Putting Their Hands on Race : : Irish Immigrant and Southern Black Domestic Workers / / Danielle T. Phillips-Cunningham.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Rutgers University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Phillips-Cunningham, Danielle T.,
• Place / Publishing House: New Brunswick, NJ : : Rutgers University Press, , [2019]; ©2020
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (268 p.) :; 10 B-W illustrations

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Putting Racial Formation Theory to Work: A Women-Centered, Transdisciplinary, and Intersectional Approach -- 2 The Lost Files of Irish Immigration History: The Irish Woman Question and Racialized Manual Labors -- 3 Southern Mammy and African American “Immigrant” Women: Reconstituting White Supremacy after Emancipation -- 4 Too Irish, Too Rural, Too Black aka “The Servant Problem” -- 5 Irish Immigrant Women Whiten Themselves, African American Women Demand the Unseen -- 6 Irish Immigrant Women Become Whiter, African American Women Dignify Domestic Service -- Conclusion: Putting Hands on Race Continues -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index