In a previous BLOG post about women in the workplace, great feedback was provided by many of my readers. In that May 2016 posting, we described one woman who experienced sexism in an academic setting, “where she was excluded by her professor from team meetings.” She recalls, “He would never fill me in on meetings or what my responsibilities would be. I had to hear second hand from the male grad students who he would provide the information too. It was bizarre.”
She soon left without gaining her masters in microbiology.
Another woman described her treatment received from the public school system, the very organization now searching for more teachers to fill their dwindling ranks. She garnered little financial support while staying at home to raise her second child. In that case, even in a female-dominated workplace, like that of K through 6 elementary schools, the bureaucracy did not support women’s needs. To wit, only two days of maternity leave are granted under the gaze of the politically powerful California Teacher’s Association, and there is no paid leave or extended sick leave for female teachers with babies beyond that miniscule token of time allowed for recovery.
I asked, “What kind of advocacy for career women is that?” And boy, did many women share their own stories.
I further encapsulate another of these job difficulties in my fictional account, Breach of Trust, where Meredith Raffensperger has changed jobs owing to sexual harassment at her previous place of employment.
From the Micro-view to the Macro-view
In this BLOG post, however, I’m taking a step back in time from the twenty-first century and addressing the challenges these women’s forerunners faced in even seeking employment outside of the home.
The era between the end of World War I and beginning of World War II – from 1920 through 1940 – is the time. The place is America.
If you’re asking why we should examine this time and place as to the increase in the female participation rate in a male-dominated workplace of the early twentieth century, please read on.
Women Finally Enabled to Join the Workplace at the Start of the 20th Century
In 1920, the nineteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified, effectively giving American women the right to vote. With newfound confidence in an early step towards equality, many women opted to join the working class. Timing could not have been better for the fairer sex. As Robert Gordon reports in his 2016 economic tome [1] about GDP in America, one reason for more women joining the job market was rooted in “the increased demand for clerical workers in response to the steady decline in the output share of agriculture and increased share of the service sector.”
Gordon’s analysis revealed another dimension to women becoming qualified to seek employment outside the home: “[It] was a response to the great surge of secondary school attendance and graduation; high school graduation rates increased from 9 percent in 1910 to 52 percent in 1940.” Women were gaining the skill sets needed for either clerical or service work. The home environment, supported by a general reduction in manual housework and the cultural environment, with society banning companies from employing child labor, allowed women to focus on education in their formative years.
She soon left without gaining her masters in microbiology.
Another woman described her treatment received from the public school system, the very organization now searching for more teachers to fill their dwindling ranks. She garnered little financial support while staying at home to raise her second child. In that case, even in a female-dominated workplace, like that of K through 6 elementary schools, the bureaucracy did not support women’s needs. To wit, only two days of maternity leave are granted under the gaze of the politically powerful California Teacher’s Association, and there is no paid leave or extended sick leave for female teachers with babies beyond that miniscule token of time allowed for recovery.
I asked, “What kind of advocacy for career women is that?” And boy, did many women share their own stories.
I further encapsulate another of these job difficulties in my fictional account, Breach of Trust, where Meredith Raffensperger has changed jobs owing to sexual harassment at her previous place of employment.
From the Micro-view to the Macro-view
In this BLOG post, however, I’m taking a step back in time from the twenty-first century and addressing the challenges these women’s forerunners faced in even seeking employment outside of the home.
The era between the end of World War I and beginning of World War II – from 1920 through 1940 – is the time. The place is America.
If you’re asking why we should examine this time and place as to the increase in the female participation rate in a male-dominated workplace of the early twentieth century, please read on.
Women Finally Enabled to Join the Workplace at the Start of the 20th Century
In 1920, the nineteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified, effectively giving American women the right to vote. With newfound confidence in an early step towards equality, many women opted to join the working class. Timing could not have been better for the fairer sex. As Robert Gordon reports in his 2016 economic tome [1] about GDP in America, one reason for more women joining the job market was rooted in “the increased demand for clerical workers in response to the steady decline in the output share of agriculture and increased share of the service sector.”
Gordon’s analysis revealed another dimension to women becoming qualified to seek employment outside the home: “[It] was a response to the great surge of secondary school attendance and graduation; high school graduation rates increased from 9 percent in 1910 to 52 percent in 1940.” Women were gaining the skill sets needed for either clerical or service work. The home environment, supported by a general reduction in manual housework and the cultural environment, with society banning companies from employing child labor, allowed women to focus on education in their formative years.
A third cause cited by Gordon and his economic team for female workers outside of the home was technological in scope: “The gradual diffusion of electric appliances, including the iron, vacuum cleaner, range, refrigerator, and washing machine.” He notes that the workplace environment evolved to a point after World War I where women could easily fit in [2]. He reports, “The opportunities for women to shift from household service and the apparel workshop to clerical and sales work steadily improved working conditions as dirty and arduous work was replaced by the more comfortable environment of the modern office and sales floor jobs that typically required fewer hours of work per week.”
Prior to the start of the twenty-first century, many historians have identified that the life of blue-collar working housewife was indistinguishable from that of a hired domestic servant. Dorothy Dix, in 1929, recalled [3], “Marriage brings a woman a life sentence of hard labor in her home. Her work is the most monotonous in the world and she has no escape from it.”
Robert Gordon adds to the evidence of difficulties women faced before cultural shifts and technology even allowed them to seek jobs outside the home. He reports on Strasser’s research [4]:
“A child raised on a North Dakota farm in the late 1890s later recalled as a grandmother details life inside her late nineteenth-century farmhouse:
[She] remembers the tools – doing laundry with tubs, washboards, and flatirons, cooking on a wood stove with iron pots, growing and preserving food, sewing and mending, cleaning filthy kerosene lamps – and speaks with a little nostalgia: ‘I’d hate to go through it again. Took us all day to do a big washing.’”
Fast Forward to the 21st Century
For women in the workplace, it has been a challenge to secure employment outside the home and it continues to be a challenge to keep such employment today. While amendments and laws are passed in supporting women, it is female perseverance that has given rise to an American civilian labor force populated with 74.6 million women, which translates to almost 47 percent of all U.S. workers in today’s America.
And since we augmented this BLOG highlighting women’s participation rates in the workplace, let’s close on that statistic for the modern era [5]:
“Women’s participation in the U.S. labor force has climbed since the [end of the 1920 – 1940 period] from 32.7 percent in 1948 to 56.8 percent in 2016.”
That means it has almost doubled since Dorothy Dix made her 1929 observation about becoming a servant in her own household after marriage. She would be proud of the progress women are making, especially on the macro level.
[1] The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, Robert J. Gordon, 2016, Princeton University Press, N.J., pp.274–275.
[2] In the March 2017 edition of my A World Perspective newsletter, I capture further details about the diffusion of appliances in the home from this era and beyond.
[3] Dorothy Dix’s recollection as documented in Robert Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd’s Middletown, 1929, p.169.
[4] Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 1982, p.49.
[5] See “12 Stats About Working Women” from the U.S. Department of Labor’s BLOG, posted in March 2017: https://blog.dol.gov/2017/03/01/12-stats-about-working-women.
[6] See also Facts Over Time: https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/facts_over_time.htm.