One of my first after-school jobs was as a department store salesclerk in the New Jersey city where I grew up. I learned a lot about working on that job: that women inevitably earned less than men, that sales was interesting but standing on your feet all day long was exhausting, and that no matter how often my friends and I assured ourselves we would find loving and enterprising husbands, many women were dependent on their own incomes to support themselves and their families. During summer breaks from college, I also worked for an agency that placed temporary workers in office jobs; I soon learned that men didn’t have it so easy either. Many labored at unrewarding jobs in order to pay the mortgage and save for retirement, and older men were often frightened by the rising young men snapping at their heels. So when I started working full-time in the early seventies, I was more than a little cynical about the endless consciousness raising of that era in which work was positioned as self-fulfillment and not just a means of earning a living, and about the so-called experts who suddenly emerged to teach young working women how to dress, walk, and talk for success.
I wonder if my attitude would have been different if I’d had Alice Kessler-Harris’s Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History to read during the early days of my career. First published in 1981, it was reissued recently in an updated and expanded edition. Kessler-Harris is a professor emerita of American history and a distinguished scholar of issues involving women and gender. Her study provides an important overview of women’s labor history — and the 2018 edition highlights many of the critical changes in the status of women in the workplace that have occurred during the early twenty-first century.
One thing I would have learned is that the meaning of “work” has changed over the years, and women’s work was not always relegated to second-class status. “In preindustrial societies,” Kessler-Harris writes, “nearly everybody worked, and almost nobody worked for wages.” But “[a]s production began to move out of the household into factories, offices, and stores, those who got paid for the new jobs were clearly workers.” During the American colonial period, “there was no separation between production and consumption, where husband and wife and offspring were engaged in a common enterprise, where the work, however hard, was clearly a part of the common purpose of the household. Women could feel little of what sociologists now call role conflict.”
I also would have realized that things did not of necessity have to turn out the way they did. During colonial times, for example, “two separate processes contributed to the way household tasks began to change … Both began in the northern colonies and worked their way south and west. The first emerged from the household itself, out of a natural desire to ease the harsh burdens of survival. The second was imposed by British mercantile policy. Both are intertwined with ongoing urbanization and incipient industrialization.” Colonialist attitudes and “mercantile policy assumed that the colonies would produce raw materials to feed the incipient manufacturing industries of the mother country or would provide food or tobacco. But it quickly became apparent that except in the South … the colonies could neither pay for British goods in adequate quantities of raw materials or food, nor rely on England for all their needs.”
These restrictive policies led to the American Revolution, as well as to the creation of factories where Americans could produce the goods needed domestically. “In the resulting competition between household manufacturers and factory-made goods, the household quickly lost ground,” Kessler-Harris writes, noting that “[a]s the household carried less of the burden of production, the need for female labor in it diminished.” Similarly, during the eighteenth century, “[t]he development of mills coincided with, and to some extent led to, underutilization of women in the home … The tremendous demand of the post-revolutionary period — when the Napoleonic Wars all but cut off trade with Europe — stimulated development …” These economic and political changes led to profound social change as an increasing number of women sought work outside the home.
Kessler-Harris’s observations about the connection between gender- and labor-history also take into consideration the very different experiences of Americans of color, as well as those of the increasing number of new immigrants who arrived during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of her main concerns is the impact of women’s working outside the home on the “caring community,” those unpaid workers — usually the wife-and-mother or unmarried female family member — who looked after children, the disabled, and the elderly, jobs that have become increasingly professionalized in our time.
I doubt that had I understood this history, my own ambitions or career trajectory would have changed. My first jobs after college were secretarial in a variety of offices. Most were dead-end assignments and I changed jobs frequently, looking for an opportunity to advance. Many of my friends looked down on what they considered demeaning office work, but I actually obtained the equivalent of an MBA during those early working years. Not only did I learn about accounting and human resources and marketing, but I grasped what they don’t teach you in business school — about office politics, sexual dynamics, and how to deal with on-the-job cycles of achievement and boredom. Had I read Kessler-Harris’s book early in my career, I might have had a clearer view that my own struggles were not unique and become more aware of the barriers and challenges that have faced workers throughout history.
I also might not have been as distracted by the hype that so often surrounds discussions of women and work. Baby Boom women were not the first cohort to deal with these issues — and the self-proclaimed experts who emerge so quickly with each new generation too often place blame on the past without presenting achievable paths for change. This plays out a little in Kessler-Harris’s discussion of contemporary trends. As she makes clear, the events of the past two decades have destabilized many long-held assumptions about the relationship between gender and work. Unfortunately, some of her analysis in the revised edition’s final chapter is problematic. This is not because her observations are inaccurate — the author clearly describes the tumultuous events of the past few decades, such as #MeToo, the growing economic inequalities between social classes in our society, and the decline of traditional jobs that provided both wages and social benefits. Nevertheless—and perhaps because we are too close to these events to anticipate the direction in which our society is going — she tends to fall back on some gender stereotypes that she avoids in her earlier chapters.
For example, although early in her study she writes that “[w}e no longer speak about either men or women as though they were fixed and discrete categories,” in her final chapter she reiterates stereotypes of men as aggressive and women as nurturing. When she writes that “the melding of wage and caring work might come down to a new value system — one that aligns the input of women’s vaunted standards of nurture and cooperation with male values of competitiveness and mastery,” she does not consider that individuals may be playing out socially-constructed roles. Too many holes have been poked in the notion of “women’s vaunted standards of nurture and cooperation.” Similarly, asides such as “[a]mong the new opportunities [of the modern, technologically driven world] are the financial resources for everyone to live more satisfying lives. Expanding resources have already provided a vast and comfortable middle class” sound antiquated and do not reflect the contemporary reality of an increasingly unstable middle class and broad economic inequality.
But Women Have Always Worked is carefully researched and comprehensive, well written and accessible to non-academic readers. It can potentially serve both as a scholarly resource and as a highly useful introduction for young women and men about to enter the workforce, increasing understanding of how gender relations have evolved in the workplace, and helping to prepare them to deal with issues they may face. If my generation had had the opportunity to read it when we first began working full time, perhaps it would have helped shift the conversation away from work as self-fulfillment and towards the often arduous challenges of earning a living and the historic ability of women to meet them.
[Published May 15, 2018 by the University of Illinois Press. 254 pages, $19.95 paperback/$14.95 book]