The Migration Series, Panel no. 57: The female workers were the last to arrive north.

A lone female worker stands surrounded by textiles as she works at the laundry in front of her, a maze of geometrical colors. A woman in a domestic job such as this one would not have made very much money completing someone else’s housework while the patchwork background behind her suggests that the she was doing a fair amount of quilting together symbolic scraps in order to make ends meet in her household. Her downtrodden solitude is symbolic of the desertion felt by women who stayed behind with families and children to care for while their husbands or other male family members began the journey to the North.
SKU: 64127
Creator: Jacob Lawrence
Date: between 1940 and 1941
Original Medium: Casein tempera on hardboard
Original Size: 12 x 18 in.
Location: The Phillips Collection
© 2016 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York