As the nineteenth
century gave way to the twentieth, women became more and
more active in the public sphere. However, this large-scale transition
into public life, politics, and professional paid work was affected—
and to a large extent, still is— not only by the duties women
have in their private lives, but also by unspoken ideas about gender
that continue to limit women’s opportunities to fully participate
in American society.
After the Civil War came to an end, demographic changes began to
bring more and more women into public spaces, visibly blurring the
traditional notion that men and women occupied separate spheres.
In Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston,
1870-1940, historian Sarah Deutsch, through the study
of a single city, examines the period in which women slowly began
to become involved in the public sphere. Her subjects range from
working class to middle-class to college-educated women to provide
a full picture of how physical, public space is reordered when women
move along difficult trajectory from private person to political
office holder.
In the late 1800s, working-class women took non-domestic jobs,
left their homes, and moved to cities. In so doing, they began to
alter the streets and public areas that were once largely “male
spaces”:
Urban spaces were designed,
appropriated, or reappropriated by different parties. For all
players, the ability to lay claim to certain types of space and
the power to shape space—public areas, housing, and so forth—was
crucial to their ability to meet their basic needs and often less
basic desires.
As the scale of workplaces grew, increasing numbers of young women
were drawn to urban areas. They took up residence in boardinghouses,
entertained men in private, and dined out in restaurants and created
new norms of behavior. While many researchers have argued that these
women who lived in the city were isolated, Deutsch argues instead
that these women created a new type of community, one that blended
their private needs with their greater public visibility. They found
ways to turn Boston’s public streets into their home:
When they could, working
girls created spaces suited to their own moral geography—rooming
and domestic situations where they could protect each other and
themselves. The physical layout, with eating places distinct from
living places, suited their needs faced as they were with often
irregular work and low wages, while wanting freedom from the restraints
of a male-dominated family without isolation…For the working
girl, lodging and boarding houses, restaurants, and workplaces
were sites that simultaneously manifested and created community
ties that enhanced their safety.
These new bonds would come in useful when female workers began
to organize politically. Their boarding houses provided spaces for
meetings. At the restaurants where they bought their meals, they
could read literature and pick up the news, all of which made them
more informed participants of the world they inhabited.
As women came more into public view, the lines between various
classes began to blur. While working-class women were reshaping
the city through their daily activities, educated, middle- and upper-class
women were engaged in similar activities through a wide range of
social organizations. Many of them began to study the working-class
women, establish settlement houses, or take employment that took
them into new areas of town. For example, the Women’s Educational
and Industrial Union (WEIU) located its offices in the political
center of the city. It opened lunchrooms for women and created spaces
where women “could appear in public without having their virtue
questioned by being on the streets.” The WEIU ran employment
offices, evening classes, Sunday services, school lunches, and organized
milk distribution.
To accomplish these goals, organizations such as the WEIU learned
how to navigate city politics for access to buildings and finances.
While interaction with the male-dominated government did not always
bring about desired results, it is also far from true that women
were merely tools in a changing political culture, in which male
politicians were beginning to see that the issues the women promoted
could help them consolidate their political bases. In this environment,
women learned to play politics:
The result was more
complex than co-optation of women or domestication of men for
women did succeed in transforming, somewhat at least not only
themselves and the public roles of women, but the city and its
government in their own image. Within the middle-class world of
gender, the city had learned to behave, because of these women,
if not more liked a sister and neighbor (the original version),
then more like a mother. The city now provided milk and school
lunches, vocational guidance, and kindergarten.
Until women got the vote
in 1920, their ability to directly influence and participate in
political structures was extremely limited. Of course, doors did
not suddenly open with the vote, nor were a flood of women suddenly
elected to public office in Boston. Being able to vote provided
women with an opportunity to inhabit the world of politics in a
way that was previously impossible. However, the ability to run
for office did not immediately translate into political power. While
women had success with school boards, the legislature, and appointive
offices, they found it difficult to win seats in Boston’s
important power center, its City Council.
Some of the first women who ran for office found themselves being
judged not on their political abilities, but on their skills as
housewives. Women who were not supported by political organizations
found it almost impossible to get coverage in the press. In addition,
female politicians found, as they do today, that being female does
not guarantee that other women will vote for you. Class, political
orientation, and ethnic background also played a large role. In
fact, it was not until 1937 that a woman, Mabel Gleason Harris,
was elected to the City Council. The key factor in her election
was not her status as a female politician, but her kinship connections
to Boston’s powerful Irish community.
Valuing
women’s labor
Of course, politics is not the only area in which women have had
to struggle for full participation and to have their private needs
addressed in the public arena. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris’ In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for
Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America demonstrates
how assumptions about gender are built, in seemingly invisible ways,
into many of this country’s social and labor policies. According
to Kessler-Harris, this “gendered imagination” creates
policies that value paid labor over other forms of labor.
It is these “deeply embedded belief systems” that create
disparities in citizenship. In theory, citizenship provides people
with access to a wide range of rights and benefits. However, different
types of citizenship can be at odds with each other, and this contradiction
largely affects women. In this country, many of the rights a person
has a citizen are connected to ideas about work, particularly work
for which one is paid:
[C]onstructing “work”
as the passport to certain social rights produced dramatically
different paths for different citizens. Not only has women’s
economic freedom never been accepted as axiomatic, but, with respect
to the rights meant to accompany it, the limited freedoms available
to all women were further restricted to marriage and motherhood—and
by treating unmarried females in the workforce as if they were
potentially married and mothers.
Historically, social and labor policy has viewed women as dependents,
rather than as equals in areas such as heading families, finding
work, and being eligible for government benefits. From the policy
perspective, the ideal is a nuclear family headed by a male wage
earner, who provides for the entire family, while his wife performs
unpaid labor at home. Even today, with large numbers of women working,
the idea that women freely enter the labor force is rarely entertained.
Women’s paid labor outside the home is rarely discussed as
primary to a family’s survival, but as something that is supplementary—
a way to make ends meet or pay for “extras.”
Given the current debate over Social Security, it is interesting
to note the gender assumptions that went into its development in
the1930s. Initially begun under the title of Old Age Insurance,
ideas about gender were debated from the very beginning. The male-headed
household formed the program’s backbone, and it was seen as
a way for a man to continue to provide for his family after he retired—
and after he died.
In contrast with today’s Social Security, which allows people
to continue working while drawing benefits, one of the program’s
initial goals was to remove people from the labor force to make
way for new workers. Access to the program was not, as is the case
of many European social programs, defined largely by national citizenship,
but by the fact that one worked. Invoking traditional gender and
family norms ensured public support for this new program:
Gendered
constructs helped soothe a public increasingly enamored of government-funded
assistance (which seemed to some policy makers an appropriate
and to others a short-sighted and short-term solution). And they
provided the language of family normalcy that convinced reluctant
policy makers who remained skeptical of the capacity of an insurance
program to solve general employment problems without depending
on general taxation. Ultimately, gendered conceptions provided
the keystone that maintained public confidence in the core old
age program and justified its redistributive goals. By providing
economic security in particular ways and to particular people,
old age insurance, defined a new category of economic citizenship…
Benefits were to be tied to the notion a male wage earner, with
categories of pay connected to this wage earner’s status.
Widows with young children could receive benefits, but a widow without
children could not collect until she was older. If a widow with
children went back to work, her benefits were reduced, in order
to encourage her to stay out of the labor force. An irrational fear
that some women might marry men just to get access to their benefits
was “solved” by mandating that the marriage must have
lasted at least a year before she could collect. Because women were
deemed to be less skilled in handling money, they could not receive
a lump-sum payment, but had to have it doled out monthly.
One of the interesting things about the history of Social Security
is that it was one of the few national policies that was changed
due to the influx of women into the labor force. While, for example,
the income tax system still penalizes people for being married,
Social Security benefits no longer penalize married female workers.
What is notable about the current Social Security debate is its
traditional emphasis on the notion of the “worker.”
The Bush administration constantly appeals to “workers”
to gain support by saying changes will give them more control over
their money and their future. What is not discussed in any detail
is how others who depend on Social Security, but who do not work,
will be affected.
As Kessler-Harris points out, one of the major problems in American
social policy is this strong emphasis on paid labor, and in fact,
on particular types of paid labor. For example, many domestic and
agricultural workers do not have access to government retirement
benefits. This is in contrast to Europe, where many people receive
medical insurance, pensions, educational assistance, and childcare
regardless of their work status.
In fact, in the United States, if all citizens were provided with
health care and pensions, many of the struggles over gay rights,
inheritance rights, and women’s rights, which are often struggles
to gain the full rights willingly given to the white, male head
of a nuclear household, would not exist.
However, no society
or economy can function without the contributions of unpaid labor.
This unpaid work, done largely by women, encompasses much more than
taking care of children. In this country, just imagine what many
schools, health organizations, and social services organizations
would look like without the participation of people who freely give
their time. Until this type work is valued at the policy level,
women will not receive the full benefits of citizenship.
Women
workers in the global economy
Because of the uncertainty it creates, globalization harms people’s
ability to earn a secure living. In Mollie’s Job:
A Story of Life and Work on the Global Assembly Line,
journalist William Adler examines, through the prism of three women,
the effect of corporate desire for cheap, global labor. By tracing
how one job changes and changes hands over the course of approximately
forty years, Adler’s goal is to describe how
government and Wall
Street reward U.S.-based companies for closing domestic plants
and scouring the globe for the lowest wages in places where human
rights and labor rights are ignored; and about the ways in which
free trade harms democracy, undermines stable businesses and communities,
exploits workers on both sides of the border, both ends of the
global assembly line.
In 1955, Mollie James, an African-American woman, went to work
at Universal Manufacturing Company in Paterson, NJ. This successful,
immigrant-founded company produced ballasts for fluorescent lighting.
It was a unionized, well-paying job, and it enabled Mollie to raise
her five children relatively comfortably. In 1989,
Mollie earned $7.91
an hour; not so much in itself, but with all the overtime she
put in, it came to about $30,000 a year. She also received company-paid
health insurance, and the peace of mind that came from a secure
job— a job she could raise a family on, buy a house, a car,
borrow money against, count on for the future.
In the early 1960s, Universal experienced a great deal of union
unrest, and the company began to look for a second plant in a location
where the conditions were less favorable to unions. It settled on
Mississippi’s Simpson County. In addition to weak unions,
Mississippi was a right-to-work state that provided public financing
for private factories. The jobs at Universal’s Mississippi
plant were initially only for whites, paid less than the jobs in
New Jersey, and did not provide any benefits.
However, Mississippi was not immune to the social and political
changes of the 1960s. Union organizing and the Civil Rights Act
combined with the site manager’s efforts to desegregate the
local labor force led to the hiring of a number of African-Americans.
One of these, who got a job similar to the one done by Mollie at
the plant in New Jersey, was a woman named Dorothy Carter. Carter,
like many of the other African-Americans who worked at the factory,
got the opportunity to free themselves from low-paying dead-end
jobs and the chance to work their way out of poverty. Universal
also brought prosperity to the county as a whole, but of course,
the county’s prosperity would be dependent on the firm’s
fortunes:
One thing everybody
in Simpson County could agree on…was how inextricably linked
was the community with its largest employer. With some much riding
on one horse, it is no wonder that people speculated about what
would become of them were Universal every to close the barn doors.
“I remember when everyone was buying a new trailer,”
[said] Dorothy Carter, “and someone said, ‘Boy, if
that plant ever shuts down, they’re gonna hook ‘em
up like a wagon train.’”
In the 1980s, Universal Manufacturing, like many companies, was
caught up in the “gale winds of Wall Street’s merger
mania.” While the firm had been sold to Philadelphia &
Reading Corporation in the 1960s, P&R had retained most of the
original management and made very few changes. This would not be
the case with Universal’s new owners. In the mid-1980s, Universal
was sold twice within eight months, and it ended up in the hands
of Magna-Tek, an electrical components conglomerate.
In 1988 Magna-Tek opened a plant in Matamoros, Mexico, a city full
of
foreign-owned assembly
plants that wed first-world engineering with third-world working
conditions. The maquiladoras, in turn, are a beacon to tens of
thousands of poor, young women (the industry prefers women, the
younger—for their nimble fingers and compliant minds—the
better), for whom a factory job trumps any other employment options.
The plant in Paterson, NJ could not continue to compete with the
“benefits”— lower wages, weak unions, weak environmental
laws— of operating in Mississippi and Mexico, and in 1989,
the plant was closed. Mollie James, lost her job and the security
that came with it:
She had received a
severance package of $3,171.60— about $93 for each of the
thirty-four years she worked. She collected unemployment benefits
for six months and then enrolled in a six-month-long computer-repair
school, receiving a certificate of completion and numerous don’t-call-us
responses to job inquiries. Mollie never again found work.
In Mexico, the equivalent of Mollie’s job was taken in early
1993 by Balbina Duque, a young woman with an incarcerated husband
and three small children. However, by the end of 1993, the combined
effects of the passage of NAFTA and the collapse of the peso wreaked
havoc with her wages. In 1997 on paper, she was earning twice as
much as in 1993, but, in reality, her wages had declined. To help
control expenses, she lived with her sister and her sister’s
children in two rooms in a subdivision with poor roads and few services
next to a toxic waste dump. While Balbina’s job was the same
as the one Mollie held, her work environment was much different:
The job in which Mollie James once took great pride, the job that
fostered and valued her loyalty, enabled her to rise above her humble
beginnings, provide for her family— that job does not provide
Balbina Duque a wage sufficient to live on.
The company’s move to Mexico did not stop continued attempts
to decrease wages and cut operating costs. In 1997 and 1998, Magna-Tek
closed the remaining US plants and shifted jobs, not to Matomoras,
but to another Mexican city, Reynosa, where it was possible to pay
wages lower than those in Matomoras.
Of course, any time a company moves out of the country, it does
so at the expense of the local community, which very often, through
its labor force and other incentives, helped make the company successful.
Very often, these communities do not recover. Today, in Paterson,
NJ a once thriving industrial center no longer exists, and one-fifth
of its population lives in poverty. The “race to the bottom”
creates anxiety for workers who see their chances for security constantly diminishing.
When Adler visited Balbina again in 1999, he asked her if she would
move to Reynosa if her job were transferred there. Her answer speaks
volumes about the effects of globalization. “And what if they
were to move again?” she replies. “Maybe to Juarez or
Tijuana? What then? Do I chase my job all over the world?”
Bombs,
bases and working communities
In Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th
Century, anthropologist Catherine Lutz asks the question:
“How have bombs and bases come to live in so many American
communities and why are their burdens so little recognized?”
Homefront uses the history of Fort Bragg and Fayetteville, NC to
critically examine the social and economic costs of militarization.
While Homefront was published just before September 11, 2001, her
analysis is relevant to the social context of the current war on
terror. According to Lutz, residents of the United States “inhabit
an armed camp, mobilized to lend support to the permanent state
of war readiness that has been with us since WWII.”
Today, Fort Bragg is home to, among others, the 82nd Airborne Division
and a variety of Special Operations Forces, whose soldiers and officers
are deployed to the war on terror’s hotspots. The fortunes
of Fayetteville, NC have been tied to Fort Bragg since 1918 when
the town’s civic boosters began a successful campaign to lure
a military installation to the region.
Lutz provides an enormous amount of information that shows how
much of American society is influenced and funded by the military.
While the United States may be proud of its “volunteer army,”
that volunteer army requires “standing” resources.
For example, by 1999 the US government’s military operations
covered over 27 million acres. In the state of Nevada alone, the
government controls large portions of airspace and more than three
million acres of land, some of which was used as a weapons testing
site.
Since WWII, military projects have doubled, in some sense, as public
works projects by spending fifteen trillion dollars between 1946
and 1991. In 1992, just over 40 percent of all tax dollars went
to military purposes. If you add civilian employees who work on
military projects to its regular employees, the military is the
country’s largest employer.
Given the huge sums of money involved, one might think that living
next to a military installation would be economically beneficial.
As Lutz shows, this is far from the case. For one reason, military
spending is one of the least efficient job creation engines. A billion
dollars given for military projects will create 26,000 jobs. The
same amount give to health care will provide 37,000 jobs and if
given to education, will provide 48,000 jobs.
An economy dominated by the military creates other problems. Military
needs pull researchers away from other industries, giving the research
and profits in consumer items like electronics and automobiles to
researchers in countries such as Germany and Japan that have small
militaries. A powerful military also prevents the development of
social policies, such as universal health care. While millions of
military veterans and workers receive a wide range of benefits,
these benefits are not race, class, or gender neutral:
The high-paying jobs
designing and crafting advanced Cold War weaponry were in the
engineering and technical fields whose workforces were overwhelming
white and male. The women who did get jobs on military contracts
found a gender pay gap even wider than in civilian work. More
well-known than this effect is the GI Bill’s disproportionate
assist to men, both in the late 1940s and now.
The result of this
implicit labor policy of military spending is that blacks of both
sexes and women of all races have been left comparatively worse
off and so more in need of welfare programs. The idea of unearned
benefits is then associated with blacks and women in the minds
of many Americans.
Fayetteville illustrates the problems of living in such close proximity
to a large military base. As Lutz points out, one way to imagine
Fayetteville’s relationship with Fort Bragg is to imagine
it as a city dominated by “one gigantic firm.” While
not everybody works for the firm, it influences wages and benefits,
working conditions, development opportunities, and what resources
are available to the town. In such an environment, it is only relatively
small segments of the population that benefit
The combination of more soldiers having families, advertising,
and easy credit means storeowners in Fayetteville, who sell goods
not available on base, do well. For retail workers, however, the
situation is much different. The region’s exceptionally large
labor pool, composed of military retirees and dependents, local
residents, and the unemployed, ensures that wages are lower than
in other areas of the state because there will always be someone
to take the job.
Fayetteville loses tax money through exemptions for federal land
and exemptions for consumer goods sold on the base. However, soldiers
and their families use public resources, which the local community
must provide for a population that is larger than its tax base.
Since Fayetteville cannot collect property taxes from the military,
one area affected is public education. While many of the children
of military families attend Department of Defense schools located
on the base, those living off-base as well as all high-school age
students attend public schools. Because of the small tax base, the
area has one of the North Carolina’s lowest rates of school
spending.
The majority of people in the military are young, which means that
a greater burden is places on city resources that support children
and young families. The area has one of the state’s highest
rates of child poverty and infant mortality. Fayetteville also has
a large number of other features that are considered to be low-income
markers—trailer parks, substandard housing, poor roads, and
neighborhoods without water and sewer hookups. Although there are
women in the military, as a labor force, the military is still overwhelmingly
male, leading to a situation in which “[s]trip clubs and prostitution
spill into the daily lives of people in the poorer neighborhoods
in town.”
It turns out that proximity to the military creates a strange kind
of social dependency:
[W]hile Fayetteville’s
military dependency has made fortunes for some as the post continued
to grow through the 1970s and 1980s, its economy was increasingly
based on selling goods and services to soldiers, creating retail
jobs that pay less than any other category of work. Despite the
egalitarian pay and strong benefits packages military works bring
to town, overall the installation established a low-wage economy,
a vulnerable labor force of dependent women and teens, the high
crime rates that come with poverty, and a weak democratic culture
and public sphere.
What these books vividly show is the constraints government policy,
entrenched ideas about gender, and attitudes toward what counts
as employment have on women’s abilities to create a life which
honors their personal, familial, and professional needs--however
those needs may be combined. In today’s America, the government
wants to own its successes, but not solve its problems. Until the
government is forced to do so, women will find their ability to
achieve the full benefits of citizenship determined by forces outside
their influence and control.
mmo : march 2005
Margaret
Foley is a writer and historian living in Portland, OR.
She is a regular contributor to the MMO. |