Books About Women in the Workforce

SC, You might like "The Egg and I" by Betty MacDonald. It was written during the depression and she describes all the jobs she and her sister had to endure in order to feed themselves and their mother. Much of the book focuses on her attempt to start a chicken farm, but overall it's a very moving book about women in the workforce at that time. It touches on everything from crazy office bosses to crazy husbands to abortion to daily life for women before all our modern conveniences. It's written with a lot of humor, but there is an undertone of a woman who is paddling as fast as she can to stay sane and safe. It was a best seller in it's day and it might still be in print or available used on Amazon.

Thanks for the suggestion, GW. That sounds like a good one!

Here's a list by the New York University Libraries.

Thank you for the list, Walter! I found some interesting titles there, and some names of other writers to research.

Oh! I just found another good one:

"Slacks and Calluses: Our Summer In A Bomber Factory," by Constance Reid and Clara Marie Allen, two school teachers who, during their summer vacation, went to work in an aircraft factory, building bombers during WWII.

"Shutterbabe" was not a particularly good book about being a woman photojournalist but it was a book about being a woman photojounalist. I wanted this book to be great. Not many women get to do this kind of work and I really wanted to hear her story.

There was a semi decent one, I think called "Strip City" about working as a stripper.

"Nickle and Dimed" was written by a woman who decided to document what it was like to live on minimum wage jobs. That was pretty good.

"Geisha" was a good story but not so well told, by the only American woman to ever become a geisha. She was an anthropoligist.

There is a good one ticking around somewhere in my head.... I can't quite bring it up...... it is going to drive me nuts until I remember.... it was a good story told well.....

How crazy is it that I can remember the mediocre ones but not the good one?

Yeah, now you'd think that would be a good book, wouldn't you? Sounds like she had an interesting enough life.

The Geisha book.....hmmm..... I don't know. It might be interesting, but it's such a completely different world from the one we American women inhabit. It sounds kind of demeaning to me, and it might make me mad! (Hee!)



I've heard about this one. It sounds pretty good. Thanks, boomer!

Just wanted to add this: I just started reading "My Life In France," by Julia Child. It tracks her the beginning of her career as America's leading authority on French cuisine.

So far, it's excellent!

Hmmm...you'd think there's be a lot about the Land Girls in WW II UK, who went to farm in place of the men who were in the forces.

Marge Piercy wrote a book about WW II....just looked it up....it has a different name in the US..

Gone to Soldiers:

Amazon page

Marge Piercy's book is excellent.

Working-Class Women: On the Front Lines of Feminism
Working-Class Women: On the Front Lines of Feminism
by Tula Connell
http://blog.aflcio.org/2006/09/03/working-class-women-on-the-front-lines-of-feminism/
Sept. 3, 2006

When we think of 20th century U.S. women's movements, the events that come to mind are the feminist battles of the 1960s and before that, the suffragettes of the early 20th century.

But in between those two eras, working women were not silent. And many of the women in the 1940s and 1950s who agitated for fair pay, equal access to jobs and other fundamental workplace rights not only laid the groundwork for the gains of the recent years, they did so from a strong foundation: Their unions.

These women, largely forgotten in popular memory, were instrumental in maintaining the drumbeat for a workplace environment that benefited women and men, and set the stage for the successes that followed.

Although active on the picket lines and on the forefront of organizing workers in industries with some of the most vicious employers in areas hostile to unions such as the South and West, their efforts have not captured popular imagination as have events such as the "Bread and Roses" strike. In that 1912 walkout, 30,000 primarily female textile workers protested a cut in wages in Lawrence, Mass., were attacked by state militia that sought to prevent them sending their children out of state to safety.

But as steadfast champions of low-wage women, they were the critical link between women in the Progressive era and the modern day women's movement. Betty Friedan, the ultimate modern-day champion of women who died earlier this year, was among those inspired by their struggles on the picket lines and in the political process.

In the late 1940s, after working for The Federated Press, a news association for labor and progressives, Friedan became a reporter for the United Electrical Workers (UE, a union that exists today). It was while covering a strike at a New Jersey plant, where nearly all the workers were women, that Friedan suddenly realized what it meant to be a low-paid working woman.

In her autobiography, Life So Far, Friedan wrote:

I discovered, with a strange sense of recognition…that the women were getting paid much less than the men for that job….There was nothing I had studied, at economics class at Smith or in the classes on radical economics I now took…that explained or even described the special exploitation of women.

This "Other Women's Movement," according to labor historian Dorothy Sue Cobble, whose 2004 book of the same name brings to light these women's struggles, carried forth an agenda for social reform. While many scholars have portrayed this era as time when unions were "engines of reaction," Cobble takes issue with this notion, arguing that in part because of the role of women, the union movement was anything but "tamed" and conservative.

By midcentury, increasing numbers of women were in unions. Fewer than 1 million women belonged to unions at end of 1930s. But in the early 1950s, 3 million were union members and in addition, another 2 million made up union "auxiliaries," organizations that supported male-dominated unions by organizing boycotts of nonunion goods, helping out during strikes and serving as social, fraternal and charitable organizations. Among these unionists were women whose "labor feminism rested on American workers' heightened sense of economic rights and their success in building permanent and influential labor institutions in the postwar era," writes Cobble.

Esther Eggersten Peterson is one of the most influential of this generation. The Mormon daughter of Danish immigrants, Peterson traveled far from her home in Utah to become the first female lobbyist for the AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department in the 1950s and as assistant Secretary of Labor, the highest ranking woman official in the Kennedy administration.

Peterson started out with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, worked as an organizer for AFT, the national teacher's union, and organized textile workers in the South with Bessie Hillman for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, headed by the legendary Sidney Hillman.

The mother of four children, Peterson well understood the needs of wage workers who did not have the luxury of staying home with their children: At one point, she was earning $15 a week, while paying someone $20 a week to look after her children.

In fact, working-class women were the first to feel the effects of paid work and all its inequities?-only later in the 1960s, after large numbers of middle-class women became full-time workers, did the women's movement become largely the cause of the middle class.

And because union feminists were wage-earners, they championed a feminism that often sought equality at the workplace through laws that recognized women have a special burden to care for their families. As Cobble writes, "theirs was a vision of equality that claimed justice on the basis of their humanity, not on the basis of their sameness with men."

Most labor feminists in this book never resolved the tension between equality and difference strategies, not did they see the necessity of doing so. They wanted equality and special treatment, and did not think of the two as incompatible. They argued that gender differences must be accommodated and that equality cannot always be achieved through identity in treatment.

As we look back now, some of the earliest legislation mandating shorter work weeks (think 48 hours) or making night work illegal, applied only to women and perhaps to children. (By 1899, 20 states had passed laws limiting the hours women worked in factories, according to historian David Brian Robertson).

From a contemporary vantage point, such legislation, which began to be introduced at the turn of the 20th century (and always enacted at the state level), seems perversely discriminatory. But in assessing the evolution of U.S. labor law, these measures very often were the starting point for the passage of more sweeping laws encompassing women and male workers.

When the nation's midcentury labor feminists argued for special treatment of women, they faced a reality their middle-class feminist daughters and granddaughters often did not: Even though they engaged in wage work to help support their families, their burdens at home were not reduced. American society had not transitioned to a point where "parenting" had become a verb. And so when it came to demanding equality at the workplace, these women proposed their own version of the Equal Rights Amendment, one that did not wipe out all sex-based laws because some were helpful, such as those that addressed anatomical or social gender differences.

As a result, from the 1920s to the 1960s, the debate over the Equal Rights Amendment had "distinctly class, interest group and ideological overtones, pitting affluent, business-oriented and politically conservative women against poor, union-oriented and political liberal women," writes Cobble, quoting historian Carl Baruer. Further, says Cobble:

Like their equal rights opponents, labor feminists indicted American society in the postwar years for its discriminatory treatment of women, and they called for an end to such policies. But they differed from equal rights feminists was over how to define discrimination and how to overturn statutes deemed discriminatory. Labor feminists supported some sex-based laws, although they realized laws prohibiting women from certain jobs or from night work should be amended or eliminated.

Women in the 1940s first worked through the Women's Trade Union League and like Peterson, through the federal Women's Bureau, where they instigated and sustained the national alliance that emerged among labor feminists. Later, some were active in the National Committee for Equal Pay operating out of the IUE union's building, where they coordinated federal and state equal pay campaigns from 1953 to 1963. They were involved with the NAACP and other civil rights coalitions, as well as a full range of Democratic politics.

And at a time when Betty Friedan was just shedding her privileged notions of womanhood and her self-described potential for wanting "to be asked to join the country club and thus be truly free to disdain it," these midcentury union feminists had long been on the frontlines, fighting to improve the workplace conditions of their sisters in the factories, plants and mills and educating a new generation of women.

BBB
Exerpt:

MINORITY, WORKING CLASS, AND POOR WOMEN

Soon after they were founded, the new feminist groups recognized that they were working primarily in the interests of their white middle-class members while neglecting the interests of working-class, minority, and poor women. The initial "guilty-white-liberal" response was to pay lip service to the problems of underprivileged women in their programs to achieve equality. NOW was one of the first organizations that went further?-five of its present twenty-four national task forces specifically included underprivileged women as an integral part of their programs: the task forces on Compliance (of employers with federal regulations), Feminism and the Economic System, Minority Women and Women's Rights, Poverty, and Labor Unions.

While the new feminist groups have in the meantime had some success in working for working-class, poor, and minority women, they have had very little success in recruiting representatives of these groups. One reason for this failure is that personal encounters between middle-class whites and others, based on lack of understanding, are often awkward.

A more important reason derives from different priorities. The new feminist movement is sincerely interested in the problems of all women: sexism, or discriminatory and offensive treatment on the basis of sex, confines all women to their traditional role and prevents them from seeking other forms of personal autonomy, group identification, and self-fulfillment. But for the most part, only middle-class women are able to protest about this purely sexist oppression; underprivileged women are preoccupied with racist and economic oppression. In the face of day-to-day problems of survival, self-fulfillment is irrelevant, and, while they are aware of sex discrimination (for example, in employment), they worry much more about unemployment, low pay, the welfare system, or sub-standard housing. It is logical, therefore, that they should attack their own most pressing problems by creating their own organizations, both within and outside of the new feminist movement.

(i) Minority women.

The National Black Feminist Organization founded in 1973, has a probable membership of a thousand people working to eliminate racist and sexist oppression. The organization pays special attention to problems neglected by "standard" black and "standard" feminist movements, e.g. black women's experiences with the welfare system, with domestic work, with unemployment, and with prison systems, and the black woman's lack of a clearly defined, admirable self-image.

Since 1972 another national group, the Black Women's Community Development Foundation (BWCDF), has spent $74,000 (received through many small awards from foundations) to support black women's organizations working at the local community level, especially for projects in criminal justice, education, community advancement, communication, and international affairs. As is shown by its programs, the BWCDF is not as exclusively committed to feminist issues as is the National Black Feminist Organization.

Black women's organizations with more limited goals include groups like the locally-oriented Black Women Concerned (Baltimore), Black Women Organized for Action (San Francisco), and the Black Child Development Institute (an offshoot of the BWCDF). These and others are part of the large network of black women's organizations whose concern with discrimination caused by gender is far less than their concern for discrimination caused by race and economic status.

Four organizations for Spanish-speaking women have also been located, three of which seem to be concerned primarily with racial and economic problems. Only one, the Mujer Integrate Ahora of Puerto Rico, identifies itself as feminist and wants to see Puerto Rican women achieve equality and control over their own destinies.

Footnote :

37. The other three organizations are: The Comision Femenil Mexicana Nacional of Berkeley which provides leadership training for Chicanas and disseminates information about the achievements of Mexican and Chicana women. Concilio Mujeres, of San Francisco, which encourages La Raza women to become actively involved in a wide range of local issues, and the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women which works for equal rights for Puerto Rican women and for their participation in all aspects of U.S. society.

NOTE: BBB was one of the founders of the organizations in BOLD:

(ii) Unions.

Working women have founded one union-related and several union-like organizations. The most important group is the Coalition of Labor Union Women. Its 5,400 members share the goal of eventually representing the four million unionized and, through unionization, the thirty-four million non-unionized women in the U.S. CLUW manages to be a strict adherent of the labor-movement tradition while also espousing such feminist objectives as equality in the work place, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, provision of high-quality child-care services, prevention of child abuse, and elimination of tax inequities affecting women. Where feminist and labor interests conflict, CLUW very carefully straddles the two ideological camps. For example, it can afford to support seniority rules that might require dismissal of recently-hired women workers because its program includes enactment of federal legislation guaranteeing jobs for all who want to work.

In contrast to CLUW, the Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality (Union WAGE) considers the traditional labor movement irredeemably male-dominated, and attempts to organize San Francisco Bay Area women into caucuses or independent unions. Its bimonthly newspaper, Union W.A.G.E., has existed since 1971 when the organization was founded and has increased steadily in size and scope.

Many other union-like groups have been formed among the low-paid blue-and white-collar women in the larger cities and industries, Some are independent, but the majority are caucuses and interest groups within established organizations. Such union-like groups have, therefore, been excluded from this report.

On the other hand, feminists have made almost no effort to organize poor rural women, even though a number of feminist periodicals have produced heart-rending reports of conditions in Appalachia and among women migrant workers.

Read the entire essay about the struggles of women:

http://www.fordfound.org/archives/item/0111

The Marge Piercy book sounds very interesting, dlowan -- thanks for the recommendation!

BBB, I have to go out so I didn't get a chance to read your posts completely, but I will definately read them when I get back. Thank you for the links!

I'm interested in reading more about the struggles of working women through the years -- how things have changed, and how they haven't.



Unfortunately, I think this is still the case today, contrary to popular opinion. From what I've read, women still only make 75 cents to every dollar that men make.

Sounds interesting, I'll have to check it out.