The Maid Narratives: Oral Histories from the Great Migration to Iowa
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Scope and Contents
“The Maid Narratives: Oral Histories from the Great Migration to Iowa” collection dates from 2006 to 2023 and measures 5 linear inches and 31.5 gigabytes. The collection is organized into three series: Oral history interviews, The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South, and Iowa Women's Archives and The Maid Narratives.
The Oral history interviews series (2009-2011) consists of audio recordings and transcripts of 20 oral history interviews. The interviews with seventeen African American women, two African American men, and one white man were conducted in Iowa by Charletta Sudduth and Dr. David W. Jackson III as part of The Maid Narratives project. Interviewees were born between 1906 and 1952, with the majority born before 1940. Most were born in the southern states of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Two of the interviewees were born in Iowa (Buxton and Waterloo) and worked for white families in Iowa. The interviews cover a wide range of topics such as access to education, midwifery, sharecropping, relationships with white employers, resistance to norms of segregation, and religion. The women describe daily incidents of racism in the lives of Black domestic workers, such as underpayment, having to use the back door, whether they were allowed to use the bathroom where they worked, and whether they experienced sexual harassment or assault from their employers.
The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South (Approximately 2009-2018) series comprises materials related to the book of the same title published in 2012 by Louisiana State University (LSU) Press. Materials include abridged oral history interview transcripts, color photographs of the interviewees, an LSU Press information sheet, and a note about the project written by Katherine van Wormer.
The Iowa Women's Archives and The Maid Narratives (2006-2023) series consists of materials related to the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA) 2020 Women’s History Month event at the Iowa City Public Library, titled “Iowa Women of the Great Migration: The Maid Narratives,” as well as IWA archivist subject files, such as oral history interviewee biographies and obituaries.
Dates
- Creation: 2006 - 2023
Creator
- Van Wormer, Katherine S. (Katherine Stuart) (1944-07-24) (Author, Person)
- Jackson, David W., 1972- (Author, Person)
- Sudduth, Charletta, 1968- (Author, Person)
Conditions Governing Access
The collection is open for research. Audio recordings of three oral history interviews are closed, but the associated transcripts are open.
Conditions Governing Use
Copyright held by the donor has been transferred to the University of Iowa.
Biographical / Historical
In 2011, African American scholars Dr. David W. Jackson III and Charletta Sudduth collaborated with University of Northern Iowa professor Katherine van Wormer, a white scholar, on an oral history project to record the experiences of African American women who had been domestic workers in the Jim Crow South before moving to Iowa. These oral histories, combined with additional interviews with white individuals whose families had previously employed Black domestic workers, contributed to the publication of The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South (LSU Press, 2012), co-authored by van Wormer, Jackson, and Sudduth. The collection includes material for 20 of the 50 individuals whose testimonies were recorded as part of this project.
Biographical / Historical
Katherine van Wormer was born in 1944 and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Van Wormer attended the University of North Carolina, where she studied English and became involved in Civil Rights and peace activism. Van Wormer continued her studies at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland and taught English before receiving a PhD in sociology from the University of Georgia and a Master of Science in Social Work from the University of Tennessee-Nashville. Van Wormer pursued a career in addiction treatment before becoming a professor of social work at the University of Northern Iowa. Van Wormer’s academic work focused on women in prison and addiction treatment. She published numerous articles and textbooks in her field. The oral history project for The Maid Narratives was initially inspired by van Wormer’s memories of growing up in the South and her interest in the 1930s Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) effort to record interviews with the last generation of men and women who were formerly enslaved. [Biographical information found in van Wormer’s biography as published on the University of Northern Iowa website]
Biographical / Historical
David W. Jackson, III was born in Des Moines, Iowa and raised in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Jackson earned a BA in general studies, with an emphasis in African American World Studies, from the University of Northern Iowa; an MA in African-American World Studies from the University of Iowa; and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Iowa. His graduate research included a master’s thesis, titled “Colonial Origins of Instability: The Case of Nigeria,” and a dissertation, titled “The Walking Nkisis: African-American Material Culture in Iowa: A Case Study of Yard Art in Waterloo, Iowa,” which explored African American Iowans’ yard art collections. Jackson was an Associate Professor in the Africana Studies Department at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. He subsequently became a visiting scholar and Adjunct Assistant Professor in African American Studies at the University of Iowa, teaching courses on Africana Studies, the Black community, and African American culture, among other topics. In the early 2000s, Jackson produced a four-volume oral history video project, “African-American Voices of the Cedar Valley,” for which he received two awards. Jackson also produced a two-volume oral history video project focused on African Americans living in Denver, Colorado. Jackson authored several articles and the book Key Issues Confronting the Black Community in Denver, Colorado: A Community in Transition (2021). In 2012, Jackson was co-author of The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South; he conducted most of the interviews with African American women for the project. [Biographical information found in Jackson’s biography for the African American Voices of Cedar Valley project]
Biographical / Historical
Charletta Sudduth of Waterloo, Iowa, was born in 1968. In 1991, Charletta D. Williams married Toril E. Sudduth. The couple had six children. Charletta Sudduth earned a BA in Liberal Arts (1992), an MA in Youth and Human Service Administration (1998), a Master in Social Work (2002), and an Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction (2011) from the University of Northern Iowa (UNI). In 2006, Sudduth began working for Waterloo Community School District as an early childhood consultant. Charletta and Toril Sudduth hosted a radio program called “Parents, Love Your Children” on the Waterloo, Iowa non-commercial educational African American radio station KBBG (88.1). The program included children’s story readings and parenting tips. Charletta Sudduth’s mother, Annie Pearl Stevenson, was a Civil Rights activist who previously worked as a maid in Oxford, Mississippi. Sudduth joined the Maid Narratives oral history project while she was a doctoral student at UNI. For the project, she interviewed her mother and several other African American women who had worked as maids in the Jim Crow south before moving to Iowa. [Biographical information found on the University of Northern Iowa and the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier websites]
Extent
5 linear inches
19 audiocassettes
31.5 Gigabytes
Language of Materials
English
Abstract
Oral history interviews with African American women who worked in domestic service in the South before moving to Iowa.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
The collection was donated by Katherine van Wormer (donor no. 1552) in 2018.
Processing Information
Interviewees used a range of terms to describe the work that they and their family members did. Some terms include domestic worker, day worker, housekeeper, helper, and cleaning lady. This work was not uniform in nature. Interviewees described a variety of childcare, cooking, and cleaning duties. Terminology used in the individual biographical notes varies based on the terms used in each interview, whether it was the interviewee’s own term for their role, how their employers referred to them, or what they considered to be the common terminology at the time. As The Maid Narratives authors explain, “In those days, the women themselves often simply said, ‘I work for Mrs. Jones,’ or ‘I used to work for Mrs. Johnson,’ as the type of work they did was obvious.” In such cases, the biographical note refers to the specific duties the person performed or uses the general term “domestic work.” The Maid Narratives authors explained their use of the term “maid” in the book’s introduction. They wrote, “For the title of the book, we chose to use the contemporary term that best conveys the present-day meaning. ‘Maid Narratives’ also nicely parallels the term ‘slave narratives’ of the century before.”
- Author
- Heather Cooper, 2022; Meredith Kite, 2024
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Repository Details
Part of the Iowa Women's Archives Repository
100 Main Library
University of Iowa Libraries
Iowa City IA 52242 IaU
319-335-5068
319-335-5900 (Fax)
lib-women@uiowa.edu