During the summer of 1881, African-American domestic servants staged a strike to gain higher wages and maintain autonomy in the workplace. In the article, Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta, Tera Hunter examines the plight of newly emancipated black domestic workers who actively resisted the terms of their employment in Atlanta. Her focus is on how these women shaped the meaning of freedom through workplace resistance, exercise of political rights, and institution building during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The purpose of this essay is to examine the hidden ways in which African American domestic workers have constructed their worlds of work, negotiation, resistance, and community. Hunter begins her analysis by integrating the experiences of African American women workers into the broader examination of political and political issues. economic conditions of the New South. According to Hunter, the period between 1877 and 1915 is critical to understanding the social transformations in most Southern cities, and complicating this transformation are issues of race, class, and gender. Examining the lives of black domestic workers reveals the complexity of their struggles to maintain their autonomy with white employers and municipal officials. For example, African American women built institutions and often left jobs in response to Southern whites' attempts to control their labor and mobility. Hunter carefully places these individual tactics of resistance in the capitalist development of the New South and white attempts to limit the political and social freedoms of emancipated slaves. African American women who immigrated to Atlanta after emancipation found themselves... middle of paper ......African American domestic workers in Atlanta during the periods between Reconstruction and World War I demonstrate active participation in economic life, social and political life of the New South. Furthermore, the private and public sphere afforded to the white woman was non-existent for African American women. Hunter concludes that the strategies employed by the laundresses' strike are inconclusive at best and evidence is lacking whether their demands for wage increases ever materialized. Note, however, that the washerwoman maintained the appearance of independence that most workers did not enjoy. Works Cited Tera W. Hunter, “Domination and Resistance: The Politics of Wage Household Labor in New South Atlanta,” in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., We Specialize in the Totally Impossible: A Reader in Black Women's History (Carlson Publishing, Inc., 1995)