Next event
Previous event
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library
Share:
1940s-1950s
Alice Childress
Writing Domestic Workers into Literature
Alice Childress (1916-1994) was an award-winning writer, playwright, director, and actress. She wrote about the everyday struggles that domestic workersA worker who performs paid labor in a home, such as cleaning, cooking, and caretaking. Their labor makes other forms of work possible. faced in the 1940s and 1950s.
Childress was born into poverty in Charleston, South Carolina. Like many Black women born in the 1910s, her great-grandmother had been enslaved. She moved to Harlem in New York City as a child, to live with her grandmother. She would later point to their weekly attendance at the local Black church as central to her education and desire to become a writer. She remembered, “We went to Wednesday night testimonials. Now that’s where I learned to be a writer. I remember how people, mostly women, used to get up and tell their troubles to everybody.”
These stories, and those of the women in her family, shaped Childress’ writing, as did her own experience as a domestic workerA worker who performs paid labor in a home, such as cleaning, cooking, and caretaking. Their labor makes other forms of work possible.. She was also active in New York City’s Black left feminist community in this period and their support of domestic workers influenced her writing. Childress would write over a dozen novels and plays, inspired by her desire to portray the complex lives of the “have-nots in a have society.”
Sources
Alice Childress, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (Boston: Beacon Press, [1956] 2017), 3.
Philip Bader, African-American Writers (New York: Facts on File, 2004), 41.
Premilla Nadasen, Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), 9.
Dayo Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 65, 108-9.
© Jennifer Guglielmo