Brokering Servitude. Andrew Urban
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the autonomy to dispose of their labor power as they saw fit.22 The freedom to contract or withhold labor power from an employer was a liberty that clearly mattered to formerly enslaved persons, but was of considerable importance to household servants and married women who were kept and governed as dependents as well.
Brokers’ and employers’ efforts to coerce workers into servitude they would otherwise avoid adjusted to new technologies that governed how labor was free to circulate. This is most evident in the ways in which the contractual arrangements that migrants entered into when promised transportation assistance, relief, or wages became devices for guaranteeing third-party employers a captive supply of servants. The debates of the nineteenth century, focused as they were on the problem of slavery, inaccurately enshrined free versus unfree labor in a misleading, ideological oppositional binary. The shifting and uneven topographies that the categories of “free” and “unfree” demarcate in respect to workers’ liberties give these concepts their cultural and political potency.23
Employers and so-called charitable brokers conspired to strip household labor transactions of their competitive dimensions. As sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein argues, one of the defining and ironic features of market capitalism, given proponents’ vocal commitment to “free enterprise,” has been its pursuit of monopoly positions and “profit-maximization via the principal agency that can make it enduringly possible, the state.”24 Northerners committed to the sanctity of free labor routinely looked to private and public welfare institutions responsible for providing relief to the indigent, as well as to orphans and prisoners, to obtain a captive labor force compelled to work in servitude. Employers tried to overcome this contradictory approach to consent by arguing that criminals, paupers, and vagrants forfeited liberal rights on the basis of having broken the law, or because they had become dependent on the state.25
Even when domestic workers failed to give cause for the abdication of their contract freedom, the availability of labor for use in household employment was predicated on the alienation of migrants from preexisting modes of social organization that were no longer viable, even if the pursuit of wages in service was ultimately rendered in liberal terms as a decision that was voluntary. This was the case both for Irish women forced to leave an Ireland spoiled by famine and British colonial land policies, and for black freed persons fleeing the horrors of war and slavery.26 Employers also tried to undermine freedom of contract as it applied to the negotiation of wages. In their coauthored 1869 publication, The American Woman’s Home, Catharine Beecher and her younger sister Harriet Beecher Stowe asked readers to consider, self-reflectively, whether it was just to impose a “rule of rectitude” against servants who, coming from impoverished backgrounds, were perceived to be demanding “exorbitant wages.” Punishing servants who sought to maximize profits from the sale of the property in their labor made employers complicit in violating “the universal law of labor and of trade that an article is to be valued according to its scarcity and the demand.” In her 1873 memoir Palmetto Leaves, which she wrote while living on a former plantation in Florida, Stowe made the resignation of a talented black cook who left for a hotel job in nearby Jacksonville that paid forty dollars a month into a lesson on respect for the free market. That free people could “command their own price” was affirmative proof that what the North had fought for was working not just in principle, but in practice.27 But these views made the sisters outliers.
Labor historians have suggested that by the twentieth century, the use of criminal and penal punishments rather than civil actions in the enforcement of labor contracts persisted as lawful devices for worker compulsion in only a few, select occupations. Merchant seamen, enlistees in the armed forces, and sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the American South are typically cited as workers who continued to be subjected to various forms of incarceration and detainment as penalties for leaving employment or lease contracts prior to their expiration. Service work exists as a neglected site of labor history because the workers who performed these jobs do not conform to the model of the liberal and national subject—the white, industrial worker—who was understood to be implicitly deserving of protections and liberties in the face of capitalist exploitation.28
As the latter chapters of this book conclude, facilitating the movement of migrant labor into domestic work became a priority enshrined in federal policies and their enforcement. One of the key ways that the federal government became a broker of servitude was by demanding that certain labor contracts be enforced as the status or condition by which a migrant was eligible to enter or remain in the United States. It did so by exempting Chinese servants from racial restrictions that would have excluded their entry into the United States as laborers and by carving out exceptions to prohibitions that would have barred European women as economic liabilities—as long as these subjects contracted to work as servants and remained in these positions. Whereas at the end of the Civil War contracts were heralded as essential to the guarantee of workers’ freedom to consent to labor, by the second decade of the twentieth century—even if the decision to enter into contracts remained in theory voluntary—they had become devices for constraining immigrant laborers’ liberty to move between jobs and employers. At the very moment when Progressive Era reformers were beginning to highlight domestic service as an occupation where labor remained governed by “feudal” rules, contemporaneous immigration legislation was creating new classes of laborers who were dependent on maintaining employment relations as servants in order to be allowed to enter or stay in the United States.29
The Value of Domestic Labor
Household labor has often been neglected as a feature of capitalism. Domesticity’s value to individuals and families, and how this gets calculated, defies a strictly monetary approach. Domesticity results from the production or consumption of tangible goods and services, but it is also a feeling and set of affective social relationships, and cannot be commodified or priced for purchase as a discrete “thing” to be obtained.
This does not mean that domesticity exists outside of capitalism. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously asserted that the employment of servants could not be considered productive because their labor did not add real value to an economy. Some seventy years later, Karl Marx seconded this conclusion. Marx grouped together everyone from “whore to pope” as service providers who did not contribute to the production of capital.30 Both classical and Marxist economic theories have been insufficient in grasping the significance of unpaid domestic and reproductive labor as well. Since the late 1960s, feminist historians and scholars have combated the view that unpaid labor performed for families and households could be dismissed, along with the work of paid servants, as unproductive in capitalist terms.31 The performance of reproductive labor generated the very conditions under which men of all classes—and women burdened with second shifts as paid workers—were physically able to work for wages or other compensation.
Historians have failed to account for how capital gets generated through transactions that establish the social relations of production, and link supply to demand. As commercial intermediaries that profited from job placement, intelligence offices generated significant anxiety. Private intelligence offices or employment agencies as they were later called profited as middlemen (and often middlewomen) through fees and commissions. Through transatlantic, transpacific, and transregional networks, they not only managed migrants’ placement in household service, but also provided loans and other forms of financing that enabled migrants’ passage. As arbiters of borders, they instructed immigrants on how to maintain their eligibility to enter the United States and on how to avoid immigration officials who might declare their actions, and the assistance they had received, illegal. Intelligence offices were demonized by middle-class commentators and accused of making a mockery out of the principle of freedom of contract by seducing workers with the promises of riches and by convincing them that they had no responsibility to potential employers beyond the satisfaction of their own self-interest.32 As an author complained in an 1868 Godey’s Lady’s Book article, lamenting the powers of contract that Irish servants had, the intelligence office “represents, in Biddy-dom, all the power of the State, and is moreover the Temple of Liberty.” “The custom of other places is here reversed,” she added, “and the servant is the mistress. She sits enthroned, waiting to receive the homage of dependent and tributary housekeepers.”33 Other middle-class commentators homed in on intelligence offices’ predatory actions, which included trafficking women in sex work, holding their possessions as