Interview with Minnie S. Whitney, March 20, 1984

 HARDY: Forever, I think.

WHITNEY: I have some friends that I go around with, and sometimes they just drag, and I say, “What’s happening?” “Oh, I’m hurting.” And I say, “You know, you ain’t gotta be so hurt when you’re 60, in your 60s.”

HARDY: Yeah.

WHITNEY: Um-hm.

HARDY: Just getting this thing positioned the right way. Okay.

WHITNEY: Um-hm. So then, you asked me what the balance of things was.

HARDY: Okay. I think last time we left off, I was just about to start to ask you about the times you worked as a domestic in Philadelphia.

WHITNEY: Here in the city. Um-hm.

HARDY: Yeah. So maybe if you could start telling me how you got the job, and then carry it from there.

WHITNEY: Well when I came here to Philadelphia, my cousin, his wife got the job for me down on, on—

HARDY: I’d like to do one thing first. Okay now we’re set.

WHITNEY: Well, as my cousin was here, and his wife had a job for me when I left 00:01:00home. And I told you I runned away and come up here. So, she got this job down on 41st and Girard Avenue, with the Jewish druggist, and I started work. I came up one day, and I started work the next day, ‘cause the job was already prepared for me. Wasn’t much money, but it was more than I was getting in the South. So from that, I stayed there until after I was married. And I got married in 1919, same year I came up here. And after I got married, I stopped work for a while, and then during the course of December, I went back down South, and I stayed there, oh, I guess about a year, then I came back to the city, and I worked again. Then I had my children. I had two children. So everything went 00:02:00along all right until I think it was 1924. My husband and I, we broke up, then I took my, my baby to my mother’s in the South. And the, my daughter, he took. And then I stayed here then. I come back and I worked then until about, I guess about 1925. Then I went to New York. But meantime, while I was here, the job at Girard Avenue wasn’t the only job. I had a job working up in Wynnefield for a big family. I was the upstairs girl. That is a job that the woman had no sympathy for nobody but herself. Cold wintertime, she’d, you have to wash the windows. I don’t care how cold it was. The rag would be sticking to the windows, just so long as you could get it off, you washed the windows. And I 00:03:00used to have to go from 41st Street, because I lived in Warren Street right over here. The building’s down now. And usually catch the number 10, and ride to 52nd Street. Now, if one 10 had broke down in front of you, you just would get out and start walking, because there wasn’t no other way you could get there, because they had no trolley car. So I had to walk, I’ll say from like 49th Street out to Wynnefield, to my job many, many days, in the cold, snowy weather. And I guess I was young. It just didn’t bother me. So I stayed there with that woman for three years, which the employment agency, I got that from an employment office. When I’d taken the job, she says, “I’m going to give you this job.” She said, “But you’re not going to stay with the woman.” I said, “Why?” She said, “Nobody can stay with her, live, you know, work 00:04:00with her,” say, “she’s just that type.” So I says, “All right.” I say, “Give it to me. I’ll try it.” See, I was game, because I wanted to work, and I didn’t want no, to be dependent on nobody. So I went to work for this woman, and I worked for her for three years, and the employment agents, when I left, I went back and told, I says, “Now, I’m not going to work here.” I says, “I’m going to leave and go to New York.” She says, “I should give you a medal.” She said, “You stayed there three years.” She says, “I was sure you wasn’t even gonna stay two weeks.” I said, “But don’t you think she didn’t give me a hard way to go.” My girlfriend, I was the upstairs girls, helped with the kitchen. They’d cook, we’d cook. She would tell us, like, if she would be, like, Thanksgiving, she was going to have a turkey dinner, she would tell us, now, after we cooked it, “You can’t eat none of the turkey. You can have some of the giblet gravy.” Now we done cooked 00:05:00it. That’s the type of woman she—and if you eat it, she come and, she chastise you about it. Until one day, I got tired of her chastising me. She had a beautiful husband. So, she told me this, “If you go home—” see, like, my baby was with my mother, and she says, and he was sick, and my mother had wrote and told me about it, so I said, “Well, I’ll go down this Sunday, on the Excursion, and come back.” She told me, she said, “If you go down home, you come, down to your ho-, home,” she said, “You won’t have no job when you come back.” So I went, because my baby meant a whole lot to me. So when I come back, that Monday morning, I went in on the job, and I was sitting in the kitchen with my coat on, waiting for her to, her to come down, for her husband to come down to pay me, because he’s the one that paid me up. So he walks down, he said, “What you sitting down with your coat on?” Said, “Why don’t you be in your uniform?” I said, “Your wife told me if I went home Sunday to see my baby, she was going to fire me.” And I said, “I went home to see my baby.” And I said, “What’s the use of me putting on the uniform 00:06:00if she’ll make me take it off?” And he said, “I’m the boss around here.” He said, “Go upstairs, and get your uniform, and come down here, and serve breakfast.” So when she come down, she see me, so he told her, he says, “Minnie’s going to work.” Said, “She’s a good worker, and you’re not going to fire her.” Then he says to me, “From now on, you take orders from me, not from my wife.” And she, and then, I really had, (laughs) had a hard way to go. When he wasn’t there a day, she, if she wanted to tell me something, she’d write it on a piece of paper, and stick it up against the wall. But he was very good. But she was, I think she was very nervous, for one thing, and looked like everything bothered her. You couldn’t do nothing right. If you dropped something, accidents would happen to anybody. And if you dropped something, she, she’d keep it going for a, oh, every time you look at her, “Be careful, you’ll drop that! Be careful, you’ll drop that!” You know, it was forever going. You’d get sick of hearing someone forever needling you 00:07:00about something. You do it, do, just say, “Well, be careful, and don’t, try not to break nothing.” But she was just that kind. So, after I left her, then I went to New York. And I stayed in New York from ’29, 1929 til 1972. That’s when I moved back here. And then, in this, this place we’d go to the theater, right here on the corner, used to be William Penn. You couldn’t go, you couldn’t sit at, you had to sit upstairs, you couldn’t sit downstairs. And anything like, anything that [ ] we’d just sit there while, while they were taking part in something else, you know, like maybe they’d have a bingo game or some kind of game. You, we could, we color people couldn’t take no part in it. And we used to sit up in the peanut gallery. That’s what we always called it: peanut gallery. So, it, I almost said when I come here, I had, I thought I 00:08:00had left the South, but I found it right here, because these people was very hard on you. You couldn’t go no place like anything, unless it was Jim Crow, and even to most all of the theaters—and downtown, don’t even think about going downtown to a show—you, you sit upstairs, and, and the other people sit downstairs. And one time, this lady I told you about that I worked in Wynnefield for, she had two daughters, so I have to chaperone those girls. So they was going to a show one night, down on Walnut Street, I think it was, and they went up, and I was with them, so when they got to the booth, where they buy the tickets, so they asked for three tickets, so the, the lady in the booth told her, said, “Well, she can’t sit with you. She’ll have to sit upstairs.” So they said, “Oh, no?” Say, if she don’t sit with us, we don’t go in the theater.” So she let them know that, you know, I was a nigger, and no 00:09:00niggers were allowed to sit downstairs. So they said, “Well, I’ll talk to my father about that.” Said, “I’ll let you know. My father will take his business from you.” They let me go, and sit that night, but you could almost, I could feel the daggers at me. (laughs) So I told the lady, the children’s mother, I said, “Please don’t send me no more with them.” I said, “Because—” She said, “Oh, yes, you’re going with them. And you’re going to sit where they sit, because I don’t want them to sit off somewhere, and then run out, and go somewhere, and you don’t know where they are. I want, want you to be right with them.” So that was one problem I had. And, oh, while I was there, I looked like I just felt cold chills, just like somebody was sticking me with something. And it, it was kind of rough, because you couldn’t go into any of the restaurants like you can now downtown. You wasn’t allowed to. And it, only thing it was here, you could ride, sit on the streetcar to 00:10:00where you want to sit down. But down in the South, you couldn’t.

HARDY: Yeah.

WHITNEY: At my home, we didn’t have no streetcars. We had nothing. Horse, and carts, and, and buggies. That’s it. And cars after later years. But you see, when you don’t know no better, you accept it. But after I left home, and I went to New York, and I went back home, I couldn’t accept those things. That’s why I would never go back to live. Because my father had a home down there, and he told me, say “Come on back and live. I’ll fix the house up better for you and your husband.” I said, “No,” I said, “I’m not with him, and I don’t intend to get married no more,” and I says, “Let me stay in the city,” I said, “Because I wouldn’t live 10 minutes down there.” You see, I had to get freed from freedom from there. And I couldn’t stand this, you go in the store, and you’d be standing up there, and if some white person come this way, you had to stand and wait until they get waited on. 00:11:00Don’t care how big a hurry you was in. So I couldn’t take that. So that’s why I stayed all my life right here. I lived more in the cities, than I did at home, because I was only in, to my home 16-and-a-half -years. And when I was 16 and a half, I left. So all the rest of my time has been right here in the city.

HARDY: Was New York different from Philadelphia?

WHITNEY: Yes, a little bit. It was Jim Crow there too. You had certain places to sit in the theater. But seemed like it soon worked itself out more than it did here, because I used to come back here, and I found that people still couldn’t sit in the theaters where they wanted. And of course some place, some, well, see, with so many theaters, what they call Harlem, like the Lafayette, and the, the Strand, they were mostly affiliated with colored people. You could go in there and sit anywhere you wanted to sit. And then they had the Gibson Theater, 00:12:00I think it was. That was on, on S-, on Seventh Avenue.

HARDY: Well, how about the Philadelphia black theaters? Didn’t you have The Standard, and the Earle, and a couple others?

WHITNEY: Well, they, no, I don’t remember the black theaters. All that I ever went to was the white theaters with the blacks maybe cleaning up there. But you still had to sit in a certain place.

HARDY: Right.

WHITNEY: It always was upstairs.

HARDY: So you never got down to some of the black theaters—

WHITNEY: No, not down—

HARDY: Down on South Street?

WHITNEY: No, not—oh, yes, I did. Used to go down there to the, what do you call it, the Strand. There was a Strand Theater I think down there. A Gibson.

HARDY: That was the Standard. Gibson—

WHITNEY: Yes. There, that was, yeah. Um-hm.

HARDY: Yeah. The Gibson and the Standard. Then there was the Dunbar.

WHITNEY: Yes. Um-hm. You—

HARDY: And then the Earle was the movie theater up on the side of Broad.

WHITNEY: You see, looked like we West Philadelphia people didn’t go too much into South Philly, because there was a line between us.

HARDY: How’s that?

WHITNEY: The colored men wouldn’t let the colored—the colored men down there wouldn’t let the colored f-, boys come here to West Philadelphia, and the West Philadelphia boys wouldn’t let the South Philadelphia boys come here. That’s the way they was, because they was looking for the girls. That’s what the problem. And they would divide themselves. But we would go there sometime, but we’d go there like a group, and we didn’t stay long. We’d go down, see a show, and come on home. We stayed right around here. I did. Right around here in West Philadelphia. Onlyest place that I used to go quite was Wallace Dream, a theater, a dance theater hall, dance hall. I’d go there, were all colored in, I mean, all of us was mixed there. That was just a colored place. So, that’s about the heighth of it here for Philadelphia. That’s—

HARDY: Huh. Let me ask you a couple more questions about the years when you were working for the woman in Wynnefield.

WHITNEY: Um-hm.

HARDY: You apparently didn’t have a real good placement.

WHITNEY: No.

HARDY: Did you talk with other women doing that sort of work about how they felt about doing work in white households, and people?

WHITNEY: Yes.

HARDY: Tell me what—

WHITNEY: They didn’t, they told me, what one girl told me, she says, “I don’t see how you stay there,” because they all disliked that woman. And they all didn’t have any good word for her. When you go in your office, and when the lady told me, she said, “The onlyest job I got is out here in Wynnefield,” and she was calling the name, and you could hear the—and them people sitting there needs a job, they said, “Uhm.” Said, “Child, you’ll never make it.” They was old-timers. They was older than me. They said, “You’ll never stay with that woman,” said, “because she’s acting mean.” I says, “Well, I’ll try it.” Then when I went back in the office, those people was going getting work by the day. I wanted week’s work. So after that, I went back one day to finish paying the woman for the job, the employment agent for the job, and some of them women was sitting there, says, “Is you 00:15:00still on that job?” I said, “Yes.” Said, “She ain’t killed you yet?” I said, “No,” I says, “We get along very good.” I says, “She’s mean, but I can be as mean as she is sometime.” I says, “I don’t, I’m going to do what she tells me to do, but I’m not going to let her push me around.” I said, “Whatever she tells me to do.” The onlyest time that I backed up on what she told me to do was one Sunday morning. I used to, I used to sleep in, part of the time, sleep in and out. So she told me that Sunday morning, she wanted me to scrub the bathroom, and I had did it on Saturday. I told her, I says, “I don’t scrub nobody’s floor on Sunday.” I said, “That’s my Sabbath.” I said, “Because, you’re supposed to do the same thing.” So she told me, “You go,” She always would claim, “I’ll fire you. I’ll fire you.” So that Sunday morning, I got up and left. They got through with the bathroom. I just went around, and wiped the water off in splotches on the floor, but I didn’t take no mop and bucket. I mean, you know, get on my knees, 00:16:00no brush and bucket. Wasn’t no mops. They didn’t used to have no mops then. You’d get on your knees. So she said to me, “The bathroom is not clean, and I want you to take that bucket.” So she grabs the bucket, and slams it down in front of me. So I took the bucket, and kicked it over the side, and come on down stairs. So she followed me downstairs. So the cook says to her, says, “Listen,” said, “Whatever is going on between you all, at least you stopped making noise.” So she said, “She slammed the bucket at me.” I said, “No. You did it first.” And I said, “Then I kicked it in the corner, and I’m downstairs, and you followed me. Now what do you want?” Because I was getting angry then. At that time, I made well, she pushed me, and if it hadn’t been for the cook, I might would have hit her, because she had done wore my patience, when she told me that I “had to” and I “had better” scrub the floor. Otherwise, she would fire me. So I just wanted her to fire me. So she didn’t. Her husband come in. He rescued me again. (laughs) But see, I 00:17:00was young. And you know, when you’re young, and you’ve been, like, says, under pressure, and here you people talk about pressure. Now you feel that now that slavery’s over, why should you still have to be pressured. I mean, we all is one. It’s no difference out of, it’s only a difference in the skin. Why do I have to do something that I don’t want to do on a Sunday? Any day during the week, I wouldn’t care if she’d tell me to scrub the bathroom three times a day. I’d do it. But Sunday is my Sabbath, and I didn’t feel like doing it, which I don’t, since I’ve been grown, and been away from home, I had never scrubbed a bathroom on Sunday in my life.

HARDY: Hm.

WHITNEY: That’s just my, my religion.

HARDY: Sure.

WHITNEY: So, and she’s going to tell me about, oh, you, “I bear your sins.” You go ahead, and I’m the one that bears the sin. I say, “You’re not God, so don’t tell me about what you’re going to bear my sins.” 00:18:00(laughter) So she was just, oh, she was just, well, I think after that, she wanted me to go. That’s how come I stopped working ‘case she wanted me to go to Europe with her. They were going to Europe for three years there. And I told her I couldn’t go because I didn’t want to leave my mother, and my baby, and my family here. But see, I would have had to stay there three years before I could come back with them when they come back. So, that’s the way I left her. Then I got another job, just day’s work. Go here a day, and go there a day, and that was it. Then I left and went to New York.

HARDY: Now, you mentioned before, I know that you didn’t feel, when you mentioned that the feeling of slavery. You know, you shouldn’t have to do this because you were—

WHITNEY: Yes, that’s right.

HARDY: Yeah. And this is something I’ve read in some of the books about domestic work, that—

WHITNEY: Yeah.

HARDY: A lot of women, a lot of people—

WHITNEY: Yeah.

HARDY: Only had harbored, felt that doing domestic work itself—

WHITNEY: Um-hm.

HARDY: Was demeaning because it smacked of slavery.

WHITNEY: Um-hm.

HARDY: Do you remember people feeling that way? Or did you have that feeling yourself?

WHITNEY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because when I had to get on my knees, for which, in the South—

HARDY: I mean, more generally.

WHITNEY: Yeah.

HARDY: You know, just doing that sort of work.

WHITNEY: Yes. I felt like this. I don’t mind working, but I don’t want to be droved. I said, now, when you be driving me, and you’re going to tell me, after I done worked, and worked, and I’m tired now, and I feel that’s enough, then you going to come back and find another half a house for me to clean, or another big tub of clothes to wash. So I felt that was just like my grandmother had told me, because sometimes she said she would work, and work, and work, and when she was, figured the day was end, that she, she used to call the missus, the missus would go, and find more work. Then said, sometimes she would work until way late in the night. So, I felt depressed because it looked 00:20:00like she was driving me. She wasn’t saying, “Will you do it?” “You do it.” It was like a demand. And I didn’t like it because after I left home, and got out from being under rules of being, like they say, it was slavery, because I’m the second generation up from the slaves. I still felt the effects of what my grandmother always told me. And after I came here to Philadelphia, I felt it more when they, well just the same as I felt it in the South.

HARDY: Hm.

WHITNEY: So, and different ones always would tell me some women, sometimes are mean to me. They even worked so hard, they would be over crying, going home, they’d be so tired, they could hardly drag, just dragging along. And I used to feel sorry for them, because they were older women, and why would they have to be s— they would sit on a streetcar and talk about how much work the madam had 00:21:00put on them that day washing sheets, and pillow cases, and watching them hanging them on the line. They didn’t give them no laundry. You did that by hand, and you ironed those sheets by hand. Sometimes a woman, well, the lady, old lady, she said, “I just feel like sitting down in the street anywhere.” Said, “I am so tired.” And she says, “I went in this morning, six o’clock.” Then we all would be coming home at six o’clock in the evening. And she said, I said, “That’s a day’s work.” Said, I said, “How much you, how much did you get?” She said, “A dollar and a half.”Sheets, pillowcases, the husband’s shirts, and there’d be starched collars. You know the men used to, they sometimes used, had those collars that they, you, you put them, and you, you, loose from the shirt. And you do them with starch, hard collars. I’ve did a many one myself. And when you, and if you find one spot on it, she, the madam would throw it back in the water, and you’d wash it over again, and get that one spot. Better not be no spots on them. It was like you was drove to do 00:22:00everything you was doing, until after I went to New York, and I vowed I wouldn’t do private family work. I did public work. And then I found out that I was, like my own boss, the boss tell me what he want—I had a very good boss—That he’d tell me what he want me to do, and he showed me how he wanted, and I went on from that.

HARDY: Yeah, you told me last time that you were the manager there, so...

WHITNEY: Yes, I was. Twenty, yeah, I had twenty girls and four drivers. Four men.

HARDY: Yeah. It seems that’s something else I read. That a lot of women did prefer the public laundry work to the private work.

WHITNEY: Public. Yeah. Yes. I did.

HARDY: And I guess it was when you worked in a private situation, it was hard work, long hours, and—

WHITNEY: And you’d never know when you was going to finish. But in the laundry, it’s true, when I first started working in this, in the laundry, it was 72 hours a week.

HARDY: Jeez.

WHITNEY: Only had one day off on Sundays, and that was 12 and a half dollars. You go in, I used to go in around 5:30, and quarter to six, and sometimes I’d 00:23:00be there until seven, eight, and nine o’clock at night. And Saturdays, you stayed there until everything was finished. That was before the union came in. If there was a basket of clothes, I don’t care, you stayed there until every last piece was finished, because the boss know he wasn’t paying you no overtime, and you had to finish it. But when he started having to pay overtime, I would go in, like, well, I always liked going early, and get through. I liked to come home early before the other people. So I used to go in at six in the morning, and I’d get off at seven, then I’d get off at three. That’s when the union came in. And I’d only take a half an hour for lunch, which others would take an hour. But I’d only take a half an hour, and I could get out at three o’clock. But it was hard work. But when I started managing the laundry, I worked just as hard as the girls did, because I did double work. I sort, I packed, and I’d wash the clothes, and put them in the machine, and I’d take them, and hang them up for the girls to starch, and everything else that I had 00:24:00to do. And then pack, and get the wet clothes, so they could, you know, iron them up, and then I would be able to give them to the driver to go ahead, and deliver them. Some--the work that comes in like on a Friday and Saturday, that had to be ready to deliver Monday after 12, and wasn’t no few bundles. Sometime I had bundles there that the, that’s when the boss would come in and figure up, in them days and time, beautiful hand embroidery. Everything, sheets embroidered. All of them had to be by hand on a bath towel. And you didn’t know when you was going to get finished. Sometimes, one woman had to know, she wanted her sheets starched. We’d give them to her starched.

HARDY: Starched sheets?

WHITNEY: That’s right. You’d be surprised. (laughter) You’d be surprised. I didn’t, I know when I was working in private family, I know a couple of 00:25:00times the ladies would tell the girl just to run it through a little starch water to give it a finish, but these were [ ] starch. And I starched them. And we put, then we had a machine, like a mangle to put them through, and when they come out, they’d be just as stiff. I’d fold it, take the crease side. No crease couldn’t be in the sheet, not in the middle, you had to take that crease out and fold it in threes. I’m telling you, we had, (laughter) it’s like I say sometimes, I said one day I was talking about myself. I says, I should, could write a book of the life that I went through, and still able to go.

HARDY: Yeah. I sometimes wonder whether the hard work helps you live longer, or whether, on the contrary, it cuts your life, makes your life shorter.

WHITNEY: Well, I, I say like this, I say like my father always say. He’d say, “Hard work never hurt nobody.” But what it is, if you’re going to work 00:26:00hard, and then go and to run all night long, or live it up some other way, well, you’re going to die. So, if you just work hard, and take your rest, you can live a long time, because ain’t nobody in the world that worked harder than me. Because my father used to take me right along with him in the woods, and we sawed all the trees. Chopped them up for --.

HARDY: Hm. Let me ask you a couple more questions about the private work.

WHITNEY: Yeah. Um-hm.

HARDY: Since that was in Philadelphia, you know.

WHITNEY: Yeah.

HARDY: I’m really interested in getting as much as I can on that sort of thing. Now you said that, I’m really interested to hear that, you know, you speak of overhearing other women on the trolley—

WHITNEY: Yeah.

HARDY: Talking about how hard they worked.

WHITNEY: All their hard work.

HARDY: Did you discuss with your friends who did this work at all how they felt about it, or—

WHITNEY: Oh, yes. We used to meet sometime, and talk about how hard we worked, and what we felt about all of them, the madams, we used to call them, and what 00:27:00they put on us to do. And quite many of them say, “I hope I’ll live to see a day when they will have to do the work that I’m doing.” You know, do their own work, and then they’ll know how to treat people. So, the day came. That day came when some of those ladies we used to work for, they had to scrub their own kitchen, because they couldn’t get nobody to do it. And the younger ones that come up behind us, they wouldn’t think about scrubbing. “You, you want me to scrub? Get a mop. I don’t get on my knees.”

HARDY: What was the thing about scrubbing on your knees instead of doing a mop?

WHITNEY: You would do it—

HARDY: Why would—

WHITNEY: Well, well, no, they wouldn’t, they didn’t allow no mops.

HARDY: Why not?

WHITNEY: They think, “Uh-uhn. You didn’t get the house clean. You had to get down, and scrub all around.” A great big room like this, sometimes you’d scrub it with soap and water, then after you’d left one side to scrub, then 00:28:00you’d go back, and scrub this side, then you’d get a fresh bucket of water, and scrub that side again. [ ] they called it. You’d be surprised. And that’s what a lot of women used to talk about. How the woman say, when they scrubbed the floor once, they thought it would be enough. But on their knees. And sometimes they’d give you a pillow, if you’d talk about your knees hurting, because we stayed on our knees a long time. They hurt. So they’d give us pillows. A little old pillow like this, and you, as you move, you, you get your knee back on a pillow, and you scrub again. And they give you, they used to put lye in the water, they sprinkled it in there for you. And if you wasn’t careful, you’d go home, you ain’t got no nails, your fingers and hands is all chopped up. They didn’t trust, they wouldn’t let you put it in, because they were afraid you wouldn’t put in enough. So they’d put it in for you. It was, well, I mean, many of us used to get together, and talk about it, the way we felt about it. And we just felt horrible. We all, we would say, we would hope 00:29:00the day would come when they would have to do their work themselves, and see if they’d get down on their knees. So what happened, they started inventing mops, because that drugstore down on 41st and Girard Avenue, that was almost a half a block long. And I used to scrub that from the kitchen, because the kitchen was on the, kitchen, dining room downstairs, and the drugstore was on the front. I used to scrub from that kitchen all the way out through the drugstore, all around those stools, where they sit up at the counter, on my knees, that stone floor. And they’d give you a certain amount of time to scrub it. Now, you weren’t supposed to, and it better be clean, don’t leave nothing, and do that in a half an hour, spend a half an hour on this, and twenty minutes on here. That’s the way they’d give you. So that means you’re to get it all in there. I mean, you worked.

HARDY: Yeah. So what alternatives were there for women in Philadelphia back 00:30:00then, if they couldn’t stand, you know, didn’t like the domestic work?

WHITNEY: There wasn’t an alternative. They had to do it or else. There weren’t nothing else for them to do. They had to do that.

HARDY: No other sorts of jobs that women could get?

WHITNEY: No, there was no other sorts of job. You might clean office downtown, and you still would be on your knees scrubbing. Might clean a doctor’s office, get in a job where a doctor’s office is. Or maybe where a beauty shop was, but you’d be scrub-, still on your knees scrubbing the floors. So it was no advancement, no way at all. No way. Because, just like, that’s why I left here, because it was no advancement. I went to New York, and I found public work, and it was an advancement there for me. I’d go from one step to another until I learned everything, and I could run a business myself.

HARDY: Hm. Was there any hierarchy of housework? You know-- any order of who had 00:31:00the most prestige, or what jobs were considered best, and what were considered worst? Was the cook, or the nurse, you know, was it—

WHITNEY: Well, it was like this. All of the, all, it’s, well, that’s not true. All of the madams of the household, seemed like nearly all of them would get together, and all I worked for, the people, and the girls that we run around, I run around with, they all had the--the madams had the same attitude. Everybody was listen to, keep, you know, make you do this, make you do that, make you do the other. It was no better cook, your cook better than mine, my cook is better than yours, or my madam was better than your madam. It just was the same thing. They wouldn’t give you the privilege. If you was a good cook, they wouldn’t give you the privilege. They still always would say, “Well, it could be improvement.”

HARDY: Hm. How about within the house itself? If you have a cook, and an upstairs maid, and a nurse, and a downstairs maid, did you all sort of work cooperatively or was one person the boss more than the others?

WHITNEY: Yes. We did. Um-hm. [ ] they could. No, we all worked together. All, each one of us in our job—

[End of interview.]