We Aren't Aunt Jemima Women: Dorothy Bolden’s Vision
To most of us, they are invisible. They harvest and prepare our food, clean our homes and make our lives easier. They often struggle with low pay and even lower public esteem. Many are people of color, immigrants, and women. They usually work for individual employers rather than a company.
Recently, hotel workers in California have staged a series of strikes to gain wage increases, more benefits, and reasonable workloads. In doing so, they are building on the efforts of Dorothy Bolden, a pioneer in labor organizing from the 1960s.
Bolden was born in Atlanta in 1924 to a mother who worked as a maid and a washerwoman. An early accident damaged Dorothy’s optic nerve, leaving her with diminished eyesight. She began work early, delivering loads of wash to her mother’s clients. She dropped out of high school to engage in domestic work full time, mostly housecleaning and child care.
Soon after she started, she refused an employer’s demand that she stay late one evening. On her way home, she was picked up by Atlanta police and briefly confined to a mental institution. “They told me I was crazy because I had talked back to a white woman,” she recounted.
Bolden married and continued to work while raising her own six children. She rose at four a.m. to travel across town to a white neighborhood, worked eight hours or more, then went home “where I would do the same things I've done all over again for my own family.”
In 1955, she heard the news of Rosa Parks, the Alabama woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus. Bolden was inspired. She imagined that the reason Parks had refused to move was that, like any domestic worker, she was simply exhausted. “I was telling her to sit there,” Bolden remembered years later. “I know she couldn't hear me, but I said ‘Sit down honey, don't move.’”
Bolden joined the civil rights movement and began to think of ways to bring more fairness to the lives of women like herself. She asked Dr. Martin Luther King, a neighbor, for advice. He recognized her abilities and encouraged her to organize fellow domestic workers.
Bolden knew that the only time these women had to themselves was on the bus during their long rides to and from work. She began to travel Atlanta bus lines during their commuting hours, talking to hundreds of maids in the language they understood.
In 1968, she formed the National Domestic Workers Union of America. The organization was not a formal union but a social organization. Bolden organized training in things like driving, child care, and elder care. She taught members how to communicate, how to assert themselves diplomatically with employers, how to negotiate effectively for higher wages. The union offered job placement and advised members on their rights.
In spite of the fragmented nature of the work force, Bolden was able to recruit more than thirteen thousand women across ten cities. She fought for years to increase wages and gain workers’ compensation and Social Security coverage for domestic workers. At the time, maids were typically paid less than $5.00 a day for twelve-to-fourteen hour shifts.
Bolden required all members of her organization to register to vote. “We aren't Aunt Jemima women,” she said, “and I sure to God don't want people to think we are. We are politically strong and independent.” This bloc of active voters helped her to gain substantial political power in Atlanta. Candidates for office came to ask for her support.
Bolden’s original group disbanded when she retired in the mid-1990s. She died in 2005 at the age of 80. Two years later, a similar organization, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, was formed to carry on her work. Today, that group continues to fight for overtime pay, for at least one day off per week, and for protections for domestic workers under state labor laws. Although progress has been made, most domestic workers are still saddled with low pay and long hours. They are vulnerable to abuses that range from wage theft to sexual assault.
Today’s Alliance members still remember their pioneering leader. They admire Bolden for the pride she took in her own work and the work of all domestic workers. Throughout her life, she insisted on the professionalism of those she led. Their struggle was for dignity as well as for fairness.
“A domestic worker is a counselor, a doctor, a nurse,” she pointed out. “She cares about the family she works for as she cares about her own.” Bolden understood that when the women felt good about their own work, they were better able to take a stand for their rights.
Yet today house cleaners, maids and nannies remain largely invisible. They still face daunting challenges. Home health care aides are just one example of those who often work sixty hour or more a week for a minimum wage and no benefits.
Dorothy Bolden struggled during much of her life with the visual impairment that had afflicted her as a child. What she never lacked was vision. Looking at herself and her fellow domestic workers, she saw human beings, people with the right to the same respect as anyone else.
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Click the image to check out my history of an earlier strike:
I definitely knew about Rosa Parks but nothing about Dorothy Bolden and I sure do now and an amazing woman of color and so good to see that she managed to accomplish. A great read.
How do some women manage to do what she did and have six children as well?