108

divorce, and/or widowhood, the proportions of Blacks and whites in the work force
continued to diverge radically. The Black community continued to differ from
other ethnic communities in that a majority or near majority of its women in all
phases of the adult life cycle worked.

In terms of the location of women in general in the working class* above it
was argued that women workers tended to polarize toward the non-industrial
sectors, that they were heavily concentrated in domestic work and in certain
occupational categories in the commercial and clerical sectors, and that in
manufacturing they concentrated on the operative level of certain labor intensive
industries. Taking race and ethnicity into account (see Table 4-4C), we find that
Black women were drastically underrepresented in all these areas of concentration
except domestic work^1. In fact, Black women made 85.5% of all personal servants
and 913% of all employed Black women held these jobs. White women, foreign-
and U.S.-born, were drastically overrepresented throughout manufacturing and
commerce, and sharply underrepresented in the domestic sector. The processes of
job distribution for white and Black women workers in Baltimore were so distinct,
so separate — qualitatively more so than those for Black and white men — that it is
impossible to consider them racial variations of a single gendered process. In other
words, there were actually two distinct gendered divisions of labor operating, one
for Black women and one for white women. In Baltimore in 1930, it was not
working-class women in general who had a growing role as operatives in industry
and in the new working-class occupations of communications, commerce, and
clerical (the more modern, dynamic sectors), but white women; it was not women in
general who virtually monopolized the backward, semi-capitalist domestic service
sector, but Black women.

There were, of course, areas of overlap between the divisions of labor for
Black and white women. However, even these areas of overlap demonstrate the