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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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Black waitresses also may have lost food service jobs as black migration into the northern cities increased after World War I. Although an estimated half-million blacks headed north between 1916 and 1921, few moved into waitressing.30 In the South, black women were more acceptable in visible public service jobs than in the North because southerners were accustomed to intimate social interactions with black servants in both the private and public realms. In the North, blacks found themselves competing with immigrant women who, unlike white southerners, were less inhibited about taking on personal service work—work that in the South was associated firmly with black labor.31
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 1924 Immigration Act also ended the traditional source of white male restaurant labor: the European-trained, immigrant cook or waiter. In contrast, native-born white female applicants, many escaping the shrinking opportunities in rural America, eagerly sought out waitressing jobs. These farm recruits were joined by their urban sisters who were spending more years of their lives in the paid work force. Many “chose” waitressing because it required little training and promised the possibility of a living wage. Of equal importance for some, however, was the change in public attitude toward the occupation.32
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, secretaries, saleswomen, private household workers, and teachers.46 The ensuing decades simply extended these trends (Table 1). By 1970, women comprised 92 percent of the trade and waitressing maintained its status as one of the fastest-growing occupations for women.47
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 created a more ambiguous kind of worker consciousness than the classic adversarial “us versus them” attitude. Some servers chose to rely on the ephemeral, sporadic tipping system rather than join with their co-workers to push for higher cash wages. Tipping also weakened the potential alliance between customer and worker. At times, workers perceived the customer rather than the employer as responsible for their feeble income. And to a large degree, employers convinced the public that low wage rates were justified because servers received tips and special fringe benefits such as room and board.
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 the public by the 1920s and 1930s, the status of the work remained low. Waitressing was seen as menial, unskilled work, and waitresses were to be treated accordingly. “The notion that serving food could be as complicated a task to learn and to do as, say, making furniture, never impressed itself on public opinion.” Personal service workers also suffered from the stigma of dependence: instead of having a formal contractual arrangement that provided a living wage, they relied on customer largess.44
In addition to demanding sexual favors or servility, customers looked to waitresses for the fulfillment of other psychological needs. The act of eating and of being fed is overlaid with powerful associations. Diners transferred unconscious memories connected with food onto the waitress. Some had insatiable appetites for recognition, mothering, and emotional nurturance; others wanted witty conversation, entertainment, or a friendly nod as they recounted their daily triumphs and defeats. “Where else can I find a friend and get my lamb chops at the same time?” one customer queried. The waitress herself was part of the consumption exchange.45