[AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMEN SERVANTS]. Domestic Service: With Particular Attention to the Negro Female Servant in the South

Durham, NC: Duke University, 1944. First Edition. Very good. Quarto. 143 pp., carbon copy typescript printed on rectos only. Contemporary cloth, title gilt on front cover (spine faded, a little worn but perfectly sound). BLACK FEMALE DOMESTIC SERVANTS UNDER ATTACK; AN UNPUBLISHED TYPESCRIPT OF WHICH ONLY ONE OTHER COPY IS RECORDED (DUKE UNIVERSITY).

The author, Julian Baker Roebuck (1920-2023) became a professor of criminal justice at Clark Atlanta University and wrote numerous books and scholarly papers on race relations, incarceration, crime, social deviance, political corruption, and much more.

This is Roebuck's 1944 MA thesis (Duke University) and was never offered for public sale. He argues that that the role of the female black domestic servant in the South was becoming seriously unstable due to the widely circulating rumor of Eleanor Clubs (named after Eleanor Roosevelt). The assertion was that Mrs. Roosevelt was encouraging black domestics to demand higher wages or quit their jobs, and the supposed motto was "a white woman in every kitchen by Christmas." Howard Odum ("Race and Rumors of Race: The American South in the Early Forties") reports that Mrs. Roosevelt asked the FBI to investigate said rumors. Roebuck's thesis is valuable partly because he collected interesting contemporary accounts from domestic servants (Black and otherwise). The author also explores -- by way of comparison -- the role of a "servant" in England, Egypt, China, Japan, and elsewhere. Finally, there is a valuable 7-page Bibliography at end.

A BRIEF LIST OF ROEBUCK'S SUBSEQUENT WRITINGS:

"The Negro Drug Addict as an Offender Type" in: Crime and & Criminology 36 (1962);
An Ethnography of a Chiropractic Clinic: Definitions of a Deviant Situation (1975);
The Negro Drinker and Assaulter as a Criminal Type (1962);
"Attitudes toward Premarital Sex and Sexual Behavior among Black High School Girls" in: Journal of Sex Research 13 (1977);
"Ficheras and Free-Lancers: Prostitution in a Mexican Border City" (with Patrick McNamara) in: Archives of Sexual Behavior 2 (1973);
The Etiology of Alcoholism (1972);
An Empirical Typology of Police Corruption (1973).

Cited by Janet Sims-Wood in: "Black Women as Workers: A Selected Listing of Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations" in: Sage (Atlanta). Vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 1986), p. 68.