When American Waitresses Were Labeled ‘Women of Ill Repute’

A peculiar facet of tipping culture is that restaurant servers depend on compensation from customers with no agreed-upon contract, so some diners calculate the worth of the labor on how pretty, friendly, or servile a waitress is. It’s no wonder that the overwhelming majority of servers have been sexually harassed on the job. But it was always so. Going back hundreds of years, the combination of low wages and the task of serving a customer’s needs led some women to supplement their restaurant income with sexual favors. Those who didn’t still suffered from that reputation.  

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Since the days of colonial taverns, women who serve have often been considered—by government officials, customers, and even courts—sexually available. For some servers, unwanted sexual attention was an unfortunate reality of the workplace. For others, like the waitresses who offered both liquor and sexual services in Gilded Age saloons, sex work was part of the job description. From steamy dance halls to staid lunch counters, sexual harassment and sex work are deeply entrenched in the history of America’s restaurants.

Alice Thomas would have known. A tavern-keeper in colonial Boston, Thomas was convicted of harboring “Lewd Lascivious & notorious persons of both Sexes, giving them opportunity to commit carnal wickedness.” She was one of many female tavern keepers in colonial America whose drink-heavy establishments catered to weary travelers and thirsty locals. As Alison Owens writes in her history of waitressing, their association with drinking sometimes led their communities and the government to label them women of “lascivious” morals.

But a job is a job, and many working class women had no other choice but to serve customers in restaurants or taverns. Read the history of institutional assumptions about servers at Atlas Obscura.

Source: neatorama

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