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essential separateness of the two process. For example, where traditional domestic
work had become industrialized, such as in commercial laundry and cleaning
enterprises, Black women found industrial work, though at a rate far below their
proportions in domestic work proper (63.9% of commercial laundry workers were
Black women as against 96.2% of domestic "laundresses"-^2). Industrialized
domestic occupations were in reality a main avenue for the few Black women who
made it into the industrial working class. The main point here, therefore, bears
repeating: in Baltimore in 1930 there was no single gendered division of labor, but
two separate such divisions based on race. To anticipate a little, these two division
would remain distinct, and Black women would continue to be barred from areas in
which white women worked for at least the next decade and a half. During World
War II in Baltimore, at a time when white women and Black men were working
throughout industry in jobs never before open to them, the resistance to hiring
Black women in jobs other than custodial help or in food service (again, domestic-
type work within industry) was so great that it precipitated a defense production
crisis.
Within the division of labor for white women there were a few distinctions
between the distribution of foreign-born and native-born white women that should
be quickly noted. In manufacturing the proportions of both white groups were very
similar to their proportions in the employed working class as a whole except, that
the white foreign-born women were more overrepresented (by a factor of over 3) in
the ranks of the skilled than the native-born (by a factor of 1.2). This is similar to
the profile of all white workers in the skilled trades noted above, and the most
likely explanation is the concentration of Jewish women in the nominally skilled
ranks of the garment industry. Another disjunctive between foreign- and U.S.-
born white women was in clerical work and in transportation and communications
sector (where almost all women were telephone operators). These rapidly growing
areas of work were almost entirely made up of native-born white women, probably
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