Women And The Work Force
Long before the colonization of America by Europeans, Native American women were part of the work force, and when Europeans settled the territory, the colonists and their imported servants and slaves included large numbers of women. Thus, women have always been a crucial component of American labor. Their jobs, like the jobs of men, changed dramatically as the society moved from a largely agrarian to a predominantly urban culture. These shifts were accompanied by changing values and attitudes with regard to gender roles.
In preindustrial society, nearly everybody worked and almost no one worked for wages. The home, whether tipi, log cabin, or spacious house, was the center of production--the place where food, clothing, and furnishings were created. Most families produced nearly all their household goods. What they could not provide for themselves--such items as rum, coffee, tea, salt, sugar--they acquired by trading surplus grain or butter, yarn or cloth. Prosperous families might enlist the services of others to provide boots, pewter dishes, and tinware. But rudimentary carpentry, soap and candle making, spinning, weaving, and sewing were the province of every household.
Among the European colonists, a division of labor by sex, though common, was not rigid. Women's efforts usually focused on work in and around the house, but it was not unusual for a woman to help plow or pitch hay. Similarly, men spent twilight hours alongside their wives at the loom, and throughout the eighteenth century, both boys and girls were trained to spin and weave. Circumstances varied regionally. In the frontier family, for example, women frequently handled rifles, hunted, trapped, and defended themselves and their children against Indians and predatory creatures.
Differences of wealth sharply divided the labor force. The wealthiest women supervised slaves or servants who performed the tasks necessary to run a large household. Such a woman ran the dairy, supervised the vegetable gardens, managed and instructed servants, ordered supplies, and planned menus. She cared for the health of the family and sometimes of numerous servants or slaves as well. Often, she made decisions about the planting, harvesting, and sale of crops.
Indentured servants and slave women did the manual labor of the household. Some women worked in the fields, plowing, digging, and harvesting alongside the men. Others laundered, nursed, cleaned, and cooked. The work of both groups was physically taxing and often dangerous, and women were frequently subjected to the sexual abuse of masters. In the middle states and the North, free white women might start their working lives as hired servants. After marriage, they contributed to the household economy by raising cash crops, spinning and weaving at home, or perhaps running a tavern or a millinery shop. To widows and the never-married fell such hard and consistently underpaid work as teaching in dame schools, sewing, and laundering.
The onset of industrialization at the beginning of the nineteenth century highlighted differences among women just as it exacerbated those between men and women workers. At first, women in farming families brought cash into the household by participating in cottage industries. Typically, they accepted a consignment of goods from a merchant or factor, agreeing to complete it in a specified way and within a given time. They were sometimes paid in cash, but it was not unusual for them to receive instead some small portion of the goods they had made. This mode of production, called the putting-out system, could involve many members of a household in such activities as binding shoes or stitching gloves. It rarely provided an income either steady or sufficient enough to support a family.
As technology developed, merchants found it more profitable to consolidate their operations under a single roof. Spinning and weaving were the first of many activities to migrate from home to factory in the period from about 1800 to 1850. Widows and children, as well as young unmarried women, trying to cope with the difficulties of making a living on New England's stony farms, were tempted by the relatively high wages of factory work. These women and their families constituted the core of the first factory labor forces. In mill towns in New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, women could learn a skill that yielded sufficient income to support themselves in minimal comfort and that often provided an environment with congenial companions as well. But by the 1840s and 1850s, mill owners, facing rising pressures from competition, were cutting wages and increasing the intensity of work. Young single women with other options now found factory jobs less attractive. They were replaced by immigrant women and poor women from cities like New York and Boston. Less able to defend themselves than the earlier factory workers, these women found themselves caught in a process of immiserization that continued well into the twentieth century. Long hours, subsistence pay, and harsh working conditions undermined the health and well-being of women whose working days stretched to incorporate many hours of household labor as well.
To be sure, there were a few women in a great variety of other occupations, some of which paid reasonably well. Women worked as printers, cigar makers, teachers, and telegraphers. A handful ran their own businesses or earned their living as writers and lecturers. But until long after the Civil War most working women held such traditional jobs as domestic service, sewing, or laundering. In 1870, 60 percent of all female workers were engaged in some aspect of domestic service and another 25 percent earned their livings in factories and workshops. Except for janitorial work, factory jobs were off-limits to black women. As late as 1900, when the proportion of white women in domestic service had dropped below 50 percent, most women of color supported themselves and their families with various forms of domestic service. Others participated in the agricultural work that continued to sustain the majority of black families.
In the late nineteenth century, the lives of women were sharply bounded by economic, ethnic, and racial circumstances. Proscriptions against married women working outside the home prevented the most prosperous from engaging in paid work. The wives and daughters of skilled male workers might similarly hope that their husbands and fathers could earn a wage sufficient to support a family. This "family wage" would protect them from the harsh realities of the job market. But most women spent some portion of their lives before marriage at poorly paid, brutal work in the fields or factories or in someone else's kitchen. Lucky women and the well educated might teach or serve as governesses or companions. The poorest continued, even after marriage, to earn money by taking in boarders, washing, or sewing. Not until late in the century were these options significantly expanded by new jobs in retail stores and business offices.
In the labor force that emerged at the height of the industrialization process, virtually all skilled jobs and access to occupational mobility were reserved for male workers. Although about one-fifth of white women and more than a third of women of color worked for wages outside their homes, they usually occupied the least skilled and poorest paid jobs. Their efforts to improve their condition included attempts at collective action and unionization. In the nineteenth century, the most successful and enduring efforts at unionization included women shoe workers who organized the Daughters of St. Crispin, Irish collar ironers who started the Troy, New York, Female Collar Laundry Workers Union, and printers who founded the Women's Typographical Union in New York City in 1868. In the 1880s, about half a million women joined the Knights of Labor, a powerful national federation of unions. When the Knights faded away late in the decade, most women were left without unions. The American Federation of Labor, which succeeded the Knights as America's major umbrella organization for unions, consisted largely of skilled craftsmen reluctant to organize those they considered unskilled, much less women.
Only 3.3 percent of the 4 million women engaged in nonagricultural jobs in 1900 belonged to trade unions. That proportion doubled in the aftermath of a successful wave of strikes by young immigrant garment workers in the winter of 1909-1910. Nevertheless, in 1920 less than one in fifteen wage-earning women was a union member, and women accounted for less than 7 percent of organized workers. Limited organization among women is partly explained by their relatively low levels of skill, which made them vulnerable to replacement by employers bent on cutting labor costs. In addition, women tended to work in difficult-to-organize small shops and to move in and out of the work force more frequently than skilled men. Women's efforts to organize also challenged the paternalistic self-image of employers.
In the absence of union protection, many women began to look to state regulation to ameliorate the harsh conditions of their work. With the aid of middle-class allies in such groups as the Women's Trade Union League, they pushed for protective labor legislation, which began to take root shortly after the turn of the century and was widespread by World War I. Most of this legislation sought to provide safe and clean working conditions, minimize health hazards, put a floor under wages, and shorten hours. But almost every industrial state also passed restrictive laws that prohibited women from holding a wide variety of jobs and from working at night. This legislation tended to reflect the prevailing sense that women's primary role was that of the mother.
The practical effects of this protective legislation were mixed. The laws had the immense advantage of ameliorating the worst conditions of women's work, while offering to conserve their health and energy in the service of their families. At the same time, by reducing the economic advantages of female employees, the new laws institutionalized their secondary labor force positions. They provided both a practical and an ideological message that restricted women's ability to compete with males.
Fortunately for women, new job opportunities in white-collar areas emerged just at the time that protective legislation became widespread. Women had first entered offices during the Civil War, and their tenure in federal jobs had expanded steadily thereafter. The invention of the typewriter and other machines speeded their integration. Still, by 1900, less than 10 percent of all employed women worked in offices. That number climbed dramatically after the turn of the century, so that by 1920, more than 25 percent of all employed women held jobs as office workers or telephone operators--a proportion that equaled that of factory workers and would soon surpass it. At the same time, the proportion of women employed in domestic work plunged. By 1920, less than one in five women had a job in domestic service, compared to three in five in 1870. Women also found jobs in new professional fields like nursing, library science, and social work, and a few broke into the ranks of medicine, journalism, and the law. By 1920, the proportion of professional women had climbed to 13 percent and it increased rapidly thereafter.
New job opportunities best explain why the rate at which women participated in the labor force rose during the 1920s and resisted the pressures of the Great Depression. These new openings were also accompanied by two major developments that conspired to encourage women to enter the labor force in ever-increasing numbers. The first was a change in the mode of production. Even before World War I, new managerial techniques embodying the principles of scientific management began to rationalize jobs so that they could be more readily learned. These techniques, which spread rapidly in the twenties, encouraged a reduction in working hours for all employees, and they were accompanied by efforts to enhance the loyalty and commitment of workers to their jobs by providing such amenities as paid vacations, night school classes, sports teams, and cafeterias. These techniques supported and sustained consumerism, the second major change. As consumer goods became less expensive, and families began to develop a taste for vacuum cleaners, automobiles, telephones, and better housing, married women were increasingly drawn to wage work to help meet the new needs. By 1930, approximately one of every six married women had a paid job--nearly triple the proportion of 1900; that was the first inkling of the revolution of attitudes toward women's work that was to come.
During the depression the high rate of unemployment led to demands that all women, especially those who were married, give up their jobs to men, but the number of employed married women rose inexorably thereafter. Pressures to reduce women's labor force participation did not succeed, partly because more and more families needed women to function as providers and partly because a sex-segregated labor market stabilized the demand for women.
World War II briefly transformed demands for exclusion into an insistence that women take jobs in war industries. It thus opened the possibility of a counteroffensive on the part of women who sometimes successfully fought for equal pay for equal work. Black women benefited from a brief respite in job segregation to move into skilled factory jobs. But at war's end, they, along with most newly hired women, were pushed out of desirable jobs to make way for returning veterans. Still, the lessons of the war were not forgotten as the economic demands of the consumer-conscious households of the fifties encouraged many women to continue wage work.
A new phase emerged in the 1960s. Sparked by the debates of President John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women and by the birth of a new women's movement, a spate of legislation supported women's efforts to overcome job discrimination. In 1963, Congress passed a long-sought Equal Pay Act. The 1964 Civil Rights Act forbade discrimination on the grounds of sex and created an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that workers could use to bring suit against employers who did not comply with the law. As a result, a small number of women managed to inch their way into better jobs. By the seventies, medical and law schools, corporate and financial institutions, and political bureaucracies had increased equal access for women. Though many women complained of a "glass ceiling" that limited access to the most powerful and lucrative jobs, the barriers to managerial-level jobs had become more permeable.
Poor women, however, did not seem to benefit as much. Those who headed the expanding number of single-parent families searched for ways to combine family life with work. Many women found themselves confined to the pink-collar ghetto of retail sales, clerical, and service jobs where low wages and part-time work carrying no benefits proliferated. New immigrants could find jobs only in sweatshops that recalled the conditions of the early twentieth century. At the same time the rising cost of living locked many two-parent families into dual wage earning, with its concomitant problem of how to integrate work and family life. As attention shifted from workplace conditions, legislators and others increasingly advocated such reforms as subsidized child care, paid pregnancy and parental leaves, flextime, and more generous health care coverage. Most experts agreed that resolving these family-related issues would be the key to achieving equality for women in the workplace of the twenty-first century.
Bibliography:
Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990); Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982).
Author:
Alice Kessler-Harris
See also Domestic Work; Feminist Movement; Indentured Servitude; Industrial Revolution; Labor; Slavery; Textile Industry; Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; United States Women's Bureau; Women's Trade Union League.
