Prevailing wisdom paints a broad picture in which women didn’t enter the labor market en masse until the late 1960s or early 1970s. (I’m not counting “domestic work” in this case.)
Okay, let’s accept the “en masse” part. But didn’t signficant numbers of women work in the New England mills in the 19th and 18th centuries? Didn’t they work in America’s schools and general stores? Didn’t many work in fields (as sharecroppers or indentured servants) and in some early 20th century factories?
Naturally, this doesn’t take into consideration the experience of African-American women. But my point is this: It seems that women, as a group, have a long history as workers.
In 1950 about one in three women participated in the labor force. By 1998, nearly three of every five women of working age were in the labor force. Among women age 16 and over, the labor force participation rate was 33.9 percent in 1950, compared with 59.8 percent in 1998.
I think “urban myth” is stunningly apropos. The mass entry of women into the workplace is commonly attributed to the “Rosie the Riveters” who helped build the military might at home while their men were off at WWII. However, this is easily proven to be false.
Until roughly WWII, most Americans lived in rural settings. Yes, the “stay at home mom” was more common, but “home” was much more likely to be a farm or shop. Even if the family didn’t literally live over the shop or out back, the family store or office was considered as much ‘home’ to many children as the house was. It belonged to the family, and America was less alienated and paranoid.
Most urban or peri-urban schools as late as the 1930’s hired only single women, and many fired them if they got married. This created a stereotype that rural communities simply couldn’t support. They didn’t have a big enough pool of potential teacher to discard them so lightly. To illustrate the same authoritarian prudery on the male side: Boston City Hospital in the 1930’s did not allow its residents (staff MDs training for a specialty) to marry - in fact, one chief of staff briefly fired all the residents, calling them communists for wanting their uniforms washed free by the hospital laundry (which already handled tons of patient bedsheets and other laundry each week) - back then, residents worked 12-14 hours a day [that part hasn’t changed so terribly much] and, being unmarried, had to pay the hospital a rather stiff percentage of their meager salaries (that part hasn’t changed so terribly much either) to have any hope of adhering to the strict hospital “clean whites” policy.
Similar stories are very well known in various professions, but they reflect urban peccadillos, and spread rapidly in the dense population of today’s urban and suburban workplaces – but they were a very minor part of the American experience, because most Americans lived in agrarian settings. Even in small and medium cities, such rules were impractical, and when instituted (often as a misplaced ‘civic pride’ gesture) were often more honored in the breach.
Think of it this way: why would a married teacher who “had tasted of carnal life” be more corrupting than the (obviously) carnal parents every child was presumed to have, or all the carnal neighbors and shopkeepers? (Large families were valuable assets in rural towns) The very idea is a silly remnant of Victorianism, which is well known to have been popular among the American Urban upper crust (and ambitous upwardly mobile) in the 1930’s - well after such trends had very significantly faded in their native England.
I’ll let the SocSci types provide you with the stats, but I’ve done a lot of private research (using my training in hard sciences, whether you consider that good or bad), and I’m convinced that not only is the economic contribution of women to the family vastly underestimated (a point which is generally accepted) but the participation of women in the [then-predominant] workplace prior to WWII is also not fully appreciated. Further, even if we accept the modern conception of a ‘job’ as being a urban factory, retail, service or office job, the role of women is quite underestimated by the few statistics that seem to support the stereotype.
Yeah, women didn’t used to often hold all the jobs they do today. [Duh!] It doesn’t mean they didn’t work, sell, or hold outside jobs.
I look forward to seeing substantiave stats and studies -pro or con- from the SocSci’s here. My bibliography on this topic is a bit moldy.
What it may be refering to , is the re-entry of women into the workforce. Married X amount of years , spawning X amount of kids, then all of a sudden hubby either passes away or got downsized and a certain portion of women are re-entering.
I think part of the problem comes from a misunderstanding. It wasn’t that women entered the workforce. It was that married women voluntarily entered the workforce. Unmarried women and poor women have always traditionally worked. But prior to the sixties many men considered it demeaning to have their wives working. It was an act of desperation. What change dint he sixties was that women started working out of choice and not necessity.
Domestic workers have almost always been women, or, to put it another way, most women in many ethnic groups, like Irish, andBlack, in America in the 1900s were domestic workers.
These jobs often were not part of the formal economy, so they weren’t marked on census forms, tax records, etc.
Dionne Brand’s Sisters in the Struggle notes that Black women have never had trouble getting work. It’s the types of work available to them (low-paid, low-status, dead-end etc) that they object to.
My point: as KP indicates, women have always been part of the ‘economy,’ no matter how you define it. Their participation, and the recognition of their participation, often has a lot to do with race, class and nationality.
Surprising in an unsurprising way, *Measure for Measure. Kinda blows the whole June Cleaver mindset some have, as if that had anything to do with reality.
Actually, not quite measure for measure. If you check the US census website, you’ll find that they modify their criteria from decade to decade, often in precisely the areas which are most controversial. To be fair, I agree that their changes unsually reflect the underlying phenomena better, but the very fact that changes are made makes them less than directly comparable retrospectively. I further respect their openly documenting changes in standards (not all publicly documented changes in gov’t statistics are exactly ‘open’), even in those cases where the changes seem politically motivated.
In rather crude terms, it’s like comparing the girls you thought you were going home with late on Friday night with the ones you wake up with on Saturday morning, and concluding you better marry soon, because women are going ugly fast.
The new criteria are intended for more accurate assessments in the future, but of course, there’s a limit to how you can correct data that was initially collected by flawed criteria. I’ve used (recreationally) with US Census statistics for decades now, and though I consider them an invaluable resource, I’ve often had my initial conclusions confounded by closer examination of the changing criteria. Every smart voter is well aware of this phenomenon to some degree.
I don’t think it really impinges on the June Cleaver view of the world, at all.
When you figure that a huge percent of elementary school teachers and a significant percent of high school teachers were women (and by the 1950s we had long since stopped firing them for getting married) and that nearly 100% of all nurses were women–many married, then figure in that an awful lot of women worked part time as receptionists, retail clerks, etc., I think you still have a society that can look on June Cleaver as “typical.” (Even on Leave it to Beaver, the teachers tended to be women old enough to be “presumed” to have married.)
Regarding a point in the OP: while women worked on farms, (regardless whether they were sharecropped or “family farms”), I doubt that they received separate direct income. I don’t think that the issues of the “labor market” include either farm wives or the “mom” in “mom and pop” retail outlets. Women have always worked. The issue in such discussions is how much or how often they were actually paid a wage.
— “The well-educated woman from the 1940s to the 1960s took a job that had a relatively flat earnings profile, such as teacher, librarian, social worker, or nurse. These positions allowed for lifecycle interruptions with little earnings penalty… In 1960 64 percent of college graduate, employed women were teachers (including music teachers), librarians, nurses, and social workers. Source: Integrated Public Use Micro-data Sample of the 1960 federal population census.”
<<<From Goldin (2002), By the same token 36% of colleged educated employed women were not teachers, librarians, nurses or social workers. -M4M>>>
All workers:
Occupational Distributions for Major Occupational Groups, By Sex
The proportion of married women engaged in paid work in the United States increased more than tenfold during the past century, from less than 5 percent in 1890 to more than 60 percent in 1990. Much of the increased employment occurred in the years after 1940… the 1940s mark an apparent break with the past in terms of women’s work. The break, moreover, is evident mainly among older married women. The participation rate of white, married women 45-54 years old was 10.1 percent in 1940 but 22.2 percent in 1950.
Emphasis added for clarity. Goldin alludes to “Figure 1”, which I can’t show, but basically show an increase in the white female married labor force participation rate from about 5 to 12% from 1890-1940, and a faster acceleration from 1940 onwards. (eg 1940-1990 moves from 12% to 55%). See the article on WWII in preceding Goldin link.
Actually, the bolded question was exactly a major criterion that swayed statistics. A shopkeeper (male or female) was counted as ‘employed’, but the wife of a shopkeeper, working just as many hours behind the counter often wasn’t, or might be self-described at her discretion. The “separate stream of income” argument was used to justify ignoring her employment, but is there a real difference?
You can’t dismiss farms and shops (i.e. MOST Americans prior to 1950). The essence of the 50s/60s [mass media driven] mindset was ignoring the realities of the present and past. For example, sexuality was much freer in the 20s/30s (even the US upper class was mostly ‘Victorian’ in its publicly voiced values, not its actions), so the prudery of the 50s/60s was actually a change in tradition. If sex is too controversial, consider the diamond wedding band: up to the 1940s, it was rare, and generally considered extravagant and foolish (It would get you talked about: why buy a ring instead of making a downpayment on a <nicer> house?) However, in the 50s/60s, a publicity campaign by DeBeers convinced newlyweds it was ‘traditional’ even though almost none of their parents had them.
It was also quite common for women to have independent revenue. A woman who raised eggs in the yard for sale was often a family’s primary source of cash money in the 1900-1930 censuses, but wasn’t counted as ‘employed’. [I’m not talking about a farm. Families in town commonly raised chickens]
[There’s some interesting sociology behind FDR’s “a chicken in every pot”: chicken wasn’t the daily food it is today. Fried chicken was mostly for celebration or travel, and baked chicken was usually the Sunday ‘gospel bird’ shared with the preacher as part of the parishes support. Eggs were a more common food than today. Before refrigeration was widespread, eggs could be stored in ‘waterglass’ (a silica solution) for weeks, and were scientifically considered “wholesome” and “germ-free” (egg-infecting salmonella didn’t arise until the past 20 years) Keep in mind that until electrification, even literal ‘ice boxes’ were uncommon in most of the US, because frequent deliveries of ice were only practical “in town”. Electricity didn’t reach all parts of the US until the 60s. Johnson was proud that it finally reached the Texas hill country when he was president]
Gardening to supplement income was also common ‘nonemployment’. Books on household mangement (now “home ec”) from the first half of the century, almost always listed ‘earning household cash’ (especially important since most Americans then weren’t paycheck workers).
Other “women’s work” that wasn’t counted as employment included “taking in” laundry or boarders - a man doing these things was a launderer or landlord m(en are strongly identified by their jobs). A woman rarely listed either as ‘employment’. Taxes were often a factor in this, as well.
The Tax Code, Social Security, job benefits (etc.) of the late 20th century have done a great deal to define what we consider ‘employment’ today. A great deal of important economic activity was not counted as ‘employment’ in the first half of the century. The distinction persists today: if your son or daughter works at McDonalds, they consider themself ‘employed’, but if they earn the same amount through [e.g.] babysitting, they may not.
Further, the issue of ‘married women’ is very important. Check both the decennial census (in years ending in ‘0’) and the off-year studies on living circumstances (e.g. the Bureau now does major studies on gender/living arrangements in years ending in ‘5’). You’ll find that at various times in the Twentieth century up to 18% of women never married. Whether this was due to war, poor economy or social circumstances, the fact is that they supported themselves, and all those single women, plus the married working women,
I doubt very much that you’ll find many gov’t reports that accurately reflect the number of women employed as prostitutes, yet it is well documented by other means that they numbered in the millions. The Census Bureau and IRS weren’t too interested in enumerating them.