The Waitress Workforce

Waitresses are a cornerstone, though often underappreciated and underpaid, of the food industry. Cristen and Caroline serve up a history of this female-dominated service sector and why gender is always on the menu.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff. Mom never told you from how stuff
works not cold. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today we're talking about waitresses.
Although Caroline is that term a bit pasta in the

(00:23):
same way as stewardesses are now referred to as flight attendants.
You know, I thought about this too. Um, And yes,
you definitely don't want to call flight attendants stewardesses because
I know this because Sally, my mother, is one of
those flight attendants. Um, But waitresses, I feel like there's

(00:44):
a gray area. Um. One thing we read was talking
about how waitress is such a past a term that
it's it's too focused on gender and feminizing, feminizing the profession.
But you and I when we did our episode on
women sculptors called them sculptresses. I don't know. I think

(01:05):
it just depends on the context. We have a little
bit of distance from having called women sculptures sculptures. Is
so it's kind of like calling women ladies. Yeah, I
don't know. I mean, there's the gender neutral default of server.
But honestly, part of me feels a little strange referring
to people as servers because it sounds more distinctly servile.

(01:28):
Sure it is the service industry. Yes, well, it's kind
of like actor and actress. But there's still that distinction
there too, and that maybe we're more used to calling
them waitresses or actresses when we should be calling them
all actors or waiters. Clearly we need some servers of
any gender to weigh it on this. Um the closest

(01:52):
I've gotten to being a waitress and we're just going
to default to waitress for this episode. Well, yeah, because
we are talking a lot about gender. Surprise, surprise. Yeah,
so it's gonna be all waitress from here on out,
just like that Carrie Russell film which I watched so
long ago and I'm never going to see it again.
I haven't seen it, and I love Carrie Russell. Was
it any good? No? Really hurts me. To the closest

(02:16):
I've gotten to being Gary Russell in waitress is working
as the fry girl at a Chick fil A when
I was in high school. Really, Oh my god, I
love this mental image of you working the fire. Oh wait,
I completely forgot. Yes, I have been a server. I
worked for a catering company in college. I think I
just completely blocked that out because it was it was

(02:39):
a pretty dismal job because at the beginning of the
night it was okay. We would work a lot of
wedding receptions, but as the night progressed and people had
more to drink, the job became tougher. And it was
definitely one of those jobs where drunk men would consistently

(03:00):
quest me to smile as I'm holding a tray and
also wearing a bow tie, and I just wanted to
explain to them that that was the last thing I
wanted to do. Would beat a smile and a bow tie,
because you know, if I had tap shoes on as well,
then then maybe I would do a little song and
dance for them. Well, how would you hold the tray?
Study though, Well, I'd be that good Caroline. I'd still

(03:22):
be held my tray, do a little soft shoe. No,
I mean, I think I think it's the same thing
with speaking of stewartesss versus flight attendants, I think it's
the same thing. There's that sense of entitlement that this person,
this woman is just there for your every whim. My
mother has been a flight attendant PS for forty six years,
and so she has some stories along those lines. Um,

(03:44):
but yeah, I think that in any profession where a
woman is in a position to serve people, she is
frequently subjected to basically sentiments of entitlement. Well, it seems
like there's an expectation that you should appear happy while
doing so. Yeah, you should be happy to serve me,
don't you want to tip? Caroline? Have you ever been

(04:06):
a server? No? Not in not in any real life capacity,
just in your dreams. I dreams. No. My family and
I gonna be real vague here because I think it'll
be funnier. My family and I go to this place, uh,
this community on a lake in Michigan every summer and
it has a central dining hall, clubhouse type thing. It's

(04:29):
very dirty dancing minus Patrick Swayze and the dancing, and
it sounds more culty the way you're describing it. You
wouldn't be wrong. Uh but anyway, now I worked there
as a as a waitress in the summers. What was
it like, Um, well, you're just serving families that you know,
so like when you mess up, everybody's really understanding, and

(04:52):
it's all families and they're all they've all known you
for a million years. So nobody's there's no like sexual
harassment in that job. Well, thank good this consider, although
I'm sure that happens so often. We're actually gonna get
into that later in the podcast. Something to look forward to. Um.
This got me thinking though, too, about how a good

(05:13):
girlfriend of mine is working as a server at one
of the nicest restaurants in Atlanta and it is so
emotionally taxing for her because the standards are so intense
and everyone has a job to do. Like she had

(05:35):
a really huge breakthrough at work because she was allowed
to serve cheese, present the cheese cart to tables, and
I mean it's it's at that level where you do
get excited if you are deemed appropriate enough to present cheese.
But it's like someone comes out and does the chairs
and then the napkins and all of the different courses.

(05:58):
But if your friends, so your friends working at at
a really nice, upscale restaurant, does she face does she
complain about facing sexual harassment the way that maybe friends
of yours have faced at less expensive places. No, not
at all. The major complaint is the intense standards and
how brutal the kitchen environment is. Where if you where

(06:22):
if say she's serving cheese and trips and spills cheese
on someone's lap. Oh my god, that's like my heaven,
please spill cheese on me. Then she would be publicly
reprimand that's awkward for everyone. Well, by public, I mean
you know, in front of other people. It would be
known to the rest of the staff that she messed up.

(06:44):
So it's intense, I mean, and I would be curious
to know from other people working in the restaurant industry
out there if there is that spectrum of high end
hell coming from more from internal standards, where as the
lower end diner style restaurants might face more customer related difficulties. Well,

(07:08):
it sounds like she's working in a place that puts
a premium on service, not necessarily gendered or feminine flirty service.
And one thing that we did find out and doing
this look into waitressing in general, is that it tended
to be easier for servers who were in like quote
unquote those gender neutral jobs where it was just serving,

(07:30):
it was just waiting rather than waitressing. It was easier
to resist feelings of subservience and entitlement. Sure because in
this role of waitress specifically, as obviously we're gonna talk
about in much greater detail. You're it's it's really not
so much about the food, it's about the presentation, and

(07:52):
by presentation, it's your presentation and interaction with all these people,
which also to Caroline, just thinking about it right now,
considering I level of introversion, like having to constantly be
interacting with other people and earning my money through that,

(08:13):
I can only imagine how exhausting that is. Oh yeah,
Oh for sure, I am. I think I'm a nice
combo of introversion and extroversion. Real nice combo, real nice,
real nice combo serves me well and poorly all at
the same time. Um, but I think it would be
exhausting too, having to like put on a face, uh

(08:35):
smiley face all the time. Yeah, I mean I blocked
out as that I mentioned like five minutes ago, just
being a cater waiter in college. Um. Well, let's get
into not any more of our personal history, but more
restaurant history, because we've talked in podcast past about barmaids,

(08:57):
women behind the bar, and we've talked us around these
kinds of emotional labor issues, women getting out in public,
and these early occupations that were gradually opened up to women. Yeah,
so early in our country's history, Um, everybody was sort
of pitching in, you could say, And so we had

(09:19):
you know, the bars, the ends, the taverns. The wife
and children and daughters were expected to pitch in and
serve the customers. So if we're looking at the early
early history of waitresses, I guess we could trace it
back to those early in owners daughters. You know, slinging
slinging beers, slinging sliders, slinging fliders, early fliders. Yeah, ye,

(09:44):
all these sliders. Um. But the first formal restaurant uh
in the country is Delmonico's in New York, which opened
in eighteen seven. But restaurants and eating out as a
thing wouldn't become common until the mid nineteenth century. People
were very like, wait, going outside my home and eating

(10:05):
somewhere and paying someone to bring me food. This is
so strange. It does feel strange sometimes to be honest. Um,
but those first servers at Delmonico's would have been gents,
not ladies, snappily dressed. Chance, they would have had probably
the same type of bow tie you wore as a
cater waiter. So I'm just imagining a little Loomier from

(10:27):
beating the beast, running around Yeah, yeah, French and on fire. Yeah,
because apparently by nineteenth century men, my brain imagines just candlesticks. Yeah.
I think that's fine. It's a strange association, but we'll
run with it. Um. So yeah, like Chris and said,
it was mostly dudes serving food. That was the standard
because you know, women just weren't leaving the house to work.

(10:49):
That was unheard of. And there was a shortage of
jobs for candlesticks. That's right, don't forget the candlesticks. So
so where do we even get waitresses? Where did where
did waitresses first emerge the Wild West? I know, I
love it. I love wild West history. This is coming
from a Smithsonian magazine article and Stephen Fried's book Appetite

(11:11):
for America. Fred Harvey in the Business of Civilizing the
Wild West One Meal at a Time. That is such
a long subtitle. But so who is Fred Harvey? What's
going on? So? Fred Harvey was this British entrepreneur who
launched the Harvey House restaurant chain in the eighteen seventies.

(11:32):
And this whole idea was that there was a railroad line,
the Santa Fe Railroad, that ran between Chicago and l
A and you would have these you know, stops along
the way, and there were very few options for people
to eat, and people would scam customers at these old
timey train stop like sandwich shacks, where they would they

(11:56):
would only have a few minutes to dash out of
the train grab a sandwich. But at these early restaurants
pre Fred Harvey, the proprietors were so evil they would
delay serving food until they knew the train was about
to take off, so people wouldn't have time to eat,
and they would essentially be like, oh, too bad, and

(12:18):
they would not pack it up to go. They would
just snag the food and then reserve it to the
next batch of customers. The West, Yeah, talk about wild West.
So basically you had a bunch of jerks moving out
west serving people sandwiches. Almost that is my hell. Spilling
cheese on me is my heaven. Snatching a sandwich away

(12:40):
from me is my hell. We'll imagine you'd get the
cheese spilled on you perhaps, but then that sort of
would snatch it back, take it away. No, once it's
on my body, it is mine. I'm sorry. I have
to get back to that train. Well, so Harvey's whole
vision for this chain of restaurants, which were America's first
chain restaurants of the way, was to offer workers and

(13:02):
rail travelers and pioneers the creature comforts that they were
lacking in the dusty old Frontier, and part of that
was women. There had always been a few waitresses in
Harvey's less hostile Frontier locations, places that were not as
like we're going to have shootouts over lunch um, even

(13:22):
including his niece Florence, but it was still thought too
dangerous to have vulnerable single women working farther out west.
But things would eventually change, and Harvey would eventually replace
his majority mail servers with women for a couple of reasons,
pretty much all of which had to do with trying

(13:43):
to exert civilizing forces on the brutish uh male servers
and employees, but also, of course the male patrons who
were shooting up the place and hold ups were common.
It was the wild West, after all. People were getting
into brawls, rabble rousers, and desperadoes are just coming into
the restaurant ordering food and refusing to pay. And what

(14:05):
are you going to do if you're like a server
with a gun in your face. You're like, well, okay,
I guess you can have that sandwich, the classic Desperado
dine and dash. I mean it was wild back then. Yeah,
the waiters would also be carrying guns themselves. Everyone's packing heat.
Everyone's pack and heat. Well, you have to keep in
mind too, that it was super common. There was a

(14:25):
lot of racial conflict. It was super common to hire
freed slaves, former slaves out west to be servers, bus boys, cook,
that kind of thing. But racism was rampant because not
only did you have former slaves moving west, but you
had former Confederate soldiers moving west to become cowboys. And
everyone wants to get a new lease on life. But
that doesn't mean that racism just disappears. And so a

(14:48):
lot of the black servers, blackmail servers, would be packing
heat just to protect themselves. And you can imagine that
that breeds a lot of tension when everyone is on
edge because nobody likes each other there. Well, so we
get a turning point in Harvey's restaurants when a brawl
breaks out among the black mail employees at the Raton
in New Mexico location and Harvey ends up firing the

(15:11):
whole staff, and it's like, I'm fed up with this,
Like everybody's fighting, there's all this violence, there's all of
this racial tension. I'm not going to have it anymore.
And he tasks new manager Tom Gable was saving the day,
and Gable in eighty three has a pretty novel solution,
just kick all the black guys out and replaced them

(15:31):
with white female waitresses. So the solution to racism is
to just, you know, kick black men to the curb
and give some white ladies some jobs. And that is
the uncomfortable chapter of How waitresses emerged in America. Yeah, well,

(15:51):
this is a policy that was expanded across Harvey's company,
getting rid of any male servers, particularly black mail servers,
and replacing them with white female waitresses, specifically though unmarried
women from Kansas. He would provide room and board and
good pay in order to secure a civilizing force. So

(16:16):
this was a racist policy across the board. You were
institutionally firing black men and hiring exclusively white women. So
if you know, a black guy gets fired and his
wife needs a job, she couldn't pick up the slack
because she would not get the job because of the
color of her skin. Yeah, exactly. And so they brought
in these women from a completely different state who had

(16:38):
no families, nothing to you know, distract them, so to speak.
And they didn't have any local ties, so they couldn't
get caught up in like danger and drama of the
wild West. They were they were part of this front
line of women who were leaving the home, leaving their
families or their rural settings and looking for ways to

(17:01):
support themselves and also get a little excitement. Yeah, I
thought it was really interesting that sort of intentional isolation
of not har we not wanting to hire local women.
But that also speaks to the intensity of their jobs.
Not to say that, you know, serving today is not
still very intense. But this was an entire lifestyle because

(17:24):
Harvey girls would live together in a dorm with a
female chaperone. Of course, bedtime was eleven pm except for
Friday nights, and they wore out or uniforms on outfits,
uniforms very reminiscent of maids, like upper class maids uniforms,
so you would have black and white, no makeup. They

(17:44):
also had to sign a contract and the kicker remain
unmarried for at least six months. Yeah, and then you've
got a bonus if you stayed at the end of
the six months. If you were, you're still there and
you're still single, that you've got to on us. And
then if he stayed for the full year, like things
started to financially look up for you and Harvey like

(18:07):
he he treated his company, not that you shouldn't, but
he treated his company and his restaurants like a machine.
I mean he had a hand in everything. He wanted
to know at the beginning of every day, how many
steaks were served, how much bacon did people eat? And
so part of that was very much like I don't
care about the black mail servers. Are they causing trouble

(18:29):
whether you know he's blaming them for causing trouble. Oh, well,
will white women come in and be a civilizing force. Well,
I don't care about them either. I just want them
to be robots serving food in the most efficient way possible. Well,
and there was a sexism too of assuming women are
easier to manage, they have the calming influence and would be,
you know, the positive presence for those lonely men. Men

(18:49):
would want to come to these restaurants in order to
have a little female companionship at least daring one meal,
and not to mention that they were very full wordable.
This is the theme every single time we talked about
the feminization of an industry. Women were cheap. I mean, granted,
all of their living expenses were paid, but Harvey girls

(19:12):
earned lapping seventeen dollars per month compared to mail waiters
who would make around forty eight dollars. But they didn't
have to pay their room and board. But still I
have a feeling that even with their living expenses factored in,
there is a gender wage gap. Well, yeah, because there

(19:34):
is um Yeah, And so Tom Gable Uh, talking about
this policy much later said, and that is how I
brought civilization to New Mexico. Those waitresses were the first
respectable women the cowboys and miners had ever seen, that is,
outside of their own wives and mothers. Those roughnecks learned

(19:55):
manners and so there, I mean, you have the constant
and consistent sta areotype of woman as nurturer, woman as
pure and good motherly virgin Mary influence on Ruff and Harryman,
and these paternalistic rules set in place in order to

(20:16):
maintain the respectability of these younger, unmarried women working out
in the public and interacting directly with men, unmarried or not.
And I guess we should say to that. And I'm
not sure at what point this term comes into youth.
But the Harvey girls were not called waitresses because waitress
was a term that was lowlier than made at the time.

(20:39):
So not a great opinion of these women who are
serving food to men. So by the turn of the
twentieth century, women are taking cues from the Harvey girls
and entering restaurants in force. So by the late eighteen
hundreds early nineteen hundreds, they would often take the place

(20:59):
of mail workers on strike. Yeah, so they're basically being scabs.
Although they're not in unions at this point quite yet,
they will be like in five minutes from now, um,
But yeah, they would take the place of male workers because,
like christ And said, they were cheaper. And so by
the nine twenties and thirties you have the rise of
diners in America. We saw the rise of restaurants fifty

(21:21):
years or seventy years earlier. Uh, and then we get
the rise of diners accompanied by the continued rise of
female servers. And keep in mind this is during the depression.
Women would work for lower pay. Employers thought that they
could attract male customers but also make female customers feel
more welcome and comfortable in these public dining settings. And

(21:41):
even within the context of the depression, diners were still
stable business because going to get a slice of pie
at the diner was the affordable luxury that some families
could still indulge in. Yeah, exactly. Well, so, as more
and more women do enter the workforce as restaurant workers,

(22:02):
as servers and waitresses, they become a major labor force
almost right off the bat. This is really neat to see,
and a lot of this information is coming from historian
Dorothy Sue Cobble. Her name is all over the place
in terms of the labor history of women in restaurants,
and frankly, it could be its own episode to talk
about the labor history of waitresses. But she and several

(22:24):
other sources talk about sociologist and undercover waitress Francis Donovan,
who in nineteen seventeen she embeds secretly with a bunch
of waitresses and writes a book about it, and she
describes these groups of women as saying, here we have
a feminist movement and ideals embodied in a class, so

(22:44):
that should set the tone that these women are not
to be messed with. And on that same note, waitress
union started emerging in the early twentieth century and and
really what made them strong was that most of these
women were working full time, year round, and they also
saw their work as vital to supporting their families or
if they were single, supporting themselves. And there was to

(23:09):
this this push for dignity in the work that they did. UM.
In the same way as if you talk to professional
servers today, like career waiters or waitresses, they saw what
they did not just as slinging food, but as a
true craft. Yeah, they consider themselves to be craftswomen that

(23:30):
this whole job, it's not just like uh an assembly
line of putting sandwiches together, which is an amazing assembly line. Um.
They were literally like, no, I have to perform for you.
And this is something you hear from waitresses and waiters today,
like I have to put on a smile, I have
to act the part, to act correctly to make you

(23:51):
feel comfortable. I've got to bring out the food in
just such a way. I have to anticipate every need.
And so they're really putting together this perform meants in
order to make the customer happy and comfortable. And as
one of those customers, it's so apparent when you do
have someone who is a legit like crafts person server,

(24:12):
because it does make a difference in the entire dining
experience of making you not only enjoy what you're eating
a little bit more, but feel special while it's happening. Yeah,
we all like to feel a little special, which is
why I love McDonald. Let's take care of me. You
are loving it. So these unions were mainly concerned with
helping members advanced economically and controlling workplace conditions, and many

(24:36):
also had benefit funds to help when women got sick
and provide money to the closest relative when a member died.
They were really trying to fill that gap that existed
in helping support women workers. But in the early nineteen hundreds,
men weren't exactly super helpful with these waitresses organizing like

(24:58):
some would join co ed local unions, but they often
would have to form their own because their male coworkers
would ignore them. Um. They were also patronizing moral reform
and progressive era groups that were stymying these women getting
together and um, advocating on their own behalfs. Yeah, basically

(25:20):
trying to speak for them, like, oh, you poor helpless
woman who's having to work in these terrible conditions, let
me tell you how to live your life. And there
were also, frankly, a lot of internal divisions among the
women working in restaurants. I mean, that's no surprise, people
are different, but these divisions were based on marital status, race, socioeconomics. Uh.
Some other obstacles to women waitresses organizing and achieving what

(25:42):
they wanted were feuds with employers who either underestimated them
and or just did not care about the people working
for them. If Taylor as old as time, Taylor is
old as time. Kristen just keeps making beauty and the
beast references not even meaning to I don't know where
this is coming from in my brain, although I am
a little concerned now to be honest, well we'll have

(26:04):
to have a movie night. Um. But yeah, so they
these women were a powerful force, and it's it's really
cool to read about because so often we just talked
about how terrible everything is for women, and not that
it wasn't terrible, and that these women didn't have to
experience awful conditions and terrible customers and things like that,
but they really form this incredible force of workers. Well,

(26:27):
and this echoes to our podcast a while back on
how teaching became women's work. You have a similar kind
of thing of those first women teachers organizing and advocating
for themselves. So back to waitresses. In nineteen oh one,
the San Francisco Union pushed for a ten hour work day,

(26:48):
down from a way more than ten hour work day. Um,
and you had more employers going along with the nineteen
o two waitress wage scales and working a remant to
employ union members only grant a six day work week
and pay eight dollars a day and nine dollars a night.

(27:09):
So yeah, we're we're seeing very quickly after the formation
of these women's only waitress unions, employers starting to be like,
oh god, oh okay, well you guys are are allowed,
so I'll give you some stuff, but uh, some other
highlights are in Like in nineteen o two, over just
a few months, the Chicago waitress Union in particular went

(27:32):
from forty one to fifteen hundred members, and they were
led by Shiro Elizabeth Maloney who successfully demanded more pay
and fewer hours, and Maloney is credited with saying, I
think a girl should be entitled to live decently and
properly and enjoy some of the things in life that
her employer wants his children to have. And when those

(27:53):
employers sort of stood in their way, these waitress unions
would fight back. For instance, in nineteen oh eight, after
waitresses won a wage in our concessions in Seattle, which
by the way, these were among the first waitress unions,
restaurant owners refused to go along with it and proposed
a return to working seven days a week. Good grief, um,

(28:17):
But all waitresses but one struck in solidarity, forcing employers
back down after just twelve hours. Yeah, the the employers
were all just going like, oh jeez, this is these
women have opinions. This is terrifying. Well, I mean, who's
gonna serve their food? Who's going to create that welcoming
environment for customers without them? Exactly? And in ve workdays

(28:41):
were legally limited to ten hours, though waitresses typically still
worked longer hours. And moving forward in time just a
little bit, waitress unions were weakened somewhat by defections. A
lot of them left for co ed hospitality type unions,
but they rebounded during and after World War One thanks
to things like the feminization of food service work, and

(29:03):
also the fact that co ed unions tilted more female
as male participation waned amid prohibition, because keep in mind
that wiped out male dominated bartending. But one lettle downside
of this a little more racism for you. A lot
of these unions restricted membership to white women only until

(29:24):
the nineteen thirties, so women of color were encouraged to
form their own unions or join existing ones. Yeah. And
another uncomfortable little blip in uh waitress union history was
that a lot of white waitresses were discouraged from working at,
for instance, Chinese restaurants. There was a lot of hostility

(29:44):
out west, particularly toward Asian business people, and so the
unions took a very uncomfortable stance there. Wait, so what
is the discomfort that white women couldn't take those jobs? Why?
Because they weren't wanted there? No, Well, the unions, the
white the whites only unions did not want their members

(30:06):
working at Asian run establishments. Yeah, okay, yeah, that happened,
probably still does. Um, but we've talked a lot about
this organizing within these early groups of waitresses. But now
let's talk about the perceptions of waitresses, like how we

(30:27):
culturally view them so public perception wise, the biggest risk,
it seems like, of being a waitress in the early
twentieth century was that you would be seen as a prostitute. Yeah,
that whole cultural perception of Oh, woman's working outside the
home for money, she's a prostitute, will and interacting with men. Yeah,

(30:51):
she's prostituting herself. But she's also vulnerable because you know,
women are helpless. They can't do anything to protect themselves
or make their own decisions. And this is a concept.
If you've read Uh, Devil in the White City by
Eric Larson or Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott,
these are all focused in that whole progressive era in Chicago,

(31:11):
you've got more women moving to cities, and women being
preyed upon by evil men looking to sell them into
prostitution and things like that. Women coming to the city
with all of these ideals like I'm going to make
something of myself and be independent, and then they end
up working in a brothel. Not that that didn't happen,
but this was like a huge cultural fear around this time,

(31:32):
the panic of white slavery particularly, yes, exactly, And so
at the same time you've got women going into restaurants
and people are panicking about that. So in nineteen twelve,
Chicago's Juvenile Protective Association issues a report claiming that girls,
of course, because we can't call them women, took this
waitressing work because hey, it doesn't require any skill, it

(31:54):
includes meals, and it's exciting because that's all women care about.
It's just a little bit of excitement. But hut that
they could stand the hard work, heavy trays, sore feet,
and rude men for just a couple of years before
they burned out. And so they point out that waitresses,
they state this is fact, that waitress has had no
hope for a bright future, that they lacked support systems

(32:16):
and what the report writers considered to be a home,
and that many were escaping, like we said, maybe bad
family situations or rural homes to come to the big city.
So you get all of these tales of the beleaguered, overworked,
underpaid waitress falling prey to some man's advance, some some

(32:36):
man who will come and say, oh, you've worked a
double shift, you're on your break, you need somewhere to
lie down. You can come to my place in a brothel,
in a brothel. But the fact of the matter was,
though the beliaguered and overworked and under paid part seems
pretty on point, considering that these women were being expected
to work seven days a week for at least ten

(32:58):
hours a day at least east yeah, at least. But
it's interesting how tacked onto that it's the assumption that
that makes them vulnerable to sex essentially, as opposed to
just looking at looking at it all realistically and realizing like, yes,
there are probably women who want to hang out with
dudes on their break. There are some women who don't.
Some women just want to lie down in the basement,

(33:21):
like or Rather than improving working condition, blaming it on
women for doing it to themselves, inviting this kind of
sin potentially into their lives, that's right, And so a
lot of it ties into social fears about women who
weren't falling in line with domestic expectations. Why are you
coming into the big city to get a job when

(33:41):
you should be coming into the big city to become
a wife. So back to that undercover sociologist we mentioned
in the first half of the show, Frances Donovan, who's
in Chicago working as a waitress in v She was
similarly judgmental about this whole thing. Um. She wrote about
women who quote failed to realize her ideal of domesticity

(34:05):
and fanned fears of women resorting to quote semi prostitution
and would end up getting abortions. Yeah, she said something
like the all too common solution of getting an abortion
or something to that effect. That like, yeah, fanning those
fears about women being on their own in the big city,
and she was this is a woman who was super

(34:26):
hung up on sex. By the way, here's how she
described women getting jobs in restaurants. She says, restaurants want
women who are young and good looking. The advertisements announced
it in most managers insist on it. For the most part,
the girl who was good looking has her pick of
the jobs for everywhere. The waitress is playing a game.
It is this which makes her life hard as it

(34:47):
is fascinating to her. It is a woman's game, the
sex game. And of course we should keep in mind
too that Donovan, during her undercover days as a waitress,
was scandalized by the staffs, sexual banter and joking. Women
who would be either joking with each other being all
body and you know, joking about their mail co workers,
or women and men joking among themselves. She was. She

(35:10):
thought that this was so dirty. She almost had to
lie down and fan herself. She couldn't believe it. I mean,
I'm kind of surprised that Francis pulled up being an
undercover server. Well she didn't. In one of the sources
we were looking at that talked about Francis, um she
was totally pinpointed by a couple of women. A lot
of women were sympathetic every time she got fired because

(35:31):
she was a terrible waitress, because she was a sociologist.
I'm not saying sociologist can't be waitresses, but you know
what I mean. But a couple of some of the
places she worked, a couple of the older, more experienced
waitresses were like, I've got your number. You better not
let any of these other broads figure you out. Although
she was a far more progressive mind, the soul Francis

(35:52):
Donovan undercover waitress incident reminds me of Barbara Aaron Reich's
book Nickel and Dimed, where she goes around the country
working undercover in these blue collar, essentially female dominated sector
So she is a waitress at one point. I think
she works at waffle House for a while, and she

(36:13):
gets the job at Walmart and she's a maid, etcetera, etcetera.
And I had a hard time getting through the book
because I listened to the audio book where she was
reading it, and there were times when she came across
very Francis donovitney of oh these poor women, and I'm
just and she would take breaks and go back to
her far more comfortable, upper middle class life, wherein at

(36:38):
one point she bemoans failing a drug test. I think
maybe it was when she was getting a job at Walmart,
because when she was in her break in her real life,
she decided she just needed to smoke some weed just
to relax. I was like, this is no you're this
feels so classes. And I know a lot of listeners
have read this book and it's it's an important book,

(37:01):
but I think it's interesting to see how those class
tensions are still so apparent. Because this job has been
respectable for women, but only women of a certain lower
income level. It's always been kind of looked down upon.
We've pitied waitresses historically, it seems like, yeah, I I
think so too, And I mean, speaking of pay, it's

(37:25):
interesting to see that there were divisions among waitresses too
when it came to pay and tips, because women who
at this time, we're working in places that served alcohol,
obviously this is pre prohibition reviewed as lower class by
their fellow waitresses who worked in in dry establishments and
in restaurants as opposed to places that's had bars. And

(37:49):
it's part of that interesting dynamic around earning tips that
Chicago Juvenile Protective Association report had found that waitresses in general,
all in general across the board were looked down upon
by society at large for accepting tips. It goes back
to those ideas of like women accepting money for work.
So it's interesting that women who worked at dry establishments

(38:12):
would look down on women who are in higher tips
at places that served alcohol, because you have to wonder like,
is this just internalized? Are they internalizing the views of
society large? Is this a little bit of internalized fear
or conflict or misogyny when they're looking at their fellow
waitresses and being like, well, you're lower class because you
serve alcohol and make more money. Well, yeah, I think

(38:35):
that that's absolutely going on. But there's still that that
gendered stealing within this whole thing, because it's not like
women who are waitresses could necessarily climate a kind of ladder.
Guys would be the managers, men would be the business owners.
Can I go up on a brief tangent about Mildred Pierce? Okay,
so some of these sources, Caroline cited the nineteen forty

(38:59):
five film addutation of the novel Mildred Pierce, and it
stars Joan Crawford and listeners, if you haven't seen it,
it's amazing. It's one of the best film noir examples
out there, and it was more recently adapted into an
HBO mini series starring Kate Winslet. I've seen it as well.
I prefer the movie. But anyway, so the whole thing

(39:21):
is about how Mildred Pierce, the title character, is in
post World War two America. Her husband cheats on her
and she basically or and he leaves, and so she's
left single mom with two kids. What's she's gonna do?
She eventually becomes a waitress, but she has to keep
it a secret from her daughter Vada because she looks

(39:45):
down at it on it so much because it's seen
as something that's only appropriate for lower class women to do.
And then she climbs the ladder and ends up opening
her own restaurant, becomes very successful, but the whole thing
is framed as this cautionary tale of women violating that
domestic role. So it's okay for us to serve the food,

(40:08):
but if you own the restaurant, then you are a
woman out of line. Well yeah, I mean that's also
post World War Two, when men are coming back from
the war to regain their position as men, manly men,
heads of the household. Women get out of those factory jobs,
get back to the house. So yeah, I'm sure a

(40:30):
piece of pop culture essentially that features a woman in
a publicly money making successful role was super threatening. Yeah,
And it's also too in that era where we get
that classic image of the waitress in that diner uniform

(40:51):
and she might be chewing gum, she's got a little patch,
she's happy enough to see you, And it's just kind
of interesting to think of all of those cultural forces combined,
which leads us up to today where it seems like
we haven't progressed that much in the position of waitresses
at large. Well, certainly not with pay. No, certainly not

(41:14):
with pay. Yeah, we're about to get into some super
depressing stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a
story over at CNN offering a little perspective. So, as
of May, two point four million waiters and waitresses in
the United States we're earning an average of ten forty
an hour. That sounds all right, No, it does now,
it doesn't does not sound like a living wage at all,

(41:36):
but it sounds a lot better than their actual wage
for a lot of them. So waitresses are tipped employees.
That's a category, meaning they're among the three point three
million Americans in forty two states who earned the federal
minimum hourly wage of two dollars in thirteen cents and

(41:57):
depend on tips for the rest of their income in
order to meet the seven dollars and twenty five cents
federal minimum wage bar for all workers. So suddenly that
ten dollars and forty cents is sounding a little bit better.
But you know, this country has had a lot of
wrangling recently over the minimum wage. And I shouldn't say recently,

(42:17):
I should say always um. But none of that wrangling
really includes tipped workers, people who they have a base
salary but then they earned tips on top of it.
The restaurant industry for a long time has painted these
people is like, they're fine, they're just complainers. They make
all of this money on top of their base salaries,
so we don't have to fight the minimum wage fight

(42:38):
for them. So that to thirteen figure has remained static
since the ninety one, which my jaw dropped to my
desk when I read that. Well, yeah, I kept I
read that and I thought there's no way, there's no
way that this is still accurate. But I, you know,
I'm looking at current statistics. Yes, yes see, And she

(43:00):
was like, yeah, it's still messed up. I would love
a shoot. Replied that way, And technically, if waitresses earned
less than that seven and our bar employers are supposed
to make up the difference with what's called a tip
credit to raise them up, but so many people don't
do that. Department of Labor investigation found that nearly of

(43:23):
restaurants in this country were guilty of some type of
wage and our violation. More than eleven hundred of those
cases involved tip credit. So they found that five point
five million dollars in back wages was owed to workers.
In other words, this is a quick p s A
to our listeners. Tip your servers. Yeah, none of this,

(43:46):
none of this thing that that you're angry. Podcasters here
have heard about about writing like l O L or
I only tip my church in the tip line, Like,
none of that. If you can't afford to tip your server,
you can't afford to go out to eat, exactly, and
tip them well because tipped workers are more likely to
live in poverty. And statistics on people earning the federal

(44:10):
minimum wage or below in general, nearly half of those
people are in food preparation and serving. Half of them. Also,
I mean they're pretty young. They're sixteen twenty four years old.
Seventy of them are white. Surprisingly, um, nearly half of
them are white women, and they're more likely to live
in the South. Yea. So this is a situation where

(44:32):
it's hard for people to break out of. If you
can't save enough money to pay your bills or buy
things for your children or go to the doctor. Like,
how are you supposed to climb out of that? Oh?
And consider too, how you know the benefits I'm sure
for being a server are are not handsome. No, they're

(44:53):
non existent. And when I lived in Augusta, Georgia, there
was one restaurant that um a few of my friends
and acquaintances worked at, like several of them, because it
was known that the owners provided certain benefits that were
about way above and beyond what any other restaurant in
the area provided. So people were actually able to go

(45:14):
to the doctor and have a life while they were
working as waiters and waitresses. But what I was curious
to learn more about is when it comes to those
tipped waiters who do make good money. Like my friend,
for instance, who's working in one of the best restaurants
in Atlanta. She's making a good wage. She's pretty comfortable

(45:35):
as a server right now. So what kinds of things
get you into those jobs? Because what one source that
I wanted but couldn't find, was on the demographics of
people in those higher end jobs, because I have a
feeling a lot of them look a lot alike, and
by that I mean not very diverse. I have a
feeling we have a lot of white people out in

(45:57):
those well paying hosting and serving jobs, and bull of
color still in the kitchen well, and in terms of diversity,
there's probably a certain look that goes along with it too.
In terms of just hiring based on conventional attractiveness, Yeah,
there was a study that came out in August in
the Journal of Economic Psychology which found not surprisingly at all,

(46:21):
that conventionally attractive waitresses earn more than twelve hundred dollars
per year more in tips. And it's not just old
fellows coming in and taking the waitress a little bit more.
It's almost also women. Female customers tipping attractive women more
than unattractive women. Yeah, and so the author's site the

(46:44):
stereotype of beautiful people being seen as more capable. So
it's interesting though that it's women driving the trend more
than men, although when you look at other things that
make up what people consider attractive, it does have a
lot more to do with tips coming from men. So
women who wear makeup, specifically lipstick, earned more tips from men.
This is coming from a set of studies in the

(47:05):
International Journal of Hospitality Management. They found that lipstick read
in particular ladies, was linked with men, but not women,
tipping more. The author's credit and increase and perceived attractiveness
and femininity of those women wearing red lipsticks. So goth
servers with black lipstick not gonna work. The lipstick effect

(47:28):
not the same, not the same man, not the same.
But of course, um, we have to discuss the issue
of diversity, which Kristen mentioned. Who earns less across the
board black servers. This is a study in sociological inquiry
from They surveyed people about their dining experience, what they tipped,
how they felt about their server, and survey respondents generally

(47:51):
viewed their black servers more favorably, but both black and
white patrons tipped those black servers less. Come on, people,
tip your servers, tip them handsomely, whether they're wearing red
lipstick or not. I mean, it's just it's it's such
a mess. And I wonder, with all of this tip

(48:12):
structure that has cheated and consistently seems like it's cheating
servers out of at least a steady, reliable income, how
that looks for a career. Servers stay in Europe where
you don't tip, you know, everything is built into what

(48:32):
you pay for your food. I mean, I wonder if
it's more equitable in places that where the tipping structure
is not there. I mean, yeah, that means that you
can't get that random five dollar tip, But that means
that you might know what to expect to take home
and not have to be like, well, let me put
on this red lipstick and a blond wig and lose
some weight and then maybe I'll get some more cash. Well,

(48:54):
the whole appearance thing is part of playing this game
that we've always had, I mean going to sex game,
Francis Kanovan's sex, sex game and jollies. We're about to
get into jollies. Get your jollies. Yeah. So back in,
a waitress told old Francis Donovan, you can't get along
in any kind of restaurant unless you jolly the customers.
Certainly the customers look for the jolly. Many times it

(49:17):
is simply friendly and innocent, but quite as often the
man starts to deliberately explore. The busier the waitresses, the
greater her difficulties, the more impatient and clamorous become the men.
And similarly, study decades later after this, you know server
is talking about looking for the jollies. Um. A study

(49:39):
and Work and Occupations found waitresses in particular performed gendered
scripts to provide good service, so it's easier to resist
subservience and performing the flirt role in restaurants where work
is classified as waitering rather than waitressing, because you take
that gendered layer out of it to some degree. And

(50:00):
of course, speaking of subservience and clamoring men, this is
the part of the podcast where we get to sexual harassment.
Waitresses have reported that sexual harassment from customers is common,
it's part of the job, and sometimes it's even ingrained
in the actual restaurant culture itself, whether it's outright or ambiguous,
which of course when somebody's like, no, I was just

(50:21):
complimenting you, why are you taking so personally, it's harder
to fight that kind of stuff when it's just so
insidious when you're working at Hooters, and when you're working
at Hooters, which is why the next podcast episode is
going to be all about breastaurant. That's right, I know,
stay tuned. But so report from the Restaurant Opportunities Centers
United found that the dynamics of women restaurant workers living

(50:46):
off tips, which forces them to rely on customers for
their income rather than their employer, forces them to tolerate
behavior that they wouldn't normally tolerate, and so they write
this dynamic contributes to the restaurant industry status as the
sing little largest source of sexual harassment claims in the
United States, and research links this prevalence of sexual harassment

(51:10):
with the very nature of the work. So there was
one study, for instance, that we found from two thousand
and eight in the journal Sociological Viewpoints that looked at
sexual harassment in the context of waitressing and nursing, because
the authors suggests that both waitresses and nurses perform work
that replicates traditional gender roles, that kind of emotional labor,

(51:32):
you know, food service, uh, all that kind of stuff.
Although like a like there some food service and nursing um.
But they tie that to something called the sexual spillover
theory um, which basically maintains that you have sexual harassment
occurring more often in jobs where people expect workers to
be available as sex objects. So the customers kind of

(51:55):
expect a little flirting and teasing and maybe even touching
to be part of the whole job. Yeah, and so
you're serving me, you're caring for me, you're being flirty.
Uh so naturally I'm just going to take advantage of that. Basically,
um Donovan would totally disapprove of any of this going on,

(52:18):
and the authors also point out that ideas about sexuality
of the role in sexual access to waitresses is perpetuated
by their expendability, because waitresses are viewed as expendable that
another one will always come along to fill the job.
Many might feel that they have to play this game
and be okay with harassment because they lack the leverage

(52:40):
or the secure job position to fight back, and so
many in this study, many waitresses in the study reported
that they felt trapped by the work culture and expectations
of both the employer and the customer. Yeah, because it's
not just risk posed by grab handy customers. You also
have shoes of the restaurant hierarchy with male employees and

(53:03):
managers using sexual harassment sort of as a tool over
these women. Because a lot of these women too, you know,
they are in this lower income job. They need that money,
they can't afford to get fired, so they might have
to put up with this kind of treatment from their bosses.
So does this then totally blow feminism out of the water.

(53:28):
Can you be someone who's basically putting up with sexual
harassment and just taking it with a smile and still
be a feminist. This was yes, well, yeah, yes, of course.
But this is something that Brittany Bronson, who is a
waitress who wrote a New York Times op ed in
April of this year, really struggles with. Yeah. So she

(53:50):
I think she's an adjunct professor somewhere, which is a
code word for it doesn't make a lot of money,
and she works as a higher end sounds like cocktail
server on the side, and she encounters a sexually charged
banter even on the lighter side, constantly, and it's horribly

(54:10):
demeaning and it's really part of the job, you know,
I mean she she cites men directly asking her to
come home with them. Yeah, And so she writes about
how she has to suppress her natural reaction in favor
of a good tip, because she writes that some days

(54:31):
I just feel like my rent is more important than
all of my ideals about the gender wage gap and
about feminism. And so she talks about how having that
job in Vegas in particular is even worse, she she
posits because Vegas it's the whole thing of like what
happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. I might be a

(54:51):
nice guy the rest of the time, but I'm here
and so I get to do whatever I want. My
family is not here. Well, it sounds like part of
that sexual spillover theory, where there's the assumption that, oh, well,
this is part of the job. You look attractive, you
are in perhaps a tight dress, and you're serving me.
So why shouldn't I be able to flirt with you

(55:12):
or outright harass you or even as she talks about
stalk you, I mean that. I mean that's the real
intense side of this too, is that it happens off
the clock as well. Yeah, and so she then talks
about because she's struggling with this whole thing of like, oh,
am I a bad feminist so to speak, because I'm
taking money from people and being harassed at the same time.

(55:35):
And that leads her to talk about some of her
coworkers who say, no, it's empowering. I'm taking advantage of
these men's like sexual appetites and being gross because if
I smile and make them feel good, they're giving me money.
So I get to take money from them and feel
superior to them in the process. I think it's challenging

(55:56):
to make a blanket statement about all of this, just
because there are so many different segments of serving. I
would imagine that life as a cocktail waitress in Las
Vegas is wildly different than working at a chili's in Buffalo.
You know, um, you will probably encounter far different working environments.

(56:17):
But it's pretty clear that there is a lot of
gendered baggage in this entire profession for women, and that
perhaps because it has been so dominated by women and
really fraught with class issues as well, that we there
hasn't been this societal push to improve their working conditions.

(56:40):
We take them for granted. I mean, these women are
very much often on the lower rungs socio economically, so
they're sort of held hostage to it. Yeah. I remember
when we did Kristen our lean in series about women
in the workplace. We did hear from some of our
listeners who work in the service industry, whether their waitresses
or some other position, and they were saying, like, cool,

(57:03):
that's great work advice, but like, I don't live that
kind of life, Like I don't, you know, it's not
between should I have children and hiring nanny? You know,
do I want to give up my shot at the
corner office. It's like, my life is very much more
day to day than that, And honestly, I don't have
any answers to it because I remember being the hourly

(57:26):
worker not terribly long ago, and even when working conditions. Thankfully,
I never encountered sexual harassment in any of the places
when I worked. But for instance, with that cater waiter job,
like I needed that money. It was actually like pretty
good money to make in a college town, and even
though there was a lot of humiliation that went along
with it, I needed the paycheck. So it's I mean, what,

(57:50):
what's what do you do? Well? I don't know. I
don't know either. It's just distressing that in this country
where we have this mythology around bootstrapp ups pulling yourself
up by your bootstraps. Uh, poor people are poor because
it's their fault. Like those two things don't they don't match.
You do have someone like a maybe a single mom

(58:13):
who's waitress saying to make sure that her daughter has
what she needs. Which is that CNN story for instance,
that we cited earlier. It's about a single mom doing
just that, um and she's working her butt off every
day just to scrat by. And so this is what
I mean. She's doing what all these people are saying
Americans should do. They should pull themselves up by their

(58:34):
bootsteps and work really hard. But it's not getting her anywhere.
I mean, I guess the bright side of it is
that you do have employers who recognize this and who
are making more efforts to provide things like benefits like
that restaurant that you mentioned um and provide living wages
and are getting a lot of positive press attention from that.

(58:56):
And you also have more local and state governments who
are proposing and implementing living wages for these kinds of
hourly workers because it's just such an untenable situation, especially
when you throw motherhood into into that mix. So I
have a feeling that there are a lot of folks
listening to this who can absolutely relate. You might be

(59:18):
listening to this podcast on a shift break, and we
want to hear from you because you're so right to
bring up the lean in conversation, because it leaves so
many people out who might want to get to the
point where Lenin is relevant, you know, but it's like
we need, we need the thing before you can even
be in a position to lean in. We we need

(59:41):
to pay our citizens, pay in in, We need to pay,
and we need to pay the people who live in
this country a wage that they can live on. And
one way that we can pitch in just just a
little bit to that is tipping your servers, your barista's,
whoever it is. Yeah, tip them. Remember this episode and

(01:00:02):
please tip so with that, we want to hear it
your tips. Mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com
is our email address. You can also tweet us at
Mom's Stuff podcast or messages on Facebook, and we've got
a couple of messages to share with you right now. Well,
Kristen and I have two letters here about our by

(01:00:24):
Philippe Dude rejection episode. This one's from a listener who
would like to remain anonymous. Uh, she says. First, there's
a great blog and instagram called Feminist Tender, which started
to show the backlash the founder face simply because she
has the word feminist and nothing else on her tender account.
She posts a lot of that backlash as well as

(01:00:46):
the nastiness that results when she rejects a guy's sexual advances,
and highly recommend you check it out. Second, well, I
agree that most of the time, the only know a
guy will take for an answer is I have a boyfriend, fiance,
husband as a married woman with a wedding ring, About
thirty to fifty of the time, guys at bars and
other places will not leave me alone, even when I

(01:01:07):
say I have a husband or I lift my hand.
A few months ago, I was at a party at
a friends of a friend's house and a guy would
not leave me alone for hours and kept trying to
like touch me, or compliment me or whatever, even after
I said I had a husband, and even after the
hostess told him I was happily married. I think it
bothered me more than usual because it wasn't a stranger

(01:01:30):
in a bar but a person within my social circle.
So I guess I expected more civilized behavior on his part.
Keep up the great work, and yeah, I'm sorry anonymous
listener that that sounds rough. Well, I've got a letter
here from M and her tail is very reminiscent of

(01:01:50):
the Ben Shane Grace Spellman story that we shared in
that Bi Phillip episode. So M rights. When I first
moved to a neighborhood, I met a online who lived
in the area. He was very funny in person, but
I wasn't interested. I told him how I felt, and
he seemed to accept it and invited me to meet
his friends the following week. But as soon as I arrived,

(01:02:10):
I discovered that he didn't take no for an answer.
Sad Boy figured I would have to go along with it.
When all of his friends were there, I realized that
the only way to get him away from me without
making a scene was to chat up one of his friends,
which worked. As soon as another man gave me attention,
he immediately stopped, unlike when I told him myself that
I wasn't interested. Turns out, Rescue Boy and I started

(01:02:31):
seeing each other, and sad Boy wasn't happy. He tried
getting his friends to ignore me. He refused to speak
to me in public, and even sent me a huge
ranting text about his wounded pride and how he never
tried to hit on me. I worked pretty hard to
make peace with it, but when the news about the
BuzzFeed writer came out she's referencing Grace Spellman listeners, the
sad Boy immediately put on his feminist hat and started

(01:02:54):
criticizing the creep because hypocrisy was staggering, and I realized
that this is his strategy for girls. He puts on
this big public display of feminism as an armor for
when actual women call him out on his creepy behavior.
I can't be sexist because I made a pro feminist
tweet today because of sad Boy. I really have a

(01:03:16):
strong side. I for self proclaimed feminist mail so often
I see that they use it to manipulate women into
falling for their sad boy ruse and then revert back
to the same sexism they're supposedly against. Oh what a
complicated web. We We've keep your letters coming, friends, I
will say, Caroline. Almost as soon as we hit published
on that bifleep episode, the letters came a rolling in

(01:03:39):
mom stuff at how stuff Works is where you can
send us yours and for links to all of our
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and podcasts, including this one with links to our sources
so you can learn more about the history of waitressing,
head on over to stuff Mom Never Told You dot com.

(01:04:00):
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