Waitressing is the quintessential female job, revealing the deeply gender-based expectations in the world of work. It is also the prototypic job of the modern service work force: sex-segregated, low wage, part-time, and contingent. Before the 1920s the majority of commercial food and lodging establishments employed men. Two historical transformations rapidly feminized the trade: eating became a widespread commercial phenomenon rather than a home event; and the presence of women in public became socially acceptable. Other forces—such as Prohibition (it was much more acceptable for women to work if liquor was not served), economic crisis, immigration restrictions, and the two world wars—played important roles. In addition, consumer preference for attractive young white women played a role in the feminization of the waiting occupation.
As waitressing emerged in the twentieth century as one of the principal jobs for women, it began as a job largely reserved for white women drawn from the "old" Northern European immigrant groups: English, Irish, German, Scandinavian. Although this racial and ethnic homogeneity enabled waitresses to sustain a culture of solidarity, it reinforced their racial and ethnic prejudices—as well as those of the proprietors—and showed the real limits of "sisterhood." In unions, the majority of waitress locals excluded Black and Asian women from membership until the 1930s and 1940s. A similar lack of Southern and Eastern European immigrants also existed. Even after legal racial barriers fell, women of color continued to be relegated to the lowest-paid, least-desirable positions in the industry and remain underrepresented in the occupation. Whites monopolized employment at higher-priced restaurants while women of color worked in fast food chains or neighborhood restaurants that served people of color.
Despite the larger societal view of their work as unskilled, the quality of waitresses' service was central to their consideration of themselves as skilled craftswomen. Before the advent of self-service buffets and cafeterias, food service required both highly choreographed teamwork and individual enterprise to ensure that hundreds of individual multicourse meals were correctly and contemporaneously dispatched. Verbal and mental agility as well as emotional and physical stamina were demanded of waitresses, who often worked long hours at a frantic pace; yet their low wages were not complemented by health or other benefits. Instead, they faced unsanitary conditions, capricious management, threatening customers, and the highest rates of sexual harassment of any occupation. Especially because most waitresses lived apart from a family setting and were therefore primarily self-supporting, they could not resign themselves to withering work conditions but actively created a supportive work culture and militant organizations.
Beginning in 1900 waitresses joined mixed culinary locals of waiters, cooks, and bartenders; they also formed all-female union locals, which enjoyed a degree of institutional independence and autonomy experienced by few other groups of organized women. Although they were affiliated almost exclusively with a male-dominated international union (the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, HERE), the waitresses' separate craft- and sex-based locals remained among the most powerful organizations within HERE until the 1970s, despite the official mixed-sex and mixed-craft organizing strategy endorsed by HERE in the 1930s. At the height of their influence in the 1940s and 1950s, over one-fourth of all women in the trade were organized. Most waitresses today do not belong to unions.
Separate-sex craft organizations were informed by the distinctive experiences of wage-earning women. Waitresses advocated for a feminism that stressed "difference" and "separateness" rather than for the similarity of the sexes stressed by the dominant middle-class ideology. They endorsed sex-based legislation, sex-based organizational structures, and a separate "female sphere" within the work world. They sought economic justice and "equal opportunity" through collective advancement and unionization of jobs traditionally held by women, rather than focusing on individual upward mobility. They also created a social identity and solidarity centered on a quest for respect and for rights that are otherwise not a characteristic feature of service sector work. These women's historic struggles and achievements are critically relevant to the new majority of service sector workers.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Robin Leidner, Fast Food, Fast Talk: Service Work and the Routinization of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); James P. Spradley and Brenda J. Mann, The Cocktail Waitress: Woman's Work in a Man's World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975).
Betsy Aron
See also
Service Sector; Labor Unions:
Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union.
