


S1: cuz i'm gonna talk about it so we'll quit. you know i'll just stop lecturing here's the midterm, (you messed up one) is anyone missing today out there? [S2: yes ] yes (xx) yes okay um,
S2: (xx) 
S1: <LAUGH> oh. i'm sorry guys.
SU-M: that's alright 
S2: (xx) no (projector?) 
S1: oh you not only have a vacation today but you have a vacation on Thursday and then we'll be showing a movie on Tu- next Tuesday. we're not even meeting. on Thursday so (xx) 
S2: which is merciful for me because, they have me working for fourteen hours today 
S1: oh you're kidding go go take a nap.
S2: i'm gonna go have some hot tea. 
<P 1:07> 
S1: okay can everybody hear me okay? okay, alright this is the schedule for today, i'm gonna lecture on women work the notes are being passed out now, and, uh i'll, finish up at around ten after eleven, then i will hand out the midterm, and um i will discuss the midterm, for a while a little bit, to make sure that all of you understand, what's expected of you in the midterm okay? i wanna remind you that we do not have class meeting on Thursday, this is to give you a chance to work on the midterm, um if you're writing the midterm in class you'd be writing the midterm in class so, spend some time on thinking about the midterm, it also will give you a chance to, get in touch with me or, um, your G-S-I before the end of the week, so that if you have questions about the midterm, uh you can ask them. now i won't be holding office hours Thursday morning but i will be, uh able to meet with anybody who feels desperate in need to meet with me in the late afternoon on Thursday so if you do, email me okay? and we can, set up some time to meet okay? now uh are there any qu- procedural questions? the midterm is due in class, on, Tuesday, right? (does that make sense?) 
SU-2: (xx)
S1: right okay and you guys figure_ you'll figure out a, a way to get your_ get the midterm you could put you know the sections, down so that people'll know, how to_ where to place their midterms. okay in class on Tuesday and on Tuesday, we will also be seeing the first half of Salt of the Earth, uh in, the continuation of our unit on work. uh, men's and women's work now are there any questions, before i get started? okay? okay. um, now i just wanna remind you that we've just finished discussing men work and, uh the uh presentation the slide tape presentation, the computerized slide tape tape presentation, uh that you saw, uh did i think a very good job of linking cultural notions of masculinity, to the changing experience of work for men. what i wanna do today, is give you an overview of, women and work, and although i'm less concerned about how their work experience, had an impact on their notions of femininity, what i a- will be emphasizing, is how cultural notions of womanhood, determine, women's work experience okay so it's a little bit different than, uh men's, uh sense of masculinity and how it, was altered, by their experience of work. uh and we're more concerned now with how cultural notions of, femininity proper femininity determined women's work experience. now i wanna make some general mar- remarks first uh some s- s- sort of generalizations the first is that, the tension between women's work and women's role in the family, was, present at the beginning of industrialization. in a way that it had not been, in the colonial period. so that they the we we take for granted today that there's tension, between, women's role in the family and women's work lives. many of us experience it either through our mothers or, in own lives profoundly and if you don't experience it yet, whether you're a man or a woman, you're gonna experience it soon. because it's still there it's there in very difficult ways okay? um and i will be talking a lot about that uh later on. but industrialization, and what it did to the organization of family life, really began that tension in ways that haven't been experienced before because it took, men's work out of the home and out of the family and pulled, some women, increasingly more women, into wage labor as well, raising fears that women's(sic) work outside the home would alter, her relationship, with the family. okay? and, the notion that women were grounded in the family was already pre- present in the colonial period, but in much more flexible ways, and in much more handleable ways since everybody's work was grounded in the family it wasn't so surprising, that women's work was okay? second generalization, which i think um, i can make because i lived through it too is that Americans have generally invoi- avoided desperately the implications of this, for much of our history, and although i- occasionally when i lecture on maternalism for example and progressivism we'll talk about the, little forays into dealing with the problem that um, gov- government made, uh or the culture made but for the most part i think avoidance has been the main, uh stance of um American culture, uh up until the last thirty years. and then we've been struggling with it because we didn't lay any groundwork for dealing with it before and, that's a theme that i will, be talking about in different ways from now until the end of the semester because it affects the family so profoundly. and thirdly the third generalization that i wanna make is that the constraints of women's home responsibilities, have typically and almost universally, placed women at a disadvantage in the labor force. it's not that uh you know it's it's their connection with the family, their link with home life their responsibilities in the family, that have continually, uh made them not equal participants, uh a- and i'm not just saying that they couldn't get into the work force who would want to be in the work force necessarily? but when they were forced to be in the work force they were always at a disadvantage because of the notion that women, weren't really permanent workers, they weren't really serious workers they didn't even need the money. they were just there okay? and all of the reasons for that is because they were seen as, nonworkers and we'll talk about that in a minute and, uh their main job was that of the family so that, we're faced with that structural problem of disadvantage and for the last thirty years we've been faced with it and i say we because, the disadvantage of women most women are married and have children in this society, so that the disadvantage of women in the workplace is also a disadvantage of families. women who work hard and earn less bring less home, to their families. and so um, the economic changes that have brought more and more women into the work force in the twentieth century, especially middle-class women uh who tried to follow the ideology of domesticity and could not, uh in the last thirty years uh uh these economic changes have been such that the need, for women's wage-earning has clashed with the inability of our society to deal, with women, large numbers of women in the labor force okay? so we're in a bind, we have a crisis, it will women will not, the majority of women will not go back to the home. okay? and when this economic boom ends i promise you, that some of those women who are profoundly privileged now to still be able to stay at home and not have to go, and work for wages they're_ some of them are gonna h- have to go back into the work force as well. or their daughters will. okay? so as a society, we have to figure out how to cope with that, and also raise, um healthy emotionally uh stable, well-loved and well-nurtured children, and have sane parents. um and that's a problem that we haven't solved. okay. now let me start, uh at the beginning or at least at an arbitrary place that i'll call the beginning women's work in pre- in the preindustrial period, very quickly going over some of the things i talked about, uh regarding the colonial period now there was no um i mean because culture in some ways was up for grabs and institutions, were up for grabs and relatively flexible, in the colonial period as, British and European culture was um transferred but then translated into the American context. it was no longer dictated that women would necessarily be disadvantaged and couldn't have opportunities of social mobility in the New World. but the two, avenues, to social mobility in the New World one was land ownership, uh and the other was apprenticeship you know learning a trade learning a um uh how to, how to be a craftsperson, both of those were at least legally and officially barred to women. it doesn't mean that women in some states weren't able to herit- inherit land and hold on to it especially in the South, where certain laws and cer- during a certain, period of openness did allow women to own own land but only um as widows, uh or as um uh dowries and the legal system brought wives under the coverture the um auspices of their husbands, and once women married they pretty much lost all their legal rights even their rights to their children. in the colonial period those laws weren't changed until the middle of the nineteenth century. uh, and in terms of apprenticeship although there was a great deal of informal apprenticeship, shoemakers and carpenters and other craftsmen very often, uh taught their wives and their daughters their trade, officially, these women worked, as part of the family economy. and were not able essentially to be free actors and agents, uh selling their own labor so that in, the division of labor in the colonies the women did, uh the bulk of the production, uh in the family economy which included, uh, making food you know raw ma- turning raw materials into food, cloth, candles soap-making they took care of the farm animals they took care of the kitchen garden, while husbands and sons did the plowing the planting the harvesting, with women's participation when necessary. um men sometimes helped at spinning and weaving when, the farm work was slow in the winter months, uh, and women's work as i've already said was seen as effe- essential to the family economy it was valued, on a lower scale than men's but remember we're dealing with a hierarchical society that believed, in the Great Chain of Being and, men were at the top i mean first came God then came the king, and then came, the heads of the families okay? fathers being the representative, of the king in governance of the family that's why when children went bad, in the colonial period it was the father who was blamed, not the mother because he was responsible, for not only his wife's behavior but everybody uh under him. okay? uh but so that so that the notion that women's work was important, lived, next to the notion that women's work was important but of course less important than men's. so it shouldn't be too surprising that that, unequal importance although i wanna emphasize the essentialness of women's labor in the home in the colonial period cuz that's something that gets lost, in the nineteenth century, uh in this translation to a new economic situation, uh so uh so the notion that women's work is important, but, subordinate to men's explains part of what happens. you know when merchant capitalism industrialization comes along, and takes men's work out of the home. women's work, m- is reduced in the home the need for women's work is reduced in the home when that happens, not all women's work, the wife was still working from morn- you know some_ from dawn till dusk, she's still doing all those chores. but not as many of them, as she needed to do before. she can buy cloth she can purchase cloth now she can purchase bread she can purchase candles she can even purchase certain kinds of foodstuffs. so that a lot of that original production which happened, in the family, is removed from the family, and we begin to get a, money economy, uh remember surplus people are are producing for surplus, and so the reduction for the need for women's labor occurs, amon- arou- among um young, unmarried women in the home, who formed some of the early, factory workers, uh in the early stages of industrialization in New England. and i think it's important to note, that the factory there was an ideology of industrialization in the United States because it happened later than in England, and the uh th- th- many had witnessed the degradation of labor and the degradation of families as whole families were pushed off the land, the family impoverished and pulled into the factories there were children of five and six years old, were working alongside their mothers and fathers in the factories, the early ideology of um uh industrialization here said no this is not gonna happen here okay? and in many respects those early factories were seen as opportunities, for poor families to make a living, uh to bring in poor widows and children poor women so that they could make a living, uh and there was a(sic) understanding a local understanding, that these factory owners would take some responsibility for protecting, workers from exploitation. but the idea of protection broke down as the transition from a, mercantilist state which took certain kinds of responsibilities for m- the m- the members of, uh this state or the citizens, of this state, uh transitioned into the demands of free-market capitalism which basically, let the market determine, what happened to people. and so the e- effects of the transition to wage labor, for women, were very complicated. for younger daughters of New England farmers it initially meant, an ability to continue to commit to the family economy to contribute to the family economy by being ex- exposed to factory work in a new kind of way. but, the effects on these women who experienced this were mixed. some of them were able to earn dowries and then marry middle or upwardly mobile young farm men on the make who were moving into the lower middle class by moving to cities taking jobs in this new economy, others put their brothers through school so that their brothers could experience the social mobility, that they did not, and others were pushed down into the impoverished working class and had to, stay uh in this new permanent working class. um it's also um true that some women, probably experienced a measure of autonomy and freedom from family authority that they had not experienced before. so we're beginning to see, a certain detachment of um both adol- adolescent boys and girls from the authority of family life as capitalism, begins to pull both young men and young women, into these new, economic situations. another important effect of wage work on all families, was the drawing of sharper lines between affluent women, who could afford not to work for wages and who could keep their daughters at home, and those families who had to send their daughters into the factories, a- or and sometimes took piecework, into their homes or occasionally even had to go into the factories themselves. so with industrialization comes the emergence of classes, and in the United States it's primarily the middle class and the working class. and it's the middle class that it's is creating a new kind of culture, to go along, with this change in family structure. where women and mothers, stay at home, with children, and are given different kinds of tasks than the productive tasks, of the subsistence family in the colonial period. and i've already talked_ this is a review but i want you to u- understand how it's very connected, to women's work and to um to economic development, this is where the emergence of the ideology of domesticity occurs. the middle class essentially invented, the ideology of domesticity, to help them cope with some of the changes that were taking place in the economic realm. and this is an ideology which dictates that middle-class women, ladies respectable women whatever you wanna call them, should stay at home, and they should be doing housework for their families, childcare and the whole notion of childcare expands, uh the whole notion of childhood expands in this period and i will talk about the emergence of childhood as a life stage, along with this family this new st- family structure. and so that um so that this new family ideal, uh, was held up, as the proper family ideal for everybody. it also meant, that women who could not live up to this family ideal were denigrated. they were seen as lazy shilf- shiftless, Irish which also meant drunk and Catholic, um you know to Protestants we already talked about that, uh irresponsible mothers et cetera et cetera mothers who had to work, were clearly, inferior morally okay? here's the beginning, of that notion of if you're poor, there's something wrong with you okay? and it still exists in our society, we assume that people are poor because they're lazy. okay? and mothers who had to go into the factory to work were simply degraded inefficient, you know immoral. okay? and you've read about this, i suggest that you go f- back and refer to this again in Christine Stansel's article Women Children and the Uses of the Streets which contrasts, these new notions of middle-class mothering with the um experience of poor women who simply can't live up to, uh the ideal. so the wives of respectable artisans those on the top of the working class attempted to imitate this life as well. and we see those artisans, you know the, top echelons of the working class managing, for the most part to keep their wives at home now those wives may have helped, a great deal in the, uh work and some of the daughters may have helped a great deal in the shops in the shoemaking, shop uh shops which were in located in the home, during this period, uh for a while. uh until the the shoe factories came in the eighteen forties and fifties and sixties, um and certainly by the end of the Civil War. (xx) but they managed to retain a certain amount of respectability. for free blacks, who didn't have the economic wherewithal for the merst(sic) most part although there was a segment of the black middle class in the North who tried very hard to live up to this ideal. but for most free blacks, for immigrants, the Irish and then immigrants who came in at the end of the century in the eighteen eighties, for widows, for those who were pushed off their, uh increasingly impoverished farms by agricultural capitalism, uh factory work became common- commonplace. and about ten percent of women, in this period up until the eighteen eighties of all women, worked, for wages outside the home. now i wanna talk about something else which has carried over, to our attitudes about women's work today. and that's what happened to married women's, work in the home, in a wage-labor economy. the most significant fact i think, um that we need to be aware of in these changes is the denial the gradual denial, of the economic worth of housework. housework anything that falls under the rubric of housework is still not factored into the American gross national product. in other words it's not considered work it's not considered productive labor, it doesn't d- it it is assumed that it doesn't do anything economically. and yet_ and so recent historical studies have shown the way, this process occurred with the emergence of industrialization in which, the gradual meaning of work and the definition of work changed from labor in the household performed by everybody, to waged(sic) labor labor in which wages for which wages were paid, outside the home. so that gradually the notion of women's work, sort of gets erased it's not paid labor in the home. and so, it no longer is considered work. and this is uh th- so that you d- do not see anymore by the eighteen forties and fifties, a recognition of either the middle-class wife's economic role, in the household, or the working class wife's economic role in the household. we begin to see elaborate_ uh the development of elaborate cash economy, in the early nineteenth century and all through the nineteenth century, the emphasis on growing competition among males for wages, and for property, uh which enhances the importance of money and, money becomes the primary measure of social and ec- economic worth. so that all wives who stayed at home, continued to produce an enormous amount, if it was only to produce the children who would then or the sons who would take their place in the wage economy. to produce food, to dress their husbands to um to feed their families there w- to take care of children, to do all the things necessary to allow the men in the family to function as workers and everybody, understood through uh, folk mythology that if you didn't have a wife, you weren't fully a man. if you weren't a breadwinner who had a wife and child to show for it, you were not a man. you were not an adult man and yet the uh idea, of how the wife allowed the breadwinner to function in the work world was hidden, and obscured. but we still see, um uh an extraordinary amount of work being performed both by middle-class and working class women. their labor at herm, home was uh subsumed under, uh child care and household management if you were middle class and increasingly for middle-class women that meant consumption. it meant becoming the purchasing agents for this little, family economy. uh but it also meant cooking cleaning baking, seeing to the family's, uh provision of vegetables, whether or not you were, growing for yourself or purchasing it at market, um, so the cultural invisibility of, the value the economic value of wives' work, emerged in this, period. and for working class women it was extremely important they didn't have uh the opportunity just to, manage servants, uh consume, uh take care of children and help to create this new life stage of middle-class childhood. um working class women as you uh learned from reading Christine Stansel's article whether they were working in the factories or not, contributed up to three hundred dollars, uh of the family economy, through scavenging for food in cities, finding discarded clothing, hou- making household implements, uh picking up fuel by going around uh you know to um uh keeping uh uh conversant of the transportation of coal, and picking up coal at on the streets, how many of you saw, what's the name of that Irish movie, Angela's Ashes? do you remember when they when the father left and the whole, the mother and the children were out there picking up coal from the streets? that, is the classic it is a classic working class, family task mother and children. um you know all i- taking in, uh certain kinds of piecework which was available to working class women, um the t- for immigrants later on taking in boarders, um al- all sorts of ways in which working class wil- women uh contributed roughly a hundred and fifty to three hundred dollars a year to a working class economy at a time when, if a family didn't make eight hundred dollars a year a family of four it could not sustain itself so that's almost a third or maybe it is a third, up to a third of you know family income was provided by this hidden non-wage labor that working class uh women performed and of course, uh although middle-class women performed their work in a more comfortable setting they were also, working hard long hours and performing essential, labor. in order for their men and their sons to participate as breadwinners in this economy. and this notion that if women are home they don't work, has pervaded, our assumptions about family life in the twentieth century. now ab- in nineteen eighty-eight, uh when there was a lot of change going on the divorce rate was going up in the nineteen seventies and eighties and the divorce uh law, was still you know sort of tied to notions of family life from the end of the nineteenth century, and a divorce lawyer, who wound up representing a lot of housewives who had given twenty-five years of their life to, you know sort of sustaining, uh families raising children and supporting husbands, so that they could be breadwinners and then were basically, thrown out on their ears and expected at the age of forty to find some way of earning wages and their you know main, work had been facilitating, the lives of others, uh this lawyer um, uh wound up, bein- representing a lot of these women and finally, uh wrote a book called What Is a Wife Worth? this was in nineteen-eighty-eight. um and uh he um at the time, he uh argued and this is this also gives you a sense of how much inflation, uh had happened uh has happened uh from nineteen eighty-eight to the present, at the time he argued that if you paid, somebody an hourly wage, to do what uh women did in the home childcare laundry cleaning uh, transportation for children, meeting with teachers, uh you know childcare all this stuff, that basically you would have to pay a wife uh, roughly thirty-five thousand dollars a year, uh if you farmed out the tasks that wives do for free. in nineteen ninety-four i heard an interview with this very same lawyer, um on N-P-R uh, and he uh the f- the economy had changed and so now and of course this is a- this is a, o- an old statistic but he updated, the worth of these tasks, and in nineteen ninety-four a wife would have would have needed to be paid sixty-two thousand dollars a year, uh in order, to um pay for the tasks that women who stay at home perform for the family. and, along with this hidden, you know sort of notion of, the fact that this isn't work, our society assumes that women who stay at home, uh with children are just playing cards and coffee-klatching all day, uh so there's this sort of denigration, uh this notion of you know when they have time they just go out and shop till they drop, uh that kind of stuff i mean the, way in which our s- society both, says that you know if you're a respectable and a caring mother you have to stay home with your children, but then dumps on them, for making that choice because they're lazy and they don't really do anything i mean it's really a schizophrenic, uh attitude towards women and i remember i remember when i was and this was before feminism i was not, you know in college when feminism had emerged i was already out of college i had just about finished graduate school. and we used to, uh we i you know at parties when you were introducing yourself to somebody blah blah blah you know w- well we used to, ask questions like well what did, your father do? what did your mother do? did your mother work? and you know the answer if you were middle class was no. she didn't work. even though my mother did not work for wages outside of the home i was lucky, she she worked, all the time i mean she was, never i never saw her sitting down i never saw her she was facilitating everybody in the world i mean that was, what she did she did a pretty good job of it and uh, you know at the end of the day she was exhausted. uh think about um uh, women in the work force now who have to do both those things talk about exhaustion. for God's sake. um but we'll get to that later on. okay so, this is the moment in which, housework and all the complicated, uh things that women do to facilitate, the functioning of the economy, you know the gross national product got, hidden and denigrated. okay. so to summarize by the end of the Civil War, the patterns of women's work, were set really up until the end of World War Two. working women, were a relatively small proportion of workers because the ideal was if you were a real true man, you could keep your wife at home. and so that even labor you know labor unions when they demanded a family wage we will come into uh discussing the meaning of the family wage again you'll be reading about it, what that meant was to be paid enough to keep their wives at home, just like middle-class men could keep their wives at home, that was the dominant notion of masculinity and of being a breadwinner. so that uh, the women who worked were the women who had to work and between ten to fifteen percent, of all women, worked in the u- in the eigh- by eighteen eighty, for wages outside the home. and that uh number went up to about twenty percent by World War Two and then shot up, to almost double that, um by uh the end of World War Two. okay World War One twenty percent almost double that by the end of World War Two. when women did work, outside the home the only excuse that they were allowed to have, otherwise they were totally degraded and unrespectable, was that they were working for family means. okay? the idea that you might, enjoy work or that it might give you certain amount of autonomy from your family and in- independence, not an excuse, those kind of women were considered promiscuous and stepping out of bounds. so wage work, for women became primarily, for immigrant women for poor women for the desperately poor, widows and there were a lot of them because there was no workmen's compensation in this period of industrialization and a lot of men were injured, or w- w- uh women whose husbands were injured, and could no longer work, but in spite of these patterns, industrialization, gradually continued because of the technology, to expand the opportunities, for women to work and more and more women needed to work. there were a number of changes that took place that facilitated that. first, technology continued to streamline factory work, in ways that allowed, industrialists to, hire, cheap women's labor in different factories because of, you know increasing technology which didn't require the kind of brute strength that men had, um a- by the end of the century employers loved being able to hire women, because the- they could pay them half the wages of men. uh and the assumption that w- uh it was fine to pay women half the wages of men, was based on this notion of proper womanhood. even though people uh denigrated women, unless they were working for their family, employers argued that women who worked, were really under the protection of men, and were just working for pin money. so you got, you got it either way if you were a working women(sic), uh wo- woman employers paid you half, the wages of men because the assumption was that you were only working for supplementary wages. and uh if you were in the work force at all you were suspect, because you hadda prove that you were helping a family if you were a widow, God help you. okay? um so, so uh, e- employers were delighted and recruited women wherever they could, and the other thing that happens with technology at the end of the eighteen eighties, is that a new work force of pink-collar, labor, emerges with the emergence of typewriters for example. type- typewriters originally uh clerks and secretaries were uh that was an originally a male occupation, and the assumption was that most secretaries male secretaries, would move into, uh uh important positions of authority in these independent (own) businesses. but once these larger corporations came along, with the you know these large numbers of of employees like you saw in the slide tape presentation, uh and men were no longer self-employed and didn't have just one secretary who would, inherit the business, people discovered that being a secretary and typing out um letters was a dead-end, job which didn't have to uh include uh mobility up uh the scale and so, it became a feminized occupation. and so a lot of women after eighteen eighty began uh seeking out office work and another um uh popular uh occupation was uh department store work, saleswomen working women who um, enjoyed uh_ they were paid less than factory workers sometimes but at least it wasn't dirty you weren't quite as exposed to sexual harassment, although you were but not quite as much in the same way um and so we begin to see, technology moving more of uh young, unmarried working class women, into other kinds of work secretarial work, department store work and factory work as well and you're gonna be reading about uh uh, you'll be reading an article by Kathy Heiss, which will talk about this new, cultural world for women workers that emerges. a second uh stimulus on uh women going into the work force at the end of the nineteenth century, was the increasing number of affluent households, of the middle class, which were able to relegate more and more domestic work to machinery, and therefore didn't need, uh th- uh to um require these light chores from some daughters who were waiting at home to get married, and many of these young daughters began to continue to go through, school till high school and then to college and so we see a real uh change by the eighteen seventies a- and eighties in which women's colleges are founded and drawing more and more, young unmarried affluent women into college educations. and what happened to some of those daughters? some very important things happened and i'll speak about it again in another context, is once those women received equal educa- college educations with some of the men most men were not going to college then, they were going into business and making it, uh part of the reason, some of these big universities like the University of Michigan which admitted women in eighteen seventy, were interested in having women is cuz they couldn't get enough young men to sustain their operating costs. and so they began to draw on middle-class women, but these women who came out of college with educations were sort of ruined, for um or at least partially ruined for being able to go back into that Victorian uh family in which they, were required to become uh you know sort of homebodies and primarily childrearers, and m- s- many of these women began to seek employment for themte- selves that would satisfy some emotional needs uh to use their education. and in order to do that, they had to invent a whole range of new occupations. and so we see many of these college-educated women becoming factory inspectors. health inspectors in factories. um, they become social workers as the, occupation of social work is, stimulated by the, horrible degradation that families working class families they're experiencing industrialization, and the old reform impulse the women reformers who'd begun to critique capitalist society in the eighteen thirties and forties and fifties, a new generation of women reformers, now college educated, begin to, create the social welfare occupations that will address the absolute um, horrors of this new industrial state so they become social workers. they become visiting nurses who go into the homes of the poor, and try and help them, with issues of health truant officers, jobs taking jobs in bureaus of labor statistics, in state and federal governments, personnel officers, they begin entering graduate programs. they'd already begun entering medical schools already by the eighteen fifties uh som- some women and law school becomes increasingly more attractive too so that by the nineteen twenties you get a significant minority at least an equal minority of women, uh about five percent, studying law as there were uh women studying medicine but it happened in medicine, much earlier you think there weren't any women doctors till the nineteen sixties right? you're wrong. there were the same percentage of the women physicians in nineteen hundred as there were in nineteen sixty so women actually entered the medical profession in the nineteenth century. but anyway these educated women, began to manipulate the ideology of woman's sphere the ideology that women were responsible for raising good children uh preserving the morals of society seeing to it that industrialization doesn't destroy the decency of Christian civilization they began to take these, notions very seriously and as they did even earlier in their involvement in abolition and other kinds of reform movements temperance in the eighteen thirties and forties at the end of the nineteenth century they began to critique government, both state and the federal government, for not putting in place social welfare programs and i will, discuss that, uh when i talk about maternalism and the invention of the social welfare state but these educated women really helped to invent the social welfare state at least, the institutions that were eventually co-opted by the social welfare state in the early twentieth century. now, one of the things that many of these women reformers did especially, uh a large group of women who were studying, sociology, uh and political science at the University of Chicago, uh and were involved in the founding of Hull House, how many of you have heard of Jane Adams, and Hull House? okay Jane Adams was one of those college-educated women, who didn't know what to do with her life, and she was so confused after getting a really good education, and feeling on the one hand that she needed to commit to this sort of relatively idle, life of an unmarried daughter until she got married and started her o- mof- own family, uh and she was not interested in marriage not profoundly interested in men she actually, uh later in life became a lesbian, uh but the fact of the matter is that Jane, Adams wanted desperately to use her education to improve society. and she had a breakdown after college in the eighteen eighties because of this horrible choice that she felt, she had a lot of pressure from her family to come home, and she felt a lot of inner pressure to do something meaningful and that's how she finally went to Chicago and established Hull House which was one of the model, settlement houses to deal with, immigrant uh workers and the University of Chicago which had been founded in the early uh eighteen nineties had an extraordinary vibrant young faculty, of uh uh W-I Thomas John Dewey and a number of scholars who taught the first generation of women sociologists and psychologists and and in many respects Hull House was a, proving ground and a ler- a learning laboratory for those academics as they, invented modern sociology, and um you know these these uh new occupations that would eventually be part of the welfare state. now one of the, most important issues on their agenda was protective legislation for women. and um so that one of the uh uh things that women reformers along with um others who were um supportive of bolstering labor's position vis-a-vis, uh the uh um uh uh industry uh th- m- the idea that women needed re- to be protected if they were gonna work in factories otherwise their bodies would be damaged for, reproduction. and so protective legislation was a very very complicated issue. it's very interesting that some of the most radical women, who were interested in socialism, did not want protective legislation specifically for women, they wanted protective legislation for all workers, men and women. because the understanding was that if women were protected they would continue to be only women were protected they would continue to be disadvantaged in the work force vis-a-vis men. but in the end protective legislation was passed, first by the states, uh individually, and then eventually um bolstered by the federal government, and, the debate over protective legislation, uh that historians um have been carrying on ever since the progressive period, still goes on. and now the fact of the matter is that we believe that protective legislation did, improve uh the work situation for a lot of women in the factories during this period. they were given breaks they were factory owners were forced to establish women's um uh washrooms, uh they were barred from certain kinds of labor night work for example which it was thought mothers shouldn't be doing they should be home taking care of their children, um and um and uh in the end, what protective legislation accomplished was very very complicated and mostly negative. it helped women, at the immediate moment when they needed it, but the fact that men weren't protected also, drove many women workers out of industries when_ where um employers ceased to hire women because it was too costly to institute um the kinds of protections that were needed, women who were barred from night work uh for example there was a large, contingent of women a large percentage of women, working in the printing industry. and much of the printing industry went on at night, because the bulk of the printing industry's work was newspapers women were essentially m- uh barred from the printing industry and lost a very very lucative(sic) lucrative and fairly decent-paying niche in industry. also in a number of leisure industries, bowling for example and amusement parks, where women were being hired at fairly decent wages but which required night work. um women lost out there too, and were unable to uh make gains because in many states, those industries were protected also this was particularly difficult for w- widows single mothers, who liked to work at night, so that they could be around for their children during the day. so what we see happening, in the long term with the institution of protective legislation for women is that it was based on the notion that women, are weaker than men, that women need a certain kind of special handling, within industry, uh and instead of equalizing the work experience for all men and by the way, in Europe the labor unions, for the most part rejected protective legislation for women. they were not they understood the implications, and they understood the ways in which it would reinforce the inequality of women in competition with men and so the labor unions which were much stronger in Europe during this period i'm talking, of France Germany England Italy, um, uh, for the most part insisted on protective legislation for all... there's been a lot of debate among historians over whether, entering the work force, was an emancipatory experience for women, or whether in many respects it reinforced their sense of um, second-class citizenship. and um many i think historians want to argue that the experience of entering the labor force did, offer a certain for- form of autonomy and agency, to women who seemed to have more control over their lives and certainly, Kathy Pize's article argues that women were agents and in control of their leisure time and understood how to negotiate, uh things that they needed. on the other hand i tend to side and you guys have to make your own decision about this i tend to side with the people who're skeptical the historians who're skeptical, about how, profoundly emancipatory, uh working class women's work experience was, uh during this period and well into the nineteen fifties. women were paid less than men. their second-class citizenship was constantly reinforced. it seems to me that the work culture, uh which uh dictated to young women that the best thing would be to get married and get out of the work force, uh the um, s- the way they were treated at work um often uh sexually harassed um, all of these, low wages the uh impossibility sometimes of being able to make it on their own, having to live together because of the low wages, the idea that marriage was a cushion from abject poverty, and uh the low self-esteem it seems to me being placed in the lowest and dirtiest jobs has to have had, an effect on, uh working class women, and i would argue that it's one of the reasons why, i think working class women were relatively slow to respond to feminism when it began to articulate, uh some of the needs of working women, in the nineteen sixties, because, working class women, hated their jobs for the most part and derived most of their emotional satisfaction and f- meaning in their lives from family. uh to the degree that they could. and so the notion that um they should be out in the work force uh given what the experience of work was for women, up until the nineteen seventies when uh, uh equal, l- legislation uh was put on the books nationally to reduce the d- discrimination, of women in the work force both of wag- in terms of wages, and other experiences, it seems to me that until, you are, uh, you are treated decently on the job, working outside the home isn't always about, independence. it's also it can often be uh about being beaten down as well. now i wanna uh to uh move to the period between uh World War One and the present. and make some uh large generalizations about women's work during that period... um, the nineteen twenties was a m- a period in which the more afflicant(sic) affluent group of women, who um, entered the work force in these new pink-collar jobs continued to enter the work force. and there was an expanding job market for clerical and secretarial work in the professions, and interestingly enough in the nineteen twenties because of that we begin to see in the women's magazines, and some of the more progressive magazines, a discussion for the first time about how women, would balance work and, family. and the notion of balancing work and family how long should women work? can women work after they get married? can women work outside the home when their children are young? these were uh issues that were raised in the nineteen twenties, and economists by the nineteen twenties were also arguing that for a certain segment of the population, wage work for women was going to exist, forever. so already by the nineteen twenties, the situation the pieces were in place, to discuss what to do about the large numbers of women in the work force twenty percent and how to balance family life and work responsibilities. but unfortunately the Depression put an end to that public debate. and the uh reaction in the Depression against, women working was swift, and ironic. married women were fired all over the place from government jobs from any other jobs a lot of women had to, hide the fact that they were married in order to keep working even though many of them were the sole supporters of their family. ironically however the numbers of women working during the Depression did not go down, because they weren't(sic) at the dirtiest and low-paying jobs, which men wouldn't take. and so we_ because of, the way in which protective legislation, helped segregate, the work market the labor force, men and women were not competing, in the work force and so in the Depression although women did lose their jobs, they didn't lose their jobs, in the same ways that m- men did because they were tie- service jobs that were needed in spite of the breakdown of the economy. and this is when between uh a fourth and a fifth of the labor male labor force was unemployed. now during World War Two and we'll be seeing a wonderful movie uh about this Rosie the Riveter, the opposite happened with large numbers of men leaving home, there was an extraordinary labor shortage especially in (the) economy gearing up for war. and so government propaganda was produced to get as many women including married women into the work force as possible and you'll see some of this government propaganda when uh we show the movie, Rosie the Riveter. but during World War Two as a result, women made some dramatic uh gains and black women as well were able to move out of low-paying, uh cleaning jobs into factory work uh which was which was much better paid. now, what's interesting about that period is although the government profoundly committed for five years to getting women into the work force, they did not commit to supporting women with childcare and other kinds of, uh supports that would help women, stay in the work force and so that a lot of women, went into the work force unsure of how to manage childcare, many of them were absent there was a very high absentee rate, uh because there were no stores that were open after they came home from work to shop, and the ability to coordinate the needs of working women, something that happened in England which you know, stores were kept open until late at night, childcare was provided for uh the understanding that if you're gonna have married women with children in the work force you have to help them, continue to take care of their families that didn't go over here so well. and although there was some discussion, some factories did attach childcare centered(sic) for the most part there was very little response to the needs of working women once they were gotten into the work force yeah?
S3: i just wondered if there was like an increase in possibly older women who couldn't work in the factories did they, go into childcare pr- childcare providing because of this shortage?
S1: no there was no coordination of need and knowledge you really do need to do that, you know in a, systematic way and either local government, state government or federal government has to, uh you know g- get in and coordinate that and there were no funds for, thinking creatively about that at all. here. there was in England. for example where they desperately needed workers and women workers filled, that gap. um, okay i because i wanna talk about the exam you guys can pass it out now. i'm gonna stop here and finish up, uh uh the uh end of this uh lecture on women and work, in which i just deal with what happened after World War Two, in the present, uh i will finish that up, just at the beginning of class on Tuesday, uh before we see Rosie the Riveter. but right now i want you to read the exam, each question at least twice. <P :22> okay. the exam <P :11> we are suggesting a length of six pages do not go over six-and-a-half pages. you say yes wait until you try and get all this stuff on six pages. you're gonna have to be a really good writer. which i'm sure you are. okay. typewritten... if if you don't if you can't have this typed speak to your G-S-I. we will uh accept, non-typewritten but boy your handwriting better be good. okay? alright. there are th- two parts to the exam, short answer and i'm not kidding when i say, i want you to identify, each of these things in no more than three sentences do not spend a paragraph these are just to make sure that you've been attending lectures and know what day it is and what class this is. okay? alright. you can do all of these you should be able to do all of these. but you don't have to you get you know only have to do five out of six okay? now... let me remind you these essays are a way of testing your knowledge and i need to know that you've been doing the reading so, tell me this is a chance to, flout or flaunt okay? not flout but flaunt, all the stuff you've been reading and everything you know okay? and what i want why i give this kind of uh e- exam is because i really want you to sit down with all the stuff you've learned your notes, your notes to the reading, your discussions and i want you to figure out what it is you've learned. in the past couple of weeks. and unless you are, asked to bring this stuff together, think it through you'll never know what you learned in this course and i really want you to know, what you learned in this course okay? i want it to be active knowledge okay so, in your essays and i'll get to the essays in a minute, every time you uh, are thinking or referring to an article that you read and refer to an article if somebody says X, you know or if you got the idea from X or you remember that an article says X, put it in parentheses just the the um you know sort of the name of the author, or the title of the article. i do not want any formal citations in this, none of that we don't need that at all. mention the movies. use the movies as examples. okay? now i usually require also that you use, handouts did i say that here? [SU-F: no ] okay because we're still you know mostly, dealing with the period, uh up until the present you you can't use your handouts yet. but do not throw away those handouts. i will require in the final that you make citations from some of those handouts. you're all thinking what handouts? i handed uh, a cou- at least two articles from the New York Times out. find them if you don't have them, get them ask me i have extras so do the G-S-Is. okay? alright now. let me tell you who does well and who does not, d- do well on this exam. the people who understand the questions, read the questions carefully, know what the keywords and what the questions are asking of you do well. the people who, invariably don't do well on this exam are people who really don't get the question. don't understand it, don't know what is being asked. okay? so you have lots of time you have a full week to do this you can email me what to you mean about X in this question okay? you can ask your G-S-Is. do not do badly on this uh test because you don't understand the question. okay? and believe me that the large number of people, fall into that category that's why i tend to read, these questions with you. and i keep rephrasing, questions because i, am trying very hard, to help you understand these questions. when i was an undergraduate it was just one sentence, not not, big long paragraphs here. nobody cared, whether i understand_ understood the question or not, and um uh sometimes i wasn't sure that i did. okay? but you can do all of you every single one of you can get an A that's what's good about these, uh exams is that you know it's, if you do what you need to do you can get an A on this exam. we don't grade on a curve. alright question one. <READING> from the last decade of the eighteenth century </READING> what is the eighteenth century? [SS: seventeen hundreds ] seventeen hundreds okay? seventeen nineties, alright? <READING> to the end of the nineteenth the concept </READING> concept okay it's in black. <READING> of the ideal American family was transformed. part of the reason for this was because the changes in the economic and social circumstances of Americans. although this new model of family life exerted a profound influence on all Americans only some social groups adopted it others did not. write an essay, that first discusses how, and in what ways both, the material conditions of family life, </READING> what am i talking about when i say material conditions of family life? <P :05> [S4: the goods produced and who produced them ] whe- who's talking? raise your hand. yeah?
S4: the goods produced and who produced them
S1: okay say it a little bit louder.
S4: the goods produced and who produced them
S1: the goods produced who produces them, was there a lot of technology? was it an agricultural, uh family? was it an industrial family? um you know who made the money how? did the money be made? was there money? because some of these groups there wasn't any money just a little hint, okay? alright so the material conditions of lives are everything did u- that has to do with the day-to-day, living eating, you know dressing yourself producing et cetera et cetera. so the larger economic atmosphere and everything else that goes into that think expansively okay? and i want you other_ <READING> write an essay that first discusses how and in what ways both the material conditions of family life and family ideology </READING> we're back to concept okay? <READING> and family ideology changed in the period under review. </READING> so i don't just wanna hear about changing ideas about family life, i wanna know what changed. in the material conditions of family li- th- under which family life was conducted. and i want you to understand how those two things or i want you to understand and then be able to explain, to us how those two things are constantly, interacting. <READING> then explain who tried to live by this ideal. discuss why after the ideal became dominant, some groups continued to live in alternative family systems. discuss how this nonconformity, with new social norms affected the attitudes of dominant classes towards these groups. </READING> okay? you've got reading material and lecture material for all of this. finally and you don't for this this means you gotta just, speculate give you a chance to, think (of) what you know counterfactual all that i don- <READING> try to speculate how members of nonst- standard family groups felt about themselves, particularly in relation to the surrounding social order. </READING> now you have a little evidence of that you certainly can infer, you have some evidence think of one group that you have, uh one nonstandard family group, that you might be able to speculate how they felt about themselves. name one.
S5: immigrants. uh some some groups of immi- immigrants
S1: okay immigrants. let's take the first immigrant group we discussed the Irish. okay? we could probably, given what we've read, and what i've talked about in terms of how the Irish were treated, how they fi- one way in which the Irish fought back. one way.
S6: they, they played on Sunday.
S1: okay they also drank on Sunday [S6: they drank that's what i, (knock in the bar) ] okay they, established parochial schools. biggie a biggie okay? alright those are all the hints i'm giving you for that one. now question two this is a hard question, people think it's the easiest question it's usually not. it can be done very well, but you have to think. <READING> it can be argued that the manner in which a family obtains it's living strongly determines how it is structured, and how it functions. looking at the period between the colonial settlement in North America </READING> what, date am i talking about? colonial settlement of North America you know the, class isn't over for two twenty-eight twenty-nine thirty t- one more minute. colonial sett- settlement. [S7: sixteen-oh-seven? ] okay sixteen-oh-seven fine excellent. to roughly nineteen-fifteen (and) nineteen-fifteen allows you to discuss immigrant groups okay? <READING> show how the economic structure, of the societies in which different families lived, helped to shape family structure roles and relationships. </READING> what comes to mind in the colonial period? two different economic structures that you could compare and contrast family life from? <P :05> [S7: Native Americans and Puritans ] okay Native Americans and Puritans good that's the only hint i'm gonna give you for that question, um, but what i want you to think about <READING> how did family economy, affect relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children family and society work and play even political and religious life and class status? </READING> you cannot answer all of these categories thoroughly. okay? you can't. i know you can but it you answer to the best of your ability and you can infer. okay? there is evidence, ee- is- s- some of these categories you can only speculate okay? but you can take educated speculations okay. <READING> do you think that the influence of economic factors has been decisive in shaping these other realms of family life? </READING> do you think, the economics, determines, how family life, functions? is it the most important thing? or does it work in conjunction with other things? i'm asking you to take a stand here, about how influential, economic structure is yeah?
S8: (for) the family relationships do you want us to do each one a little bit or pick one or two and get more (xx)
S1: you mean each of the groups? or 
S8: (uh) between the relationships husband wife parent children, yeah.
S1: you pick the ones that you can compare and contrast best. okay? the ones that you have the most information (on.) is that does that answer your question? okay. um, <READING> show how this may have worked in discussing what you have learned about the family economies, of Native American families Africa- so i've even given you the groups African-American families, immigrant families native white working class and white middle-class families during this period. </READING> now that's a total giveaway because half of you would have been graded down a whole point, for leaving out, one of these categories. so i want you to think about all these things. i want you to all do well. <READING> how and in what ways did these families survive economically, and what similarities and differences among them can you note, and how did modes of economic survival, affect these structures? </READING> <STUDENTS BEGIN TO GET READY TO LEAVE> now wait a second okay you could, ONE more minute it may be worth it okay. you do not have to organize your essays, the way these questions are organized okay? organize your essays according to the rules of good writing that will make a huge difference in your grade. one idea per paragraph. illustrate those ideas with examples transition sentences from paragraph to paragraph. think about how to organize this answer before you put pen to paper. outline it if you can. okay? good luck i want everybody to get an A. <STUDENTS LEAVING><P :13> [S9: (xx) ] what? [S9: (xx) ] um yeah. <P :05> by the way no smaller than, what? tw- eleven point? twelve point? this is you guys. in terms of your uh font. [SS: twelve point ] [S2: twelve-point font double-space (xx) <S2 LAUGH> ] you don't have to know (xx) oh if you're going to single-space make sure it's twelve-point font okay?
SS: double double
S2: double space no single space
S1: no no they can one-and-a-half is okay [S2: oh ] [SU-F: oh ] one-and-a-half is okay. [SU-F: that's fine ] <P :11>
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