women's place in the american labour force, 1870–1995

Women's Place in the American LabourForce, 1870±1995

MARGARET WALSHUniversity of Nottingham

AbstractA generation ago women's place in the American labour force was almost invisible andvery insigni®cant in the history books. Stimulated by the emergence of modern feminismand the advent of a variety of `New Histories' in the 1960s and 1970s, academics havecreated an extensive literature on women's labour history. They have not only discussedwhich women worked, and where and why they worked, but have investigated howwomen have been treated in the workplace. Many of their ®ndings have revealednegative experiences, especially in the form of gender segregation and low pay. Recentlyhistorians have turned to more positive interpretations emphasizing female values andgender relationships. Yet even with these achievements the recognition of resegregationwithin racial and ethnic minorities reminds women how far there is to go before equalityis achieved. Historians have made considerable progress in altering the structure andcontent of many strands of traditional labour history. Yet a considerable number ofgaps within the ®eld remain to be ®lled.

In 1920 the federal government recognized the presence andacknowledged the requirements of women in the American labourforce by establishing the Women's Bureau. Located within the

Department of Labor, this bureau was given a mandate to improvewomen's opportunities for pro®table employment.1 Historians tookalmost another half-century to acknowledge the existence and to discussthe signi®cance of America's working women. Yet once women'shistorians started research and writing in the 1960s and 1970s theyrecovered an abundance of evidence and produced a variety of inter-pretations concerning female labour. While no overall synthesis has yetappeared, many new ®ndings and revisions of earlier analyses havealtered the shape not only of labour history but of many other branchesof history.In surveying both the older and newer information about women's

place in the American labour force in this article I intend to examine the

*c The Historical Association 1997. Published byBlackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UKand 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

1 US Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, Milestones: The Women's Bureau Celebrates 70Years of Women's Labor History (Washington DC, 1990), p. 1.

secular trends in women's employment and the ways in which recentresearch has modi®ed earlier statements about female participation.Diversity has become the key theme, highlighting the fact that workingwomen cannot be categorized as a universal group. I shall also look atthe ways in which historians now consider that women brought specialqualities to their participation in the labour force. The conventionalportrayal of women's negative experiences in the workplace is beingpartially o�set by an optimistic approach emphasizing female values.

I

Traditionally historians failed to consider secular trends in femaleemployment. The few working women who surfaced in standard texts onAmerican economic history or labour history were described as poor,white, frequently immigrant and young. They were located in themanufacturing sector, either as millhands in the textile factories of theearly nineteenth century or as sweated labour in the light industries at theturn of the twentieth century. Some recognition was occasionally givento their presence in the emerging service industries in the early twentiethcentury or to the Women's Trade Union League. These working womenwere deemed to play an insigni®cant part in either national productivityor labour organizations and to be justi®ably marginalized or ignored.2

Yet the o�cial statistics of the federal government could demonstratethat women were active in the labour force and that their participation inthe American economy was signi®cant. In 1870, when the ®rst full censusof women workers was taken, 15 per cent of the female populationworked. These 1.7 million women then comprised 14 per cent of thenation's labour force. Half a century later, in 1920, 8.3 million womenformed a ®fth of the American workforce; by 1940 the proportion hadbecome a quarter. Following the SecondWorldWar the increase in femaleworkers becamemoremarked. Over 22million women formed 32 per centof all workers in 1960. A generation later, in 1990, their numbers had risenover two and a half times to account for over 45 per cent of the labourforce. By that date 57 per cent of American women were gainfullyemployed (see table 1). Historically the broad sweep of statistics records anoticeable rise in women's labour force participation and suggests thatpaid work has become less and less a predominantly masculine activity.Women's historians have described this secular trend as a shift from

`working girl to working mother'.3 The young single female worker gave

2 See e.g. Ross M. Robertson, History of the American Economy (3rd edn., New York, 1973);Sydney Ratner, James H. Soltow and Richard Sylla, The Evolution of the American Economy(New York, 1979); and Philip Taft, Organized Labor in American History (New York, 1964). Latereditions of these texts, e.g. Robertson and Walton, 1983, and Ratner, Soltow and Sylla, 1993, haveincorporated more information on women workers.3 Lynn Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the UnitedStates, 1820±1980 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985) [hereafter, Weiner, From Working Girl].

*c The Historical Association 1997

564 WOMEN IN AMERICA'S LABOUR FORCE

way to the older married woman worker. This portrayal remains apt as ageneralization, but disaggregation of the ®gures suggests that thedescription is more appropriate for white or European American womenthan for all women taken together. More recent research suggests thatworking women pursued a variety of options. Diverse patterns incultural values, living arrangements and economic production havecontributed to di�erential participation by female groups at varioustimes in the American past.What, then, are the main elements of this variety? In the late

nineteenth century most females in the labour force were likely to beyoung and single. In 1890 the highest participation rates were in the agebrackets 15±19 and 20±24, at 29.7 per cent and 30.3 per cent respect-ively. At the same time, 40.5 per cent of single women worked in contrastto 4.6 per cent of married women.4 These women were also working-class. Cultural norms de®ned by upper- and middle-class EuropeanAmericans required married women to stay at home and take care oftheir families.5 Upper- and middle-class women were rarely employed

Table 1 Trends in the United States female labour force, 1870±1990

Year Total Womenlabourforce No. % of women of % of labour(000) (000) working age force

1870 12,160 1,717 15 141880 16,274 2,354 16 141890 21,814 3,597 19 161900 27,323 4,834 21 181910 35,749 7,011 24 201920 41,017 8,278 24 201930 48,168 10,546 25 221940 52,711 12,951 27 251950 59,223 16,443 30 281960 69,234 22,222 36 321970 82,048 30,547 41 371980 106,066 44,741 51 421990 124,787 56,554 57 45

Source: Lynn Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The FemaleLabor Force in the United States (Chapel Hill, 1985), p. 4.; US Department ofLabor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review, November 1991.

4 Julie A. Matthaei, An Economic History of Women in America: Women's Work and the SexualDivision of Labor and the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1982) [hereafter Matthaei, AnEconomic History], p. 143; Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History ofAmerican Women (New York, 1990) [hereafter Goldin, Understanding], p. 17.5 The classic statement on American domesticity is Barbara Welter, `The Cult of True Woman-hood, 1829±1860', American Quarterly, xxviii (1966), 135±74. Though much criticized andcontested as a framework for organizing women's history, its basic premise that women's mainfunction has been domestic still remains.


MARGARET WALSH 565

gainfully, even when widowed or divorced. Their daughters might enterthe professions of teaching, nursing and social work, but usually on atemporary basis. Working-class married women were not so favourablyplaced. They might subscribe to the domestic ideal by working formoney outside the home only in emergencies, for example when theirhusbands' wages failed to support the family and when their childrenwere too young to work, or when they were widowed or divorced. Butthey regularly contributed to the family income by scrimping or econ-omizing when performing domestic tasks and by doing outwork for payin their homes. Di�erent ethnic and racial mores de®ned how much andwhat types of paid outwork an immigrant or African American mothermight undertake and whether this work was a temporary occurrence inher life cycle, but these women were frequently in the labour force. Whenhistorians move beyond the o�cial de®nition of the term `gainfullyemployed', the concept of the era of the `working girl' needs to bequali®ed.As the twentieth century progressed it became more acceptable

socially and more desirable economically for married women of anyclass to work outside the home. This in turn contributed to an olderworkforce. In 1940 the highest female labour force participation rateswere in the age brackets 20±24 and 25±29, at 45.6 and 35.5 per centrespectively, at a time when the average participation rate for all womenwas 25.8 per cent.6 By 1992 the average rate had increased to 57.8 per centwhile the highest rates were in the age brackets 40±44 and 45±49, at 78.2and 75.8 per cent.7 The domestic ideal had altered to enable `respectable'women to become gainfully employed provided that they undertook thedual burden of housework and paid work and gave priority to house-work. Technological changes in household appliances and in repro-ductive control gave middle-class wives the time to enter the workforce,while the purchase of an increasing array of consumer goods gave themthe incentive.Married women's participation rates increased gradually from

11.7 per cent in 1930 to 21.6 per cent in 1950. In the second half of thetwentieth century these rates rose more sharply, reaching 39.5 per cent in1970, and 58.2 per cent of married women with spouse present and63.6 per cent with spouse absent in 1990.8 Initially, older womenreturned to work when their children had reached adulthood. But afterthe Second World War they were followed by mothers with school-agechildren (under eighteen years old). In 1950 33 per cent of these women

6 Valerie K. Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force in the United States: Demographic andEconomic Factors Governing its Growth and Changing Circumstances (Berkeley, 1970) [hereafterOppenheimer, The Female Labor Force], p. 8.7 Joyce P. Jacobsen, The Economics of Gender (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), p. 114.8 Goldin, Understanding, p. 17; US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employmentand Earnings (Washington DC, 1993).



worked; by 1992 the proportion had risen to 65 per cent.9 This group,however, needs to be disaggregated to reveal a more recent trend. Sincethe early 1960s mothers of pre-school age children have become anoticeable feature of the female labour force. The 20.2 per cent ofworking mothers with children under six years old in 1960 had become58.4 per cent in 1991.10 All mothers have thus been involved in themarked increase in female participation in the American labour force inthe past quarter-century. Rising economic expectations, fears aboutunemployment, female career aspirations, better child-care arrange-ments, lower birth rates for multi-earner families and the growth offemale-headed families have contributed to the greater numbers ofworking mothers. Furthermore, public opinion has changed and hasbecome more favourable to the employment of wives and mothers.11

Yet there were several varieties of married working women andworking mothers. The upward secular trend has been describedprimarily in respect to European American women, who were the leastlikely to be in the labour force early in the century. The increase in theirparticipation rate ± from 6.5 per cent in 1920 to 48.1 per cent in 198012 ±re¯ects how greatly they were a�ected by the changes in the ideology ofdomesticity and in the consumption ethic. Their move into the labourforce was also noticeably in¯uenced by two divergent trends: the no-faultdivorce legislation of the 1970s pushed many white women towardspoverty and hence back to work, whereas well-educated women left theiroccupations only on a very temporary basis.Married women from racial and ethnic minorities, whether de®ned as

immigrants and African Americans in the late nineteenth century or aswomen of colour in the late twentieth century, have generally had higherlabour force participation rates than married white native-born orEuropean American women. Initially, immigrants and ethnic Americanswere part of the working class, who needed the female wage to support orhelp support the family. When their upward mobility took them into themiddle class, their participation rates stayed higher than white native-born women partly because they already had a tradition of workingand partly because they increasingly shared the consumer and careeraspirations of the upwardly mobile. Married African American women

9 Weiner, From Working Girl, p. 6; US Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, Facts on WorkingWomen 92±3 (June 1993), p. 3.10 Alice A. Kemp,Women's Work: Degraded and Devalued (Englewood Cli�s, NJ, 1994) [hereafterKemp, Women's Work], p. 185. The 1960 ®gure refers to `ever married women', which includesmarried, divorced, separated and widowed women; the 1991 ®gure refers to `all women'. In 1960,presumably, single women were not expected to have children.11 US Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, Time of Change: 1983 Handbook on WomenWorkers (Washington DC, 1983) [hereafter US Department of Labor, Time of Change], pp. 14±22;US Department of Labor, Women's Bureau, 1993 Handbook on Women Workers: Trends and Issues(Washington DC, 1994) [hereafter US Department of Labor, 1993 Handbook], pp. 10±11.12 Teresa Amott and Julie A. Matthaei, Race, Gender and Work: A Multicultural Economic Historyof Women in the United States (Boston, 1991) [hereafter Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender andWork], p. 303.


MARGARET WALSH 567

often worked. In 1920 their participation rate stood at 32.5 per cent, byfar the highest for any racial or ethnic group. These women haveremained in the working class and their ®nancial need has continued topush them into the labour force. Ironically, because of the divergenttrends of economic need and consumerism, and because of better jobprospects since the passage of equal opportunities legislation, theirparticipation rate at 60.5 per cent in 1980 was no longer the highest for allgroups of married women, being exceeded by Chinese Americans at 60.8per cent and Filipina Americans at 70.6 per cent. Doubtless furtherresearch into multicultural history will modify earlier generalizationsabout working wives and will enable fuller discussion of the unevenmovement of racial and ethnic groups into wage labour.13

II

Historians have paid considerably more attention to discussing patternsof female occupations than they have to discussing the age and maritalstatus of women workers. In analysing jobs and careers, women'shistorians have looked at both where and why women worked.Traditionally, they found lack of recognition, discrimination and poormaterial conditions. More recently they have tended to stress women'saccomplishments and their opportunities in an expanding marketplace.These achievements, however, remain contested and partial. Moreover,voices from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds are increasinglyinsisting on raising the issue of discrimination not only by males but alsoby females.Women's historians have continued to challenge the o�cial de®nition

of gainful employment. Women have always worked, but their contribu-tions have been underrated and understated because of capitalist andmale de®nitions of work.14 To be counted, physically and economically,women had to be active in an establishment which was recorded formallyas a place of work and there receive payment. This meant that theirproductive and reproductive contributions to running the householdand frequently their part-time employment as outworkers was ignored.Indeed, in the o�cial interpretation of work it would seem that85 per cent of women were unemployed in 1870, while in 1990 thatproportion had declined to 43 per cent. Women's housebound work wasdevalued and debased.Early attempts to discuss the value and productivity of housework as

an occupation drew partly on historical and sociological research on

13 Ibid., pp. 291±314. In 1991, for the ®rst time, white women's labour force participation ratessurpassed those of black women, although by a minute margin, namely 57.4 per cent as against57.0 per cent: US Department of Labor, 1993 Handbook, p. 1.14 For a classic statement of this view see Heidi Hartmann, `Capitalism, Patriarchy and JobSegregation by Sex, Signs, i (1976), 137±69; Heidi Hartmann, `The Family as the Locus of Gender,Class and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework', Signs, vi (1981), 366±94.



domestic service, since servants in essence did for pay what a wife andmother did for free, and partly on information about household tech-nology and commercial services. As on the factory ¯oor, wheretechnology and scienti®c management facilitated the division of labourand increased productivity, so too in the house, indoor plumbing, gas,electricity and domestic gadgetry enabled tasks to be done faster andwith less physical e�ort. Homemaking was further systematized byfemale educationalists who equated running a house with running abusiness. Advertisers subsequently not only maintained the pressure toimprove standards, but endowed housework with an emotional value ofwifely and motherly satisfaction.15 Yet this female work could not begiven an equal value with men's work because it was unpaid. Thehousewife's services did not enter the market arena. They were thusdismissed as being both inferior and easily accomplished. The fallacy ofsuch rejection has been exposed by middle-class women who, on enteringthe labour force, decried the `dual burden' which had for so long beencarried by their working-class sisters. Educated to expect a degree of fairtreatment between the sexes, they tried to persuade their male partners toenter the undervalued female space and share the housework. Thoughsome shifts have been made, progress towards any symmetrical arrange-ment is slow. In the early 1990s women sharing households with menwere still responsible for approximately 75 per cent of domestic labour,including housework, laundry, cooking, shopping and especially childcare.16 It would seem that housework remains an occupation which haslittle value, both because it is performed without wages and because it isdone in the private sphere.What would happen if housework were given more value by bringing it

into the public arena and making it part of the national economy? Itscontribution to economic well-being can be estimated by applyingtheoretical constructs of either opportunity cost or market cost.17 Bothhistorical and contemporary estimates for opportunity costs, however,are di�cult to establish. Attempts to calculate `lost income streams'which the homemaker might have earned have been problematic notonly because of the scarcity of data, but also on account of the domesticideal which has denied women skills and training for paid work and has

15 Three useful volumes which examine the history of housework are Susan Strasser, Never Done:A History of American Housework (New York, 1982); Ruth S. Cowan,More Work for Mother: TheIronies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York, 1983);Annegret S. Ogden, The Great American Housewife: From Helpmate to Wage Earner, 1776±1986(Westport, Conn., 1986). Two useful articles which discuss housework are Christine Bose,`Technology and Changes in the Division of Labor in the American Home', Women's StudiesInternational Quarterly, ii (1979), 295±304; Christine E. Bose, Philip L. Bereano and Mary Malloy,`Household Technology and the Social Construction of Housework', Technology and Culture, xxiv(1984), 53±82.16 Kemp, Women's Work, p. 253.17 For a bibliographical survey of this literature see Margaret Walsh, `Working Women in theUnited States: Essay in Bibliography', Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History(renamed Labour History Review), liv (1989), 42±3.


MARGARET WALSH 569

deterred them from establishing their potential earnings in the market-place. The replacement cost method of hiring in someone to do the hometasks also raises problems about estimating the monetary value ofhousework at any given point in time or at any particular place.Domestic labour has changed considerably during the past century and aquarter, as have the hours spent on that labour and the personalcommitment of wives and mothers. Nevertheless, despite di�culties withthis method, it has been used in arranging divorce settlements and informulating life insurance estimates.18 Whether econometric model-building, new historical research or di�erent use of social surveys canproduce satisfactory monetary estimates of housework undertaken in thepast remains to be seen. Though women agree that home-centred workhas been grossly undervalued and needs to be reassessed, the myth thatthis work is not really labour has yet to be dispelled.More progress has been made in valuing the contributions of female

outwork. Conventionally, the small amount of outwork that wasrecognized in historical texts was industrial. This became visible mainlyin the early twentieth century, when social reformers protested about theevils of the sweating system and investigative government reports docu-mented these problems. Recently, however, outwork has become morewidespread in terms of both its occupational distribution and its classbase. It thus has the potential to become a more positive endeavour.The paucity of home labourers in the census records has recently been

recognized as a problem of under-enumeration. Econometric work ono�cial statistics suggests that the participation in the labour force ofmarried women at home should be increased by some 10 per cent toaccount for such workers as boardinghouse keepers, agricultural hands,sweated labourers and producers of household goods.19 Individualstudies have documented some of these home activities. For example,historically, taking in boarders was possibly the most important servicesector outwork, especially in large cities. Taking in laundry, running astore in the front room, sewing, tobacco processing and shelling pecanswere other ways in which women who lived in cities contributed to thefamily budget. On the farms women shouldered a considerable amountof kitchen garden and barnyard labour.20

18 Bettina Berch, The Endless Day: The Political Economy of Women and Work (New York, 1982),p. 96; Myra M. Feree, `Housework: Rethinking the Costs and Bene®ts', Families, Politics and PublicPolicy: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State, ed. Irene Diamond (New York, 1983), p. 152.19 Goldin, Understanding, p. 44.20 John Modell and Tamara K. Hareven, `Urbanization and the Malleable Household: AnExamination of Boarding and Lodging in American Families', Journal of Marriage and the Family,xxxv (1973), 467±79; S. J. Kleinberg, The Shadow of the Mills: Working-Class Families inPittsburgh, 1870±1907 (Pittsburgh, 1989), pp. 246±8; Julia K. Blackwelder, `Texas Homeworkers inthe 1930s', Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home, ed. EileenBoris and Cynthia R. Daniels (Urbana, Ill., 1989) [hereafter Homework, ed. Boris and Daniels],pp. 75±90; Eileen Boris, `Black Women and Paid Labor in the Home: Industrial Homework inChicago in the 1920s', Homework, ed. Boris and Daniels, pp. 33±52; Elizabeth H. Pleck, `AMother's Wages: Income Earning Among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896±1911', The



Traditionally, such work was viewed as exploited labour. It wasundertaken by women who had no alternative because they needed to beat home to mind children or look after sick members of the family.Modern studies of immigrants in the clothing and other light industriescontinue to suggest exploitation as employers seek cheap and captivelabour in an informal American economy rather than setting up runawayshops beyond national boundaries.21 Yet the information technologyrevolution has made home teleworking a possibility for clerical workers,while the career mother can remain at home in a managerial orentrepreneurial position by using modern communications. Increasingly,women can choose from a variety of homework activities, ranging fromentrepreneurship to sweated labour. This female choice in homework hasbeen supported by the ideological arguments for both free enterprise andthe right to work, arguments which have become more popular since thepolitical move to the right in the 1980s and the increasing industrialchallenge of third world countries.22 A historical and sociological debatehas developed about the complexity of the issues involved. Outwork canbe, and has been, an attractive option for some middle- and working-class women as individuals; however, it has not been, and still is not, apositive work experience for women as a group.

III

When women moved out of the home to ®nd gainful employmentoccupational choice was, and remains, limited by cultural expectations,lack of skills and male prejudice. Historically, women have worked andstill do frequently work in sexually segregated jobs, and this segregationhas become a major issue. Women's historians and social scientists havespent a considerable amount of time discussing what has been called aprocess of feminization and talking about its major consequence, low

American Family in Socio-Historical Perspective, ed. Michael Gordon (New York, 2nd edn., 1978),pp. 490±510; Leslie W. Tentler, Wage-Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in theUnited States, 1900±1930 (New York, 1979), pp. 21±3, 136±79; Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier:A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence, Kansas, 1988), pp. 118±19,146; Mary Neth, Preserving the Family Farm: Women, Community, and the Foundations ofAgribusiness in the Midwest, 1900±1940 (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 29±32.21 Sandra L. Albrecht, `Industrial Home Work in the United States: Historical Dimensions andContemporary Perspective', Economic and Industrial Democracy, iii (1982), 424±6; Jamie F.Dangler, `Electronic Subassemblers in Central New York: Nontraditional Homeworkers in aNontraditional Homework Industry', Homework, ed. Boris and Daniels, pp. 147±64; M. PatriciaFernandez-Kelly and Anna Garcia, `Hispanic Women and Homework: Women in the InformalEconomy of Miami and Los Angeles', Homework, ed. Boris and Daniels, pp. 165±79.22 Section 4, `The New Clerical and Professional Homework', essays by Kathleen Christensen,Cynthia B. Costello and Margrethe H. Olsen, Homework, ed. Boris and Daniels, pp. 181±230;Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the UnitedStates (New York, 1994), pp. 305±65.


MARGARET WALSH 571

pay.23 Since industrialization women as a group have earned approx-imately 60 per cent of male earnings; only in 1990 did they break throughthe 70 per cent barrier.24 Yet again, however, this average was likely toapply to European American women. Only recently have researchersstarted to deconstruct the ®gures to reveal a pattern of double discrim-ination by sex and by colour, and to talk about resegregation within thefemale ghetto and racial/ethnic hierarchies.25

What were these sexually segregated occupations and why have theycontinued? Historical data show that in the late nineteenth century thelargest group of gainfully employed women ± nearly 50 per cent ± weredomestic servants.26 If servants included workers in boarding houses andhotels and those at outdoor functions, then in the late nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries the proportion of servants who were female¯uctuated between 84 and 88 per cent. If servants are de®ned morenarrowly, as those who undertook only work commonly done by thewoman of the household, then between 90 and 95 per cent of servantswere women. Men rarely sought paid work in the household.27 Womenin agriculture were the second largest group, making up 22 per cent of thetotal female workforce, and factory hands came in third place at 19 percent. On the farms women were part of a family venture and theircontributions, though essential, were usually regarded as subsidiary. Inthe factories women were employed only in the light industries ± textiles,clothing, footwear and food processing ± all of which were associatedwith domesticity. Even here, women were segregated within the industry:male workers held supervisory and skilled positions, whereas womenundertook unskilled and inferior jobs frequently paid by piece rates.28

23 See e.g. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the UnitedStates (New York, 1982); Matthaei, An Economic History, pp. 187±232; Ruth Milkman,`Organizing the Sexual Division of Labor: Historical Perspectives on Women's Work and theAmerican Labor Movement', Socialist Review, x (1980), 95±150; Goldin, Understanding; FrancineD. Blau and Marianne Ferber, The Economics of Women, Men and Work (Englewood Cli�s, NJ,1986);Women's Work, Men's Work: Sex Segregation on the Job, ed. Barbara F. Reskin and Heidi I.Hartmann (Washington DC, 1986).24 Goldin, Understanding, pp. 58±82; US Department of Labor, 1993 Handbook, p. 32; BarbaraReskin and Irene Padover,Women and Men at Work (Thousand Oaks, Cal., 1994) [hereafter Reskinand Padover, Women and Men], pp. 101±26.25 Evelyn N. Glenn and Charles M. Tolbert II, `Technology and Emerging Patterns ofStrati®cation for Women of Color: Race and Gender Segregation in Computer Occupations',Women, Work and Technology: Transformations, ed. Barbara D. Wright et al. (Ann Arbor, Mich.,1987) [hereafter Glenn and Tolbert, `Technology'], p. 320; Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender andWork, pp. 341±8.26 Allyson S. Grossman, `Women in Domestic Work: Yesterday and Today', Monthly LaborReview, ciii (1980), 17, 18. For the years before 1870 the census record on domestic servants isincomplete, but Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America(Middletown, Conn., 1983), pp. 72±9, suggests that the census still demonstrates large numbers ofservants in urban areas.27 David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America(New York, 1978), p. 46; Matthaei, An Economic History, pp. 197±203.28 Matthaei, An Economic History, pp. 209±18; Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: FromColonial Times to the Present (2nd edn., New York, 1979), pp. 121±2.



In the early twentieth century the clerical sector became `crowded' byyoung women.29 By 1920, when 24 per cent of employed women wereclerical workers, women made up almost half of the clerical workforce.Within that sector they held more than 90 per cent of all typing andstenographic jobs.30 Women continued to dominate in the clericaloccupations. In the middle third of the century their share of clerical jobsincreased from half to three-quarters. It continued to rise to 80 per centin the 1980s. In certain types of clerical jobs the concentration of womenwas even higher. In the early 1990s 98.5 per cent of secretaries, steno-graphers and typists were female.31 Men did not become secretaries.Clerical work is the most frequently cited example of female ghettoiza-tion in the twentieth century, not only because it is segregatedhorizontally, but also because by the late twentieth century 35 per centof all working women were in this sector.32

Other occupations which also became feminized include nursing,elementary school teaching, telephony, librarianship and shop work. In1900, for example, nurses were 94 per cent female, telephone operatorswere 80 per cent female, teachers were 75 per cent female and librarianswere 72 per cent female. The segregation continued through thetwentieth century. In 1981 nurses were 96.8 per cent female, telephoneoperators were 92.9 per cent female, elementary school teachers were83.6 per cent female, librarians, archivists and curators were 82.8 per centfemale and sales clerks were 71.2 per cent female.33 Males have not leftthese occupations completely; rather, they have moved to those positionswithin them which are the most prestigious and in¯uential and which aregenerally paid the most. In hospitals, for example, nurses were sub-ordinate to male doctors and have struggled to defend their own sphereof legitimate authority. In education, males took the management jobs inthe mid-nineteenth century and created male-dominated bureaucraticstructures to control female teachers. Even in the late twentieth centurythey still ®lled nearly half of the higher-paid posts in secondary schoolsand two-thirds of the posts in colleges and universities.34 Howeveranalysed, discrimination has been the most common phenomenon of

29 For book-length studies of the growth of female clerical work see Margery W. Davies, Women'sPlace is at the Typewriter: O�ce Work and O�ce Workers, 1870±1930 (Philadelphia, 1982); Elyce J.Rotella, From Home to O�ce: US Women at Work, 1870±1930 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1981); SharonH. Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American O�ce Work,1900±1930 (Urbana, Ill., 1992).30 Margaret L. Hedstrom, `Beyond Feminization: Clerical Workers in the United States from the1920s through the 1960s', The White Blouse Revolution: Female O�ce Workers Since 1870, ed.Gregory Anderson (Manchester, 1988), p. 145.31 Joyce Jacobsen, `Gender Aspects of the American Economy', The United States in the TwentiethCentury, vol. 2, Markets, ed. Grahame Thompson (London, 1995), p. 226; US Department ofLabor, 1993 Handbook, p. 17.32 US Department of Labor, Time of Change, p. 51.33 Ibid., p. 55; Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force, pp. 78±9.34 US Department of Labor, Time of Change, p. 55; Barbara Melosh, The Physician's Hand: WorkCulture and Con¯ict in American Nursing (Philadelphia, 1982) [hereafter Melosh, The Physician's


MARGARET WALSH 573

women's paid work, and despite equal opportunities legislation it seemsthat little progress has been made towards integration. Of the twentyleading occupations for women, eleven are currently known as trad-itionally female jobs, while in 1990 one-third of the 56 million women inthe American labour force worked in only ten of the 503 detailedoccupations. Indeed, 53 per cent of all women in the labour force wouldneed to change jobs to achieve an equal distribution by sex in alloccupations.35

Sexual discrimination, however, has recently come to be seen as a morecomplex issue, as historians of multiculturalism have insisted on dis-aggregating data to demonstrate the presence of racial and ethnichierarchies. Minority groups, whether they were Irish immigrants in thenineteenth century, Italian immigrants in the early twentieth century,Chicanas in the late twentieth century or African Americans at any time,have been treated with more disrespect than white or EuropeanAmerican women. Their recent arrival, their language problems, theircultural mores and the colour of their skin have all meant that when theyworked it was primarily because they were cheaper or because there wasno female alternative. African American workers can illustrate thehierarchies of sexual segregation. As domestic servants, black womenwere treated with disdain by white women. Native-born white orEuropean American women regarded unpaid work in the home as adomestic duty and an expression of their family love. Yet if theyemployed servants they imposed on them long hours, demandingphysical labour, clothing restrictions and control over their personallives. Women of colour in the twentieth century have attempted to resistsuch devaluation of their labour by refusing to live in, by retaining theirown cultural values, by negotiating a fee for the job rather than acceptingan hourly rate and by calling themselves professionals.36 Though theyhave gained some self-esteem through such resistance, they have

Hand ]; Myra H. Strober, `Toward a General Theory of Occupational Sex Segregation: The Case ofPublic School Teaching', Sex Segregation in the Workplace: Trends, Explanations and Remedies, ed.Barbara F. Reskin (Washington DC, 1984), pp. 144±70; Jo Anne Preston, `Gender and theFormation of a Women's Profession: The Case of Public School Teaching', Gender Inequality atWork, ed. Jerry A. Jacobs (Thousand Oaks, Cal., 1995), pp. 379±407.35 US Department of Labor, 1993 Handbook, pp. 17±18; Reskin and Padover, Women and Men,pp. 52, 55.36 Several monographs discuss African American domestic servants. See Susan Tucker, TellingMemories among Southern Women: Domestic Workers and their Employers in the Segregated South(Baton Rouge, 1988); Phyllis M. Palmer,Domesticity and Dirt: Housewives and Domestic Servants inthe United States, 1920±1945 (Philadelphia, 1989); Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out:African American Domestics in Washington DC, 1910±1940 (Washington DC, 1994). See alsorelevant sections of Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and theFamily from Slavery to the Present (New York, 1985) [hereafter Jones, Labor of Love]; BonnieThornton Dill, ` ``Making Your Job Good Yourself'': Domestic Service and the Construction ofPersonal Dignity', Women and the Politics of Empowerment, ed. Ann Brookman and SandraMorgan (Philadelphia, 1988), pp. 33±52. Evelyn N. Glenn widens the debate to discuss women ofcolour and low-level service occupations in `From Servitude to Service Work: HistoricalContinuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor', Signs, xviii (1992), 1±43.



preferred to leave domestic service when alternative occupations becameavailable.On moving out, however, they found that a range of racial and ethnic

hierarchies existed in other occupations. In the early twentieth centuryfactory jobs were mainly a white preserve from which minority womenwere excluded. As white native-born women found better-paid jobs, theywere replaced by immigrants and ethnic Americans. Not until the mid-century were African American women employed in manufacturing, andthen often only as a result of wartime shortages, organizing and whitewomen's upward mobility. They had to wait even longer to enter thepink- and white-collar sectors. As late as 1960 only 8.0 per cent of blackwomen worked in clerical occupations and 7.8 per cent in professionalemployment. Only with anti-discrimination legislation and rapid jobgrowth in the 1960s and 1970s did black women gain easier access tohigher educational quali®cations and the opportunity to work ®rst in thegovernment and then in the business sector. By 1980 25.8 per cent ofAfrican Americans were clerks and 15.2 per cent were in the professions.Yet even then black women su�ered from racial discrimination. Withinthe clerical sector in 1980 only 18 per cent of African American womenwere secretaries, in contrast to 31 per cent of European Americanwomen. Black women were more likely to be less well paid and to holdlower-status posts as typists, data entry keyers and ®ling clerks. In theprofessions and managerial occupations they tended to be teachers andsocial workers, and thus a higher proportion (60 per cent) than of whitewomen (31 per cent) worked in the public sector. Indeed, whether in thepublic or the private sector, most black female professionals were in jobswhich served their own communities. Thus their recent progress inoccupational mobility requires quali®cation. As a group, AfricanAmerican women remain clustered in occupations generally requiringlittle training and few skills, and o�ering low pay and limited oppor-tunities. They still su�er from the double burden of racial and sexualsegregation.37

IV

While multiculturalism has been the dominant strand of recentrevisionism in American women's history, two other strands have hada marked impact on altering women's place in the American labourforce. Interpretations challenging women's passive subordination in thelabour force and emphasizing gender relationships both at home and inemployment have raised new questions about traditional and masculine

37 Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender and Work, pp. 158, 187, 333, 336; Jones, Labor of Love;Evelyn Higginbotham, `Black Professional Women: Job Ceilings and Employment Sectors',Womenof Color in US Society, ed. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill (Philadelphia, 1994),pp. 113±31; Glenn and Tolbert, `Technology', pp. 318±31; US Department of Labor, 1993Handbook, p. 51.


MARGARET WALSH 575

viewpoints. These revisions move beyond the conventional economicanalysis focusing on factors of production, and stress cultural values andwomen's identity. Women's ideas about the moral economy of work andtheir desire to balance employment with family demands and life cycleshave stimulated new historical debates about labour activism and theways in which occupations have been sexually represented.Early research on women's activism in the labour force looked to the

conventional male model of trade unions, but women have beenrelatively invisible in such organizations. Possibly no more than 15 percent of female workers were union members through most of thenineteenth and twentieth centuries.38 Much attention was given toexplaining this low participation rate, and women's historians havetalked about a male conspiracy to keep women at home and men in thebetter-paying jobs.39 But they have also moved on to analyse women'smobilization wherever and however it took place, and to examine bothachievements and disappointments. Historically, most union activity hasbeen concentrated in the manufacturing sector. For example, womenwere highly involved in the shirtwaist strike in New York in 1909 and inthe Lawrence textile strike in 1912.40 Though this action did not bringsigni®cant long-term workplace gains for women, their participation,whether in alliance with middle-class female reformers in the Women'sTrade Union League or with working-class men, did demonstrate thatthey could organize competently and that they had leadership potential.In the mid-twentieth century women were also active in unions in theclothing, automobile and electrical industries, again with mixed results.They formed their own lobbying body, the Coalition of Labor UnionWomen, within the union movement.41

38 Lois R. Hembold and Ann Scho®eld, `Women's Labor History', Reviews in American History,xvii (1989), 506; Dorothy Sue Cobble, `Introduction', Women and Unions: Forging a Partnership,ed. Dorothy Sue Cobble (New York, 1993), p. 6; US Department of Labor, Time of Change, p. 48.39 Alice Kessler-Harris, `Where are the Organized Women Workers?', Feminist Studies, iii (1975),5±14; Ruth Milkman, `Gender and Trade Unionism in Historical Perspective',Women, Politics andChange, ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York, 1985), pp. 87±107; Roslyn L. Feldberg,`Women and Trade Unions: Are We Asking the Right Questions?', Hidden Aspects of Women'sWork, ed. Christine E. Bose, Roslyn L. Feldberg and Natalie J. Sokolo� (New York, 1987),pp. 299±322.40 Barbara M. Wertheimer,We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York,1985), pp. 293±317, 353±68; Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and ClassCon¯ict, 1880±1917 (New York, 1980), pp. 203±75; Nancy Woloch, Women and the AmericanExperience (2nd edn., New York, 1994), pp. 204±19; Ann Scho®eld, `The Uprising of the 20,000:The Making of a Labor Legend', A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike: Women Needleworkers in America,ed. Joan M. Jensen and Sue Davidson (Philadelphia, 1984) [hereafter A Needle, ed. Jensen andDavidson], pp. 167±82; Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900±1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995) [hereafter Orleck, CommonSense], pp. 53±80.41 Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II(Urbana, Ill., 1987); Nancy Gabin, Feminism in the Labor Movement: Women and the United AutoWorkers, 1935±1975 (Ithaca, NY, 1990); Philip S. Foner, Women and the American LabourMovement: From the First Trade Unions to the Present (New York, 1979) [hereafter Foner, Womenand the American Labor Movement], pp. 440±60; Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter and Emily Honig,



Women's activism was not restricted to their role as workers, and theirparticipation as auxiliaries has also received marked attention. Insupporting male unionists both at home and on the picket line, womenrevealed that they understood the importance of labour collectivity andcould be assertive about labour issues which a�ected the community.Indeed, female endorsement is now considered to have been an essentialelement in the Lawrence textile strike of 1912, the Colorado fuel and ironstrike of 1913±14, the Minneapolis Teamsters' Strike of 1934 and theauto sit-ins in Flint, Michigan, in 1936±7.42 It is also becoming central tounderstanding how women organized beyond the point of production asthe era of consumerism expanded. In New York in the 1920s, 1930s and1940s, for example, coalitions of militant housewives fought for publichousing, better education and price controls on rent and food. In Seattlein the 1920s, women in¯uenced the progress of boycotts, co-operativesand union label campaigns through their consuming habits. As femalekin, they used consumption politically as part of the labour movement.43

Though each case study suggests di�erent female capabilities, they alldemonstrate that women, whether as paid workers, as housewives or asfemale relatives and neighbours, were valuable members of workingcommunities.Other recent research on women's labour force collectivity has

uncovered new layers of female involvement both in industries whichtraditionally have been neglected and at the local level where women andmen's actions were interrelated. Female telephone operators, whosenumbers more than doubled from 86,081 to 175,469 in the decade of the1910s,44 usually considered the high point of women's activism, havefrequently been ignored. Yet they formed viable unions catering to theneeds of women. As young workers who viewed employment as a short-term occupation, women, unlike men, were not concerned solely with theworkplace; nor did they wish to be associated with the `disorderly' imageof male unions. They certainly wanted good employment conditions, but

`Women at Farah: An Un®nished Story', A Needle, ed. Jensen and Davidson, pp. 227±77;Diane Balser, Sisterhood and Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times (Boston, 1987),pp. 151±210.42 Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachussets, 1860±1912 (Urbana, Ill., 1993), pp. 117±69; Priscilla Long, `The Women of the Colorado Fuel and IronStrike' and Marjorie Penn Lasky, ` ``Where I was a Person'': The Ladies' Auxiliary in the 1934Minneapolis Teamsters' Strikes', Women Work and Protest: A Century of US Women's LaborHistory, ed. Ruth Milkman (Boston, 1985), pp. 62±85, 181±205; Foner, Women and the AmericanLabor Movement, pp. 323±9; Paula F. Pfe�er, `The Women Behind the Union: Halena Wilson,Rosina Tucker and the Ladies' Auxiliary to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters', LaborHistory, xxxvi (1995), 557±78.43 Orleck, Common Sense, pp. 215±49; Dana Frank, Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing,Gender and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1910±1929 (New York, 1994); Susan Levine, `Workers'Wives: Gender, Class and Consumerism in the 1920s United States', Gender and History, iii (1991),45±64.44 Joseph Hill,Women in Gainful Occupations, 1870±1920, Census Monograph 9 (Washington DC,1929), p. 33.


MARGARET WALSH 577

they were also concerned about their social life, educational improve-ment and female camaraderie. Their commitment to strengtheningwomen's identity as workers did not prevent either co-operation withmale unionists or assertive action. Female operators protested in the1913 strike in Boston and were more militant than the men in the 1919New England strike. Their activism demonstrated that they could lookafter their interests and wanted to be judged on their own terms.45

Waitresses also expressed their independence as workers. They developeda code of etiquette, a service style and a dialect which enabled them toresist arbitrary management practices and to de¯ect unreasonablecustomer demands. The growth of a female support network did notprevent a�liation with a male-dominated union, the Hotel Employeesand Restaurant Employees International Union, but women preferred toorganize in separate local branches where they could look after their ownconcerns and goals. Their social and emotional skills as nurterers andtheir dignity and moral uprightness were notable female characteristicsand these were as important to them and to the future of unions as werethe traditional male skills of physical strength and technical `know-how'.46

Indeed, working women's values sometimes meant that they preferredto `network' and to develop their own identity rather than becominginvolved with unions. In the large department stores of the turn of thecentury women developed a work culture which gave them a measure ofworkplace autonomy. When management put pressure on them to bemore e�cient and productive and when middle-class customers wereoverly demanding, sales clerks gained some measure of authority byinformal co-operation. They covered for each other, they treated clientswith disrespect and they harassed managerial sta�. By working together,women took the initiative and developed guidelines which enabled themto gain self-respect as well as a wage.47 In nursing, too, women developeda work culture. Here they created a distinctive language, a lore and a setof social rules to mediate between o�cial protocol and actual perform-ance. Through setting their own standards of a satisfying and competentperformance nurses expressed female values.48 Nor was networkingrestricted to the service industries; it was also important to manufactur-ing workers. Women in the cigar factories in the early twentieth centurydeveloped both solidarity and a collective resistance to employers'demands. In the late twentieth century Chicanas in Californian canneriesand ethnically mixed workers in clothing factories in Rhode Island and

45 Stephen H. Norwood, Labor's Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy,1878±1923 (Urbana, Ill., 1990).46 Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing it Out: Waitresses and their Unions in the Twentieth Century(Urbana, Ill., 1991).47 Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in AmericanDepartment Stores, 1890±1940 (Urbana, Ill., 1986).48 Melosh, The Physician's Hand.



in the electronics industry in New Mexico all resisted managementstrategies by adopting informal work rules. They further humanized theworkplace with family values by celebrating life-cycle events in breaktimes.49 Such patterns of work culture suggest that women havemobilized in ways which have not been considered by traditionalhistorians.Yet, for all their bonding with their own sex, women have also

networked with men. Indeed, their patterns of work, whether paid orunpaid, have frequently been in¯uenced by their relationships withmales. In moving beyond the separatist tradition of women's history,some labour historians have interwoven the activities of both sexes andhave discussed engendered patterns of work. Such labour history eithergives equal importance to the paid work of both sexes or makes thehousehold and, by extension, kin and community, central to reassessingthe meaning of work. Gender, rather than either man or woman, thenshapes the world of work. Such engendered history insists that bothfemale and male experiences are essential to any analysis of gainfulemployment rather than assuming that men's interests are primary andopposed to women's, and that the two sexes are related to each otheronly in terms of power and con¯ict.50

Recent research on Troy, New York, in the mid-nineteenth centurypoints to an engendered working-class consciousness which underlayworkers' activities. Here, most of the Irish female workers were closelyrelated to male ironworkers through family ties, neighbourhoodnetworks and community organizations. The strategies of Irish familiesthus depended on both female and male employment and theseinterconnections led to supportive behaviour at times of strikes. Therewas an overlapping network of job-related concerns in which gender wasthe key element.51 In Minneapolis in the early twentieth century genderrelations were an essential element in the success or failure of tradeunions. When the organized labour movement was rooted in communityassociations where women and men became both members and leaders itwas successful; but during the great depression, when women wereperceived as rivals to unemployed men, the movement faced considerable

49 Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigarmaker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American CigarFactories, 1900±1919 (Urbana, Ill., 1987), pp. 218±46; Patricia Zavella,Women's Work and ChicanoFamilies: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley (Ithaca, NY, 1987); Louise Lamphere, FromWorking Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a New England Industrial Community(Ithaca, NY, 1987), pp. 289±235; Louise Lamphere et al., Sunbelt Working Mothers: ReconcilingFamily and Factory (Ithaca, NY, 1993), pp. 90±130.50 Ava Baron, `Introduction',Work Engendered: Toward a New History of American Labor, ed. AvaBaron (Ithaca, NY, 1991) [hereafter Baron, Work Engendered], pp. 1±46; Alice Kessler-Harris,`Treating the Male as ``Other'': Rede®ning the Parameters of Labor History', Labor History, xxxiv(1993), 190±204; Elizabeth Faue, `Gender and the Reconstruction of Labor History: AnIntroduction', Labor History, xxxiv (1993), 169±77.51 Carole Turbin, Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class and Community in Troy, 1864±86(Urbana, Ill., 1992).


MARGARET WALSH 579

di�culties. As work and labour solidarity became increasingly viewed asmasculine, this masculinity altered the nature of unionism and therelationship of women to working-class solidarity.52

Gender has become signi®cant in analysing the service sector as wellas the industrial sector. In choosing to enter clerical work in Pittsburghat the turn of the twentieth century, working-class daughters and sonscarefully considered their future gender roles. Young women appre-ciated the feminine respectability of the job and the immediate materialbene®ts. Young men were interested in longer-term prospects. Theymight feel that their masculinity was threatened by working withwomen; but higher wages and the prospects of steady employment wereimportant considerations when supporting a family.53 In the lifeinsurance and banking services in the early years of corporate growthfrom 1870 to 1930, gender was central to institutions as well as workers.The mutual relationship of female and male employees blurred thedivision between the public sphere of business and the domestic sphereof the home. Corporations identi®ed themselves as benign motherswatched over by fatherly executives, while supposedly female traits ofservice, duty and self-denial became characteristics of middle-class maleworkers.54 When historians analyse work and the economy in genderedways, not only do men become involved with the family and women withthe workplace but culturally constructed di�erences between the sexesbecome the property of activities and institutions as well asindividuals.55

A generation of research on women's place in the American labourforce has brought women out of invisibility into a position of majorsigni®cance. Their numbers and participation rates in gainful employ-ment have increased notably in the twentieth century, making theirpresence an essential element of any discussion of productive capacity.Yet their contributions have been marked and marred by oppressivepatterns of sexual segregation, discrimination, low pay and thecontinued denial of their domestic and reproductive roles. Womenhave struggled to gain recognition and the cost has often been high.Recent historical considerations of di�erence, women's culture andgender have portrayed female labour force participation as both morecomplex and more dynamic. Multiculturalism has drawn attention todouble discrimination, while the recognition of womanhood and femalevalues has shown women to be capable of many positive achievements.The gendering of labour increasingly looks beyond the separate

52 Elizabeth Faue, Community of Su�ering and Struggle: Women, Men and the Labor Movement inMinneapolis, 1915±1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991).53 Ileen A. DeVault, Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the-CenturyPittsburgh (Ithaca, NY, 1990).54 Angel Kwolek-Folland, Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate O�ce, 1870±1930 (Baltimore, 1994).55 Baron, Work Engendered, pp. 35±7.



tradition of a masculine workplace and a feminine home to relationsbetween the sexes and their workplaces. Much has been achieved inintegrating women into some historical accounts; yet there is still a longway to go before women are deemed central rather than marginal to theAmerican labour force.


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women's place in the american labour force, 1870–1995

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