The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South
''This collection of oral history narratives fills a significant gap in U.S. social history. The book tells the story of those women who remember both segregation and domestic work in the South and took an active part in their migration to the Midwest. No person attempting to understand the popularity of books such asGone with the WindandThe Helpshould be without it.'' --Susan Tucker, author ofTelling Memories Among Southern WomenLittle else grabs a human's attention like a first-person narrative: the recollection of someone who can say, "I was there. I saw it, tasted it, touched it felt it." The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South gathers a group of such stories to extend the discussion about the nature of domestic work in the South in the twentieth century. The volume is composed of excerpts of oral history interview with thirteen African American women who grew up and worked as domestic servants in the South and then moved to Iowa; interviews with an essays written by fifteen white women and one white man from various places int the South, mostly New Orleans, whose families employed domestic servants; and prefatory, analytical, and summary essays by the editors. --The Journal of Southern HistoryRegardless of our own racial background, this volume opens our eyes to the daily lives of thousands of African American women absent from history books. Working as domestics in the North and South, women were sometimes treated with regard and even loved by their employers, but often barely respected as human beings...The Maid Narratives fills a great historical void. As the first sentence of the introduction says, it is 'intended to take its readers on a journey back in time to a place that, to many, will be a foreign country. We will travel there with the help of our storytellers.' --Friends Journal