ourselves with social justice. bell hooks makes it clear that focusing on the injuries suffered by those who are in a power up relation to those who are power down, is not only distracting but can be harmful: Anti-racist work that tries to get … individuals to see themselves as ‘victimized’ by racism in the hopes that this will act as an intervention is a misguided strategy. And indeed we must be willing to acknowledge that individuals of great privilege … are capable, via their political choices, of working on behalf of the oppressed. Such solidarity does not need to be rooted in shared experience. It can be based on one’s political and ethical understanding of racism and one’s rejection of domination. Therefore we can see the necessity for the kind of education for critical consciousness that can enable those with power and privilege rooted in structures of domination to divest without having to see themselves as victims. Such thinking does not have to negate collective awareness that a culture of domination does seek to fundamentally distort and pervert the psyches of all citizens or that this perversion is wounding. (152-153) In The Social Construction of Whiteness: White Women, Race Matters, Ruth Frankenberg describes her research on the ways white feminists talk about being white. From that research she has discerned three modes of discourse on race in America: essentialist racism, color- and power-evasiveness, and race-cognizance. Essentialist racism supported the definition and uses of whiteness from the beginnings of U.S. history and remained the dominant mode of race discourse for most of U.S. history. Essentialist racism posits race as a difference of biological and ontological nature, upon which allegations of basic inferiority and superiority can be based (139). Color-blind evasion of race, the second mode of discourse, as Frankenberg describes it, functions to absolve white women from acknowledging race when that serves to create for them a racially innocent identity. Color-blind evasion of race includes a denial of the real differences race makes in people’s lives. It also includes a selective acknowledgement of power via sporadic attention to race. Within color-blind power evasiveness, a denial of race is maintained even though the speaker may contradict herself by using race only in contexts that make the speaker look or feel good. Power-evasiveness also includes the use of euphemism, through which race can be acknowledged but cleansed of its negative effects (156). The third mode of race discourse Frankenberg describes, which she has called race cognizance, is the one she propounds: [Race cognizance] articulates explicitly the contradiction that racism represents. On the one hand, it acknowledges the existence of racial inequality and white privilege and, on the other, does not lean on ontological or essential difference in order to justify inequality or explain it away (160). . . [The] discursive repertoire that I will here describe as race cognizant insisted on the importance of recognizing difference—but with difference understood in historical, political, social, or cultural terms rather than essentialist ones . . . [Race cognizant women] shared two linked convictions: first, that race makes a difference in people’s lives and second, that racism is a significant factor in shaping contemporary U.S. society (157) . . . In dramatic contrast with color- and power-evasive women, [race cognizant] women insisted that racism was something in which they had a part . . . their view of racism included awareness of institutional, social, and structural factors, rather than confining attention to ‘prejudice’ and discrimination. (167) It is with Frankenberg’s model of race cognizance that I hope a discussion and analysis of the experience of Jewish women raised in households employing Black domestic workers can take place. Out of such a discussion, out of such analysis, would emerge “a complex language to talk about white Jewish identity in the United States and its relationship to blackness and black identity” (hooks 205). In her 1996 memoir Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness, Jane Lazarre provides a race-cognizant model of thinking applicable to the angst of Jewish women who find their actions defined, sometimes against their wills, by a system against which they wish to strive. In one passage, she refers to her use of the term “you people” in addressing a mixed group of Black and white students in a class, her dismay when the Black students were offended, and her subsequent understanding that her intention, which was other than to single out the Black students, didn’t take away the hurtful meaning: It doesn’t matter what you meant when you are moving against a tide of history and social reality far more important than one white person’s mistake. A white American either accepts the weight of this history or relinquishes the respect and possibility of authentic connection to Black Americans. (32) When I decided to dismiss the domestic worker who had been cleaning our house, I rejected the employment of domestic workers entirely, using a mode of thinking Rollins refers to as “utopian feminism, “ believing the inherent bottom-rung status of domestic work was reason to refuse to support it entirely. I did not see or question the victim-blaming implicit in my decision. Nowhere within my experience of Jewish community life did I readily find discussion or models for thinking and acting otherwise. Nowhere within the library catalogues I searched did I find contemporary Jewish thinking focused specifically on the question I faced. It is my longing for that discussion, not any sense of expertise, which impelled me to seek the written reflections of other Jewish women. Outside Jewish contexts, however, I found material that questioned and critiqued the structure of domestic work: Domestic service, rather than functioning as a gateway through which socioeconomic marginals pass into the mainstream, functions to reinforce racial and ethnic stereotypes and maintain those biologically ‘deviant’ in a social and economic underclass. (Rollins 55) According to Richard Katzman in Seven Days A Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrialized America, a pre-industrial model of servants and mistresses shaped the occupation of domestic service which persisted into the industrial age (146). Moreover, according to Katzman, the terms of employment defined for domestic service were used by employers to further define racial characteristics of the employee group (222). Julia Wrigley, in her 1991 review essay on Palmer’s Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920 – 1989, describes the conditions of domestic work which include the structure of exploitation: Ironically, the category of domestic work that requires the most skill and commitment, looking after children, also frequently entails employment relations that are most similar to those of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The trend toward depersonalization of relations between employers and employees does not apply to childcare workers, who often work for just one employer, experiencing the dependency this implies. Further, they typically have much more difficulty establishing regular work hours than do domestic workers who primarily clean. The exigencies of the parents’ careers can interfere with obligations to the employees. This ‘flexibility’ is part of the reason parents hire in-home caregivers for their children, and it makes child care workers particularly vulnerable to exploitation (320). Although domestic work is defined by the isolation of domestic workers from one another and within the assumed privacy of the home, it is not only the isolation of the workstation but also the implicit personalization of the employee-employer relationship that denies domestic workers the protections of formal working relations (Rollins156). In her 1980 essay “The Means To Put My Children Through,” Bonnie Thornton Dill points out that the personalized connection between women employers and women domestic workers is used to exact unacknowledged and unpaid emotional service from the domestic workers (109). This, according to Katzman, is the direct transference to domestic service of the servant-mistress relationship in which a mistress would ask a servant to devote her life to the mistress’ family, and specifically not to her own family (157). But perhaps the most exploitative form of emotional service is that of absolution for racism demanded through personalized relationships. Developing personal relationships with the women of color whom they employ functions for some white middle-class women to affirm their self-image as non-racist. Kathy Dobie suggests that absolution of racism is one psychological need fulfilled in the relationship with women of color: But perhaps for most white people, a black person’s affection can never mean more than an act of absolution for historical and collective guilt, an affection desired not because of how one feels about that particular person but because that person is black. (111) Phyllis Palmer, in Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States, 1920 – 1945, further looks at the ways concepts of dirtiness and cleanliness have been used to police the borders of race and class: The theory that underlies this book is that sex, dirt, housework, and badness in women are linked in Western unconsciousness and that white middle class women sought to transcend these associations by demonstrating their sexual purity and their pristine domesticity … It was this desire to differentiate herself and sustain a compelling, though limited, image of womanhood, that led white middle-class women to devalue housework, to deny their connection with it, and to act in ways that maintained other groups of women in domestic service related occupations. (138)
‘Dirtiness’ appears always in a constellation of the suspect qualities that, along with sexuality, immorality, laziness, and ignorance, justify social ranking of race, class and gender. The ‘slut,’ initially a shorthand for ‘slattern,’ or kitchen maid, captivates all these personifications in a way unimaginable in a male persona (140). Rollins identifies maternalism as a particular use of personalization within the employer-employee relationship that includes acts of magnanimity not unlike paternalism. She describes the means through which maternalism functions, not with directly harsh treatment, but with indirect, psychological means to ignore the presence or humanity of domestic workers, to use them as windows to the exotic, and to use them as recipients for a kind of generosity, the main purpose of which is self-aggrandizement on the part of the employer at the psychological expense of the employee (157). “First and foremost,” she writes, “all domestics concurred that employers appreciated some forms of deference and outward signs of subservience. As domestics talked in detail about this aspect of the relationship, I came to realize this formed the essence of the employer-domestic relationship. … Part of being a domestic was acting like the person the employer wanted her domestic to be. The better this performance, the greater the probability of the domestic receiving more than the minimum in material and emotional rewards” (47). Romero documents the specific strategies of emotional exploitation in this way: The calculated strategy that employers use to place domestics into nurturing and caring roles is evident in the following advice for keeping a maid offered in Ladies Home Journal: ‘If you are so fortunate as to find a maid you love with your whole heart, you might try binding her to you by having a child or two born during her tenure. Not high wages or Christmas gifts of blue-chip stock or every weekend off will prove so much a lure as children to whom she has grown attached.’ (107). It is no wonder that Dill’s research affirmed the desire of Black domestic workers to protect their children from domestic service (109).
I would like to know how, like my aunt, like the old woman on the trolley, like Emmie, to stand up for dignity. I’m not sure I recognize the streets or the hours though I know I stand right here, when allies are wanted. It’s taken me this long to listen, so long to ask.
Bulkin, Elly, Minnie Bruce Pratt , and Barbara Smith. Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Wrigley, Julia. "Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants in the United States,
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