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private households and individuals who consumed their labor directly, and their
labor generated no profits. Their relationships to their employers were often
marked by personal dependence and paternalism. They, in a sentence, were the
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lineal descendants of pre-capitalist servants. '
However, in Baltimore by the 1930s, many of the pre-capitalist trappings of
domestic work, including living in with employers, were steadily eroding. Also
these workers were socially integrated into larger working-class communities.
They, therefore, are correctly considered a sector of the working class, albeit one
whose working situations were extremely small-scale and isolated, whose work was
under control of private individuals, whose income was low, and whose work, in the
eyes of society as a whole, received little respect. There are indications that there
was some tradition of struggle amongst Baltimore's domestic workers, but their
situation was not one that easily lent itself to collectivistic, trade-union forms.
To sum up then for a moment, the Baltimore working class of 1930 was
overwhelmingly dominated by its industrial sector, a sector differentiated in many
ways by skill, industry, and type of enterprise, but still retaining a large number of
skilled workers. Moreover, in its non-industrial sectors, the Baltimore proletariat
was beginning to develop a newer service-based working class, but still contained a
large almost pre-capitalist sector of domestic and personal service workers.
Superimposed on the division of labor generated by the economic structure
in Baltimore of 1930 was a very definite division of labor by gender. A glance at
the census data summarized in Table 4-2 makes it clear that men and women were
concentrated in very different sectors and places of the employed working class.
Overall, women occupied about 29.7% of all working-class jobs, a percentage that
had been rising throughout the twentieth century. And a larger portion of the
gainfully employed women than gainfully employed men were found in working-
class (rather than petty bourgeois or bourgeois) occupations (72.9% versus 61.4%).
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