Thompson gave the situations a formulation that has outlived the markets themselves. Black women in America, she wrote, met a triple exploitation as workers, as women, and as Black people. She also described the mechanics from the buyer's side, which is what made the essay bite. There were always plenty of women to choose from on the corner, so the price could always be pushed down.
And every dollar saved on a day's cleaning was a dollar left over for the employer's bridge game or theater ticket. In June of 1936, the Domestic Workers Union in New York announced that it intended to bring every domestic worker in a private home under the union. The union making that announcement was local 149 of the Domestic Workers Union, an affiliate of the Building Service Union under the American Federation of Labor. It had been formed in Sunnyside, Queens in 1934.
That same year, a domestic worker named Dora Lee Jones helped establish a branch in Harlem, built specifically in opposition to the street corner markets. By 1937, under Jones and Rosa Rayside, the interracial union counted somewhere between 350 and 1,000 members, with Black women as its largest group. The demands were concrete. A minimum wage and a maximum work day, coverage under social security and workers' compensation, higher pay, shorter hours, and a six-day week instead of a schedule with no end, two weeks' notice before dismissal, Works Progress Administration projects for domestic service, and a specific clause banning window washing written into a model employer contract because women had died doing it.
The union opened a free employment center at 2561 White Plains Road in the Bronx, open to any domestic worker and meant to give the corner women somewhere else to stand. The lasting achievement was harder to see than a membership number. The union recast the entire debate by insisting that a private home is a workplace, not a purely private space where an employer's conduct is nobody's business.
But the union could not solve the market. It never had the money it needed, and the corner workers turned out to be nearly impossible to organize. Domestic service isolates people by design, one woman alone in one apartment. The market drew the most vulnerable job seekers, those with the least training and the fewest options, and many of them said flatly that their chances were better on the sidewalk than at any agency, including the union's own center.
Dora Jones spoke with open frustration about being unable to reach the very women who needed the union most, and in interviews she sometimes described them in the harsh language of respectability that was common at the time. Meanwhile, the courts were being tested. In 1937, a domestic worker named Pansy Kennedy sued her employer for $10.60 in unpaid wages, and she won. But Magistrate F. Anthony Burke used the case to declare that domestic workers were unwilling to work because they could fall back on home relief, and that they were spending the extra money living it up at night.
The New York Times printed the accusation in July 1938. Marvel Cooke published a rebuttal in the Amsterdam News that same month. That same year, the photographer Robert McNeal went to the corner at 170th Street and photographed the women waiting for Fortune magazine.
The pictures survive. In the fall of 1939, a domestic worker named Bessie Brown finished a job at the home of a wealthy white couple in Mount Vernon, just north of the Bronx, and refused to leave the house without her wages. The couple beat her, using racial slurs while they did it. She was hospitalized.
With help from the International Labor Defense and interest from the Domestic Workers Union, Brown sued the couple for assault. She lost. The not guilty verdict was read to a packed courthouse, and her photograph ran on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News on September 30, 1939. Afterward, having gone through the whole ordeal again in public, Brown said she was glad to have brought the conditions domestic workers lived under into the light.
She had. The case, coming 2 years after Pansy Kennedy's, made it very difficult to keep claiming that the danger in this line of work was exaggerated. That same year, a graduate student named Lois Taylor decided the only way to document the markets properly was to stand in one. Posing as a job seeker, she spent months on the street corners of the Bronx and turned the investigation into her master's thesis at Columbia University in 1940.
Her research recorded what the newspapers had been reluctant to print, including how the pressure to feed a family pushed some women into sex work, and how those women were judged for it by everyone, including some of the advocates who claimed to speak for them. The state finally moved in December of 1939. Frieda Miller, the industrial commissioner of New York, formed a committee on street corner markets with a mandate to study the markets and eliminate them. Its members came from local, state, civic, and religious organizations, and it included labor representatives.
Dora Jones was one of them. In June of 1940, the committee issued its findings. Its central recommendation was modest and practical. Open two free employment agencies in the Bronx so that women looking for day work would have an indoor place to go where rates could be recorded and an employer could be identified.
The report went to the city. Months passed and nothing happened. Then, in February of 1941, the city acted on its own and the women on the corners found out about it when the police arrived.