You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby

Women in the workplace: “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

Women in the work culture and how it developed throughout history, will argue that the definition of “women’s work” has changed in direct relation to the needs of the nuclear family to survive in a rapidly changing world. The traditional model of the division of labor in which the woman took care of the needs of her family in the home while the man plowed, planted, hunted, and worked “from sun to sun,” coming home to the family hearth to rest. At the same time, his wife continued her busy day well into the late hours of the night was already changing in Colonial America of the 18^th Century.

In her work, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich opens a window on the day-to-day life of women in the colonial period.[1] Martha was a midwife, a vocation that would take her out of the home day or night, and she was both a homemaker in the traditional sense and also a working woman. Her midwifery provided the family with items in exchange for her services, as rural communities of the day used the barter system. As Ulrich writes, “Midwives were the best paid of all the female healers, not only because they officiated at births, but because they encompassed more skill, broader experience, and longer memory.”[2]

Her status as a midwife was a profession in addition to the normal woman’s work that was necessary for the maintenance of a household. Ulrich writes that Martha’s diary paints regarding the planting and harvesting of flax. During harvest time, all members of the family would work in the fields, harvest the flax. After this, the local women would work together to provide the finished cloth. (Ulrich 432). Ulrich looks at Martha’s world holistically and argues in her work that to understand Martha’s world (and the world of the 18^th-century American woman) in looking back “we must approach it on its own terms, neither as a golden age of household productivity nor as a political void from with a later feminist consciousness emerged. Martha’s diary reaches to the marrow of eighteenth-century life.” (Ulrich 489)

The situation changed in the late 18^th  and early 19^th Century, where the family became more and more dependent on cash rather than barter to survive. Boydston points in his article that survival in the early colonial period required both husband and wife to bring in “tangible goods for the family.” The woman would use her housewifery skills, and the husband used his skills in agriculture. He argues that there were crossovers in which both worked equally in the areas of market exchange. [3] Women were evolving and, as goods and services became more readily available than raw materials, were learning how to shop wisely to give their family more for the dollar. Boydston quotes Harriet Beech Stow best described this change in housework as “the science of comparative values” (Boydston p. 124). Women were forced to learn excellent management skills in their determination to “make ends meet,” a vitally important skill needed to augment their working-class husbands’ insufficient wages. The necessity to learn management skills soon developed into wage consciousness. Women for centuries had been “unpaid laborers” but by the 1850s and pushed by economic necessities to earn and use cash, they by selling their handiwork and services in cooking, cleaning and so on, both augmenting the income by smart shopping on the one hand and selling surplus products on the other, working by night on their housework and working for pay for more affluent households. (Boydston p. 133) Boydston goes on to say, “Much had changed- and little had changed in the household labor of women over the antebellum years. Like their colonial counterparts, antebellum women worked hard in their families, maintaining the basic operations of the household, seeing to it that children survived to adulthood, that adults survived from one day of work to the next, producing many of the goods required by their families, and maneuvering in the marketplace to obtain what could not be produced internally. In the midst of all this, they grappled with the clever and cantankerous new machines and the heart-sinking dangers, the new propriety and the new poverty of an increasingly industrial society. (Boydston 140-141) Boydston points out on the last page of his article that housework in the antebellum societies started to see housework (women’s work) as having little or no intrinsic value at all, forgetting the fact that this same work was highly valued during the early colonial times and the Revolutionary War. This radical change of status in the work culture for women would be repeated during future wars, where women’s work was valued when the manpower was low. Soon after the men came marching home from war, the women were once again not valued as workers.

From the post-Revolutionary War period until the American Civil War saw slow fruition of the factories in the North. Prud writes, “While evolving differently in different economic sectors, self-reinforcing circuits of demand and production took shape after 1789, ensuring that a growing desire for goods called forth increased manufacturing capacity, which then further stimulated demand, facilitated by new governmental policies and credit arrangements, and critically bolstered by legions of western and southern customers hungry for cheap versions of consumer goods like cloth, clothing, and shoes, industrialization-including its factory variant-grew apace in response to a far-flung market that was itself continually nurtured by the availability of products”[4](Prude p 245)

Prude limits this shift in manufacturing primarily to the northern countryside and argues that this expansion in the North allowed rural women to become paid workers. Many of these women served the newly forming networks of industrial production, mostly as outworkers who wished to augment the household income. (Much like we have seen in the Wal-Mart business model, which started in the Ozarks). (Pride pp 245-246)

This trend offered new occupational possibilities to women and girls, and for those who worked in the factory, especially unmarried women, found a new self-awareness and confidence as they became workers who gave economic relief to their families. Prude adds a caveat when he writes, “ … the willingness of northern industrial enterprises to hire women, families, and newcomers did not extend to African Americans.”(Prude p251) These women and girls would play a crucial role in the Great Shoe Strike of 1860. On page 253, Prude refers to a book published in 1924 in which Norman B. Ware offers a complete analysis of these years. [5]

Regarding the Southern Women, Rebecca Sharpless offers a thorough summary in her article found in Agricultural History, Vol 67, entitled,  “American Rural and Farm Women in Historical Perspective.”[6] Sharpless divides the southern society women of the Old South by race, class and gender. According to Sharpless by 1950, three-quarters of the slave women worked in the cotton plantations. Their owners, white mistresses, lived as rulers in their husbands’ households and seldom worked in the cotton fields. By 1860, the cotton industry was a kingdom with four million (black) slaves. After the Civil War, everything changed (as it always does in post-war societies. Women found themselves in difficult economic situations. By 1925, 60 percent of all farmers (and their wives), both white and black, were sharecroppers, and another 80 percent of rural southerners owned no land. (Sharpless p 37)

The Civil War marked the most significant change in women’s culture up to that time, and following the war, the women were returned to their previous status; however, both black and white women had a taste of freedom and a realization of self-importance. A brief look at the civil war found women not only being utilized in support organizations like nursing, home industries, replacing men in factories and the like, but surprisingly some women took on combat duties in the armies. Two researchers (Blanton and Cook) discovered about 250 women who fought in the armies.[7] Their conclusion is astonishing. For instance, they found that there was no difference between male and female soldiers. Their reasons for going into harm’s way were identical to their male comrades, and, as soldiers, they were promoted, captured, and killed in the line of duty. The article notes that some fought with the knowledge of their officers and comrades as women, while others kept their sex a secret.

Interestingly the authors discovered that Union women were far more likely discharged from their regiments than were Confederate women being revealed as females.” (Blanton and Cook, p. 268) The authors conclude that “women soldiers of the Civil War merit recognition because they were there and they deserve remembrance because their actions made them uncommon and revolutionary, possed of valor at odds with Victorian and, in some respects, even modern views of women’s “proper role.” (Blanton and Cook, p. 269)

History shows us that the role of women changes in times of stress, offering opportunities, some lost, and some realized, during and after the wars and hard times. World War I was no different. Dumenil writes that “ Women in a wide variety of groups, including organizations associated with the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the Red Cross, had different goals, but most women activists agreed on the need to promote women’s suffrage and citizenship rights and to continue the maternalist reform programs begun in the Progressive Era. At the center of their war voluntarism was the conviction that women citizens must play a crucial role in protecting the family amidst the crisis of war.”[8]

In keeping with these goals, women mobilized and joined organizations in support of the war effort, which for the most part, was dominated by white middle-class women. Dumenil found that it was not surprising that affluent, educated white women would take the lead since they had leisure and personal resources available that would allow them to do this unpaid work. Dumenil argues that voluntarism was defined by class and shaped by gender. She points out that during WWI, the federal government (as was the case with the Civil War) depended on white, elite, middle-class women to manage the programs and drives during wartime. (Dumenil p. 215)

Women were already organized before the war. It was a simple thing to change gears and upgrade pre-existing women’s organizations to wartime standards. Examples of this are the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Young Women’s Christian Association, and local clubs in every major city across the nation. The suffragists (NAWSA) debated whether to picket the Woodrow Wilson  Whitehouse to draw attention to the rights of women or to follow the national NAWSA by demonstrating women’s loyalty and usefulness during the war, which would validate claims to full citizenship and suffrage. (Which would indeed result in the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted American women the right to vote, a right known as women’s suffrage, and was ratified on August 18, 1920, ending almost a century of protest.)[9]  Duminal argues that this was both because women’s groups wholeheartedly supported war mobilization, and yet had their agendas, which they believed would justify full citizenship. These agendas would serve to support and promote both causes. (Duminal p 45)

The next significant evolutionary change in the workplace for women, I would argue, was WWII. The two decades between the wars,  from 1918 to 1939, tested the mettle of both men and women who grew up during that era, men to fight a horrible war, and women to replace them in unheard-of numbers securing the home front. Most were born in the twenties to parents who came of age at the end of the previous Century. The depression era marked the beginning of the new American socialism. America got tough, and she needed to because this new era plunged us into the most devastating war in history. This war also gave women countless opportunities to prove their mettle as women replaced tens of thousands of men conscripted to fight in Asia and in Europe. From December 7, 1941, to the end of the war in 1945, Rosie The Riveter held the home front secure and proved that ‘yes, women could do it.’ This was a transformative point in the history of women in the workplace. Between the years 1940 and 1947, the demand for female labor in the United States shifted rapidly. Wages for women rose swiftly during the war, then fell suddenly when industries converted to peacetime production.”[10]

Schweitzer offers statistics compared to the earnings of men and women in 22 women-employing industries in 1940. She found that women’s wages were lower than the lowest wages men received. Within four years, 37 percent of all women over fourteen were in the job market and were by then 20 million women. Schwitzer breaks this down into several categories: clerical (4.7 million), factory operators (4.5 million), and production workers (2,174,000) by 1943. (Schweitzer p 90)

It all changed after the war. As soon as the war ended, the women were laid off, while the factories retooled for peacetime production, and the women were stunned when only the men were called back. Women were active in the union and wrongly believed that they would have seniority when called back to the factories. They were never called back. When the war ended, the wages and services formerly provided for female workers also ended, as did their job positions and any seniority in the unions they might have had. Women found themselves (except for secretarial services, and young single women assembly line workers) abruptly expelled from the working class and returned to housewifery. This situation continued until the rise of the Service Class spearheaded by Wal-Mart. Morton, in chapter 4, “The Family in the Store,” virtually created what would come to be known as the Service Class.

From 1998 to 2004, Wal-Mart created a workforce of over 1.5 million women. There were problems with the upper management, defacto comprised of men (eligibility for management positions required being willing to relocate for ver six years on average to another Wal-Mart, which discouraged women from rising higher than assistant manager because of the hardship of relocation). In 2004, Judge Martin Jenkins of the U.S. District Court certified the largest private-sector class-action lawsuit in history: Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. On June 20, 2011, the Supreme Court ruled in Walmart’s favor by saying the plaintiffs did not have enough in common to constitute a class. However, right or wrong, Wal-Mart provided jobs and created a new industry that has been copied ever since. By the ’90s industry was declining with the former front runners like U.S. Steel permanently closing their doors. When that happened, Wal-Mart opened its doors to women. The experiment started out in the Ozark mountain communities, where women were homemakers and the men worked part-time at seasonal work or for the local municipalities. As Morton writes on page 51, “Women—both employees and customers—structured a unique social relationship that had no precedent in the factory model of work. Middle-aged mothers, in particular, formed the stable backbone of the new workplace, training a generation of male managers and providing a reserve of service skills. Workers and customers alike brought rural, Protestant family ideals to the workplace, changing the face of postindustrial America.”  As the industry was shuffling into the backwaters of history, a new service-oriented industry was being born.

After the shock of being literally thrown out of the workforce with the return of millions of male war veterans to the industrial working class, women were forced into traditional work roles. Morton writes, “In earlier American transitions from agriculture to waged labor, the destination had been the factory. Young women left their family farms to work in the Lowell textile mills in the antebellum north.” (Morton p. 54)  The new service industry would include and be based on women employees who needed to augment their family income. As Morton points out on page 56, since managers would be moved from place to place, it would be the women who worked at Wal-Mart who would be the personal face of the company in their area for decades. This model, which created the “service class,” was soon copied by other giants like Target Stores, but without the family feeling of meeting grandpa or grandma at the entrance to Wal-Mart, who would greet every customer with a smile.

For the first time since World War II, women found a workplace that was secure and paid a reasonable wage. What will the next step be? Richard Florida, in Chapter 1 of The Transformation of Everyday Life, argues that the next step will be “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which would be the result of human creativity being “unleashed on an unprecedented scale. (Florida p. 5).

According to Florida, more than 40 million Americans belong to this new class. Florida goes on to include in this class creative professionals in law, health care and related fields. (Florida p.8) This new class would be equal, all-inclusive, utilizing the creative talents of both men and women. As he writes, in his conclusion, “These changes have been building for decades and are only now coming to the fore, driven by the rise of the Creative Economy and the Creative class. (Florida p 12)

Conclusion:  The American woman, in terms of her work culture and the evolution of both her perception of herself and her needs regarding her work and her family, has evolved into today’s woman in the workforce. From colonial times, legal, cultural, and even religious conventions restricted women. Higher education was restrictive for women, and even in the medical fields, rising above the status of a Nurse was rare. This essay has pointed out that during times of war and national conflict, women became the bulwark of the nation only to be forced back to their former status, but with one difference; women learned what they were capable of and slowly, they evolved an intense desire to both be regarded as equal partners in the workforce and to become equal partners both in their own eyes and just as importantly in the eyes of the men who work with them. Women in the workforce are still oppressed but well on their way to equality, and perhaps even superiority. Women have overcome every obstacle and have progressed much faster in times of war than during the peaceful interludes between conflicts. It is a case of two steps forward and one step backward. We see, as this essay maintains in the introduction, that women have come a long way, and may they go even farther as the perception of women in the workplace continues to evolve.

You’ve come a long way, baby and may there never be an end as to how far you can go.

—

Bibliography

Boydston Jeanne. “Home and Work, Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic.” Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press

Ulrich LT. “A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812.” New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1990.

Prude, Jonathan. “Capitalism, Industrialization, and the Factory in Post-Revolutionary America.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 16, no. 2, 1996, pp. 237–255. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3124248. Accessed February 4, 2020.

Sharpless, Rebecca. “Southern Women and the Land.” Agricultural History 67, no. 2 (1993): 30-42. www.jstor.org/stable/3744048.

Blanton, DeAnn and Book, Lauren M: “They Fought like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War,” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 88 No. 2 (Summer 2004) pp. 267-269, Georgia Historical Society,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/40584749

https://www.jstor.org/topic/working-women

Dumenil, Lynn. “Women’s Reform Organizations and Wartime Mobilization in World War I-Era Los Angeles.” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10, no. 2 (2011): 213-45. www.jstor.org/stable/23045158.

Schweitzer, Mary M. “World War II, and Female Labor Force Participation Rates.” The Journal of Economic History 40, no. 1 (1980): 89-95. www.jstor.org/stable/2120427.

[1] Ulrich LT. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1990

[2] Ibid kindle location 992

[3] Boydston Jeanne. Home and Work, Housework, wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.  P.122.

[4]Prude, Jonathan. “Capitalism, Industrialization, and the Factory in Post-Revolutionary America.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 16, no. 2, 1996, pp. 237–255. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3124248. Accessed 4 Feb. 2020.

[5] Antebellum labor and reform or ganizations and activism is found in Norman B. Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840- 1860: the Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (Boston, 1924)

[6] Sharpless, Rebecca. “Southern Women and the Land.” Agricultural History 67, no. 2 (1993): 30-42. Accessed February 4, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/3744048.

[7] Blanton, DeAnn and Book, Lauren M: They Fought like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War, The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Vol. 88 No. 2 (Summer 2004) pp. 267-269, Georgia Historical Society,  https://www.jstor.org/stable/40584749

[8] Dumenil, Lynn: Women’s Reform Organization and Wartime Mobilization in World War I-Era Los Angeles, The Jornal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 2011, pp. 213-245), Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23045158?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#reference_tab_contents

[9] ibid

[10] Schweitzer, Mary M. “World War II and Female Labor Force Participation Rates.” The Journal of Economic History 40, no. 1 (1980): 89-95.  www.jstor.org/stable/2120427.