Moving with the Women: Tracing Racialization, Migration, and Domestic Workers in the Archive

This article invites readers to embark on a methodological journey to examine the challenges of conducting archival research about the similar yet distinct labor experiences of Irish women and African American women from the US South who worked as domestic servants after migrating to the state of New York between 1880 and 1930. Researching these women’s lives required tracing formations and circulations of racialized ideas of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality between England and New York. Yet the sources and the organization of the archive itself initially appeared to have no relevance to the study of race and gender. Drawing from Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, this article discusses how employing innovative and interdisciplinary research methods led to the discovery that the British archive actually offered important yet unforeseen interventions in the analysis of materials housed in the archives in England and New York. The British sources revealed that tracing the processes of gendered racialization within domestic work requires an analysis of how the occupation lent itself to particular racial, class, and gender meanings. Thus, the aim of this article is to offer insights about negotiating the politics of the archive while conducting feminist research about the experiences of racial minority women who performed stigmatized forms of labor.