Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105i/Section 026/Nora Bates

Overview
Bates was an African American laundress who resided in Cary, North Carolina, where she raised her six children. Bates was interviewed for the Federal Writer's Project on February 28, 1939 by Mary A. Hicks, and at that time she was 38 years old.

Early Life
On the year of 1931, Nora Bates was born in Cary, N.C. to a family of six, with two sisters and one brother. Bates’ father dug wells and ditches for a living, but died when she was very young, leaving Bates’ mother to provide for the family as a washerwoman. Bates dropped out of school in the fourth grade to help her mother wash clothes, learned how to make clothes, and was introduced to working in the field of domestic service.

Adult Life
At the young age of 15, Nora Bates married Buck Bates, whom she’d known her whole life, and moved into his mother’s house with him. Over the course of the next four years, Bates continued working as a laundress and had a baby every year. Entering the fifth year of their marriage, Buck died of pneumonia, leaving Bates with their four children. Four months later, Bates remarried to a man from Georgia, but as she recalled, wasn’t as great of a husband as Buck. He was a drunk who couldn’t keep a job, ran through what little money he had gambling, and even went to jail twice during their marriage. Bates had a child with him, but before the child was born, her husband left her. About three months later, Bates married her third husband, who also didn’t have a job and was just as bad as her second. A year later, Bates’ sixth child was born, which was around the time she found out her husband was still married to another woman from South Carolina. After kicking him out, Bates decided she’d never remarry again and moved back in with Buck’s mother, where she settled down with her family.

Black Women in Domestic Service
Black woman who originally had jobs doing housework, laundry, or more, began losing their jobs as many began laying off their workers and taking on the tasks themselves in order to save money during this financially straining time. Many others who were recently unemployed from other fields of work, especially African Americans, were forced to find menial work in domestic service since it was all that was available. Another new challenge that arose against these Black women was the competition they began getting from the influx of white woman trying to find domestic work, causing discrimination and making it increasingly difficult to find jobs. With the small amount of jobs available and high amounts of job seekers, both white and black, work was incredibly hard to come by. It got to a point where, in urban areas, Black women would gather in "slave markets" trying to get hired for extremely low pay and were taken advantage for their labor. According to Robert Boyd, “…in Atlanta, over 70 percent of all self-employed black women were domestic service workers in 1940, a year of the Depression when black unemployment was extraordinarily high.” Boyd compares Black women in the North to those in the South, where in the North, it was much easier to find self-employment jobs in small entrepreneurial activities, which was much more reliable and sustainable. On the other hand, those in the South were limited to domestic work, where they were treated almost like slaves in the private homes of middle-upper class white woman, with long hours and low pay.

Economic Hardships and Marital Relations
With the economy at an all-time low, jobs were scarce, and money was tight. According to Liker and Elder, “…heavy income loss during the early 1930s increased financial disputes which substantially raised the level of tensions in marriages.” The frustration of the inability to provide or support their families caused many to lash out on their partners and in some circumstances, resulted in physical or verbal abuse. The idea of “personal instability” is what links the financial pressures to the tension in a relationship as it is the root of internal conflict. A major difference between white and black women’s marital relations was caused by the fact that white women began working after the Great Depression, while black women were in the workforce well before the recession happened. This new development of “power” from the shift of stay at home mothers to employed wives increased the tension as it threatened the masculinity of their partners.

Government Aid and Direct Relief
The New Deal was a revolutionary establishment that many of those in the poorest communities were forced to heavily rely on to support their families, but ultimately was still discriminating against the African American community. The most common type of aid was direct relief, where case workers followed up with families in need, providing them with money or food every few weeks. But with limited resources, aid was distributed unfairly as Blacks were never prioritized and those who were most disadvantaged typically only got the bare minimum of support. Even in the workforce, organizations such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a supposed relief program that provided jobs, paid Blacks much lower wages than Whites. Eleanor Roosevelt was known for championing the rights of African Americans during this time and attempted to lessen the discrimination prevalent in many of the New Deal’s programs.