In July 1881 African American washerwomen in Atlanta formalized the Washing Society and launched a strike to protect their autonomy and demand higher fees for their services. The initial organizers expanded their ranks from twenty to three thousand and generated broad support within the Black community by canvassing houses from door to door. Churches provided sanctuaries for meetings and disseminated information. White employers and city authorities arrested the strikers for "disorderly conduct," threatened to levy an exorbitant business tax on each member of the Washing Society, and proposed building a competing laundry facility to minimize the leverage of the women's monopoly. Undaunted, the women wrote a defiant open letter to the mayor outlining their grievances and demanding respect for their labor.
There is no conclusive evidence about the strike's resolution. But even the Atlanta Constitution, the opposition's unofficial mouthpiece, admitted that the women were effectively organized. Moreover, the strike was symbolically meaningful. The laundry workers' protest sharply contrasted with the image of docile southern workers depicted by the city's business and political elite. The washerwomen demonstrated an astute political consciousness by making domestic labor a public issue in a city where white households relied on Black women's labor as laundresses, cooks, maids, or child nurses. Their action was a pointed reminder to the city that African American women's labor was vital to the political economy of the New South.
Tera W. Hunter
See also
Strikes.
