HISTORICAL NOTE
Isabel Eaton's “Special Report on Negro Domestic Service in the Seventh Ward” was a trailblazing documentation of the social and economic conditions of the single most prominent occupation among blacks in nineteenth-century urban America. Eaton's contribution to sociology and history, however, was largely ignored in reviews at the time The Philadelphia Negro was published and in critical assessments in the years since.
Eaton was born in 1858 into an established New England family. Her father, General John Eaton, was an educator noted for his assistance to slave “contraband” during the Civil War and for his position as the Superintendent of Education in Tennessee during Reconstruction. The younger Eaton embraced her fathers passion for justice and was active in social reform, anti-racism, and anti-war activities throughout her life. She was graduated from Smith College in 1888 and received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University ten years later, based on the research she conducted in Philadelphias Seventh Ward.1 Her thesis was published a year later as the “Special Report.”
Eaton was introduced to community-based social work by Jane Addams, the leading proponent of the social settlement house movement and the founder of Hull House in Chicago. As a member of the College Settlement Association (CSA), which co-sponsored the research for The Philadelphia Negro, and as a recipient of its Dutton Fellowship, Eaton did settlement work in New York City's East Side in the early 1890s, which enabled her to conduct a comparative study of the wages and living conditions of garment workers in New York City and Chicago.2 She continued her study of the working class when she was awarded another fellowship from the CSA to live and work in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward.
Eaton's report followed on the heels of another pioneering book, Domestic Service (1897), written by her mentor and friend, Lucy Maynard Salmon.3 Salmon's book was one of the first social science inquiries into the subject of domestic service, though it focused almost exclusively on white women in the North. Eaton's study, like Salmon's, emphasized the importance of the social stigma of domestic work, but Eaton's work was distinctive in highlighting the racial implications of domestic service, which for blacks were too often reminiscent of slavery.
Eaton's report is also remarkable because of the circumstances under which it was produced. The professional and personal collegiality between Eaton and DuBois was unusual for a white woman and a black man. They remained life-long friends and worked together on such projects as the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.4 DuBois supervised the research and writing of Eaton's Masters thesis at Columbia, although he had no formal ties to the university. Eaton, too, left her mark on the text of The Philadelphia Negro, as is indicated by her signature on a few extended footnotes.5 A practical outgrowth of Eaton and DuBois's collaboration, and perhaps a testimony to the respect they had gained from the residents of the Seventh Ward, was their work in helping to establish the League of Colored Mechanics in 1897.6
TERA W. HUNTER
Department of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
1 Herbert Aptheker, foreword to The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1899; reprint, Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1975), p. 6; The Crisis, 10 (May 1915): 66-67.
2 “Receipts and Expenditures of Cloak Makers in Chicago,” in Hull-House Maps and Papers, by Residents of Hull-House (New York: Thomas Y Crowell and Co., 1895), pp. 75-90.
3 Domestic Service (New York: Macmillan Co., 1897; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972).
4 Mary Jo Deegan, “W.E.B. DuBois and the Women of Hull-House, 1895-1899,”American Sociologist 19 (Winter 1988): 307; The Crisis, 10 (May 1915): 66-67; Aptheker, foreword, p. 26.
5 Aptheker, foreword, p. 18. See footnotes on pp. 92, 129-131, and 336-339 of the current edition.
6 Aptheker, foreword, p. 12.