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Why The Women in My Family Don’t Scrub Floors
As black women, we’ve never had the luxury of choosing to be homemakers
Whenever my 20-year-old son comes to visit me in California, the third thing he does (after requesting his favorite home-cooked meal and rolling around with the dog) is drive over to Target to buy a new mop.
The kid has never once seen me wash a floor. Because I never have. Neither have my mother and grandmother.
Mother and Gran were awesome cooks, haphazard launderers, and one-step-ahead-of-the-health-department housekeepers (like me) — but their vigilance about making us kids wipe our feet or remove our shoes before we entered the house wasn’t about cleanliness. It was about race. And gender.
When my mother graduated from high school in 1955, it was Gran’s fervent wish that she find a job where she could “sit on her ass” all day long. She didn’t want her daughter stuck in a factory, on her feet for hours, sweating out the summers and freezing through the winters, tolerating white men’s wandering hands and white women’s racist jokes.
And factory jobs were plum! Gran’s older sisters were all maids, nannies, and washerwomen for affluent white ladies on the west side of town. I remember my Aunt Beulah, well into her sixties, standing outside in the…
