UC Press Blog

Who speaks out against fascism—is it only the most powerful or politically connected who can do so, or is it those whose rights are most in danger? Historian Katherine Marino traces the history of Rosa Rayside, a Black activist in the 1930s who organized domestic workers in New York and participated in the international anti-fascist movement. In tracing the story of Rosa Rayside, Marino reveals connections between fascism and domestic worker organizing—two topics that historians have usually considered separately.

Marino’s article, “Rosa Rayside and Domestic Workers in the Fight against War and Fascism,” appeared in Pacific Historical Review’s special issue on Feminist Histories. Marino was recognized with an honorable mention for the Robert W. Cherny Prize of the Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association. 

How did you come to this topic?

While researching my first book, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement, I learned about the World Congress of Women against War and Fascism in Paris in 1934, and was amazed by the geographic and racial diversity of its attendees, and by the breadth and radicalism of its demands. I wanted to know more about it and the antifascist organizing it inspired. Four Black women from the United States attended and shaped the congress’s resolutions against racism and in support of the Scottsboro youth—one of the women was Rosa Rayside, a domestic worker organizer from Harlem who had recently co-founded New York’s Domestic Workers Union. 

I was fascinated to learn that after the Paris Congress Rayside testified before U.S. Congress for a social security bill that would have given protections to domestic and rural workers, and spoke out there against the “slave markets” domestics faced. Rayside, who became a nationally recognized antifascist and labor activist, offered a portal into connections between two areas that are often not usually thought of together: domestic worker organizing and antifascism, locally and globally. 

What was the relationship between antifascism and domestic worker organizing?

In the early 1930s, Black domestic workers like Rayside connected their own struggles—against racism, economic exploitation, and sexism—to a broader global understanding of fascism. At a time when antifascism fostered connections among multiple harms, Rayside and other Black domestic and industrial workers helped shape the concept of “triple exploitation” (based on race, class, and sex) and argued that because they faced these multiple forms of oppression, they were uniquely positioned to lead antifascist and liberation movements. These ideas gained purchase in the Black antifascist community, and were articulated by leaders like Louise Thompson Patterson, Richard Wright, and later Claudia Jones, among others. But domestic workers themselves were critical to developing this powerful analysis. Their grassroots activism, on the frontlines of demanding relief during the Great Depression, dignity in their jobs, and freedom from racist oppression, embodied it.

What’s next?

This article is part of a larger project that highlights the importance of Black women and Latin American and Caribbean women in global antifascist organizing in the 1930s and 1940s. Antifascism proved an important crucible for Black women’s domestic worker organizing not only in the United States, but also in Brazil, Cuba, Uruguay and elsewhere. Today, when the core values of fascism—authoritarian leadership, racism, nationalism, violence, and forceful suppression of dissent—are growing domestically and globally, it is instructive to study how this movement diagnosed fascism and how they fought it. We should heed the lessons of domestic workers—predominantly women of color and women from the Global South—who continue to organize locally and globally today.

We invite you to read Marino’s article, “Rosa Rayside and Domestic Workers in the Fight against War and Fascism,” for free online for a limited time.

Print copies of PHR's "Feminist Histories" special issue (issue 93.3), in which the article appears, as well as other individual issues of PHR, can be purchased on the journal’s site. 

For ongoing access to PHR, please ask your librarian to subscribe and/or purchase an individual subscription.

We publish PHR in partnership with the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.