Contextual Essay

VUS.14a

The critical questions regarding the growth of female participation in the workforce revolve around two issues: the effect such changes in labor supply have on the division of national income and unemployment; and the ways in which these same changes have affected women's status, independence, and opportunities for professional advancement.

In the United States, economists have traditionally expected greater female labor market participation to depress male employment and general productivity, and to reduce the share of national income going to workers. Female workers, whose participation in the national workforce rose from 22% in 1930 to 46% in 1995, have allegedly produced these effects by entering the job market with less experience and training, by working outside the home on a more intermittent basis, and by encouraging their husbands to spurn relatively unattractive job offers they could previously not afford to ignore. Fearing these effects, state legislatures of the early twentieth century passed restrictive divorce laws and specialized vagrancy laws designed to limit job opportunities for single women. By 1932, twenty-six states had made it illegal for married women to seek paid employment outside the home. In 1964, perennial presidential candidate Harold Stassen called for a "Mother's Social Security Plan," designed to keep women at home and to shrink the overall labor supply. And in 1982, President Reagan explained that prevailing unemployment rates (peaking at 10.8 percent in November and December—the highest since the Great Depression) had emerged because of the "increase in women who are working today."

The most significant increases in U.S. female workforce participation, however, produced no such results. Despite having emerged during a period when the U.S labor force tended to be younger and less experienced (due to the post World War II baby boom), large gains in female employment materialized alongside low and declining unemployment and increased general productivity. Extending opportunity and independence, and muting or eliminating overt discrimination, full employment and labor scarcity undoubtedly helped foster new opportunities, even a new regime.

The widely observed productivity collapse of the 1970s—often judged to be either a productivity "riddle" or the product of rising female employment—corresponds only by coincidence with trends in female labor market participation. Subsequent productivity rate increases, for example—particularly in the 1990s—also accompany rising female labor market participation. Moreover, American men with working wives have consistently exhibited lower, rather than higher, unemployment rates than their counterparts classed as sole breadwinners. Coupled with the emergence of politically charged cost-accounting practices during the last half of the twentieth century, and the related difficulty of assessing real managerial cost trends, it is quite likely that these costs have determined productivity changes more than any factors tied to the nation's working class. The emergence of a fast-growing and increasingly well-compensated class of business executives, in other words, may explain many of the economic problems for which analysts have tended to implicate an emerging female workforce. The growing preponderance of service sector jobs—the type historically most available to American women and in which opportunities for the utilization of productivity-enhancing technology are most limited—only suggest an increasingly circumscribed area for large, potential productivity gains where many women workers toil. Yet, where general economic policies succeeded in closing the gap between potential and actual output and in nurturing full employment, increased female workforce participation has generally helped improve overall economic performance. Helping to expand labor supply when markets pressed for its expansion, such increases appear to have bolstered American productivity, paying significant social and economic dividends.

Despite small tremors of change in the 1910s and 1920s, and the powerful symbolism of Rosie the Riveter during World War II, most gains in female labor-market participation occurred, however, only as civil rights initiatives and full employment strategies emerged hand-in-hand. Prior to the 1960s, therefore, these advances remained uncertain, elusive, or mostly symbolic. The War Manpower Commission propaganda campaign that developed Rosie the Riveter placed special emphasis, in fact, upon Rosie's fictional Marine boyfriend "Charlie," the brave young man on whom she waited and for whom she filled in. Of the approximately six million female workers that joined the American workforce during World War II, three million were young single women who had just finished secondary school and, like their counterparts in earlier decades, were mostly expected to work only until they found a suitable husband. Upon the return of American servicemen, most married women left their wartime jobs and exited the workforce along with many of these younger, single female employees. During the war, most women had taken either clerical or service sector jobs or specially designed low-skill blue-collar jobs on aircraft or shipyard assembly lines. By 1947, the proportion of women in blue-collar jobs (24.6%) was actually lower than it had been in 1940 (26.2%).

Though important civil rights victories for American women came early in the twentieth century, the inertia for genuine and ongoing change mounted at an extremely slow pace. The toils of female sharecroppers and domestic servants, accomplishments in education and public health, and political triumphs such as the Nineteenth Amendment, seldom paved the way for genuine or sustained workforce opportunity. Gains here were not truly cemented and reinforced until accompanied by economic abundance and full employment, and a renewed push for civil rights. The 1960s and 1970s, as a result, proved to be a watershed period, one in which gains for American women also fostered and accompanied similar gains for Blacks, Hispanics, and other U.S. minorities. This brief period, however, was followed by an era in which economic stagnation and high unemployment tended to force change, presenting a situation in which many more households required two incomes to maintain their prevailing standard of living. Women workers once again found themselves laboring outside their homes in greater numbers and, like Rosie the Riveter in the 1940s and African-American domestic servants throughout the twentieth century, were doing so more often out of necessity than because of increased opportunities for rewarding employment. Having reached a critical mass, past social gains and demonstrated independence became somewhat self-perpetuating, but this occurred without much labor market reinforcement and in the midst of lingering job market discrimination, always greater during times of high and rising unemployment. Indeed, the conservative reaction to the status gains of American women in the 1960s and 1970s, as documented by Susan Faludi in Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, may have remained far less compelling without the less-than-successful economic policies that produced such an environment.

Whether an indicator of enlarged opportunity or economic necessity amid lingering—and sometimes increasing—discrimination, female workforce participation in the United States continued to rise after this watershed period, as did female entrepreneurship. In 1970, women owned a scant four percent of all U.S. businesses; by 1990 they owned approximately thirty-eight percent. Though hardly inevitable, status changes accompanied these increases in workforce and entrepreneurial participation. As Eileen Boris has noted, however, the equality that has emerged has tended to benefit only those women "who are wealthy, who are white and who live lives like most men's—that is, who are not mothers or the caretakers of dependent persons." With twenty percent more women than men currently graduating from American colleges, many of whom will enter the workforce in a managerial occupation, such trends are likely to persist for some time. Increased emphasis has been placed on day care and early childhood education as a result of increased female workplace participation, but waiting lists are long and policymakers continue to support little more than self-limiting programs (encouraging welfare mothers to become the daycare workers they really need themselves, for example). Public subsidy, essential to those programs requiring skilled labor and needed most of all by the poorest of the American working class, has most often been introduced as an afterthought rather than an inescapable or essential ingredient. Without it, the most essential forms of daycare remain unreliable, perilous, or simply unaffordable. Working Mother's annual list of the hundred best companies continues to exhibit an increasingly diverse set of incentives for working mothers—from subsidized onsite daycare to opportunities for job sharing, paid maternity leave, and the tying of managerial pay to women's advancement—yet the list seldom includes any but the wealthiest of American oligopolies or companies in the financial sector, the sector in which large-scale female professional advancement first occurred. A relatively high percentage of female employees (often well over fifty percent) also appears to be a prerequisite for greater responsiveness, a threshold surpassed by relatively few American businesses. Ninety-four percent of the "100 best companies" offer job-sharing, compared to twenty-four percent nationwide; ninety-eight percent offer child-care resource and referral, compared to twenty percent nationwide; seventy-five percent offer at least one on-site or near-site child care center, compared to six percent nationwide; and ninety-five percent of these "best companies" offer compressed workweeks, compared to only thirty-three percent nationwide.

Dependent in large measure upon general economic policies that have generated both tight labor markets and wealthy companies, these incentives, the status of women in general, and the opportunities for female professional advancement appear to stem from the inertia of past success and the force of large numbers. Accordingly, harassment and discrimination have tended to remain primarily where there are relatively small numbers of female employees or managers, and have occurred during times when general unemployment rates remain relatively high. Yet numbers alone seldom determine key changes in social status or opportunities for professional advancement. The history of nursing, for example—the largest female profession in the United States—reveals that female dominance of a given profession may itself cultivate male-dominated social reaction, a response that often serves to circumscribe and devalue the contributions of the profession in question. Margarete Sandelowski's history of the nursing profession and its relationship to technology and medical expertise, Devices and Desires: Gender, Technology, and American Nursing, suggests just such a predicament. Though it has yet to be examined closely, a similar history and social quandary likely obstruct the development and cultural defense of public education.

Any discussion of female workforce participation in the United States ought to include an appraisal of these related forces and historical tendencies. Indeed, it is very likely that the increased workforce participation of women, projected to continue well into the 21st century, may oblige American policymakers to do so with increased alacrity and attention.

Suggested reading:

Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

This is the most comprehensive and detailed history of U.S. female workforce participation.

Claudia Golden, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Also a comprehensive survey, this study offers especially useful analyses of ethnic, racial, and life cycle patterns of female employment in the U.S.

Valerie Kincade Oppenheimer, The Female Labor Force in the United States: Demographic and Economic Factors Governing Its Growth and Changing Composition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970).

Limited to coverage of trends and underlying factors from 1900-1960, this study remains as one of the most complete analyses of structural changes in the female labor force and of the effects of general demographic changes on distinct female and male labor markets.

Margarete Sandelowski, Devices and Desires: Gender, Technology, and American Nursing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

An insightful look at the world of nursing and its technology that reveals much about the hidden politics of gender and the social limits of female profession.