What was the attitude toward women during the 1930s?

Answer 1

Economic indicators show that GNP in the American economy reached its low in the summer of 1932 to February 1933, then steadily climbed upward until a downturn in 1938. However, unemployment continued to remain at very high levels until 1941.

Women got the vote in America in 1920. However, black women, like black men, were often prevented from voting in the south by the poll tax, literacy laws, threats, intimidation, and outright violence.

Most single women worked for a living, and so did a lot of married women. The number of married women going out to work increased during the 1930s because many women were trying to keep their families afloat. Some people objected to married women working, because they thought they were taking jobs from single women who needed to support themselves. Many school boards, for instance, refused to hire married women teachers. But in spite of this, the number of working married women increased steadily throughout the 30s.

It was still a widely held assumption that the man should be the head of the household, and many women preferred it that way. But not all couples were the same. Some wives ruled the roost, and some couples had a more equal relationship. Generally, most married couples probably didn't get along any worse than most do now, and some were probably getting along better.

The marriage rate dropped in the 30s: "Do you realise how many people in my generation are not married?" asked Elsa Ponselle, who was working as a teacher when the Chicago school system ran out of money and started paying its staff with I.O.U.s. Her boyfriend, a commercial artist, vanished when he was laid off from his job. "It hit him like a ton of bricks." she said. Magazines once again ran articles about women who found happiness in life without a husband. 'Live Alone And Like It' was a best-seller.

In the 1940s, some women were able to obtain better-paid employment than they had formerly had by working in defence. Peggy Terry, who got a job with her mother and sister at a shell-loading plant in Kentucky, was euphoric. "We made the fabulous sum of thirty-two dollars a week" she said. "To us it was an absolute miracle. Before that, we made nothing." As a result of the great migration of women to defence jobs, 600 laundries went out of business in 1942, and in Detroit, a third of the restaurants closed because of the lack of help.

Although most unmarried women were already working when the war started, a number of college students quit school to join the war effort. Among the other early volunteers were the wives of servicemen: "Darling, you are now the husband of a career woman - just call me your Shipyard Babe!" wrote Polly Crow to her husband overseas.

By late 1942, unemployment was virtually non-existent, and the government projected a need for 3 million more workers in the next year. The prime pool of potential workers was married women. Ads and movie newsreels constantly emphasised how defence work was just like housework. However, even when the war was at its height, and the need for workers was most desperate, nearly 90 percent of the housewives who had been at home when Pearl Harbor was bombed still ignored the call.

One of the reasons was undoubtedly the lack of child care. Unlike England, where the government provided all sorts of support services for women who worked, the US government left them to their own devices. Congress didn't appropriate money for federal daycare until 1943, and even then it was used so ineptly that only about 10 percent of the defence workers' children were ever enrolled. Defence work was also hard and dirty. A lot of women found it unappealing.

Whether women worked or not, their lives were made infinitely more complicated by rationing, which restricted the availability of sugar, coffee, butter, certain types of meat, and canned goods as well as things like gasoline, tires, and stockings. Unable to find stockings, women began wearing makeup on their legs instead. And since the stockings of the 1940s had seams down the back, women's magazines ran guides on how to draw a realistic-looking line down the calf.

Civilians got stamps ever month that gave them the right to buy different products. "My mother and all the neighbours would get together round the dining-room table and they'd be changing a sugar coupon for a bread or meat coupon. It was like a giant Monopoly game" said Sheril Cunning, who was a child in Long Beach, California, during the war.