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

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