in Eastern and Southern European labor would elicit similar critiques.18
It was assumed that in the absence of explicitly coercive methods for moving labor, and where profit was not the apparent motive, brokers’ restrictions on migrant workers’ liberties maintained natural dependencies that were rooted in laborers’ gender (in the case of white women) or in their race (in the case of black women and men and Chinese men). Yet as historian Gunther Peck argues, “For the trafficked migrant, coercion begins not with one’s legal status as a slave, but by the varied ways a migrant’s transnational movement and political status en route become commodified and controlled by middlemen.”19 This holds true in regard to the brokerage of migrant laborers into domestic service, and is complicated further by the fact that the middle-class homes were not seen as market actors let alone potential destinations for bonded, deceived, or trafficked laborers, even though their consumer demand dictated that certain workers would be pressured or in some instances compelled legally to accept household employment. Middle-class households were often granted immunity—except from workers themselves—in respect to accusations that they might be sites of exploitation.
Contracts
As legal scholars and historians have argued, a defining feature of the late nineteenth-century United States was the ground-shifting changes that took place in respect to how social relations within households were governed. Whereas slavery, master and servant relations, and family law were previously governed in accordance with the “natural” dependencies that they purportedly captured, and the belief that only white propertied men were fit for independent citizenship, this system clashed with and gradually yielded to the liberal belief that certain rights and protections were universal, regardless of an individual’s race or gender.20
The liberty to contract has never implied a political commitment to social or economic equality.21 Liberty of contract entitled individuals the right to freely determine the agreements they entered into without coercion, and protected them from the alienation of their personal property by granting them the autonomy to dispose of their labor power as they saw fit.22 The freedom to contract or withhold labor power from an employer was a liberty that clearly mattered to formerly enslaved persons, but was of considerable importance to household servants and married women who were kept and governed as dependents as well.
Brokers’ and employers’ efforts to coerce workers into servitude they would otherwise avoid adjusted to new technologies that governed how labor was free to circulate. This is most evident in the ways in which the contractual arrangements that migrants entered into when promised transportation assistance, relief, or wages became devices for guaranteeing third-party employers a captive supply of servants. The debates of the nineteenth century, focused as they were on the problem of slavery, inaccurately enshrined free versus unfree labor in a misleading, ideological oppositional binary. The shifting and uneven topographies that the categories of “free” and “unfree” demarcate in respect to workers’ liberties give these concepts their cultural and political potency.23
Employers and so-called charitable brokers conspired to strip household labor transactions of their competitive dimensions. As sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein argues, one of the defining and ironic features of market capitalism, given proponents’ vocal commitment to “free enterprise,” has been its pursuit of monopoly positions and “profit-maximization via the principal agency that can make it enduringly possible, the state.”24 Northerners committed to the sanctity of free labor routinely looked to private and public welfare institutions responsible for providing relief to the indigent, as well as to orphans and prisoners, to obtain a captive labor force compelled to work in servitude. Employers tried to overcome this contradictory approach to consent by arguing that criminals, paupers, and vagrants forfeited liberal rights on the basis of having broken the law, or because they had become dependent on the state.25
Even when domestic workers failed to give cause for the abdication of their contract freedom, the availability of labor for use in household employment was predicated on the alienation of migrants from preexisting modes of social organization that were no longer viable, even if the pursuit of wages in service was ultimately rendered in liberal terms as a decision that was voluntary. This was the case both for Irish women forced to leave an Ireland spoiled by famine and British colonial land policies, and for black freed persons fleeing the horrors of war and slavery.26 Employers also tried to undermine freedom of contract as it applied to the negotiation of wages. In their coauthored 1869 publication, The American Woman’s Home, Catharine Beecher and her younger sister Harriet Beecher Stowe asked readers to consider, self-reflectively, whether it was just to impose a “rule of rectitude” against servants who, coming from impoverished backgrounds, were perceived to be demanding “exorbitant wages.” Punishing servants who sought to maximize profits from the sale of the property in their labor made employers complicit in violating “the universal law of labor and of trade that an article is to be valued according to its scarcity and the demand.” In her 1873 memoir Palmetto Leaves, which she wrote while living on a former plantation in Florida, Stowe made the resignation of a talented black cook who left for a hotel job in nearby Jacksonville that paid forty dollars a month into a lesson on respect for the free market. That free people could “command their own price” was affirmative proof that what the North had fought for was working not just in principle, but in practice.27 But these views made the sisters outliers.
Labor historians have suggested that by the twentieth century, the use of criminal and penal punishments rather than civil actions in the enforcement of labor contracts persisted as lawful devices for worker compulsion in only a few, select occupations. Merchant seamen, enlistees in the armed forces, and sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the American South are typically cited as workers who continued to be subjected to various forms of incarceration and detainment as penalties for leaving employment or lease contracts prior to their expiration. Service work exists as a neglected site of labor history because the workers who performed these jobs do not conform to the model of the liberal and national subject—the white, industrial worker—who was understood to be implicitly deserving of protections and liberties in the face of capitalist exploitation.28
As the latter chapters of this book conclude, facilitating the movement of migrant labor into domestic work became a priority enshrined in federal policies and their enforcement. One of the key ways that the federal government became a broker of servitude was by demanding that certain labor contracts be enforced as the status or condition by which a migrant was eligible to enter or remain in the United States. It did so by exempting Chinese servants from racial restrictions that would have excluded their entry into the United States as laborers and by carving out exceptions to prohibitions that would have barred European women as economic liabilities—as long as these subjects contracted to work as servants and remained in these positions. Whereas at the end of the Civil War contracts were heralded as essential to the guarantee of workers’ freedom to consent to labor, by the second decade of the twentieth century—even if the decision to enter into contracts remained in theory voluntary—they had become devices for constraining immigrant laborers’ liberty to move between jobs and employers. At the very moment when Progressive Era reformers were beginning to highlight domestic service as an occupation where labor remained governed by “feudal” rules, contemporaneous immigration legislation was creating new classes of laborers who were dependent on maintaining employment relations as servants in order to be allowed to enter or stay in the United States.29
The Value of Domestic Labor
Household labor has often been neglected as a feature of capitalism. Domesticity’s value to individuals and families, and how this gets calculated, defies a strictly monetary approach. Domesticity results from the production or consumption of tangible goods and services, but it is also a feeling and set of affective social relationships, and cannot be commodified or priced for purchase as a discrete “thing” to be obtained.
This does not mean that domesticity exists outside of capitalism. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith famously asserted that the employment of servants could not be considered productive
