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

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