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Waitress work culture was based first and foremost on the positive assessment of the occupation held by individual waitresses. To a surprising degree, waitresses valued their work and derived both pride and pleasure from service. Although burdened with adverse employment conditions and stigmatized …

Customer maltreatment of waitresses, in part rooted in the tipping system, in part inherent in the unequal financial relation between customer and service worker, was fueled by the condescension of the public toward food service work. Although waitressing had lost its immoral cast in the eyes of th…

Although tipping permitted a certain amount of autonomy in service work, it also fostered individual entrepreneurship, competitive behavior, and dampened the ardor for collective effort. With its “remnants of use value,” tipping lay outside the commercial exchange system; this intimate transaction …

By the 1950s, food service had become not only a thoroughly female-dominated occupation, but also one of the principal means by which women earned a living. Four out of five servers were female, and waitressing emerged as the sixth-largest occupation for women, outranked only by clerks and typists,…

Finally, employers turned to women in the 1920s, particularly white women, because, unlike white men, they were plentiful. In the 1920s, many white, native-born men had better-paying and more gender-appropriate job options than those opening up in the expanding restaurant sector. The passage of the…