- Title
- "The matter of wages does not seem to be material": Native American domestic workers' wages under the outing system in the United States, 1880s-1930s
- Creator
- Haskins, Victoria K.
- Relation
- Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers p. 323-345
- Relation
- Studies in Global Social History
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/9789004280144_016
- Publisher
- Brill
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- In the early decades of the twentieth century, Native American girls and young women worked as domestic servants in white homes under a government program known as "Outing". Historians of the Outing program have pointed to its simultaneously assimilationist and exploitative nature. The question of the wages paid to the young women "working out" in white homes, however, has not yet received attention. That the wages were low is simply taken for granted, and the assumption that the authorities approved is not problematized in any way. Such oversight may be seen as justified by offhand remarks in the record, such as those of an unnamed senior official in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), who made the dismissive comment upon the 1916 report of an Inspector for the BIA on the Outing program, that the "big thing is for us to see that the girls are protected in these homes and the matter of wages does not seem to me to be material in that connection." In this chapter, I want to open up that final, rather curt remark for a closer interrogation, in order to more clearly elucidate the significance of the wage rates for the administration and for our understanding of the Outing program.
- Subject
- wages; domestic workers; Native Americans; outing system
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1321030
- Identifier
- uon:24250
- Identifier
- ISBN:9789004293298
- Language
- eng
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