I attended the Business History Conference over the past weekend. It was held in Minneapolis, which was very convenient and cheap. Even with the current gas prices my 1.5 mile drive to free street parking could not have cost much.
My session was distinguished by having the only two papers on the program that had exclamation marks in their title!! Actually, if you look at the program they don't have the "!" there, trust me that their title slide had the crucial "!"
In my paper I used interviews with 300 workers from the Western Electric company (the people that used to make all the telephones in America) conducted between 1929 and 1931 to look at what rank-and-file workers thought about married women being in paid employment.
During the Depression this was a topic of some concern, and nearly half the workers interviewed referred to the issue. (The interviews let employees choose the topics of conversation). The most identifiable group of workers opposed to married women remaining in employment were single women with dependent family members.
There were actually very few people who came out and said things like "a married woman’s place is at home …. she can find plenty to do there" and
There’s plenty of work to be done at home, and in order to keep the home fires burning the way they should be, I don’t think the woman’s place is down here. It is at home cooking good meals for her husband and doing the necessary work she should do.
Most employees opposed to married women working framed their opposition as a concern for equity amongst households while work was scarce. There was a widespread perception that families with both spouses working were spending all their money on "cars and fur coats," while struggling single girls had to support their parents.
At the same time, single women were also frustrated that men were delaying marriage proposals because of the Depression. The same ideology--that men's wages should support families--that criticized married women for working gave men pause about marrying.
The new thing about my paper is that it takes this literature into the factory, whereas much of the previous research about opposition to married women's work in the inter-war era has looked at women in clerical or professional occupations.
If you're truly interested, the paper is here. It's still a little loose and unformed, but gives me something to start hanging the rest of the fourth chapter around.
Posted by robe0419 at May 23, 2005 11:35 AM