From Racy to Sexy: Waiting Tables in the Early Twentieth Century

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a demographic shift occurred among waitstaffs in the restaurants and hotels of America.  Managers consistently identified certain styles of service with certain ethnicities and genders, but their opinions on which ethnicity and gender the American public desired in a waiter changed.  Though women often served meals in family-run establishments, the largest and most famous nineteenth-century eateries generally hired black or Irish men—the first evoked various kinds of nostalgia for slavery (even while slavery still existed), and the second performed a different kind of subservience.  Managers thought deeply about this choice, sometimes firing entire staffs overnight and replacing them with members of the other race.

In the early twentieth century, various factors led to a vast increase in the number of white waitresses and a concomitant decline in the number of African American waiters.  Though the labor shortages of World War I were an immediate catalyst, change also stemmed from a long-term shift in ideals of service that made white women more attractive as waiters, and black men less so.  This shift from a desire for racial mastery to sexual mastery may have been driven by changing consumer demand, but it seems just as likely that managers drove the shift and consumers followed suit.  Using management journals and sources from popular culture, this paper traces the change from racy to sexy service, and speculates on the relative importance of managers and workers in bringing it about.