history

DuBois, Ellen, C. and Lynn Dumenil.  Through Women's Eyes. Available from: MBS Direct, (5th Edition). Macmillan Higher Education, 2018.

CHAPTER 9

Change and Continuity

WOMEN IN PROSPERITY, DEPRESSION, AND WAR, 1920–1945

FROM ONE PERSPECTIVE, WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES IN the period from 1920 to 1945 seem marked more by change than by continuity. Popular culture icons graphically capture the differences between the decades. The young, devil-may-care flapper with her short dress, rouged face, and rolled stockings symbolized the New Woman of the 1920s. Rebelling against the restraint of Victorian womanhood, the flapper eagerly embraced the growing consumer culture, with its emphasis on leisure and materialism, of this largely prosperous era. For the following decade, the most powerful icon is Dorothea Lange’s widely reproduced photograph of a migrant mother (see p. 537), who symbolized Americans’ dignified suffering as they weathered the devastating economic crisis of the 1930s. The migrant mother embodied, too, the popular assumption that woman’s most important role during the Great Depression was an extension of her traditional responsibilities of maintaining the home and family. Images of women during World War II seemingly point in yet a third direction. “Rosie the Riveter” — the cheerful, robust woman in overalls working in the defense industry, taking on new and challenging work to serve her country in time of need — emphasized female independence and strength outside the home.

But although each decade had its distinctive qualities, overarching developments, especially in work and politics, link these seeming disparities into the larger trends in American women’s history. In the immediate aftermath of the Nineteenth Amendment, women plunged into the responsibilities of active citizenship and struggled to carve out a base for political power and influence. Female participation in the paid labor market continued to grow, especially with respect to the growing numbers of working women who were also wives and mothers. Finally, cultural expectations for women shifted in two crucially related areas, consumerism and sexuality. Both of these shifts had implications for women’s family lives as well. Yet despite these changes in women’s lives, another theme also emerges, that of continuity with the past. Racial and ethnic prejudice continued to limit women’s opportunities in the workforce and women’s access to political influence. And for all women, traditional expectations about women’s primary role in the home persisted, serving as the filter through which change would affect their lives.

1919

Eighteenth Amendment (Prohibition) ratified

1920

Nineteenth Amendment (woman suffrage) ratified

1920

League of Women Voters founded

1920

Women’s Joint Congressional Committee founded

1921

Sheppard-Towner Act appropriates funds for mother-infant health information

1921

Immigration Act limits immigration

1922–1929

Record economic expansion

1923

Equal Rights Amendment introduced

1924

National Origins Act further limits immigration

1925

Height of Ku Klux Klan

1927

Movie It with Clara Bow emphasizes sex appeal

1928

Herbert Hoover elected president

1929

Stock market crashes

1930

Midwestern drought begins

1932

Height of deportation of Mexican workers

1932

National Economy Act limits federal employment to one person per family

1933

Unemployment rises to highest level

1933

Franklin D. Roosevelt becomes president and begins New Deal

1933

Frances Perkins appointed secretary of labor

1933

Ellen S. Woodward appointed to direct Women’s Division, Federal Emergency Relief Administration

1933

National Industrial Recovery Act passed

1933

Mexican women participate in cotton strike in California

1933

Twenty-first Amendment (repeal of Prohibition) ratified

1935

National Youth Administration (NYA) created

1935

National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act passed

1935

Social Security Act passed

1935

Works Progress Administration (WPA) created

1935

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) founded

1936

United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries legalizes the dissemination of contraceptive information

1936

Mary McLeod Bethune appointed to head the National Youth Administration’s Division of Negro Affairs

1937

Japan invades China

1937

Women create the Emergency Brigade in Flint, Michigan, strike

1938

Fair Labor Standards Act passed

1939

World War II breaks out in Europe

1941

Fair Employment Practices Commission established

1941

United States enters World War II after Japan attacks Pearl Harbor

1942

Women recruited into war industries

1942

Women’s Army Corps given formal military status

1942

Japanese immigrants and citizens of Japanese ancestry interned

1942–1945

Rationing increases women’s domestic responsibilities

1943

Congress extends the right of naturalization to Chinese immigrants

1945

Harry S. Truman becomes president after Roosevelt’s death

1945

Japan surrenders, ending World War II

PROSPERITY DECADE: THE 1920s

On the surface, the 1920s appear to have been a decade of progress and prosperity. Industrial growth and international economic expansion created a society more affluent than ever before. An explosion of consumer goods, from mass-produced cars to gleaming bathroom fixtures and electrical kitchen appliances, helped to transform daily lives and gave women more power and pleasure as consumers. Underlying the bright prosperity of the decade, however, were darker currents. Many Americans continued to live below or near the poverty line. Farm families suffered from low prices and high indebtedness for most of the decade, and many rural women endured harsh, isolated lives. Cities provided more opportunities, but here, too, poor wages and living conditions, especially for Mexican Americans and African Americans, separated the haves from the have-nots.

Relatively few commentators in the 1920s delved beneath the surface image of prosperity to analyze the lives of those who did not participate in the boom times. The same superficiality characterized the widely held image of the New Woman. In the popular mind, women had become liberated — by the freedom of wartime, by the exercise of the vote, by participation in the workforce, and by experiments with a new sexual morality. The image was an exaggerated generalization of the experience of young, urban, prosperous white women who were glamorized in the popular media. But contemporaries were correct in thinking that most women’s lives had changed significantly since the nineteenth century, even though the goals of autonomy and equality remained elusive.

The New Woman in Politics

In 1920 women political activists were poised for a great adventure. With the energy they had brought to the suffrage campaign, women from all groups were now prepared to make women’s votes count. African American women focused on using the new national amendment to extend suffrage in the South and on lobbying for a federal antilynching law. In 1920 white women formed the League of Women Voters (LWV), which emphasized lobbying, voter education, and get-out-the-vote drives in the overall mission to train women to be good citizens. An astute recognition of the growing importance of national organizations’ lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., led fourteen women’s organizations to form the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, with the goal of promoting legislation backed by the member organizations. On the local and state levels, women also pursued their agendas, supporting child and women’s labor laws, health and safety legislation, municipal reform, and a broad extension of women’s legal rights. The lobbying efforts of these women’s groups underline the importance of women activists in pioneering twentieth-century interest-group politics. (See Primary Sources: “Women’s Lobbying in the 1920s,” pp. 519–27.)

In addition to working through their organizations, activist women debated among themselves as to how, and whether, they should act within the Democratic and Republican Parties. The argument that women were unsullied by the corruption of political parties had been a common one in the suffrage battle, and many women had grave reservations about working within the established party system. Indeed, like its precursor, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the LWV was established as a nonpartisan group that refrained from supporting political parties or their candidates. While some former suffragists attempted to exert influence within the Republican and Democratic Parties, others followed Alice Paul’s lead and joined the National Woman’s Party (NWP). Always a single-issue organization, the NWP focused exclusively on passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). First introduced in Congress in 1923, the ERA stated: “Men and women shall have equal rights throughout the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction.”

At first glance, the optimism of white women activists seems justified. In 1920 both Democrats and Republicans recognized women’s issues in their platforms, presumably taking women at their word when they said that they planned to use their combined votes as a powerful political tool. And they opened up places within the organizational structure of their parties for female members, although the positions granted were rarely equal in terms of power or influence. As the New York Times magazine Current History summed it up, “Where there is dignity of office but little else, or where there is routine work, little glory, and low pay, men prove willing to admit women to an equal share in the spoils of office.”1 Women became officeholders, although only a handful were elected to the House of Representatives (a high of seven in 1928). Suffrage veteran and newspaper magnate Ruth Hanna McCormick’s 1928 effort to become the first woman elected to the Senate was blocked by influential Republicans, including former California Progressive leader Hiram Johnson. But hundreds served at the state level in legislatures and executive positions earmarked as women’s jobs, such as secretary of education and secretary of state. Women were more numerous in local governments, in part because many of these positions were nonpartisan and thus seemingly more in keeping with ideas that women should operate “above politics.” Despite these inroads, female officeholders generally worked within the context of prevailing assumptions that women should relegate themselves to women’s issues, or “municipal housekeeping,” the same assumptions that limited their ability to wield much power within their political parties.

Women reformers also had mixed success in their lobbying activities. Many states passed laws urged by women activists, including those that expanded women’s legal rights and those directed at maternalist social reform, such as child labor laws and wage and hour protective laws for women. At the federal level, the women’s lobby saw an early success in the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921, which gave matching funds for states to provide health care and other services for mothers and children. Sheppard-Towner funds brought midwife education classes to black, Mexican American, and immigrant practitioners, while also contributing to the eventual decline of lay midwives through the medicalization of childbirth. By the end of the decade, however, progress had slowed, especially on the national level. The Child Labor Amendment — passionately advocated after the Supreme Court invalidated a second national child labor law in 1921 — failed to be ratified, and most national legislation supported by women lobbyists was unsuccessful. Congress cut the Sheppard-Towner Act’s appropriations and ended its once-promising program in 1929. (See Primary Sources: “Women’s Lobbying in the 1920s,” pp. 519–27.)

The Sheppard-Towner Act in Action

Although the Sheppard-Towner Act was limited in how much assistance it offered mothers, the Children’s Bureau nonetheless worked hard to educate women about “scientific” prenatal and child care designed to protect the health of mothers and children. It distributed 22 million pieces of advice literature and arranged for nursing visits to over 3 million homes in the seven years the Sheppard-Towner Act was in operation (1921–28). In the era the Act was in force, infant mortality rates dropped from 76 per 1,000 live births to 69. Despite efforts to connect with racial and ethnic minorities, the Children’s Bureau was probably most successful in helping white rural women. This was in part because of the dire poverty of so many black and immigrant women, but also because the Bureau staff was suspicious of alternative forms of healing and of midwives, an attitude that may have limited their ability to reach racial and ethnic minorities. Beyond its outreach programs, the Bureau also conducted surveys and studies. This image from 1923 shows Anna Grosser of the Children’s Bureau using a chart to demonstrate the Bureau’s findings on infant mortality. The focus on income here reflects some of the Children’s Bureau staffers’ frustration, because without the ability to offer financial assistance to poor mothers, the Bureau was limited in what it could do to “save” babies. Note the emphasis in the chart on fathers’ earnings. Today, a graph like this would use the term “family income.” What does the term “fathers’ earnings” suggest about Bureau staff assumptions?

Moreover, the women’s rights movement itself was deeply divided as to tactics and goals. By decade’s end, many women activists were disillusioned and embittered. Ironically, some of the problems hindering a sustained feminist movement grew out of the success of the suffrage battle. Before national suffrage was achieved, a great many women — equally excluded from this basic right of citizenship — came under the same umbrella of “votes for women.” Once the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, the lines that divided women — class, race, age, ideology — became more significant. By gaining the individual right they had so vigorously sought, they laid the groundwork for the fracturing of female communities. As one activist ruefully put it in 1923, “The American woman’s movement, and her interest in great moral and social questions, is splintered into a hundred fragments under as many warring leaders.”2

This was particularly evident in the ferocious debate over the Equal Rights Amendment. Under the leadership of Alice Paul, the NWP focused so exclusively on the ERA as a means of achieving political and economic equality with men that it appropriated the newly coined term “feminism” to refer to its specific agenda. Women interested in broader social reform were alarmed at this “blanket amendment,” which they feared would undermine the protective labor laws that they had worked so hard to achieve in the states. Although not unsympathetic to the plight of working-class women, ERA supporters countered that such legislation treated women as invalids and could limit their economic opportunity. The controversy revealed differing attitudes about women’s nature and the meaning of equality. Social reformers such as Julia Lathrop and Frances Perkins also cared about extending women’s legal rights, but they nonetheless stressed the distinctiveness of their sex. They believed that biological attributes justified protective legislation. Moreover, their sense of women’s moral superiority and special maternal qualities, rooted in the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres, shaped their commitment to social reform.

Other factors besides differences over the ERA would hamstring the development of a strong feminist movement. Young, middle-class white women often seemed more interested in the pleasures of consumption and leisure than in the social commitment involved in pursuing women’s rights and social reform. If these women felt both ERA and anti-ERA supporters were quaintly old-fashioned, black women reformers found their white counterparts largely unresponsive to their concerns. This split emerged most concretely at a 1921 NWP meeting, where sixty black women representing the National Association of Colored Women were refused convention time to raise the subject of the failure of southern states to acknowledge the voting rights of black women. Alice Paul insisted that this was a “race issue,” not a “woman’s issue.” The African American delegation, led by Addie Hunton, field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), countered by reminding the convention that “five million women in the United States cannot be denied their rights without all the women of the United States feeling the effect of that denial. No women are free until all women are free.”3 Although this and other setbacks in the effort to secure the vote in the South led African American women to de-emphasize the voting issue, they persisted in their broad agenda of improving the lives of all African Americans; in particular, they continued their antilynching activities by working for federal legislation and even, in some cases, forging alliances with southern white women. (See Primary Sources: “Women’s Lobbying in the 1920s, pp. 519–27.) Though some women could come together in interracial cooperation, the limited vision of white leaders such as Paul as to what constituted “women’s issues” shut off possibilities for a broader, more inclusive conception of a feminist movement.

While the difficulties women reformers faced arose in part from women’s disunity, a far more serious problem was the decade’s conservative political climate. Citing declining overall voting participation in the 1920s (roughly half of those eligible voted), contemporary observers assumed that women’s nonvoting accounted for the decline. With only sparse data of voting by sex available, many historians have echoed this assumption. More recent studies, however, maintain that women’s participation in elections varied significantly by location and by election. Women in states that only recently had enfranchised them seem to have participated in fewer numbers than those living in states such as California, where women had longer experience with the electoral process. Notably, men’s voting decreased in this period as well, following a long-standing trend of declining engagement in partisan politics. Jane Addams ruefully commented in 1924 that the question should not be “Is woman suffrage failing?” but rather, “Is suffrage failing?”4 That both men and women were failing to vote in large numbers points to a political climate of disaffected or uninterested citizenry, and it is this broader context of American politics, not women’s failures as voters, that offers the most compelling explanation for the difficulties women reformers faced.5

A related problem was a political climate hostile to reform that made it impossible to sustain the prewar enthusiasm for progressive measures. On the national scene, the Republicans dominated the White House and Congress, and, reflecting in part the party’s ties to corporate business interests, resisted efforts to expand federal regulatory powers. Federal prohibition of alcohol, following ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, further increased many Americans’ wariness of intrusive social reforms. Prohibition met with vigorous opposition. Many Americans resented and circumvented the law, and others worried that the ineffectual effort to control alcohol consumption had fostered contempt for the legal system. That women reformers were so closely associated with the controversial amendment surely fueled hostility to the social reforms women activists promoted in the 1920s. Finally, the widening prosperity of the period may well have influenced many Americans to turn toward new consumer and leisure pleasures and away from political engagement and concern for the nation’s poor.

Perhaps most damaging to reform and especially women’s part in it was the “Red Scare” of 1919 to 1921. Prompted initially by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the fear that the fledgling U.S. Communist Party was plotting a revolution to topple this nation’s government, Americans succumbed to a hysteria in which wild-eyed Bolsheviks seemed to be lurking around every corner. The Red Scare led to the deportation of “suspicious” immigrants, the suppression of the labor movement, and massive violations of civil liberties. It also helped to fuel the growth of the second Ku Klux Klan, an organization opposed to immigrants, Catholics, Jews, and blacks that achieved significant popularity and influence in the early 1920s. Finally, the Red Scare contributed to the passage of restrictive immigration laws in the 1920s and became a weapon for opponents of reform legislation, who could now argue that efforts to increase government’s role in regulating the economy or protecting workers and the poor would lead America down the same path as Russia.

Red Scare hysteria particularly focused on a number of women’s groups, including those in the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which opponents claimed were spreading bolshevism in the United States. Jane Addams in particular came in for forceful criticism. Opponents’ attempts to discredit women reformers with claims that they were Bolsheviks point to a further dilemma facing women activists. Preeminent among the opponents of reform were right-wing women’s organizations. The Women Sentinels of the Republic was a small but vocal group that opposed social reform as the forerunner of bolshevism. The Daughters of the American Revolution, initially interested in women’s social reform efforts, had by mid-decade also taken up the antiradical hysteria. Women in an auxiliary of the all-male Ku Klux Klan supported some reforms such as Prohibition but, like other right-wing women’s groups, promoted what was called “one-hundred-percent Americanism” and were suspicious of the liberal goals of the women’s lobby. (See Primary Sources: “Women’s Lobbying in the 1920s,” pp. 519–27.)

With these counterpressures, then, it is not surprising that the reform agenda of women’s groups stalled at the nation’s capitol, and it is impressive that women activists accomplished as much as they did on the local and state levels. In the process they helped to keep the reform spirit alive, if not well, and created a crucial bridge to the social welfare reforms of the 1930s introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Women at Work

Although women’s expanding political opportunities contributed to the sense of a New Woman in the 1920s, changes in work were equally important — and were similarly mixed in offering women genuine independence. World War I had brought short-term opportunities in a variety of jobs for women, but these opportunities were not sustained. After the war, as before, women’s work was characterized by sex segregation, clustered in job categories dominated by women. In the 1920s, 86 percent of women workers concentrated into ten job classifications, jobs in which they made less money and had lower status and fewer skills than men. (See Tables 1, 2, and 4 in the Appendix.) As one historian neatly summed it up, “Women were invited into the workforce and again invited not to expect too much of it.”6

The growing acceptance of women in the workforce is evident in the hard statistics. Their participation in paid labor grew from 21.2 percent in 1900 to 24.4 percent in 1930. Not only did more women work, but the percentage of married women in the labor force doubled, rising from 6 to 12 percent. This increase resulted in part from compulsory education laws that kept children from taking jobs to help out the family, a trend that particularly affected immigrant wives. Also contributing to the rise of working wives were new consumer standards, which required more family income.

Despite the dramatic increase in the number of married women in the labor force, only 10 percent of all wives worked outside the home during the 1920s. Yet their presence signaled a trend that would grow steadily in the future, and in the 1920s the development was significant enough to spark heated controversies. Marriage experts such as Ernest Groves announced that “when the woman herself earns and her maintenance is not entirely at the mercy of her husband’s will, diminishing masculine authority necessarily follows.”7 Even observers sympathetic to working wives tended to criticize those who elected to pursue careers allegedly for personal satisfaction, as opposed to women in poorer households who were compelled to join the workforce to help make ends meet.

Married or single, as more and more women entered the labor force, the idea of women’s proper place profoundly shaped their work experiences and opportunities. Factory work continued to be a major source of employment, especially among immigrant daughters, but the most rapidly expanding field was clerical work. The emergence of the modern corporation in the late nineteenth century transformed office work and office personnel. By 1910, women already held most stenographic and typing positions, and in the 1920s they increased their presence as clerks and bookkeepers. As clerical work became increasingly dominated by women, or “feminized,” assumptions about these positions changed as well. While men might enter the lower rungs of white-collar work as the first stepping-stone to climbing their way up the corporate ladder, jobs that women filled rarely had the same potential for upward mobility.

Status and salaries were low within the feminized white-collar hierarchy; nonetheless, many women viewed these jobs as welcome opportunities and flocked to the commercial courses offered in the public high schools. European immigrant daughters, whose level of education was improving in part because of mandatory education laws, now had more options than factory work. Middle-class workers — who would have found factory work and domestic service demeaning — also staffed the modern office, and their high visibility helped to improve the respectability of women working. Women of color, however, faced office doors that were largely closed to them. Black women found positions only in a small number of black-owned firms. Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese American women also experienced discrimination in finding office work.

Similar patterns of sexual and racial discrimination appeared in the professions. The professional woman attracted much publicity in the 1920s as an exemplar of the New Woman, yet the percentage of working women in the professions was still small. Women professionals tended to cluster in teaching, nursing, and the expanding field of social work. Even in these increasingly feminized fields, women met with discrimination. Although eight of ten teachers were women, for example, only one in sixty-three superintendents was female. For women of color, the barriers were particularly high, and they made few inroads in this period. The percentage of black women working in the professions, for example, barely rose from 2.5 percent in 1920 to 3.4 percent in 1930.

While educated women struggled to find meaningful work in the professions, the vast majority of American women worked at far less satisfying labor. Black women had been optimistic that migration to the North would provide well-paid factory work. But even in the boom time of World War I, their jobs were the least desirable ones and usually did not last after the war had ended and soldiers had returned to the workforce. In the 1920s, some black women managed to find jobs in industries such as Chicago’s packing plants and slaughterhouses, where researcher Alma Herbst found them seasonally employed in the hog-killing and beef-casing departments and working “under repulsive conditions.”8

Most African American women, however, engaged in agricultural labor, laundry work, or domestic service. Seeking to improve control over their work lives, they increasingly refused jobs as live-in servants. The change to day work allowed these women to carve out some control over their work lives and their private time. As Mayme Gibson put it, “When I got work by the days I’d work in jobs where I’d be doing all the cleaning, my way. Nobody’s be looking over your shoulder, saying what you was to do. People took daywork to finally get to work by theyself; to get away from people telling you how to do every little thing.”9 While day work offered an improvement over live-in situations, domestic work continued to be highly exploitative, with poor wages and conditions.

Like black women, Mexican American women were heavily concentrated in domestic labor. In 1930, the first date for which census figures reported people of Mexican descent separately, 44 percent of Mexican women who worked were servants. Some urban women found semiskilled factory work. A 1928 study of Los Angeles reported “that in some cases the wife or mother sought the work; in others, the young daughters. In either case, poverty was the immediate incentive.” Most worked in “packing houses and canneries of various kinds, followed by the clothing, needle trades, and laundries.”10 Outside the cities, many Mexicanas and their American-born daughters worked with their families in agricultural labor. Next to black women, Japanese women were the most likely women of color to work outside the home; about 30 percent worked for wages. Most were married and, like Mexican Americans, worked either as family farm laborers or as domestic servants.

Mexican American Woman at Work in Food Processing

Mexican immigrant women in the West and Southwest had the double burden of working while trying to maintain their families in harsh, substandard living conditions. In addition to working in the fields, they also packed fruits and vegetables and worked in other food processing jobs. Here, a young woman picks over pecan shells at a plant in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939. This image was captured by Russell Lee, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) who documented the lives of poor agricultural workers throughout the nation during the Great Depression. (For more photographs commissioned by the FSA, see Primary Sources: “Dorothea Lange Photographs Farm Women of the Great Depression,” pp. 535–41.)

For all women of color, even the educated, the double burden of race and gender translated into few job options. In contrast, most white women, especially native-born ones who had office and professional employment, had cleaner, better paying, less demanding work. Despite these significant differences, all women faced a hierarchical labor market that devalued women’s work. As Emily Blair put it at the end of the decade, summarizing her and other feminists’ disappointment over women’s failure to make significant economic advances in the 1920s, “The best man continued to win, and women, even the best, worked for and under him. Women were welcome to come in as workers, but not as co-makers of the world. For all their numbers, they seldom rose to positions of responsibility or power.”11

The New Woman in the Home

As significant as changes in the public realm of politics and work were for women, the most dramatic transformation in women’s lives emerged in the private worlds of home, family, and personal relationships. Contemporaries in the 1920s either celebrated or condemned what was widely viewed as a female sexual revolution. At the center of the revolution was the young, emancipated flapper with her bobbed hair, skimpy clothes, and penchant for outrageous dancing and drinking. Although the image of the flapper was glamorized in movies and in the pages of popular novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, many young women across class and racial lines eagerly adopted the flapper clothing style and danced to jazz music their elders found alarmingly erotic. Even more unnerving was their sexual activity. Rejecting the Victorian moral code, young unmarried women increasingly engaged in “petting” — a term that encompassed a wide range of sexual play short of intercourse. And the generation who came of age in the 1920s was significantly more likely than their mothers to have engaged in premarital intercourse.

But if daughters were experimenting sexually, many of their mothers, too, were carving out new roles in what historians have called the “affectionate family.” Smaller families were becoming the norm for the urban middle class, but fewer children did not mean less maternal responsibility. Modern mothers, aided by a bounty of household appliances made possible by the widespread electrification of homes in this period, were expected to maintain their homes and raise their children with new efficiency and skill. Increasingly important was their role as consumers. Photoplay magazine ran an ad that summed up popular opinion of the New Woman in the home: “Home Manager — Purchasing Agent — Art Director — Wife. She is the active partner in the business of running a home. She buys most of the things which go to make home life happy, healthful, and beautiful.”12 The rosy images of advertising aside, most homemakers continued to have time-consuming responsibilities. Indeed, expectations about careful shopping, cleaner homes, and healthier children may have increased, rather than lightened, women’s domestic burdens. Also in the 1920s, a new emphasis emerged on the marriage partnership’s being a mutually satisfying sexual relationship. A 1930 sociological study, New Girls for Old, encapsulated the new way of thinking: “After hundreds of years of mild complaisance to wifely duties, modern women have awakened to the knowledge that they are sexual beings. And with this new insight the sex side of marriage has assumed sudden importance.”13

Changing ideas about female sexuality were furthered in part by the increasing availability and respectability of reliable birth control, especially the diaphragm. When reformer Margaret Sanger began her drive to legalize the dissemination of contraceptives in 1912, she initially concentrated on helping poor women to control their fertility (see pp. 441–44). By the 1920s, however, discouraged by conservative opposition to her plans for birth control clinics for the poor, she began to target elite and middle-class audiences and to emphasize the erotic potential for women by separating sex from reproduction. Sanger was instrumental in liberalizing state laws to make contraceptives more available, although the requirement that a physician dispense contraceptives meant that they were more likely to be readily available to prosperous white women.

Changing conceptions about female sexuality had been evident in the prewar years, especially among radical feminists and some urban working-class young women. By the 1920s, these new ideas had filtered to a broad middle-class audience. Crucial to the popularization of these ideas was the rapid expansion of the mass media, especially motion pictures. Popular movies featured stars like Clara Bow, who had “It” (the catchphrase for sexual appeal) and attracted audiences with displays of female flesh — bare arms and legs — and sensual love scenes. Despite heightened attention to sexuality, movies rarely condoned adultery or promiscuity. While some plots titillated with the escapades of “bad” girls, these women usually paid for their sins; the heroines who resisted temptation were rewarded at the end by marriage or a renewal of their marriage commitment.

Sex at the Movies

As this poster for the 1924 movie Alimony, starring Grace Darmond and Warner Baxter, suggests, movies of the 1920s emphasized sexuality. One ad for the film tantalized, “Beautiful Jazz Babies — Petting parties — Moonlight bathing parties on golden beaches — Midnight revels on costly yachts — Wine, women and song — all lead to alimony!” The major characters in the film ultimately reconcile, and the virtuous but sexy wife triumphs over the women out to seduce her husband. One reviewer was relieved to claim the movie was a “dramatic indictment of the loose lives of today.”

Another way in which movies and other forms of mass media, most notably advertising, simultaneously promoted a new sexuality while limiting it was the close association drawn between sexuality and consumer goods. Advertising featured a variety of images of women, but one of the most ubiquitous was the glamorous female, made sexy by the products she purchased. The 1920s also witnessed an explosion of beauty shops and a dramatic increase in the sale of cosmetics. Thus, just as women were being encouraged to explore their sexuality, they were also being encouraged to identify it with particular standards of beauty and with the purchase of consumer goods and to see its goal as the happily adjusted marriage. In the process, the radical egalitarian potential of women’s sexual liberation that earlier feminists had hoped for was muted. (See Primary Sources: “Beauty Culture between the Wars,” pp. 528–34.)

There were other indications that the sexual revolution was less revolutionary than it seemed. Young women might engage in petting, for example, but prevailing norms discouraged intercourse except as a prelude to marriage between engaged couples. A double standard for men and women persisted, and women could get a reputation for being “fast,” which could damage their marriage prospects. Moreover, not everyone embraced the new sexuality. Divorce case records in the 1920s reveal that some wives, traditionally reared, could not comfortably accept the new sexual code, much to the dismay of their husbands, who had anticipated a highly sexualized marriage. Among Italian immigrant daughters, a very low rate of illegitimacy persisted into the 1930s, an indication that many of these young women remained outside the peer culture that sanctioned sexual activity for unmarried women.14

The concentration on women’s sexuality in the twenties also disconcerted many women’s right activists, for whom equality in matters of sexuality had never been a goal. They worried that the pursuit of sexual pleasure and recreation led women away from more serious concerns such as civic reform and women’s rights. Many older activists, who came of age in a time when homosocial bonding was especially common among educated, professional women, were also disconcerted that the new psychology of sexuality focused on the erotic dimension of close relationships between women, in part because it became increasingly common for hostile critics to dismiss militant feminists as repressed lesbians. For women more comfortable with same-sex sexuality, sophisticated urban environments gave them opportunities to live the lives they wanted, but the relentless celebration of heterosexuality may well have been disconcerting.

For many African American women reformers, who had labored for decades to protect black women from sexual exploitation and to counter the stereotype of black women as promiscuous, celebrating female sexuality was also problematic. During the Harlem Renaissance, a major cultural movement of black authors and artists who sought to articulate a distinct black contribution to American culture, some women writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston were sensitive to the sexualized portrayal of black women. But in another major expression of black culture, female jazz and blues singers such as Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, and Ma Rainey often presented an exuberant sense of women’s enjoyment of their sexuality that spoke of resistance to sexual objectification and domination by men. Some songs featured a woman demanding that her lover pay attention to her needs, such as “One Hour Mamma,” in which Ida Cox reminded her partner that she wanted “a slow and easy man” who “needn’t ever take the lead.”15 Others suggested lesbian desire, such as “Prove It on Me Blues,” in which Ma Rainey sang, “Went out last night with a crowd of my friends / They must’ve been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.”16

The sexual dimension of the New Woman, like her participation in politics and the workforce, was thus complex. New developments in both public and private spheres ushered in significant changes, although these were filtered through the lens of class, race, and ethnicity and were accompanied by continued emphasis on women’s roles as wives and mothers. A coalescence of factors in the 1920s — an expanding role in the workplace, new political opportunities, a more sexualized marriage, and the growing importance of the consumer culture — did not give women full economic and political equality or personal autonomy, but it did give their lives a modern contour, putting in motion the trends that would characterize women’s lives for the rest of the twentieth century.

DEPRESSION DECADE: THE 1930s

Although the fabled prosperity of the 1920s was never as widespread as popular memory has it, the contrast between the affluence of that decade and the economic hardships faced by Americans in the 1930s is striking. In 1933, unemployment figures had reached 25 percent and the U.S. gross national product (GNP) had been cut almost in half. A stunning stock market crash in late October 1929 had helped precipitate the Great Depression, particularly by damaging the nation’s banking system, but long-standing weaknesses in the economy accounted for the Depression’s length and severity. A prolonged agricultural depression and a decline in certain “sick” industries such as textiles and mining were just two points of underlying vulnerability. An unequal distribution of the nation’s wealth — in 1929, 40 percent of the population received only 12.5 percent of aggregate family income, while the top 5 percent of the population received 30 percent — meant that once the Depression began, the majority of people were unable to spend the amount of money that was needed to revive the economy. The Great Depression became self-perpetuating, and for ten years it left what one observer has called “an invisible scar” running through the lives of millions of Americans.

If our most familiar female icon of the 1920s is the flamboyant flapper, then the counterpart for the Depression decade of the 1930s is Dorothea Lange’s haunting photograph of Florence Owens, later Thompson, titled “Migrant Mother” (see p. 537). Thompson was part of a massive exodus of farm families from the southwestern plains states, where farmers, already suffering from low crop prices in the 1920s, were devastated by a prolonged drought in the 1930s that had created the “dust bowl” and countless family tragedies. (See Primary Sources: “Dorothea Lange Photographs Farm Women of the Great Depression,” pp. 535–41.) The image potently evokes the hardships embodied in the sterile statistics of the era, a period in which overall unemployment rose as high as 30 percent, banks closed by the thousands, and hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their homes and farms. Even if a woman was not among the down-and-out, she could identify with the fear and uncertainty of the migrant woman. But just as the flapper only scratches the surface of the experience of women in the 1920s, the migrant mother was just one facet of a complex mosaic of American womanhood.

At Home in Hard Times

Even more so than in good times, class and race proved powerful determinants of women’s experience in the Great Depression. While elite and middle-class families experienced downward mobility and emotional and material hardships, it was the nation’s working-class and farm families who suffered most from the economic crisis. Not only did they face a greater likelihood of losing their jobs or farms, but they also had fewer resources to draw on. African Americans were among the greatest losers. They were the first fired in industrial jobs and the hardest hit among the rural southern Americans so devastated by the farm crisis. Mexican and Asian American farmers and workers in the West and Southwest also experienced high rates of unemployment and low wages. Like African Americans, they met with discrimination from city, state, and federal agencies that provided relief payments to the impoverished. Indeed, resistance to subsidizing unemployed immigrant workers led to a drive to deport Mexican immigrants, especially in Texas and California. In the 1930s, Los Angeles lost one-third of its Mexican population, many of whom were citizen children of immigrant parents. This deportation movement led to significant disruption in communities, placing heavy burdens on women and families already coping with economic dislocations.

The Depression was also a heavily gendered experience. Although women’s participation in the workforce had been steadily increasing in the early twentieth century, most observers continued to regard women’s proper place as the home. Thus, policy makers, sociologists, and popular writers alike interpreted the unemployment crisis of the 1930s as primarily a male dilemma, emphasizing “the forgotten man” and worrying about the psychological impact of unemployment for American traditions of masculine individualism. Sociological studies such as The Unemployed Man and His Family (1940) emphasized the familial disruption that resulted when men lost jobs and often sacrificed their dominant position in the household. Observers may have been correct that the crisis was harder on men than on women. As sociologists Helen and Robert Lynd put it in their widely read 1937 study of “Middletown” (Muncie, Indiana), “The men, cut adrift from their usual routine, lost much of their sense of time and dawdled helplessly and dully about the streets; while in the homes the women’s world remained largely intact and the round of cooking, housecleaning, and mending became if anything more absorbing.”17

These tasks became more absorbing because so many women had to juggle fewer resources and become adept at making do. Magazines ran articles on cooking with cheaper ingredients, and ads aimed at female consumers touted moneysaving products and offered advice for preparing nutritious “7 cents’ breakfasts.” For poor women, the burdens of homemaking were exacerbated by problems of poor sanitation and substandard housing — problems especially for minority women and poor white rural women. In many social groups, homemaking was made more complicated and stressful by the presence of extended kin, as families coped with reduced income by combining households.

Other issues shaped the households women inhabited. Unemployment for men often strained marriages, especially ones that had been patriarchal. Desertion rates rose, but rates for divorce, an expensive proposition, did not. Another measure of the Depression’s impact was the decline in fertility rates, dropping, for example, from eighty-nine to seventy-six live births per thousand women of childbearing age between the years 1930 and 1933. The trend toward smaller families and the use of contraception, evident among more prosperous families in the 1920s, spread to many working-class families in the 1930s, as fewer children became an economic necessity and access to legal birth control was facilitated by a 1936 decision (United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries) invalidating federal laws that had prohibited the dissemination of contraceptive information.

Women and Work

Although contemporaries viewed women’s primary responsibility to be maintaining the home in hard times, women as workers constitute an important part of the Depression story. Hostility toward the idea of married women going to work intensified in the 1930s, as evidenced in public opinion polls such as the one conducted by George Gallup in 1936, which asked if married women should work if their husbands were employed; 82 percent of the respondents said no, although there was less opposition to wives in very low-income families who worked.18 Legislation reflected this attitude. The 1932 National Economy Act required that when workforce reductions occurred, the first let go should be those who already had a family member in the government’s employ. While this legislation did not specifically target women, it led to the firing of thousands of them. State and local governments echoed this trend, as did many private companies. Most school districts did not hire wives as teachers, and half of them fired women when they married. For those women who did work, wages shrank in the 1930s; women also continued to earn less than men — in 1935 they earned approximately 65 cents for every dollar of men’s wages.19

Despite this discrimination, women’s desire and need to work increased, and their participation in the workforce grew modestly, inching up from 24.4 percent in 1930 to 25.4 percent in 1940. More striking was the increase of married women workers. In 1930, 12 percent of wives worked; in 1940, 17 percent.20 While women also experienced devastating unemployment, especially in the early hard years of the Depression, white women at least found jobs far more quickly than their male counterparts. Sex segregation in the workforce ironically assisted them. Heavy industrial jobs, the domain of men (where women counted for less than 2 percent of all workers), were the most affected by the Depression, while light industry, usually associated with female operatives, recovered more quickly as the decade progressed. More significantly, opportunities in clerical work expanded in part because the federal agencies of the New Deal designed to cope with the Depression almost doubled the number of federal employees.

In contrast to white women, black women lost jobs during the 1930s. One traditional field for black women — farm labor — constricted as hundreds of thousands of sharecroppers and wage workers were thrown out of work in the South. Mechanization further eliminated farm jobs. At the same time, opportunities in the other major area of employment for black women — domestic work — shrank and competition grew. In New York City and elsewhere, “slave markets” provided a particularly potent example of the harsh conditions. Black women would stand on street corners waiting for white women to drive by and hire them for a day’s heavy labor for less than $2.00. Whatever their jobs, black women were almost certain to earn less than other groups. The average wage per week of white women in Texas factories, for example, was $7.45, while Mexican women took home $5.40 and black women only $3.75.21

“Make a Wish”: Bronx Slave Market

This 1938 photograph of the so-called Bronx Slave Market was part of a series shot by Robert H. McNeill, an African American who would later work for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). These two neatly dressed women and the man standing next to them seem to be merely waiting for something. But context is everything. In 1935 Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke wrote an article for Crisis on the demeaning process whereby impoverished black women sold their labor, mostly to Jewish housewives, in New York City’s Bronx. “Rain or shine, cold or hot, you will find them there — Negro women, old and young — sometimes bedraggled, sometimes neatly dressed — but with the invariable paper bundle, waiting expectantly for Bronx housewives to buy their strength and energy for an hour, two hours, or even for a day at the munificent rate of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, or, if luck be with them, thirty cents an hour. If not the wives themselves, maybe their husbands, their sons, or their brothers, under the subterfuge of work, offer worldly-wise girls higher bids for their time.”22 As Baker and Cooke reported, the women were largely powerless in the arrangement and were often short-changed and required to do arduous labor. The market, born of the Great Depression, lasted into the 1950s.

The patterns of work in the 1930s underlined the broad trends becoming clear in the previous decade. Participation of women, especially married women, in the workforce increased, but it did so in sex-segregated labor markets that limited women’s occupational mobility and income. Moreover, that market was further segregated by race and ethnicity, with white women dominating the rapidly expanding clerical workforce. Jobs in agriculture decreased, but they were still a significant source of work for women of color, as were domestic labor and semiskilled industrial work, especially that related to garment and food processing. The restricted nature of women’s job opportunities would not be challenged — and then only temporarily — until the United States entered World War II in 1941.

Women’s New Deal

As American women and men coped with hard times, they sought strong political leadership. They found it in President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1932, as the Depression deepened, Roosevelt defeated Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover handily and came to Washington, D.C., with a clear mandate to act forcefully to bring about recovery and relieve suffering. He brought to the presidency charisma and a willingness to experiment with programs that directly assisted the needy. Labeling these programs a “New Deal” for Americans, Roosevelt pushed an enormous amount of legislation through Congress. Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies contributed to his immense popularity, a popularity that the efforts of his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, enhanced. A gifted woman with a long-standing commitment to social reform, Eleanor called herself “the eyes and ears of the New Deal,” perhaps an implicit reference to her husband’s limited physical mobility. (He was severely crippled from polio.) She crisscrossed the nation promoting the New Deal, pushed Roosevelt to pay more attention to the plight of African Americans, and gathered around her a group of activist women particularly concerned about the hardships women and children faced during the Depression. Despite her efforts, however, most New Deal programs slighted or discriminated against women.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Marian Anderson

Although Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did not significantly challenge institutionalized racism, many New Dealers sought to draw attention to issues of poverty, segregation, and disfranchisement. None was more important in this regard than Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1939 she made one of her more famous interventions as First Lady when the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), which owned the largest concert venue in Washington, D.C., Constitution Hall, refused to lease the space for a concert by the brilliant black contralto Marian Anderson. In response, Roosevelt not only resigned from the DAR but also facilitated the use of the Lincoln Memorial for what became an iconic moment in American history when an integrated audience of 75,000 covered the length of the mall to hear Anderson’s concert. The connection between the two women continued when Roosevelt attended the NAACP’s convention in order to present Anderson with the NAACP’s Spingarn medal, pictured here. In her comments, the First Lady noted that Anderson “had the courage to meet many difficulties. She has always had great dignity; and her modesty and her dignity together with her great gift have gained for her wide recognition. I am glad to have been chosen to give you this medal, Miss Anderson, for your achievement far transcends any question of race. It is an achievement in the field of art, and this medal is given to you in recognition of the perfection of your art.”23

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) reflected the way in which the New Deal reinforced existing assumptions about women’s subordinate role in the workforce. Passed in 1933 and designed to stimulate recovery, this pivotal piece of legislation established codes that set wages, hours, and prices in the nation’s major economic sectors. Jobs described as “light and repetitive” were those usually assigned to women, and 25 percent of the codes explicitly permitted differential wages between men and women, anywhere from 5 to 25 cents per hour. Clerical workers in many fields were excluded, and farm and domestic workers were not covered at all.

Despite such shortcomings, the New Deal did help some women workers, especially in its efforts to provide protection for organized labor. The 1920s had been a low point for unions, which suffered from the postwar Red Scare and corporate antiunion drives. Union membership stood at a mere 12 percent of the workforce at the end of the decade. The NIRA, however, contained provisions that legitimized unions and helped to spark hundreds of organizing drives that tapped into the widespread discontent of workers. Women were particularly active in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which conducted organizing drives in sixty cities, increasing its size by 500 percent between 1933 and 1934. When in 1935 the Supreme Court, arguing that the NIRA represented an unconstitutional delegation of power to the executive, invalidated the act, the New Deal replaced its labor provisions with the National Labor Relations Act, known as the Wagner Act. This legislation again galvanized unionization campaigns and contributed to the success of a new national union federation, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which in 1935 had broken off from the more conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL). The CIO, influenced in part by the significant presence of Communist Party members among its organizers, many of whom were women, concentrated on mass production industries. Women especially benefited from union inroads in light industries such as tobacco and paper products manufacturing. In 1924, 200,000 women belonged to a union; by 1938, the figure was 800,000.

Women actively participated in strikes, both as workers and as wives of male strikers. In 1933, poor wages and working conditions led to a long and bitter strike by eighteen thousand cotton workers in California, most of whom were Mexicans associated with the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. Women participated by preparing and distributing food among the strikers, but they were also active on the picket line. They taunted strikebreakers, urging them to join the strike, yelling out in Spanish, “Come on out, quit work, we’ll feed you. If you don’t, we’ll poison all of you.” This confrontation ended in violence as many women armed themselves with knives and lead pipes.24

Women also played a crucial role in the 1937 Flint, Michigan, sit-down strike against General Motors. When the men sat down at their machines, their wives as well as women workers (who were not included in the occupation of the factory because of concerns about sexual propriety) organized the Women’s Emergency Brigade. They fulfilled the traditional female role of providing food for the men, but then they moved beyond that role to stage a women’s march of seven thousand and to create other diversions that allowed men to expand the strike to another GM plant. Brigade leader, autoworker, and socialist Genora Johnson Dollinger explained, “This was an independent move. It was not under the direction of the union or its administrators — I just talked it over with a few women — the active ones — and told them this is what we had to do.”25 (See Reading into the Past: “Genora Johnson Dollinger and the General Motors Sit-Down Strike.”) The successful strike ended with GM’s recognition of the United Auto Workers union. Thus, as supporters and as workers, women played an important role in the labor radicalism that shaped the 1930s.

The federal government’s new involvement in protecting working-class Americans through labor legislation was matched by its unprecedented intervention in providing relief for those made destitute by the Depression. Although most policy makers perceived the unemployment crisis as primarily a male one, an inner circle of female New Dealers, aided by Eleanor Roosevelt, insisted that the government pay attention to the “forgotten woman.” A central figure was Ellen S. Woodward, who headed the Women’s and Professional Projects Division of several agencies that provided federal relief for the unemployed — the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), Civil Works Administration (CWA), and Works Progress Administration (WPA). Woodward worked hard to get women included in programs that created jobs for the unemployed. A small number of professional women, such as librarians, social workers, teachers, and nurses, were accommodated in federal projects, and some artists and writers found employment in programs such as the Federal Art Project or the Federal Theater Project, headed by Hallie Flanagan. But the vast majority of women needing help (almost 80 percent in 1935) were unskilled, and for them the work-relief jobs clustered in traditional women’s work of sewing, canning, and domestic labor.

In addition to offering individual employment, these programs benefited the community. Between 1933 and 1937, women made over 122 million articles that were distributed to the poor free of charge. They provided the food for highly successful free school lunch programs. Librarians created card catalogs and oversaw Braille transcription projects. Handicraft programs drew on regional variations. In Texas, women were given leather to make coats and jackets; in Arizona, Native American women fashioned copperware; in Florida, women produced hats, handbags, and rugs for the tourist industry.

Yet, despite these benefits and Woodward’s promise that “women are going to get a square deal,” New Deal programs were riddled with discrimination against women. Most programs focused on male unemployment and treated women as subordinate earners who ideally should be in the home. To be eligible for work relief, women needed to prove that they were heads of family, and if a husband was physically able to work, whether he had found work or not, women were unlikely to be given federal jobs. Some young women found jobs with the National Youth Administration (NYA), but they were excluded from the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put 2.5 million young men to work conserving the nation’s parks and natural resources. Only after Eleanor Roosevelt intervened were similar camps set up for women, but these accommodated only eight thousand young women.

This type of discrimination provoked protest from women’s groups as well as the unemployed. One woman wrote to the Roosevelts to complain: “I should like to know why it is that men can be placed so easily and not women.”26 The answer to that question lay in part with local administrators, who often resisted finding work for women, particularly work that challenged traditional notions of women’s proper domestic roles. When women found positions, the jobs invariably fell into low-paying categories. New Deal agencies, then, not only followed sex segregation policies based on traditional notions of women’s proper place in the home but also helped to institutionalize them.

Similarly, New Deal agencies replicated the discrimination based on race and ethnicity found in the private labor market. Relief policies were designed to help the poor, and indeed, most minority groups benefited from them to some degree. But despite official guidelines that tried to limit racial discrimination, federal agencies rarely challenged the policies of local administrators. On many Native American reservations, officials often were even more indifferent to the problem of work relief for women than to Native peoples in general. In the racially segregated South, local New Deal agencies resisted giving black women jobs during harvest periods when cheap farm labor was in demand. When African American women could get federal jobs, they were usually in segregated programs and were routinely given the most menial work. In San Antonio, a three-part caste system was in operation. African American women were formally segregated from projects that could employ white or Mexican women, but an informal process kept white and Mexican women from working together in sewing or canning rooms.

That the New Deal both assisted women especially in their family responsibilities and reinforced their inequality as wage workers was most dramatically evident in the Social Security Act of 1935. This pathbreaking legislation owed much to women reformers, especially Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. It provided a federal pension plan and federal-state matching fund programs for unemployment assistance and for aid to dependent mothers and children. Neither domestic workers nor farmworkers — two major employment options for poor women — were covered by the program, however, and women who worked in the home as mothers and housewives were similarly excluded. A 1939 amendment to Social Security further institutionalized inequality. Married working women were taxed at the same rate as their husbands, but because there was a family limit to benefits, a wife’s benefits were reduced if her wages and her husband’s exceeded the family limits. In addition, widows and their children received benefits when a husband and father died, but a married woman’s dependents did not. In common with other New Deal programs, then, Social Security operated under the assumption of women’s subordinate place in the labor market and their primary role in the home.

Despite its mixed record in terms of racial and gender discrimination, the New Deal did assist a wide variety of Americans in coping with the devastating effects of the Great Depression. It facilitated the growth of unions, put millions of people to work, and institutionalized the modest welfare provisions of the Social Security Act. One thing it failed to accomplish was to end the Depression. The return of prosperity would not come until the advent of World War II, when the demand for war production set American factories back to work and created full employment.

READING INTO THE PAST

MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE

Letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1940)

African American women leaders worked for women’s rights in the context of the broader struggle for justice for all members of their race. Mary McLeod Bethune was in this tradition. A prominent educator, Bethune had founded Bethune-Cookman College, served as president of the National Association of Colored Women, and established the National Council of Negro Women in 1935. Bethune began her New Deal experience as an advisor to the National Youth Administration but soon became the director of the Division of Minority Affairs, later called the Division of Negro Affairs. Although the New Deal’s assistance to blacks fell short of her expectations, Bethune was a loyal supporter of both Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. The following is a formal letter to President Roosevelt. In 1940, as the United States began mobilizing its industrial productivity anticipating the advent of war, Bethune wrote from her position as president of the National Council of Negro Women. Although not a participant in the white women’s New Deal, Bethune had a strong base of power among black women’s organizations.

My dear Mr. President:

At a time like this, when the basic principles of democracy are being challenged at home and abroad, when racial and religious hatreds are being engendered, it is vitally important that the Negro, as a minority group in this nation, express anew his faith in your leadership and his unswerving adherence to a program of national defense adequate to insure the perpetuation of the principles of democracy. I approach you as one of a vast army of Negro women who recognize that we must face the dangers that confront us with a united patriotism.

We, as a race, have been fighting for a more equitable share of those opportunities which are fundamental to every American citizen who would enjoy the economic and family security which a true democracy guarantees. Now we come as a group of loyal, self-sacrificing women who feel they have a right and a solemn duty to serve their nation.

In the ranks of Negro womanhood in America are to be found ability and capacity for leadership, for administrative as well as routine tasks, for the types of service so necessary in a program of national defense. These are citizens whose past records at home and in war service abroad, whose unquestioned loyalty to their country and its ideals, and whose sincere and enthusiastic desire to serve you and the nation indicate how deeply they are concerned that a more realistic American democracy, as visioned by those not blinded by racial prejudices, shall be maintained and perpetuated.

I offer my own services without reservation, and urge you, in the planning and work which lies ahead, to make such use of the services of qualified Negro women as will assure the thirteen and a half million Negroes in America that they, too, have earned the right to be numbered among the active forces who are working towards the protection of our democratic stronghold.

Faithfully yours,

Mary McLeod Bethune

SOURCE: McCluskey and Smith, Mary McLeod Bethune, 173–74.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

What is Bethune asking of Roosevelt in this letter?

What claims does she make about African American women and why?

How does she appeal to broader national ideals in order to advance African American women at this moment of impending war?

READING INTO THE PAST

Genora Johnson Dollinger and the General Motors Sit-Down Strike (1936–37)

Genora Johnson (later Dollinger) was a Socialist Party organizer who played a central role in mobilizing women in the Flint, Michigan, General Motors sit-down strike of 1936–37. Johnson created the Emergency Brigade, which armed women with clubs and blackjacks to assist the United Auto Workers (UAW) union in standing up to the violent efforts to break the strike. But Johnson also spearheaded the creation of the Women’s Auxiliary, consisting mostly of wives of strikers, which aided the strike in more conventionally female ways, as she describes in this oral history account.

I should tell you how the Women’s Auxiliary was formed. The last days of December 1936 were when the sit-downs began. Following that came New Year’s Eve. Among working class families, everybody celebrates New Year’s Eve. I was amazed at the number of wives that came down to the picket line and threatened their husbands, “If you don’t cut out this foolishness and get out of that plant right now, you’ll be a divorced man!” They threatened divorce loudly and openly, yelling and shouting at their husbands. I knew I couldn’t go and grab each one of them to talk to them privately. So I could only watch as some of the men climbed out of the plant window up on the second floor, down the ladder to go home with their wives. These were good union members, but they were hooted and hollered at by their comrades in the plant who were holding the fort in the sit-down. This was a very dangerous turn of events because I knew how few men were inside holding that plant, and it worried many of us.

The next day, we decided to organize the women. We thought that if women can be that effective in breaking a strike, they could be just as effective in helping to win it. So we organized the Women’s Auxiliary and we laid out what we were going to do.

Now remember, the UAW was still in the process of getting organized. It didn’t have elected officers or by-laws or any of the rest of it. So we were free to organize our Women’s Auxiliary, to elect our president, vice-president, recording secretary and heads of committees, all on our own.

We couldn’t have women sitting down in the plants because the newspapers were antagonizing the wives at home by saying that women were sleeping over in the plant. In fact, GM sent anonymous messages to the wives of some of the strikers alleging that there were prostitutes in those embattled plants. But we knew we could get women on the picket lines.

So we organized a child-care center at the union headquarters, so children would have some place to go when their mothers marched on the picket line. Wilma McCartney, who had nine children and was going to have her tenth, took charge of that. At first, the women were scared to death to come down to the union, and some may have been against the union for taking away their pay check so they couldn’t feed their children who were hungry or crying for milk. Then this wonderful woman, this mother of nine children who was pregnant with another, would talk to them about how it would benefit them for their husbands to participate actively. And if they won the strike, it would make all the difference in the world in their living conditions. We recruited a lot of women just through the child-care center.

We also set up a first aid station with a registered nurse in a white uniform and red union arm-band. She was a member of the Women’s Auxiliary. The women in the Auxiliary also made house calls to make sure every family had enough to eat, and they gave advice on how to deal with creditors.

But that wasn’t enough as far as I was concerned. Women had more to offer than just these services. So we set up public speaking classes for women. Most of the women had never even been to a union meeting. In those days, many of the men would go to union meetings and say to the women, “It’s none of your damn business. Don’t you mix into our affairs.” So the women didn’t express any of their ideas about what could be done to better their conditions.

Women came out of those classes thinking, “Well, women did play a role in the unions. We have got a right to say something.” We trained them in how to get up in union meetings and what appeals to make. We gave them an outline of a speech and they practiced in the classes.

Some of the men were very opposed to having their wives at the union headquarters and a few of them never gave up their sexist attitudes. But most of the men encouraged their wives. They thought we were doing a wonderful job, making things better for them at home because their wives understood why their husbands had to be on the picket line all day long and do a lot of extra things for the union. They could talk and work together as companions. And the children were learning from their parents’ discussions about the strike.

A few men still opposed women becoming active or walking the picket lines. I was often called a “dyke.” Some men said that women who came down to the picket line were prostitutes or loose women looking for men. But as more married men with families became active in the strike, they kept those elements quiet.

SOURCE: Susan Rosenthal, Striking Flint: Genora Dollinger Recalls the 1936–37 General Motors Sit-Down Strike (ReMarx Publishing, 2014).

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

How did the women’s auxiliary help sustain the Flint autoworkers’ community during the sit-down strike?

What parallels do you see between Johnson’s description of the problems facing women on the picket line and those faced by the strikers described in “Parades, Picketing, and Power: Women in Public Space,” pp. 462–69.

WORKING FOR VICTORY: WOMEN AND WAR, 1941–1945

In the late 1930s, as the militarism of Germany, Italy, and Japan rose to a crescendo, most Americans adamantly opposed being drawn into war. This remained true even after Germany, under Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland in 1939 and France and Britain, the United States’s allies in World War I, declared war on the Axis powers, Germany and Italy. Despite the official neutrality mandated by Congress, the United States offered financial and other material assistance to its former allies and began its own defense buildup. Public sentiment remained high against becoming involved in the war, but December 7, 1941, shattered that resistance. When Japan, which had signed an alliance with the Axis, executed a devastating surprise air attack on the American naval base and fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, killing 2,400 Americans, Congress declared war on Japan. Within days, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and the United States in turn declared war on those nations. The United States entered a global conflagration being fought in Europe, Asia, and Africa that would last until 1945.

The global war and the massive mobilization it entailed had a tremendous impact on American women. By undercutting patterns of sex-segregated labor and offering women new independence and responsibilities — perfectly symbolized by the poster image of “Rosie the Riveter” — it produced significant changes, both in the workplace and in the domestic arena. (See Primary Sources: “Voices of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ ” pp. 542–47.) Yet to a striking degree, Americans continued to reiterate traditional notions about woman’s proper sphere in the home even as they challenged these ideas in daily life. And, as was the case during the Depression, race, ethnicity, and gender discrimination continued to shape American women’s experience.

Women in the Military

Despite a long tradition of exceptional American women edging their way onto the battlefield, donning the nation’s uniform was a particularly male act that served to shape definitions of ideal masculinity. As the American military establishment geared up for World War II, it initially resisted incorporating women into the service. Eventually, military necessity, as well as pressure from women’s groups under the leadership of Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, led to the acceptance of female military recruits. Thousands of men were thus made available for combat. The Women’s Army Corps (WAC) attracted 140,000 recruits; 100,000 served in the navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES); 23,000 were in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve (MCWR); and 13,000 enlisted with the Coast Guard Women’s Reserve (SPAR: from the motto Semper Paratus, Always Ready). Another 76,000 served as army or navy nurses.

In the service, women’s jobs typically followed the conventional patterns of peacetime. While some women worked as mechanics and welders and in other skilled jobs that broke the gender barrier, most filled jobs as clerks, telephone operators, and dieticians and in other routine assignments. A particularly vital role filled by women was nursing, often in exceptionally dangerous circumstances, just behind the front in all the major theaters of the war — North Africa, Europe, and Asia. While the military welcomed nurses, it resisted commissioning women as doctors — despite the severe shortage of physicians — until April 1943, fifteen months after America’s entry into the war.

A War Job with a Future

To address a nursing shortage at home and abroad, in 1943 the U.S. Congress created the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps to support nursing students who would pledge to “engage in essential nursing, military or civilian, for the duration of the war.” This advertisement for the program appeared in Modern Screen. The ad emphasizes many elements of interest to women, beginning with the cadet nurses’ beauty and femininity. It also reassures prospective nurses that they will not be “closing the door on romance,” because they will still have time to date and even continue their training after marriage. And finally the text emphasizes that nursing offers a “job with a future.” Do you think young women looking at this advertisement would have been more intrigued by the promise of a career or the glamour of serving one’s country in uniform?

Black women experienced racial discrimination at the hands of the federal government’s segregated military establishment. Because the navy prohibited African American men from serving in any but menial positions, it also refused to incorporate black women into its ranks until 1944, almost at the end of the war. Black nurses were commissioned in the army, and 10 percent of WACs were African American, but they lived and worked in segregated units and had less access to training and skilled jobs than white women. Black nurses were allowed to attend only to African Americans or prisoners of war, and they were often assigned to menial, not skilled, patient services.

Officer Charity Adams

The federal government did not use images of black women in its recruitment campaigns for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, whose members were known as WACs (formerly WAACs). But the African American magazine Opportunity, which often featured black women defense and military workers, published this 1943 photograph of officer Charity Adams standing in front of a WAC poster, suggesting that black women could also “answer America’s call.” Adams, a former teacher, rose to the rank of major in the WAC. Her autobiography details pride in her accomplishments and the women who served with her but also harshly criticizes the segregation they experienced.

All women in the service encountered a public that was ambivalent about the gender challenges presented by women in uniform. Oveta Culp Hobby, a prominent Houston woman who became director of the WACs, had to counter pervasive rumors of sexual immorality and drunkenness among servicewomen. Although some of the rumors focused on lesbianism among recruits, referring to the “queer damozels of the Isle of Lesbos,” most critics alleged promiscuity among heterosexual women.27 The WACs distributed publicity praising the women’s high moral character, but the agency also refused to distribute contraceptives to women in the service, in contrast to the policy adopted for men that was designed to prevent the spread of venereal disease. For women and men alike, the military also adopted a harsh policy toward homosexuality, making “homosexual tendencies,” as diagnosed by a psychiatrist, sufficient grounds for dismissal from the service. However, although World War II military service offered many women and men opportunities to participate in a discreet lesbian and gay subculture, relatively few servicepeople were discharged on these grounds.

Equally as pressing as concerns about sexual immorality was the worry that servicewomen were sacrificing their femininity by usurping men’s roles. In an effort to put these fears to rest, the New York Times reported in 1945 that the WAC “will always be a civilian at heart,” and predicted that “the most important postwar plans of the majority of women in the WAC include just what all women want — their own homes and families.”28 Similarly, Colonel Hobby, while insisting that women in the service be treated with respect, reiterated traditional notions of women’s proper place by asserting that military women were developing “new poise and charm” and that they “were only performing the duties that women would ordinarily do in civilian life.”29

One duty that women rarely took on in civilian life was eagerly embraced by the members of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). The U.S. government refused to militarize this agency, a measure of just how threatening the idea of women performing high-status “male” jobs was. Instead, these pilots were civil servants without military rank, privileges, or uniforms. Drawing on an eager applicant pool of over 25,000 women, the air force accepted 1,074 as WASPs, all of whom had pilot’s licenses and experience, unlike most men accepted for training as military pilots. Of these, two were Mexican American, two Chinese American, and one Native American. The lone African American who applied was urged to withdraw her application by WASP director Jacqueline Cochran, who explained that she wanted to avoid controversy at a time when the program had not yet been officially put in place.

WASPs ferried and tested planes and participated in maneuvers and training. Although they did not participate in combat, thirty-eight women lost their lives on duty. The WASPs performed invaluable services, but they were disbanded in December 1944, before the end of the war, because of pressure from civilian male pilots and veterans groups, which resented potential female competition in an elite male field. WASPs were not eligible for veterans benefits until a congressional act passed in 1977 finally gave them partial recognition for what they had accomplished. In 2010, they were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal for their service.

Working Women in Wartime

Just as the military establishment was reluctant to incorporate women into the armed services, employers did not initially welcome female workers into defense industries. But by mid-1942, as more male workers were drafted into the army, the reality of labor scarcity started to erode resistance to female war workers. Women became the objects of a massive propaganda campaign to urge them to do their bit for Uncle Sam. Women responded eagerly to expanded job opportunities, not just in defense industries but in other sectors of the economy as well. After the hardships of the Depression, with some 3 million women unemployed as late as 1940, a burgeoning demand for labor put the unemployed to work and created jobs that provided new opportunities for women coming into the labor market for the first time. Between 1940 and 1945, almost 5 million new female workers entered the labor force, representing a 43 percent increase in women workers.30 In 1944, an estimated 37 percent of adult women worked in the paid labor force. In a particularly important trend that foreshadowed postwar developments, older, married women provided the largest numbers of new workers, while there was little change in women between twenty and thirty years of age. Traditional jobs in light industry and clerical work expanded, and for white women, professional positions also became more readily available.

Women’s participation in the defense industry was particularly significant because it broke down sex-segregated labor patterns, at least for the duration of the war. Women were trained in skilled high-paying jobs such as welders, riveters, and electricians. Although it was imperfectly implemented, the federal government’s National War Labor Board (NWLB) issued an order in November 1942 calling for equal wages for women when the work they were doing was comparable to men’s. Women’s groups had pressured the NWLB, but the main motivation for the order was a desire not to undercut men’s wages while women were temporarily taking on male jobs. Unions adopted a similar approach. Women’s participation in unions rose from 9.4 percent of union members before the war to 22 percent in 1944. Although some left-wing unions’ nondiscriminatory policies stemmed from genuinely egalitarian goals, most unions supported equal pay primarily with the goal of preserving male privileges. Moreover, older patterns of male and female classifications for jobs persisted, as well as seniority-based pay scales that served to ensure higher wages for men. Thus, a development that could have dramatically challenged sex segregation in the labor market was robbed of its more radical potential. (See Primary Sources: “Voices of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’ ” pp. 542–47.)

For African American women, war job opportunities presented a mixed lot. Defense industries resisted hiring black women until it became absolutely necessary. In Detroit’s war industries in 1943, of ninety-six thousand jobs filled by women, women of color held only one thousand.31 Not until later that year did wartime manufacturers begin to hire black women. These possibilities for breaking into better-paying industrial work — the first since World War I — were undeniably exciting and helped to create another large migration out of the South. This time, in addition to the cities of the Midwest and North, African Americans branched out into the West, especially southern California. In this burgeoning center of defense manufacturing, as many as twelve thousand African Americans arrived monthly in the peak year of 1943.

War jobs allowed many black women to escape the drudgery and poor wages of domestic work. However, they were often denied training and, even with training, assigned to less desirable positions, such as work in foundries and outside labor gangs. Although some of the treatment black women received reflected employer racism, white women often resisted working with black women, in particular refusing to share toilet, shower, and meal facilities. In some cases, white women even went on strike over these issues, reflecting more a desire to maintain social distance between the races and a deep-seated belief that black women were “unclean” than fears about economic competition.32

Many black women protested the discrimination they encountered. Black organizations such as the NAACP fostered this new militancy, as did black newspapers. In Los Angeles, publisher Carlotta Bass used the pages of the Eagle to call for more jobs for African Americans. In concert with the NAACP, Bass organized a march in July 1942 against the local U.S. Employment Services office to insist that black women be given jobs in war industries, a tactic that eventually helped to integrate southern California defense plants. Black women also turned to the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), filing 25 percent of the complaints it received. This federal agency, charged with ensuring that defense industries and training programs did not discriminate, had been created in 1941 in response to a determined black protest and a threat to lead a march on Washington, D.C. A significant development in the history of civil rights, the FEPC nonetheless had limited success. The imperative of keeping war production up to speed meant that the FEPC had few tools for disciplining discriminating companies, and it rarely succeeded in forcing defense contractors to hire black women.

Nonetheless, black women benefited significantly from war opportunities. The percentage of black women employed in domestic service decreased from 60 percent in 1940 to 45 percent in 1944, and their participation in the industrial workforce increased from 7 to 18 percent for the same period. They also obtained more white-collar work in the federal government, especially in Washington, D.C. However, black women’s low seniority usually meant that as the war wound down, they were the first fired. Margaret Wright, a skilled worker for Lockheed Aircraft, a major defense contractor, was laid off at the war’s end; later she sadly recalled, “I had to fall back on the only other thing that I knew, and that was doing domestic work.”33 By 1950, some of the gains made in breaking away from domestic work had eroded: 50 percent of African American working women were still in domestic service. After the war, however, some women were able to hold on to higher-paying industrial and clerical work. Even for those who went back to domestic work, the migration from the impoverished rural South offered at least the hope for a better life.

Other women of color found expanded opportunities in the war years and faced less discrimination than African Americans. Defense industry companies as well as the government actively recruited Mexican Americans. The Office of War Information distributed posters touting “Americanos Todos” (“Americans All”) that featured a Mexican sombrero and Uncle Sam’s star-studded hat and proclaimed, “Americans All Let’s Fight For Victory.”34 In the Midwest, Mexicans, who before the war had difficulty finding industrial work and were routinely asked for their citizenship papers, found that employers “stopped asking for proof of legalization because they needed all the workers they could find for the war effort.”35 In Los Angeles, Mexican American women flocked to the new jobs, especially in the aircraft industry. During the 1930s, as garment workers they earned $8 to $10 per week. But in war plants, as riveters, welders, inspectors, and punch press operators, they could earn as much as $40 to $60 per week. Besides taking satisfaction in better pay and increased skills, many found long-term economic and social mobility in their new jobs. As Rose Echeverria commented in an oral interview, “We felt that if we worked hard and that if we proved ourselves, we, too, could become doctors and lawyers and professional people.”36 Not only did these women secure jobs in defense industries, but they also found that the labor scarcity improved their circumstances in other industrial jobs. Food processing, which was traditionally characterized by low status and pay, was vital to the war effort, and the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America union in California was able to use the war emergency to push usually resistant employers for pay concessions and other benefits, including in one instance a plant nursery for children of employees.

Native American women’s employment also expanded during the war. About one-fifth of adult women on reservations left to take jobs, and those who stayed behind increased their duties, helping to maintain farming and tribal businesses such as the timber industry. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, under John Collier, a New Dealer who had constructed a more humanitarian and liberal Native American policy (though still perpetuating a patronizing attitude toward Indians), publicized Native American contributions to the war effort, as did the journals of off-reservation boarding schools, which supplied most of the young women who went into defense work.37

For Chinese American women, the war offered unusual opportunities. Jobs in defense industries represented a significant economic improvement over working in family businesses or in food processing or garment industries. Unlike many other groups of women, Chinese American defense industry workers were young and unmarried. Before the war, these second-generation women had found most jobs outside Chinatown closed to them, despite their American education and English language proficiency. Their improved job prospects stemmed in part from the labor scarcity but also from a reduction in the racial prejudice against the Chinese now that China was a U.S. ally in the war against Japan. Even on the West Coast, where Asian Americans were most densely populated and where prejudice ran extremely high, the Chinese became the “good” Asians. Symbolic of this change in attitude was the 1943 congressional decision to abolish the legal strictures prohibiting Chinese aliens from becoming naturalized citizens. For Chinese women and their families, then, World War II facilitated more integration into mainstream American society as well as improved economic opportunities.38

For most Japanese American women, especially those in the West, the situation was bleak. Following decades of anti-Japanese sentiment on the West Coast, the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor touched off a firestorm of suspicion directed at the Japanese in the United States. Despite the absence of any evidence of sabotage or disloyalty, President Roosevelt, encouraged by military leaders and western politicians, issued Executive Order 9066, mandating the internment of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent, more than two-thirds of whom were native-born American citizens. In ten remote camps in California, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Arkansas, the Nisei (the Japanese term for second-generation Japanese Americans) and the Issei (their parents) lived in stark barracks behind barbed wire. Prisoners without trial, incarcerated because of race, the internees found the experience bewildering and humiliating.

Japanese Internment

Personally horrified by the internment order, Dorothea Lange nonetheless accepted a commission from the War Relocation Authority in order to document the lives of Japanese Americans and their experiences as internees. Presumably because the images showed the Japanese in such sympathetic terms, the photographs were impounded for the duration of the war. This 1942 photograph features a mother and baby in Centerville, California, in conversation with another woman while they await an evacuation bus. Posted on the wall behind them were schedules listing the names of families, the buses to which they were assigned, and the departure time. Note the tag on the parcel the woman on the left is holding. Families were identified by numbers, and their belongings and their children bore these tags as they were evacuated. Do you see any similarities between the composition here and the photographs Lange shot for the Farm Security Administration?

Women continued as best they could with their familial duties, trying to supplement the unappetizing and inadequate food provided in the mess tent, keeping clothes clean without the benefit of running water in their barracks, and above all struggling to keep the family unit together in the face of the disruption of relocation and camp life. Ironically, internment may have offered slight benefits to young Nisei women. They worked in the camps as clerks or teachers for the same low wages as their fathers and brothers, giving them some small taste of economic equality and independence. Within the camps, peer groups exerted strong pressure as teenage girls tried to keep up with the latest fashions on the outside and socialized with young men. Club life, which had been important to urban Nisei girls and young women before the war, flourished in the camps. Groups associated with the YWCA and the Girls Scouts, for example, staged elaborate candlelight initiation ceremonies, which offered relief from the depressing camp environment and, as one historian has observed, linked the Nisei “to national organizations and the outside world from which they had been exiled.”39 The strong patriarchal authority of the Japanese household further eroded when the Nisei began to leave the camps in 1942 after the government decided that an individual Nisei’s loyalty could be sufficiently investigated and determined. Some obtained permission to go to college in regions outside the West; an estimated 40 percent of those who became students were women. Others secured jobs in the Midwest and on the East Coast, with the most likely type of work being domestic service, although some found employment in manufacturing. After Nisei men were urged to volunteer for military service to “prove” their loyalty, some Nisei women followed suit and became WACs or military nurses.

War and Everyday Life

Far removed from the experience of Japanese internment, most American women faced very different sorts of pressures connected to everyday life on the home front. When men went off to join the military, wives often followed them while they were in training stateside, living in makeshift accommodations and coping with a sense of impermanency and an uncertain future.40 Other women migrated either alone or with their families in search of better-paying jobs in cities, confronting the challenges of adjustment to new surroundings. These included scarce housing in boom areas, a particularly pressing problem for black women and Mexicans, who were also subject to housing discrimination.

The new environment also could be liberating, especially for single women. New jobs offered higher income and a sense of independence that led to more sexual experimentation. As one young war worker expressed it, “Chicago was just humming, no matter where I went. The bars were jammed, and unless you were an absolute dog you could pick up anyone you wanted to.” Observers worried about this trend, pointing out that it was not prostitutes but “amateurs” who were undermining morality and spreading sexually transmitted disease.41 Although promiscuity was probably not as great as critics feared, women did experience more personal freedom. Particularly notable were opportunities for lesbian women. Leaving provincial hometowns for large cities, they found other women who identified as lesbians. A woman who called herself “Lisa Ben,” an anagram of “lesbian,” reported that she moved from a ranch in northern California to a job in Los Angeles, ending up in a boardinghouse occupied by young single women and asking herself, “Gee, I wonder if these are some of the girls I would very dearly love to meet.” They apparently were; Ben stayed in Los Angeles after the war and became part of the discreet lesbian bar scene that emerged there and in other major cities during the war years.42

Despite the sexual experimentation, conventional expectations about marriage and family remained unaltered. The number of marriages escalated, with the Census Bureau estimating that between 1940 and 1943 a million more families were formed than would have been expected in peacetime. Fertility spiked as well, after the low levels of the Depression, with the birthrate rising from 19.4 per 1,000 in 1940 to 24.5 per 1,000 in 1945 (see Chart 1, p. A-17). Popular culture reiterated respect for the domestic ideal. While movie heroines were often portrayed as self-reliant and independent war workers or army nurses, the message remained that women at war were only temporarily outside their proper place of home and family.

Whether they worked or not, married women faced ongoing responsibilities in the household. Although released from the extreme restraints of making do in the hard times of the 1930s, homemakers still worked hard. Consumer goods such as sugar, meat, and shoes were rationed, and housewives had to organize their shopping carefully. Home appliances that might have lightened their load were not being produced because factories and workers were needed for war production — though manufacturers continued their advertising campaigns to keep up consumer desire. A vacuum cleaner company promised, “A day is coming when this war will be done. And on that day, like you, Mrs. America, Eureka will put aside its uniform and return to the ways of peace . . . building household appliances.”43

For women who worked, household burdens proved particularly difficult. Limited hours for shopping after their workday ended was one source of frustration. Nor could women expect any help from absent husbands and sons during their “second shift” at home. Child care posed another problem. Some corporations, faced with high turnover and absenteeism, offered nurseries. The federal government mounted a limited program of day care centers, but these were underutilized, in part because women associated federal programs with New Deal assistance to the down-and-out and in part because of cultural resistance to the idea of strangers taking care of one’s children. Most women relied on friends and family members for help with child care.

As the war drew to a close in 1945, people expressed growing fear about the long-term roles of Rosie the Riveter and her colleagues and the implications for the postwar family. Anthropologist Margaret Mead reported that soldiers contemplating their return to the United States worried, “Well, mostly we’ve been wondering whether it’s true that women are smoking pipes at home.”44 Americans foresaw that women were in the workforce to stay, and agencies like the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau still worked to improve their wages and opportunities. But most opinion makers advocated reinstating women to their rightful place, the home, so that returning GIs could expect full employment and a stable family life. Industrial leader Frederick Crawford pronounced, “[F]rom a humanitarian point of view, too many women should not stay in the labor force. The home is the basic American institution.”45

Surveys of women working during the war indicated that a significant number — a Women’s Bureau survey reported three of four women — had hoped to continue to work outside the home after the war.46 But with demobilization women were laid off in large numbers. Gladys Poese Ehlmann recalled the shock of her dismissal from Emerson Electric Company in St. Louis: “[T]he war was over on August 14 and we went in on the 15th. They lined us up and had our paychecks ready for us.”47 Accounting for 60 percent of the dismissals in heavy industry, women were fired at a rate 75 percent higher than men. But although women’s participation in the workforce dropped, this decline was short-lived. Women lost better-paid positions and most of the high-status jobs that had challenged sex-segregated labor patterns. But within a few years of the armistice, 32 percent of women were back in the labor force, and more than half of them were married. The war had not eroded cultural ideas about women’s primary role in the home and their secondary status as wage earners, but it had been a vehicle for sustaining and even accelerating a process of increased female participation in the workplace.

CONCLUSION: The New Woman in Ideal and Reality

The images called up at the start of this chapter — the 1920s flapper, the 1930s migrant mother, and the 1940s Rosie the Riveter — capture the distinctive qualities of these three decades. But while the eras of prosperity, depression, and war affected women in different ways, we can still discern broad trends for the period as a whole that reveal the trajectory of twentieth-century women’s lives.

Between 1920 and 1945, women worked in greater numbers, and more wives and mothers contributed to this trend, but they did so in the context of discriminatory sex-segregated labor patterns and unequal opportunities for women of color. In politics, women also witnessed important changes. Women now had the vote in all states, with the significant exception of African American women in the South, who like southern black men were largely disfranchised. In most states, women also enjoyed other legal rights — the right of married women to own property and obtain divorces and the right of all non-disfranchised women to serve on juries.

Although women did not sustain the ambitious hopes that followed the successful suffrage campaign, they could claim smaller victories. Reformers in the 1920s struggled against a repressive political climate to sustain their social justice agenda and, in the Depression years, became active and valued participants in the New Deal. Not as influential in the war years, they nonetheless left a permanent mark on public policy, especially in their Women’s Bureau and Social Security activities.

Patterns in the home are less clearly defined. The Depression and war had contradictory effects on marriage, divorce, and fertility rates. Trends of the 1920s toward increased emphasis on female sexuality persisted, but they did so in the context of an abiding cultural ideal that assumed that this sexuality would be confined in the context of marriage and the home.

As Americans faced the realities of a complex postwar world, these themes of women’s lives at home and in the workplace and political arena would do more than continue. They would eventually erupt in dramatic challenges to prevailing notions of women’s proper place.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Women’s Lobbying in the 1920s

WHEN THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT WAS RATIFIED in 1920, many American women eagerly looked for new opportunities to influence policies and policy. While some did so through electoral politics, others focused on lobbying around legislation on the state and national levels (see pp. 484–89). Although the maternalist social welfare reforms associated with the “women’s dominion of reform” were a crucial part of women’s political activism in the 1920s, other issues occupied a diverse group of women, including African American activists seeking racial justice and conservatives who drew upon the anti-Bolshevik Red Scare to challenge the extension of social justice reforms.

African American women activists were eager to use their vote to bring about significant improvements in the lives of black Americans. Although stymied in their efforts to challenge disfranchisement of African American men and women in the South, in states where they had the vote, women mobilized, mostly through the Republican Party, to help elect candidates they viewed as friendly to black interests. In the wake of a wave of race riots and violence, African American women became particularly focused on the campaign to pass a federal antilynching law. First introduced by Missouri representative Leonidas C. Dyer in 1919, the assumption behind the Dyer Bill was that a federal law would offer a means of prosecuting racial murders that local and state officials ignored. Women had been central to condemning lynching ever since Ida B. Wells began her campaign in 1892. (See Primary Sources: “Ida B. Wells: ‘Race Woman,’ ” pp. 325–29.) Now, armed with the vote, women turned to a well-organized lobbying campaign. Although many of the women who formed the Anti-Lynching Crusaders were members of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), which had been outspoken in its condemnation of lynching, the Anti-Lynching Crusaders was formed under the auspices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP; see pp. 432–34), which had taken the lead as the premier black civil rights organization. Founded in 1922, the Crusaders committee consisted of fifteen women, headed by Mary B. Talbert, who in turn recruited seven hundred women nationally with a goal of raising $1 million, lobbying politicians, and publicizing their campaign through meetings, prayer services, press releases, and advertising. The group actively reached out to white women’s groups and was successful in eliciting support from a number of prominent women.

Although the antilynching bill passed the House of Representatives in 1922, it failed in the Senate due to a filibuster by white southern Democrats. It would be reintroduced repeatedly and unsuccessfully over the next two decades. Although the Crusaders disbanded after one year and fell far short of their hopes for uniting 1 million women and raising $1 million, the publicity they distributed undoubtedly raised consciousness among white Americans. It may well have contributed to the creation of one of the first biracial women’s organization to address racial violence — the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (1930).

The first document below is from the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. It is followed by an excerpt from an African American newspaper that reported on the founding of the organization and published its statement. Figure 9.1 is an example of the advertising that the Crusaders placed in newspapers throughout the country. What do you think was the significance on the emphasis on prayer in The Crisis article? What arguments did the Crusaders use in the advertisement to secure support for the Dyer Bill? How do these excerpts compare with those of Ida B. Wells?

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders (1922)

Under the leadership of Mrs. Mary B. Talbert of Buffalo and an executive committee of 15 supported by over 700 state workers, there has been started the “Anti-Lynching Crusade,” the object of which is to “unite a million women to stop lynching.” These crusaders are planning a short, sharp campaign beginning immediately and ending January 1, 1923. They seek to arouse the conscience of the women of America, both white and black. They are in deadly earnest and they put forward as the first fact in the lynching campaign the horrid truth that 83 American women have been lynched by mobs in the last 30 years in addition to 3,353 men. This, in part, is the prayer which the Anti-Lynching Crusaders have sent out:

“We are slain all the day long in the land of our nativity, which is the land of our loyalty and of our love. The vials of race vengeance are wreaked upon our defenseless heads. The inhuman thirst for human blood takes little heed of innocence or guilt. Any convenient victim identified with our race suffices to slake the accursed thirst. We are beaten with many stripes. Our bodies are bruised, burned and tortured and torn asunder for the ghoulish mirth of the blood-lusty multitude. Whenever such atrocity is perpetrated upon any one of our number, because of his race, it is done unto us all. Vengeance and wrath are not invoked for the fit atonement of committed crime, nor yet for the just punishment of evil doer [sic]; but the sinister aim is to cow our spirit, enslave our soul and to give our name an evil repute in the eyes of the world. . . .

We pray Thee to enlighten the understanding and nerve the hearts of our lawmakers with the political wisdom and the moral courage to pass the Dyer Bill, now hanging on the balance of doubt and uncertainty. . . .

Quicken the conscience of the people with the moral firmness and determination to demand and to uphold the effective enforcement of this measure and of all righteous laws.”

SOURCE: “The Anti-Lynching Crusaders” The Crisis 25 (November 1922): 8.

One Million Women Are Working Like Trojans to Stop Lynching in the U.S.A. (1922)

The anti-lynching program demands: Publicity. Pressure upon Congress, Pressure upon state legislatures. Investigation. Legal processes.

The Negro has never given his cause proper publicity. It is proposed, if sufficient funds are obtained, to conduct a newspaper campaign of publicity patterned after the Red Cross and Child Welfare campaigns. A campaign where full page statements of the facts concerning lynching shall appear in every influential daily paper through the country until the general public is informed of the fact that this country is cursed with lynching.

SOURCE: “One Million Women Are Working Like Trojans to Stop Lynching in the U.S.A.,” Richmond Planet (December 9, 1922), p. 6.

Figure 9.1 “The Shame of America” (1922)

AMONG WHITE WOMEN REFORMERS the most important agenda in the 1920s on the national level was the effort to improve the lives of women and children. Women like Florence Kelley, for example, worked hard to secure a Child Labor Amendment. Although they failed in that campaign, reformers did have modest success with the Maternity Act (the Sheppard-Towner Act of 1921), with Kelley directing much of the lobbying. Supporters had hoped that the legislation would provide some financial assistance for poor mothers, but intense resistance by the medical establishment and conservative politicians and women’s groups like the Women Sentinels of the Republic limited the act to establishing a mothers’ education program through the Children’s Bureau and a program of visiting nurses for new mothers and infants. The act continued to be controversial and was phased out by 1929. The document below, a summary of an article by Anne Martin published in Current Opinion in 1920, includes the claim that medical care would be available to poor families, a provision that was cut from the final law. Martin’s call to action reveals the way in which women reformers hoped to draw upon new voters to put pressure on their representatives to pass the bill. What arguments does Martin make? Why might these arguments have been effective?

American Women Urged to Vote for State Protection of Motherhood (1920)

Four million voters in 1916 were able, by concerted action, to make the national Woman Suffrage amendment a political issue in the last Presidential election, with the result that it has lately been passed by Congress. Can fifteen million women voters in the present year be persuaded to unite in behalf of governmental protection of maternity and infancy? Anne Martin, the Woman Suffrage leader of Nevada, raises the question in Good Housekeeping and urges that a movement be started to educate American public opinion in the matter.

Investigations carried on by the Children’s Bureau in rural areas in Wisconsin, Kansas, North Carolina and Montana have revealed a higher maternal mortality rate than in the United States as a whole. “The rural districts,” Miss Martin observes, “are in the greatest need of help.” Imagination easily supplies pictures of women who have no trained attendance of any kind at the births of their babies; who are compelled to work until the last moment before a birth and who are expected to resume work in their households within two or three weeks after a birth.

The bill introduced by Senator Sheppard and seconded by Representative Towner in the House is entitled “A Bill for the Public Protection of Maternity and Infancy, and Providing a Method of Cooperation between the Government of the United States and the Several States.” . . . [I]t furnishes help to mothers in industrial, as well as in rural, districts — to all others, in fact. It creates a Federal Board of Maternal and Infant Hygiene, consisting of the Secretary of Labor, who shall be chairman, the Chief of the Children’s Bureau, who shall be the executive officer, the Surgeon-General of the United States Public Health Service and the United States Commissioner of Education. The Federal Board is to act through State boards appointed by the various legislatures. The benefits extended are of two kinds. First, popular instruction in the hygiene of infancy and maternity and related subjects is to be supplied through public health nurses and consultation centers, and through qualified lecturers in extension courses. Second, medical and nursing care for mothers and infants at home or at a hospital, when necessary, will be supplied.

Practically all of the leading countries, with the exception of the United States, now furnish some kind of government aid to mothers. Germany, in 1884, was the first to initiate legislation of this sort; Austria and Hungary soon followed. Italy and New Zealand took action in 1901, Great Britain in 1911, France in 1913. “When it is squarely presented to them,” Miss Martin concludes, “American women voters will unite upon this great human issue. They will insist that Congress take instant action.”

SOURCE: “American Women Urged to Vote for State Protection of Motherhood,” Current Opinion 68(3) (March 1920): 375.

CONSERVATIVE WOMEN — ORGANIZED IN GROUPS like the Women Sentinels of the Republic, the Woman Patriots, Massachusetts Public Interest League, and the Daughters of the American Revolution — roundly condemned welfare reforms like the Sheppard-Towner Act. Profoundly shaped by the Red Scare, they viewed reformers, pacifists, and feminists as an unholy alliance of women determined to undermine the family and the ideals of the nation. A popular piece of evidence for their claim was the so-called Spider Web Chart (Figure 9.2). Concocted by Lucia Ramsey Maxwell, who was a librarian at the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, the convoluted diagram highlighted twenty women and seventeen organizations. Although it is difficult to read the details, how does the image below convey the supposed threat of organized women reformers?

Figure 9.2 “The Spider Web Chart” (1924)

CONSERVATIVE WOMEN, MANY OF WHOM had been anti-suffragists, nonetheless felt patriotic women must become activists to fight the threat of encroaching Bolshevism. In the document below, a statement that Delaware senator Thomas Bayard read into the Congressional Record, the Woman Patriots summed up the threat posed by the Sheppard-Towner Act, which in 1926 was up for renewal. Do you think the argument made here might have influenced Congress’s decision to limit that renewal to only two years? Many scholars see in groups like the Woman Patriots the origins of the contemporary radical right in American politics. Do you see any similarities?

Woman Patriots Protest the Sheppard-Towner Act (1926)

SUMMARY OF GENERAL OBJECTIONS

1. The Congress and public tricked: These bills are dishonestly presented to hide their true scope and purpose. They are counterfeit legislation, organized schemes to trick the Congress and the country by pretended humanitarian, beneficent-appearing bills, masked as “welfare” and “women’s” measures, and intrusted to certain women’s organizations to engineer, the better to allay public suspicion, but are none the less straight imported communism. The Bolshevik wolf rarely gets to the doors of Congress except as a little Red Riding-hood.

2. Unconstitutional and unpopular: The . . . bill concerns matters over which the American people never gave their Federal Government an iota of authority. It involves the same principal of nationalized, standardized care of children and Federal interference between parent and child which the American people so sweepingly repudiated in defeating the Federal child labor amendment, on which the States, acting under popular pressure, now stand 36 to 4 for rejection. Since aroused by the campaign of information waged from Massachusetts to Oregon against the child-labor amendment, there can be no question where the people stand on Federal interference in their homes. More oppressive invasions of the private lives of citizens have recently been proposed or attempted by the encroaching Federal power than George III would have dared to impose upon the American colonists. . . . Citizens of Massachusetts have said that they regarded the advisory referendum of 1924, against the child labor amendment, as a bloodless, second Concord, “to leave their children free” . . . from tyrannous control by Congress. . . .

3. Revolutionary conspiracy: The Federal maternity bill inextricably interlocks with the child labor amendment and the Federal Children’s Bureau. They constitute, with the Federal Education Department bill, a unified agency and program of revolution by legislation. They are as deliberate a conspiracy to destroy this Republic as any plot ever hatched to overthrow a government by force and violence.

Including the creation of the Children’s Bureau in 1912, they were all backed by the same open groups and “underground” by the communists, and were chiefly promoted by one woman, a Marxian socialist, Mrs. Florence Kelley, formerly Mrs. Wischnewetsky . . . pupil and translator of Friedrich Engels (coauthor with Karl Marx of the communist manifesto) and Engel’s chosen lieutenant for introducing communism into “the flesh and blood of Americans” as he instructed her. . . .

The Engels-Kelley program carries in its wake as logical sequence doles for children and maternity or childbirth doles for women — “maternity benefits” — not as a help for needy mothers, but as a natural right, confirmed the socialist doctrine that maternity is “a service to the state” and that all children “legal or illegal” and all mothers, married or unmarried, should be supported by public taxes instead of by individual husbands and fathers. This cattleizing, stock-farm, breeding proposition for replenishing the population that dehumanizes marriage and lifts responsibility for their offspring from fathers and mothers has incalculable social and moral consequences compared with which the mere cost or taxation aspect of the issues, however enormous, is relatively trivial.

An examination of Children’s Bureau publications will reveal so many elaborate “studies” of illegitimacy, compared with the few short pamphlets of infant and child care, that the bureau might be considered to have a morbid interest in this subject were it not a well-known and deliberate plan of socialists, set forth at length in Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, and August Bebel’s Woman and Socialist, to wipe out all legal, social and moral distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children. It will be shown hereafter that both of these indecent socialist books have been recommended by Mrs. Kelley as fundamental studies for social workers. . . .

With the inner ring of socialists and feminists in control throughout the country, under the Federal maternity act, of the health centers for mothers and infants (corresponding to the “shop nuclei” in factories as agitation centers in the industrial communist campaign) and of public schools and colleges under the proposed education bill, a channel of propaganda as pervasive as the circulation of the blood in the human system, the youth of the Nation would be at their mercy.

SOURCE: Woman Patriots, “Maternity and Infancy Act,” Congressional Record, 69th Congress, 1st Session, July 3, 1926, 12918–52.

WOMEN WHO FOR THE MOST PART SHARED THE ASSUMPTIONS of reformers like Florence Kelley hoped to create a powerful national lobbying entity to promote reform and women’s rights. The document below is an extract from a pamphlet written by Maud Wood Park, who was chair of the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee (WJCC), founded in 1924. According to Park, what was the rationale for the WJCC? How does she counter the anti-Bolshevik type propaganda used to discredit the WJCC and its organizations?

ORGANIZED MANUFACTURERS VS. ORGANIZED WOMEN

[T]he Women’s Joint Congressional Committee . . . functions as the cooperative agency of constituencies in every State of the Union; functions by conveying to members of Congress the sentiment of the women voters back home; and to those women in turn it conveys the news of what their representatives do at Washington.

USE VOTING S TRENGTH — NO FINANCIAL POWER

Nothing just like this joint committee exists for any other group of voters; certainly nothing like it representing men’s organizations as such. . . . Their corporations, their manufacturers’ associations, their chambers of commerce, their fraternal orders, their mutual-benefit clubs — all these have a different history, a different concept, a different motive. They may be used for political ends, but their dependence is not upon their voting strength per se. . . .

Women’s organizations — the group here considered at all events — have a social welfare purpose. They work without self-interest, for the public good. Their service is largely voluntary and unpaid. They have scant funds in their treasuries. Their influence upon public opinion and their voting strength are their sole reliance and source of power.

USING THE TOOLS OF CITIZENSHIP

Women’s propensity . . . for organization, and their instinct for social as well as family welfare, has carried them into politics as a highly organized voting force seeking certain specific things. The “women’s clubs” with their great variety of local community purposes, had convened into the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Thousands and thousands of women had organized as mothers, into a National Congress of Mothers; as wage-workers into the National Women’s Trade Union League; as prohibitionists into the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Others had organized as business and professional women, as consumers, as teachers, as college and university women, as church members. Two million women had been enrolled in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which with the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment made way for the National League of Women Voters, a full-fledged non-partisan organization of women.

The Women’s Joint Congressional Committee is a piece of machinery through which at first ten and now twenty-two national organizations of women execute their programs of federal legislation. Not all of them endorse the same legislation, and the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee itself, being merely a clearing house, and a cooperative machine, endorses no legislation, proposes none. Whenever any piece of legislation is called for by five or more organizations, however, a sub-committee, composed of the legislative representative of the supporting organizations, is formed for the promotion of that bill.

THE ANTIS AND THEIR ATTACKS

These lists — of measures sought and organizations seeking them — should be scanned thoroughly. There are people who insist that they conceal a plot to overthrow the Government of the United States — yes, by violence. They say it is a program dictated by Moscow, by the leaders of the Russian communist party. They say its proponents are ‘Organizing Revolution through Women and Children.” The women, they say, are dupes of their “radical” leaders, “socialists” and “communists.”

The same people are saying this who used to say the suffrage leaders believed in free love. They profess to consider the Government in danger from the very women that the organized women of the country have delighted to honor. By weird distortion and artificial juxtaposition of paragraphs and phrases lifted from newspaper stories, by garbled quotations from speeches, and sometimes from fantasies or nightmares all their own, they throw out a fabric of misrepresentation to destroy, if possible, the faith of the women of America in such woman as Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, Miss Julia Lathrop, Miss Grace Abbott, Miss Mary Anderson, Mrs. Florence Kelley, Mrs. Harriet Taylor Upton, Mrs. Emily Newell Blair, Mrs. Raymond Robbins, Miss Jane Addams, Miss Mary McDowell, and other women who have achieved important results in fields of usefulness. With the epithet “bolshevist” or “communist” they try to discredit both the women leaders and the reforms they seek.

WOMEN MUST STAND THEIR GROUND

It is, of course, to laugh. Or rather it would be but for the fact that the credulous are too often misled by the printed word. Women therefore must firmly stand their ground, and hold their purpose.

Women organized, as voters, are seeking social legislation; the kind of legislation that considers human beings and human happiness above and before dollars and cents, or politicians’ fate. Women voters care supremely about the health and education of their children, the well-being of their families, and the peace and decent conduct of their communities. They want to abolish child labor. They want an eight-hour day, a decent standard of wages, and healthful surroundings for the girls and women, as well as for the men, who work for their living. They want a square deal for women everywhere and an opportunity to share with men the responsibilities of government. And they demand that the nations of the world find some way to keep the peace.

Women have, fortunately, the courage to use their voting power to these ends. They will not be diverted or terrorized by witch-burners, or their hirelings. The question really is this:

Do the men of the country intend to leave the women to make the fight? Or will you, men and brothers, do your part to make public sentiment such that no man or woman dare asperse the loyalty and patriotism of your wives and sisters and daughters who believe in giving to our country, as to our homes, the kind of thought and care that puts human beings above property, social well-being above the dollar mark and commercial profit?

SOURCE: “Organized Manufacturers vs. Organized Women,” Life and Labor Bulletin 3 (May 1925): 1–2.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Despite the significant differences among the three groups of women represented here, do you see any similarities in their approaches to political activism?

How do these documents help explain some of the limits to women’s efforts to achieve political success in the 1920s?

In the Woman Patriot document, why do you suppose the author invokes American Revolutionary images such as King George III and the battle of Concord?

Do these documents shed light on any of the political issues contemporary Americans struggle with?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Beauty Culture between the Wars

THE 1920S MARKED THE EMERGENCE of a highly commercialized beauty industry that built upon the growing interest in cosmetics of the prewar years. Cosmetic use expanded after 1900, but because such products were associated with prostitution and the seductive “painted lady,” concern about respectability meant that many women were cautious about using beauty aids. As interest grew, hundreds of women operated small businesses and a handful turned cosmetics into lucrative beauty empires. Among these were Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein, who catered to white women, and Annie Turnbo Malone and Sarah Breedlove (later known as Madam C. J. Walker), who focused on African Americans. These entrepreneurs pioneered marketing techniques and the concept of using a beauty “system” of related products. They hired women as agents, demonstrators, and clerks, thus making the beauty industry largely female.

After World War I, the nature of the cosmetic industry changed for both white and black women. Beauty salons, which mostly offered hair care, multiplied dramatically, growing from five thousand in 1920 to forty thousand by 1930. At the same time, the sale of cosmetics grew an astounding 400 percent. As fears about respectability receded with the popularity of the New Woman of the 1920s, rouge, lipstick, mascara, and nail polish were added to women’s makeup routines. This growth took place in the context of a modern consumer culture dominated by corporations. Although the prewar companies of Arden, Rubenstein, Walker, and Trumbo persisted, male-dominated firms increasingly took over the beauty industry. Firms that marketed to black women were run not only by men but by white men, although consumers rarely knew this. A smaller niche focused on Mexican American women, with mainstream companies like Max Factor advertising in Spanish-language newspapers.

This essay focuses on a key part of beauty culture — advertising — and explores the differences and similarities in marketing strategies directed at black and white consumers. Generous advertising budgets (mass-market magazines’ expenditures for ads reached $16 million in 1930, up from $1.3 million in 1915) led to the marketing not just of products but also of an idealized beauty that emphasized youth and sexuality. Ad agencies seized on public fascination with glamorous Hollywood stars to sell products as well. The techniques we recognize today were already in place in the 1920s. All the advertisements reprinted here come from movie fan magazines and as such were primarily targeted to young and working-class women.

One of the most common themes in cosmetic advertising is what historian Kathy Peiss terms the promise to women of the “democratic” ability to remake themselves, to choose and to have the resources to be beautiful.48 How does the 1926 Tre-Jur ad in Figure 9.3, part of a series that featured beautiful unknown women in the fan magazine Photoplay, demonstrate this motif? Note that although the emphasis is on face powder, the young woman has bobbed and marcelled hair, providing a modern look typical of the era’s flappers. This ad also demonstrates the new emphasis on attractive packaging for cosmetics that appeared as mass-market corporations took over the industry.

Figure 9.3 “Can you tell us her name?” (1926)

Despite the Great Depression, the cosmetic industry continued to flourish. “Irresistible” was a low-cost line sold in dime stores. The heavily made-up face of the woman in the dramatically colored (in reds and purples) 1938 ad in Figure 9.4 further suggests that these products were marketed to working-class women, because the trend in 1930s higher-end cosmetics was toward the “natural” look. What were the advertisers promising consumers who bought the Irresistible line?

Figure 9.4 “Irresistible” (1938)

Cosmetic ads used Hollywood stars to promote their products, with the promise that ordinary women could be as glamorous as the women they saw on the screen. Ads featuring stars often had tie-ins to their latest movie. The 1942 ad in Figure 9.5 links Max Factor products, movie star Rita Hayworth, and her film You Were Never Lovelier. Hayworth, who was born Margarita Carmen Cansino and was of Spanish descent, had small parts in dozens of movies before she changed her name in 1937. She also altered her hairline and dyed her hair red to look less like the Spanish dancer she was often typecast as. Actively seeking publicity, she frequently told the story of her makeover as a typical American success story and retained her ethnic identity even as she rose to extraordinary stardom in the 1940s. An icon for Mexican Americans, she was widely popular and was one of the era’s most glamorous and sexy stars. Although publicity stills showed more skin and erotic energy than the image used here, in what ways does the ad stress Hayworth’s sexual appeal? Do you think the phrase “beauty of your type” reflects any ethnic or racial preference?

Figure 9.5 “You Were Never Lovelier” (1942)

In the prewar era, Madam C. J. Walker, highly celebrated for her financial success and commitment to civil rights, stressed the ways in which her firm represented the success of black businesses and gave employment to women agents. Competition from new white firms resulted in ad campaigns that featured beautiful black women using the Walker products, but ads featuring the company itself continued, as is evident in the 1925 ad in Figure 9.6. The “Tan-Off” product mentioned in the bottom left “note” referred to a skin-lightening cream. Walker had refused to sell whitening products, but after her death in 1919, the company kept up with the competition by offering them. Black critics lashed out at these products as well as hair-straightening processes, viewing them as attempts to emulate white notions of beauty. Manufacturers answered these complaints by insisting that their customers were not trying to be white but aiming to achieve a neat and carefully groomed appearance. Many scholars agree, and one historian has noted that while the ads might stress light skin or soft, wavy hair as a goal in beauty rituals, they nonetheless “reassured black women of their beauty when so much of American popular culture told them they were unattractive.”49 Is this argument evident in the ad? How does the ad justify its claim that the products “glorify” their users’ womanhood?

Figure 9.6 “Glorifying Our Womanhood” (1925)

Although there were not many black popular culture stars to choose from, firms marketing to black women used stars to promote their products in much the same way as white cosmetic companies did. In the ad in Figure 9.7, the white-owned firm Golden Brown features popular black recording artists and vaudeville performers Hazel Meyers, Ethel Waters, Rosa Henderson, and Edna Hicks. The “Madame Mamie Hightower” referred to here was an invention, part of Golden Brown’s masquerade as a “race” firm. In what other ways does the company present itself as a black firm? How does this ad compare with Figures 9.5 and 9.6?

Figure 9.7 “Golden-Brown Beauty Preparations” (1923)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Changes in the cosmetic industry emerged at the same time as the New Woman of the 1920s. How do these ads enhance our understanding of corporate business and popular culture’s role in creating the New Woman?

How have ads for cosmetic products changed since the years of the ads shown here? How significant are these changes?

Historians disagree on whether the rise of the cosmetic industry signaled new freedoms for women to choose individual styles and play with personal appearance, or led to a higher, more impossible single standard for beauty, privileging appearance over other qualities. Is this debate still relevant?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Dorothea Lange Photographs Farm Women of the Great Depression

THESE DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHS of poor farm women provide compelling evidence of the hardships of Depression-era rural American women. The numbers of Americans involved in agricultural labor declined steadily in the twentieth century, a reflection of both the mechanization of farmwork and the growing importance of the industrial and commercial sectors of the economy. Even before the Depression, farm women and their families faced hard times, but the economic collapse made their lives even harder — especially for tenant farmers in the South and Southwest, many of whom were forced off the land and became homeless and desperate. Also suffering were farmers of the southern plains, where decades of soil neglect and years of drought turned parts of Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, as well as neighboring states, into arid wastelands. Such conditions prompted over three hundred thousand to go west to California. These “Okies,” as they were pejoratively called, were potent symbols of the economic collapse and its human toll.50

A New Deal agency called the Farm Security Administration (FSA) sought to resettle poor farmers on better land and to provide assistance to migrant farmers, primarily in the South and West. Only a small percentage of tenant farmers were actually resettled, however, and the number of temporary camps established for homeless migrant families was small — only fifteen in California — but they did provide a minimum of housing, child care, and sanitation. While the FSA programs themselves were very limited, the photographs they commissioned — at least one hundred thousand of them — had the enormous effect of creating empathy with the rural poor. These photographs shaped a visual legacy of the Great Depression that informs popular memory to this day.

The following images, produced by Dorothea Lange for the FSA, would eventually establish Lange as one of the foremost American photographers of the twentieth century. As she recorded the experiences and despair of the unemployed, Lange became part of the development of documentary photography. Although earlier photographers like Jacob Riis (see pp. 408–14) had embarked on a similar undertaking, photographers and filmmakers of the 1930s had a distinct vision of their work: they hoped to create an authentic record of the experiences of ordinary Americans.

In keeping with the concept of documentary photography as it was evolving, and in line with the FSA’s desire to deflect criticism of the photography program as mere propaganda for the New Deal, the photographers were under strict orders not to manufacture scenes or alter photographs in the darkroom. Yet in many ways the photographs were propaganda: their purpose was to drum up sympathy for the victims of the Depression and to demonstrate the way in which the New Deal was helping them. Despite the imperatives of “documenting” the real experience, we do know that FSA photographers, including Lange, often posed their subjects and routinely cropped images to make them more dramatic.

Lange, like the other artists working for the New Deal, aligned with the social realism approach to representation. Social realism celebrated the hardworking men and women of the United States and invoked the promise of democratic values. One scholar has calculated that Lange, in keeping with her progressive values and her early experiences photographing Mexican farmworkers, featured people of color in one of three of her FSA images.51 Yet the photographs distributed by the FSA to the print media were almost exclusively of whites, in keeping with a conscious effort to create empathy for hardworking rural white Americans, who, through no fault of their own, had become “down-and-out.” This approach of the FSA reminds us of another way in which photographs do not necessarily represent “reality.”

The most famous of Lange’s photographs, “Migrant Mother #1” (Figure 9.8), was one of six pictures Lange took in 1936 in Nipomo, California, at a “pea pickers” camp. The next day, Lange sent the now-famous image to San Francisco papers. But the succession of photographs here reveals that Lange experimented to get the “right” picture. The long shot (Figure 9.9, “Migrant Mother #3”) set the scene with the lean-to tent on the back of the truck and Florence Owens Thompson with four of her children. What does this image tell us about the family’s life? Although the teenage daughter is prominent in this image (and in one other shot similar to the first), she is not present in the other four photographs Lange took. Instead, Lange experimented with close-up compositions such as Figure 9.10 (“Migrant Mother #5”) that frame Thompson in a Madonna-like posture. This motif was common for Lange and other FSA photographers. Why would viewers have found this pose evocative? Why might Lange have chosen to eliminate the teenager from her photographs?

Figure 9.8 Migrant Mother #1 (1936)

Figure 9.9 Migrant Mother #3 (1936)

Figure 9.10 Migrant Mother #5 (1936)

For Figure 9.8, Lange dispensed with some of the context of poverty. The symbolic empty pie tin and oil lantern disappear, and all that remains is the four figures. In what ways does the image still convey that the family is destitute? Why do you suppose Lange had the two children who stand leaning on her shoulders turn their faces away from the camera? Although most scholars emphasize that this image evokes a heroic motherhood, one has suggested that despite the pose and the physical closeness of the children to Thompson, the lack of visual contact or engagement with her children might suggest the burdens or even the imprisonment of motherhood. What do you think?

Lange usually took a great deal of time with her subjects, but these images were shot in haste late in the day and Lange learned little about Thompson, not even her name. Years later, a more complicated story emerged. Thompson’s granddaughter reported that Lange had promised that the photographs would not be published but would be used to help the migrants. (In fact, they did help the migrants: after their publication in the San Francisco newspapers, contributions of over $200,000 poured in to help the pea pickers in Nipomo, but by then Florence Thompson’s family had moved on.) Decades later, Thompson resented the photograph’s widespread distribution and the fact that she never received any money from its publication. She also felt it misrepresented her as a dust bowl “Okie.” She and her family originally migrated to California in the 1920s. Thus, ironically, the portrait that has embodied the poor white farmers of the Great Depression era was in fact of a Native American, part of a group that the FSA largely chose to ignore.

Lange’s caption for Figure 9.11 was “Unemployed lumber worker goes with his wife to the bean harvest. Note social security number tattooed on his arm. Oregon.” Although the work of Lange and other FSA photographers often featured strong, heroic mothers, images of husbands and wives together rarely challenged the gender order. In what ways does the positioning and posture of the two indicate the woman’s subordinate status? Lange often featured women surrounded by the implements of their household labor and showed them in their struggle to maintain cleanliness and order. What is the significance of the small table, towels, and pot in this image? Why has Lange chosen to feature the man’s Social Security number? Though it is unlikely that Lange had this in mind, consider the gendered nature of the Social Security Act (p. 507) and the way in which this image seems to embody that quality.

Figure 9.11 “Unemployed Lumber Worker Goes with His Wife to the Bean Harvest” (1939)

In addition to her work on the West Coast photographing migrant farmworkers, Lange also worked in the South among sharecroppers and migrant tenants. She often photographed women at work in the fields, showing the hard, stooped labor involved in cotton and tobacco production. The close-up of a woman in Figure 9.12 working in a more domestic setting, as she sorts tobacco on a porch, perhaps minimizes the harshness of tobacco labor and the history of African American women as slave laborers in the fields (see the image on p. 125 in Chapter 3). The image is a very harmonious one that emphasizes the woman’s beauty and dignity. She is placed in the center of the photograph as the stable, central figure, and the piles of tobacco on either side of her chair provide balance and symmetry. The caption read, “Near Douglas, Georgia. ‘You don’t have to worriate so much and you’ve got time to raise sompin’ to eat.’ The program to eliminate the risk and uncertainty of a one-crop system meets the approval of this sharecropper. She sits on the porch and sorts tobacco. (July 1938).” It’s not clear what specific program Lange refers to, and in fact few African Americans received many benefits from the New Deal agricultural programs. But how might the caption explain the optimistic quality embodied in the image Lange produced?

Figure 9.12 “You don’t have to worriate so much and you’ve got time to raise sompin’ to eat” (1938)

For Figure 9.13, Lange’s caption is terse: “Cotton weighing near Brownsville, Texas, August 1936.” This would have been an arresting image in 1936 because it features a white woman in the cotton fields, which challenged American notions of appropriate work for white women. Yet, among poor tenant farmers and migrant workers alike, both black and white women routinely worked in the fields, in addition to carrying out their domestic and child care responsibilities. Although this image does not feature the cotton picker engaged in harsh labor, it shows the aftermath: her harvest being weighed. How does Lange’s composition reflect class status between picker and weighers? At first glance the image might suggest patriarchal power, with men determining the welfare of the woman. Yet the figure in the foreground is almost certainly a woman — the hair is long and the waist is narrow. What does this suggest about the relationship between women of different classes in the farm economy?

Figure 9.13 Cotton Weighing near Brownsville, Texas (1936)

Figure 9.14’s caption was “Sign of the Times — Depression — Mended Stockings, Stenographer, 1934.” Lange’s title might only refer to how the economic downturn had forced the woman to mend her stockings and “make do.” However, if Lange was suggesting that the stockings were a symbol for the nation as a whole, what do the tear — and the mending — suggest? Compare Figure 9.12 with Figure 9.15, “Feet of Negro Cotton Hoer near Clarksdale, Mississippi,” which was taken in 1937. The stenographer is evidently dressed up and composed, and she is in an indoor setting, as indicated by the wood floor. In contrast, the black cotton hoer is in a natural, outdoor setting, her feet in contact with the rough ground. Her shoes are in a worn-out condition. How might the second image be a symbolic representation of the harshness of agricultural labor, and especially of black women laborers? Why did Lange choose to photograph just the feet of these two women?

Figure 9.14 Sign of the Times — Depression — Mended Stockings, Stenographer (1934)

Figure 9.15 Feet of Negro Cotton Hoer near Clarksdale, Mississippi (1937)

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

The director of the FSA photography project, Rexford Tugwell, once commented, “You could never say anything about photography — it was a photograph, it was a picture. This was something you couldn’t deny. This was evident.”52 In what ways does the work of Dorothea Lange challenge Tugwell’s assessment?

In what ways do these photographs of diverse women support the FSA project of creating empathy with the “down-and-out” in the Great Depression?

What insights do these photographs give you about the lives of poor farm women in the Great Depression?

In many ways, the images reproduced here tell us more about Lange’s intent and values than they do about the women she photographed. Today, we might consider such photography an invasion of privacy that would be embarrassing to the subject. Indeed, we know that Florence Thompson was later unhappy about becoming the face of the “migrant mother.” Why do you suppose these women cooperated with Lange?

PRIMARY SOURCES

Voices of “Rosie the Riveter”

DURING WORLD WAR II, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT embarked on a well-organized publicity campaign to recruit women to work in the defense industry. For the most part, these efforts portrayed women’s work as patriotic service and stressed that such labor would not undermine their femininity. The campaign drew extensively upon modern advertising techniques and encouraged newspapers and magazines to run stories about women defense workers. Although defense work was notable for providing new opportunities for black and Mexican American women, most government propaganda featured white women. While the most well-known image of a woman defense worker, illustrator Norman Rockwell’s “Rosie the Riveter,” pictured a brawny, self-assured woman, the majority of government ads and posters emphasized attractive, even glamorous women, as Figure 9.16 suggests. Portrayed in full color, the woman wears a vivid red shirt and beret, with matching red nail polish and lipstick. How does this ad compare with the one on page 509, featuring servicewomen? In what ways does it emphasize the defense worker’s femininity? Compare it to the World War I posters in Chapter 8 (pp. 470–74).

Figure 9.16 “The more women at work the sooner we win!” (1943)

While the government campaign sought to defuse anxieties about the implications of women’s tackling “men’s” jobs by indicating that their motives were purely patriotic, in women’s contemporary accounts and oral histories a more complicated set of reasons emerges. As this set of documents makes clear, higher wages, more interesting jobs, and personal independence accompanied patriotic motives, but the motivations that shaped women’s decisions were as diverse as the women themselves.

HORTENSE JOHNSON

FOR MANY AFRICAN AMERICANS, this demonstration of patriotism could also be linked to demands for full citizenship. The first document appeared in Opportunity, the magazine of the National Urban League, a black organization. During the war, the Urban League had a firm commitment to a campaign called the Double V, which encouraged African Americans to support the war while at the same time continuing to call for civil and economic rights at home. Hortense Johnson, who was an inspector at an arsenal in Dover, New Jersey, won first place in Opportunity’s contest for essays by black women war workers. Johnson was atypical in leaving what she called a well-paid business position for defense work — for most African American women, the war offered opportunities to leave poorly paid domestic and farm labor. Johnson’s level of political engagement may also have been atypical, yet she offers a compelling account of the appeal of defense work for African American women. What motivates her? How might the publication of her story in the Urban League’s journal have affected what she wrote?

What My Job Means to Me (1943)

Did I say my job isn’t exciting, or complicated? I take that back. It may be a simple matter to inspect one box or a dozen, but it’s different when you are handling them by the hundreds. The six of us in my crew sometimes inspect as many as fourteen or fifteen hundred boxes during one shift. That means two hundred and fifty apiece — an average of one every two minutes, regardless of size and not counting any rest periods. Try that sometime and see if it’s a simple job! You stand at your bench all day long, with rest periods sometimes seeming years apart. You fight against the eye fatigue that might mean oversight. You probe with your fingers and tap here and there. Your back aches, your legs get weary, your muscles scream at you sometimes — groan at you all the time. But the dozen and one little operations must be carried on smoothly and efficiently if your work output is to keep up. It’s exciting all right, and it’s plenty complicated — in the same way that jungle warfare must be, hard and painstaking and monotonous — until something goes off with a bang! . . .

So if it’s as tough as all that — and it is! — why do you stick on the job? Why did you leave the comfortable job you held with a city business house? Why don’t you go back to it and make as much money as you’re making now? Why? Because it’s not that easy to leave, and it’s not that tough to stay! Of course the work is hard and sometimes dangerous, but victory in this war isn’t going to come the easy way, without danger. And we brown women of America need victory so much, so desperately. America is a long way from perfect. We resent the racial injustices that we meet every day of our lives. But it’s one thing to resent and fight against racial injustices; it’s another thing to let them break your spirit, so that you quit this struggle and turn the country over to Hitler and the Talmages and Dieses [prominent white southern politicians who were ardent supporters of segregation] who will run this country if Hitler wins. America can’t win this war without all of us, and we know it. We must prove it to white Americans as well — that our country can’t get along without the labor and sacrifice of her brown daughters, can’t win unless we all fight and work and save. . . .

I’m not fooling myself about this war. Victory won’t mean victory for Democracy — yet. But that will come later, because most of us who are fighting for victory today will keep on fighting to win the peace — maybe a long time after the war is over, maybe a hundred years after. By doing my share today, I’m keeping a place for some brown woman tomorrow, and for the brown son of that woman the day after tomorrow. Sterling Brown [an African American poet] once wrote, “The strong men keep a-comin’ on,” and millions of those men have dark skins. There will be dark women marching by their side, and I like to think that I’m one of them.

SOURCE: Hortense Johnson, “What My Job Means to Me,” Opportunity, April 1943, in Maureen Honey, ed., Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 71–75.

BEATRICE MORALES

BEATRICE MORALES (CLIFTON), A MEXICAN AMERICAN WOMAN born in Texas, lived with her husband, Julio, and their four children when the United States entered the war. As Morales recalled in an oral history interview conducted in 1981, her husband resisted when she first decided to take a defense job. But she told him, “Well, I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to go to work regardless of whether you like it or not.” Morales found work as a riveter at Lockheed Aircraft. At first, she was overwhelmed by the noise, the enormous size of the factory, and the challenge of learning the necessary skills, but she soon mastered her job. Although paid employment was new to her, her account makes it clear that she found her work satisfying. What was so appealing about being a Lockheed riveter? Do you think that the growth of the women’s movement in the 1970s may have affected Morales’s understanding of her marriage and work history? How might the fact that this interview took place so many years after her World War II experience have affected her story?

Oral Interview (1981)

As time went on, I started getting a little bit better. I just made up [my] mind that I was going to do it. I learned my job so well that then they put me to the next operation. At the very first, I just began putting little pate nuts and stuff like that. Then afterwards I learned how to dill the skins and burr them. Later, as I got going, I learned to rivet and buck. I got to the point where I was very good.

I had a Mexican girl, Irene Herrera, and she was as good a bucker as I was a riveter. She would be facing me and we’d just go right on through. We’d go to one side and then we’d get up to the corner and I’d hand her the gun or the bucking bar or whatever and then we’d come back. Her and I, we used to have a lot of fun. They would want maybe six or five elevators a day. I’d say, “let’s get with it.” We worked pretty hard all day until about 2:00. Then we would slack down.

I had a lot of friends there. We all spoke to each other. Most of them smoked, and we’d sit in the smoking areas out there in the aisle. Then, some of the girls — on the next corner there was a drugstore that served lunches. There was a white lady, she used to go, and Irene would go. We’d talk about our families and stuff like that.

Irene stayed on that same operation. I don’t know why I got a chance to learn all the other jobs, but I learned the whole operation until I got up to the front, the last step. They used to put this little flap with a wire, with a hinge. I had to have that flap just right so that it would swing easy without no rubbing anywhere. I used to go with a little hammer and a screwdriver and knock those little deals down so that it would be just right. That guy that I used to work with helped me, teached me how to do it, and I could do it just like him.

New people would come in, and they would say, “You teach them the job. You know all the jobs.” Sometimes it would make me mad. I’d tell them, “What the heck, you get paid for it. You show them the job.” But I would still show them. . . .

I was just a mother of our kids, that’s all. But I felt proud of myself and felt good being that I have never done anything like that. I felt good that I could do something, and being that it was war, I felt that I was doing my part.

I went from 65 cents to $1.05. That was top pay. It felt good and, besides, it was my own money. I could do whatever I wanted with it because my husband, whatever he was giving to the house, he kept on paying it. I used to buy clothes for the kids; buy little things that they needed. I had a bank account and I had a little saving at home where I could get ahold of the money right away if I needed it. Julio never asked about it. He knew how much I made; I showed him. If there was something that had to be paid and I had the money and he didn’t, well, I used some of my money. But he never said, “Well, you have to pay because you’re earning money.” My money, I did what I wanted.

I started feeling a little more independent. . . . [When one of her children became ill, Morales quit working to stay home with her children, but she explained, “I wasn’t too satisfied.” She worked at various jobs and then in 1950 returned to Lockheed, where she worked until 1978, eventually being promoted to a “lead man,” with enhanced responsibility. When the interviewer, Sherna Gluck, asked for her opinion about the women’s movement, she replied as follows.]

I wouldn’t want to lose my identity as a woman. I wouldn’t want a man to treat me like a man, to say, “you go dig ditches. Because I dig them, you go dig them, too.” There are a lot of things that a woman can do — and good — but to lose your identity completely, I just can’t see that.

My life, it was changed from day to night. I’m not the person that I started when I first married Julio. The changes started when I first started working. They started a little bit, and from then on it kept on going.

SOURCE: Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 198–219.

SYLVIA R. WEISSBORDT, U.S. WOMEN’S BUREAU

WHEN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ESTABLISHED the United States Women’s Bureau within the Department of Labor in 1920, it explicitly recognized the growing importance of women in the workforce. The U.S. Women’s Bureau took seriously its charge to “formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”53 During World War II, it particularly focused on women in the defense industry and urged employers to follow equal pay for equal work guidelines. As the war came to a close, it drew attention to the dilemma women faced when they lost the better-paid, more interesting industrial war jobs and returned to less desirable ones that were considered appropriate for women. In summarizing its findings for this 1946 study, the bureau emphasized that the vast majority of working women needed to continue working after the war and noted that women faced “a variety of postwar readjustment problems.” Despite the bureau’s hope that its report would lead to national policies to ease women’s transition to nondefense work, it had little success in advocating for expanded opportunities for working women. According to the report, why did most women want to keep their wartime jobs?

Women Workers and Their Postwar Employment Plans (1946)

Three conclusions of particular postwar significance stand out from the series of home interviews by representatives of the Women’s Bureau with women who were employed in 10 war production areas in 1944 and 1945.

First, the war brought about great increases in the number of women employed in each of the 10 areas and in the number of women who planned to remain in the labor force in the respective areas.

Second, there were tremendous increases in the proportions of women employed in industries producing directly for war purposes, and the take-home earnings of these women considerably exceeded the take-home earnings of women employed in other industries.

Third, a high proportion of the women employed during the war period reported that they carried heavy economic responsibilities at home, and a high proportion of those who planned to continue working after the war gave economic reasons for their decision. . . .

The outstanding postwar question in any war production areas is, of course, how many of the wartime workers will want jobs and how many will want them in the same area.

That very large numbers of wartime women workers intend to work after the war is evidenced by their statements to interviewers. On the average, about 75 percent of the wartime-employed women in the 10 areas expected to be part of the postwar labor force. . . .

The highest percentage of prospective postwar workers in most areas came from the group of women who had been employed before Pearl Harbor, rather than from those who had been in school or engaged in their own housework at that time. On the average over four-fifths of the women who had been employed both before Pearl Harbor and in the war period intended to keep on working after the war. Among the war-employed women who had not been in the labor force the week before Pearl Harbor, over three-fourths of the former students expected to continue working, while over half of those formerly engaged in their own housework had such plans. . . .

The nature of postwar employment problems is influenced not only by the number of wartime workers who expect to remain in the labor force but also by their expressed desires for work in particular industries and occupations. Postwar job openings as cafeteria bus girls, for example, are not apt to prove attractive to women who are seeking work as screw-machine operators.

The bulk of the prospective postwar workers interviewed in this survey, or 86 percent, wanted their postwar jobs in the same industrial group as their wartime employment, and about the same proportion wanted to remain in the same occupational group. Postwar shifts to other industries were contemplated on a somewhat larger scale, however, among the wartime employees in restaurants, cafeterias, and similar establishments, as well as in the personal service industries in certain areas. . . .

In each of the nine areas where there were enough non-white employed women in the war period to make comparison valid, a much higher proportion of the Negro women planned to continue work than of the white women. In six areas 94 percent or more of the Negro or other non-white women who were employed in the war period planned to continue after the war. . . .

Responsibility for the support of themselves or themselves and others was the outstanding reason given by war-employed women for planning to continue work after the war. . . . Fully 84 percent of [those surveyed] had no other alternative, as this was the proportion among them who based their decision on their need to support themselves and often, other persons as well. Eight percent offered special reasons for continuing at work, such as buying a home or sending children to school; and only 8 percent reported they would remain in the labor force because they liked working, or liked having their own money.

Virtually all of the single women and of those who were widowed or divorced (96 and 98 percent, respectively) who intended to remain in gainful employment after the war stated they would do so in order to support themselves or themselves and others, whereas 57 percent of the married wartime workers who expected to remain at work gave this reason. The remaining married prospective postwar workers interviewed offered reasons of the special purpose type, such as buying a home, about as often as those of the “like-to-work” type. . . .

That the need to work is just as pressing among some married women as among some single women was highlighted by the replies from the war-employed women on the number of wage earners in the family group. Out of every 100 married women who were living in family groups of two or more persons, 11 said they were the only wage earner supporting the family group. This was almost identical to the proportion of sole supporting wage earners among single women living with their families. The state of marriage, therefore, does not, in itself, always mean there is a male provider for the family.

SOURCE: Sylvia R. Weissbordt, Women Workers in Ten War Production Areas and Their Postwar Employment Plans (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 1–20.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS

Scholars have compiled a number of oral history archives documenting women’s war defense work, and many have online audio files where you may listen to these fascinating firsthand accounts. Listen to some of these interviews (for example, the “Rosie the Riveter Revisited” collection, which you can find by searching online) to learn more about how different types of women interpreted their war work experiences. Compare one of the online accounts to one of the excerpts you read here.

How might Johnson or Morales have reacted to the ad in Figure 9.16?

How might Johnson or Morales have responded to the U.S. Women’s Bureau report about women’s postwar work plans?