In the summer of 1881, African-American servants organized a strike for higher wages and to maintain their 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 conditions of their work in Atlanta. She focuses on how these women shaped the meaning of freedom through workplace resistance, the exercise of political rights, and the strengthening of institutions during the latter part of the 19th century. The purpose of this essay is to examine the covert ways in which African American domestic workers constructed their worlds of work, negotiation, resistance, and community. Hunter begins her analysis by integrating the experiences of African American women workers into a broader examination of political and policy issues. economic conditions in the New South. According to Hunter, the period between 1877 and 1915 is critical to understanding social transformations in most southern cities and issues of race, class, and gender complicate this transformation. Examining the lives of black domestic workers reveals the complexity of their struggles to maintain their autonomy from white employers and officials. For example, African American women built institutions and frequently left their jobs in response to attempts by Southern whites to control their labor and mobility. Hunter carefully situates these individual tactics of resistance within the capitalist development of the New South and white attempts to restrict the political and social freedoms of emancipated slaves. African American women migrating 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 that they actively participated in the economic, social and political life of the New South. Furthermore, the private and public spheres granted to white women were non-existent for African-American women. Hunter concludes that the strategies employed by the washerwomen's strike are, at best, inconclusive and that evidence is lacking as to whether their demands for wage increases ever came to fruition. She notes, however, that the washerwoman has maintained a semblance of independence that most workers do not enjoy. We specialize in what is completely impossible: a reader on black women's history (Carlson Publishing, Inc.., 1995)