This assumption reflected the tendency to blur the distinction between abortion rights and the general advocacy of abortions. As if having fewer children could create more jobs, higher wages, better schools, etc., etc. Most of these women, no doubt, would have expressed their deepest resentment had someone hailed their abortions as a stepping stone toward freedom.ĭuring the early abortion rights campaign it was too frequently assumed that legal abortions provided a viable alternative to the myriad problems posed by poverty.
Abortions and infanticides were acts of desperation, motivated not by the biological birth process but by the oppressive conditions of slavery. “Why were self-imposed abortions and reluctant acts of infanticide such common occurrences during slavery? Not because Black women had discovered solutions to their predicament, but rather because they were desperate. No one would be more thankful than I to see the clerks have a chance to sit …” Please don’t go until I have signed that petition.
“My maid always has Sunday after dinner,” she said.
My caller rose with red cheeks and flashing eyes. It seems to me that her case is more pitiable than that of the store clerk.” According to that, your maid is on her feet at least eleven hours a day with a score of stair-climbings included. “At what work? Washing? Ironing? Sweeping? Making beds? Cooking? Washing dishes? … Perhaps she sits for two hours at her meals and preparing vegetables, and four days in the week she has an hour in the afternoon. “… (S)he can often sit down at her work.” “At six.” “And at what hour does she finish at night?” “Why, I don’t know,” she gasped, “five or six I suppose.” Jones,” said I, “how many hours a day does your maid stand upon her feet?” “The girls,” she said, “have to stand on their feet ten hours a day and it makes my heart ache to see their tired faces.” In 1902 the author of an article entitled “A Nine-Hour Day for Domestic Servants” described a conversation with a feminist friend who had asked her to sign a petition urging employers to furnish seats for women clerks. The convenient omission of household workers’ problems from the programs of “middle-class” feminists past and present has often turned out to be a veiled justification-at least on the part of the affluent women-of their own exploitative treatment of their maids. They have rarely been involved in the Sisyphean task of ameliorating the conditions of domestic service. “White women-feminists included-have revealed a historical reluctance to acknowledge the struggles of household workers.
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