Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray: Alison Owings
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
As Owings (Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich) knew when she decided to explore the large, understudied world of the American waitress, many women have worked as waitresses at some point in their lives because it requires little training. Marrying social history and oral history, the author deftly explores her themes, primarily classism and the social stigma conveyed by waitressing (tips, she argues, give customers too much power and some restaurants the legal right today to pay as little as two dollars an hour), the confidence-building that comes with handling a demanding and often rude public, the sexism of bosses and kitchen staff, and the pride the women take in presenting an attractive meal and making their customers feel good. Owings allows a wide range of women to speak for themselves, among them a supremely confident mother-and-daughter duo; a former Connecticut housewife whose job gives her independence from an abusive marriage; a Ph.D. who feels more at ease as a waitress than as a graduate student; and a former Seattle union leader who has made great strides in improving the working conditions of waitresses. Owings presents her findings with compassion and wit and a sense of feminist indignation that doesn’t detract from her journalistic balance. These qualities make for a lively read in this trailblazing contribution to the study of women and work.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This is the second oral history by Owings, whose first book, Frauen, collected the reminiscences of average German women about Hitler’s Germany. The subject here is not so fraught, but the observations of 35 waitresses, as selected and edited by Owings, are absorbing to read. Part of the interest is in her choice of locales: an Ursuline convent, the Woolworth’s counter where civil rights sit-ins took place, one of the Harvey restaurants that “civilized the West,” the first New York haute cuisine restaurant to hire a woman, and Everglades National Park, among others. Judicious editing also makes the book compelling: each waitress is full of insights about her life and her life’s work and does not seem mired in the job. This is neither a labor study like Greta Foff Paules’s Dishing It Out nor a first-person expos‚ of what Barbara Ehrenreich calls one of America’s “least attractive jobs” (Nickel and Dimed). At its heart is young Owings’s compassionate realization, while on a summer job at Howard Johnson’s, that “some girls do not go to college”; she is not referring only to the scarcity of the literature when she observes that “waitresses stand alone even when they sit down.” Recommended for labor history, women’s studies, sociology, career counseling, and general interest collections. Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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