Jane Street, Secretary of the I.W.W.’s Domestic Workers’ Industrial Union Local 113, describes conditions and makes an appeal on behalf of ‘rebel housemaids.’

‘Denver’s Rebel Housemaids’ by Jane Street from Solidarity. Vol. 7 No. 339. July 8, 1916.

There are hundreds of thousands of women and girls in this country slaving away their lives looking after the most intimate personal needs of others, who treat them as inferior beings. This girl house slave cooks the food for her mistress’ family and serves them at the table; she scrapes their leavings into the garbage can and washes their dirty dishes in greasy dish water; she cleans their soiled clothes and washes out their toilets, and takes care of their helpless infant children. She scrubs their floors with strong soaps highly injurious to her skin. She cleans beautiful rooms in which she is never permitted to sit; she serves sumptuous dinners at brilliant dining tables at which she is never once permitted to dine; and she handles gorgeously exquisite gowns the like of which she can never have money to possess. She wears the uniform of the menial, lives in the attic or the basement, and eats in the kitchen. She sees at close range the joy and the frivolity and the cruelty of wealth.

She lives right in the homes of the master class that she may answer their every beck and call. She hires herself out into this sort of service for all the time she is awake, receiving as a compensation about 3c to possible as high as 10c an hour. She shuts herself up as in a cave or prison for the very best part of her life, away from the intercourse and freedom of the outside world. Her memory becomes but a calendar of menial tasks-Monday she washes, Tuesday she irons, Wednesday she scrubs, and Thursday she cuts a little triangle out-“her afternoon off,” into which she tries to cram all her own tasks and attend to all her own personal needs.

It is a hateful sort of work that makes rebels of people. Of all kinds of labor it bears the deepest taint of chattel slavery handed down from the time when it was a disgrace for a member of the master class to lace his own boots.

But the wage slave of today has the right to quit one mistress and take on another. And the house slave certainly makes use of this prerogative. As owing, perhaps, to the hatefulness of the work there is always a deficiency in this kind of labor, the domestic workers possess a leverage unknown to workers elsewhere. And greatly to the chagrin of the rich women, the house girls everywhere are constantly moving about in high-spirited but ineffective rebellion.

They feel the sword prick of caste but they know that their mistresses are afraid to unsheath that sword. When they take a job they know their employers are afraid of their quitting it. They feel this in the air. The rich woman slave driver knocks under in a hundred little high-handed yet condescending ways. What labor should do is to grab that sword, to take possession of that power and hold it over the heads of the parasites who have subdued them.

Here in Denver the domestic workers have banded together in an effort to gain their rights through organization and sabotage-united not into a clumsy, conglomerated, purposeless, faithless mass, begging for a raise of a few cents an hour or the use of the front door instead of the back, but into a union composed of the red-blooded women who spring up in the age of revolution, unflinching and loyal, knowing all that they want. and knowing that they want all, refusing to believe that it should require one woman to wait upon one other woman, refusing to sell out their time, their lives, their very souls looking after the petty wants of other human beings. The I.W.W. women who make up the union here revolt at the system of slavery under which they live, which they ultimately seek to abolish. They are not content to be servants or slaves. And for the time being they expect to use all their power in every and any way to get all they can possibly get from the mistresses who rob and humiliate them.

They don’t believe in mistresses or servants. They would do away with caste altogether. They believe in removing the degradation from domestic service by teaching their employers to look upon the hands that feed them and wash for them, and scrub for them with respect or fear and humility.

The union girls here call upon all domestic workers everywhere to join the I.W.W. You poor little house slaves, don’t throw yourselves down on your bed in your attic bedroom in useless fretfulness; don’t beat your own two little wings against the iron cage of capitalism; don’t waste your precious spirit of rebellion THAT’S WHAT COUNTS. Join us. Help us to gather in these golden threads of rebellion elsewhere until we have formed a mighty rope that can break the chains of slavery that hold us down. JANE STREET, Sec. Domestic Workers’ Industrial Union, I.W.W., Local 113. Denver, Col.

The most widely read of I.W.W. newspapers, Solidarity was published by the Industrial Workers of the World from 1909 until 1917. First produced in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and born during the McKees Rocks strike, Solidarity later moved to Cleveland, Ohio until 1917 then spent its last months in Chicago. With a circulation of around 12,000 and a readership many times that, Solidarity was instrumental in defining the Wobbly world-view at the height of their influence in the working class. It was edited over its life by A.M. Stirton, H.A. Goff, Ben H. Williams, Ralph Chaplin who also provided much of the paper’s color, and others. Like nearly all the left press it fell victim to federal repression in 1917.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/solidarity-iww/1916/v7-w339-jul-08-1916-solidarity.pdf