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Oh, I don’t think of that as truth but as literal occurrence. Truth, to me, is that which lives within experience. Sometimes you’re working from things that have happened to you in life, but you realize that it would have more force if someone other than you were speaking. Exactly transcribed lived experience will not always make the best poem possible, partly because your conclusions about what you’ve already lived are made before you start writing. What you want to have happen is that on the page you discover something. That’s when the electricity comes, so you invent stories in order to come upon discoveries, insights you haven’t yet had. That’s what I believe in.
I became quite obsessed. There was a period of two years when I read nothing but gardening catalogues. I really thought my life as a poet was over. Then I wrote The Wild Iris (1992), a book in which flowers speak. I could see that a lot of the prose from the catalogues came into the poems. One of the things I feel most strongly—and that book taught it to me—is that you have to allow yourself your obsessions. You can’t decide they’re not literary enough, or not elevated enough. I mean, it’s not that I had given myself permission to read the catalogues, but it was all I could put my mind to. I realized subsequently that this was the catalyst for a book that seemed to me at the time the best thing I’d written—it doesn’t now, but it did then.
Lately, I’ve been watching a whole lot of television, and I’m sure it will get into my work—maybe not the fact of its being television, or maybe that too, I don’t know, but the point is that I don’t feel I have a choice. You must trust that impulse in yourself, because your work is going to come out of what absorbs you. Your work is not going to come out of things you decide should absorb you.
I hate that kind of vocabulary, because it presumes that there should be an uninterrupted fluency. Block is not a word I would use, because I think there is a necessity to be still sometimes and let life happen to you, to let your manner of being in the world be changed by what happens to you so that you will have a different self out of which to write and different news to tell from that space. I’m unhappy, mostly, when I’m not writing, unless I’ve just written something, in which case I’m euphoric because I don’t have to try and write something again, but the fact of being not happy doesn’t mean that I think that I can put an end to it. I think it’s an ordeal I have to live through. I feel kind of pious about this. I keep records of what I write—I started doing this in the sixties—and I can see in my little charts that there were these years when nothing was written, an X for every month, and then when something was written it was so different from the last thing written two years before. I don’t think I could have gotten to that doing busywork for two years. I think I got there because I shut up and waited. I could be wrong—maybe that’s not why I got there and maybe I would have gotten there faster—but my sense of my experience is that you have to wait out certain nadirs. You just wait them out, and if you continue to want to write, you’ll write, and if you stop wanting to write then you’ll have a small gift, and it’s just as well to be informed of that.
My interest in unionism—and more specifically unionism in a traditionally female occupation—undoubtedly had its roots in my own particular family history and my desires to recast that history. From my father I learned male union traditions, both noble and shortsighted. The railroad brotherhood gave him a route to dignity and an alternative to upward mobility, but the battles against technological change, an inept railroad management, and the dissolving fraternity of craftsmen inspired more bitterness than hope. His union culture also offered few resources for a revaluing of the contributions and power of those outside the white male craft brotherhood. In contrast, my mother operated in inclusive ways and seemed infinitely flexible in the face of political, social, and economic upheaval. Yet she found it difficult, if not impossible, to see her own work in a nonunion department store as worthy of romance and a living wage.
Was there a working-class institution that captured the best of these traditions? One that could lay claim to rights, provide a sense of identity and power to its members while granting the same to those outside its ranks? An institution to which I as a woman could belong? Perhaps only a union built by women could forge such a vision. What I found, however, was that history resists mythology, and that my desire to revise the work and union histories of my parents was not to be fulfilled in the ways I anticipated.
Waitressing reveals the deeply gendered expectations surrounding the world of work. In the theater of eating out, the waitress plays multiple parts, each reflecting a female role. To fulfill the emotional and fantasy needs of the male customer, she quickly learns the all-too-common scripts: scolding wife, doting mother, sexy mistress, or sweet, admiring daughter. Other customers, typically female, demand obsequious and excessive service—to compensate, perhaps, for the status denied them in other encounters. For once, they are not the servers but the ones being served.
Waiting work, however, was not always a prominent occupation for women. In 1900, barely a hundred thousand people worked as waiters, and only a third of these were female; as late as the 1920s, men still retained close to a half of all wait jobs. But by 1970, more than a million people served food, and 92 percent were women.
[...] Beginning in 1900 with the founding of the Seattle waitresses’ local, waitresses formed all-female unions in Chicago, San Francisco, and other communities across the country; they also joined mixed culinary locals of waiters, cooks, and bartenders. In contrast to the sporadic organizing among women telephone operators, clericals, and other female service workers, waitresses sustained their organizational impulse for more than seventy years. At their peak in the 1940s and 1950s, union waitresses represented nearly one-fourth of the trade nationally. In such union strongholds as San Francisco, Detroit, and New York, a majority of female food servers worked under union contract. Indeed, only the institutions built by women in the garment trades appeared to rival waitress unions in terms of influence and longevity.
They also sought a feminism that balanced the needs of the individual woman with the needs of the working-class community and the family of which she was a part. They argued that economic justice and fair treatment for the majority of women can only be provided through employee representation and collective power not individual upward mobility. Rather than focus primarily on moving individual women into the higher-paying jobs held by men, they opted for improvements in the jobs traditionally held by women. Upward mobility for a few did not seem as important as the economic security of the larger group. Class loyalties and communitarian “class” values shaped their concepts of justice and equality.43 Advancement meant being better able to fulfill the responsibilities (and enjoy the pleasures) of motherhood and family life as well as improving life at the workplace.44 Although their perspective differed in fundamental ways from other forms of feminism, waitresses were no less committed to the advancement of their sex.
In seeking to compare the sensibility of waitresses with their male working-class counterparts as well as with their more elite sisters, I have thus far stressed the unanimity among this group of working-class women. Sisterhood and class solidarity had very real limits, however. The majority of waitress locals, for example, excluded black and Asian women from membership until the 1930s and 1940s. Although a few locals pursued issues of racial discrimination in hiring and promotion once the racial barriers fell, minority women continued to be relegated to the lowest-paid, least-desirable positions in the industry and remained underrepresented in the occupation as a whole.52 In addition, although waitress consciousness contained elements of class and gender identification, the strongest, most consistent aspect of their ideology appears to have been trade identification. When the interests of their trade conflicted with the larger interests of their class or sex, the needs of the craft often came first.
By and large, employers preferred women in these new-style eateries. Few of the exotic “theme” restaurants called for men: women were more suited for the role of decorative object. One of New York's most popular restaurants hired young, attractive waitresses to match its elaborate color scheme: “service in the Fountainette room is by waitresses with red hair; in the main dining room, blondes; in the lunch room, brunettes.” Indeed, one industry analyst in Restaurant Management recommended matching waitresses to each other, observing that “a corps of waitresses of uniform size and color” could add as much to a restaurant interior as expensive or unusual furnishings. Even employers who worked the more traditional theme of “family-style dining” preferred female servers to complete the effect; in this case, however, they looked for the nurturing, motherly type. Tea rooms, department store restaurants, and other light luncheon spots that catered to a predominantly female clientele hired women as well, admonishing them to act and dress like maids in upper-class homes.26
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