the history of working mothers

[grovelina]

Back in the olden days, mothers knew thier place was in the home, except they didn't. A percentage of mothers of children have always worked, a fact census records bear out, regardless of what fundies say. Here is an infographic that shows what percent of mothers with children at home worked outside of it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pare ... d-working/

[Ave Maria]

It's still a demographic shift, and a large one in many areas.

That's like saying people shouldn't be shocked by the divorce rate, because divorce existed in the 1800s. Sure, it existed, but it was less common, and less accepted.

[polecat]

According to this, only 7.5 percent of mothers worked during Abe Lincoln's presidency. How exactly are they defining working?

[yetanothermeg]

I don't know, the map is too simplistic. Does this show only full-time employment or include part-time employment as well? The map shows a small number of women workers in 1930 and before. Is this only for women laboring for outside employers? I am sure it doesn't include women laboring on their own family farms producing animals and crops for market or women in factory towns taking in boarders (which in the old days meant cooking them 3 meals a day from scratch and washing & ironing their clothes). The map paints a false picture that most of America was composed of middle class, white collar, one-income households, and that was just not the case. Poor and working class women frequently worked, they didn't have a choice. One thing I found interesting about the map is that in the past the South had the highest percentage of "working women". I would hazard to guess this was due those states having large populations of African-American women engaged in domestic work for white households or working as field laborers.

[SPHASH]

A lot more women worked outside the home during the Depression and WW2 cuz A-they needed the money during the Depression and B-all the men were in uniform and someone had to fill those jobs.

[samurai_sarah]

It's still a demographic shift, and a large one in many areas.

That's like saying people shouldn't be shocked by the divorce rate, because divorce existed in the 1800s. Sure, it existed, but it was less common, and less accepted.

No, it isn't a demographic shift. Unless you know nothing about farming. Or being poor in a city. Women have always worked, and worked hard. It wasn't recognized, it wasn't counted, but the fact remains. And no, it was never shocking, it was just a fact of life. As for divorce... just because my Catholic family called it "separation", doesn't make it any more, or less shocking. It happened. None of my business. That's it.

[FloraKitty35]

The old days are never as great they seemed. People have always had to do what they had to do to survive.

[Arete]

According to this, only 7.5 percent of mothers worked during Abe Lincoln's presidency. How exactly are they defining working?

Exactly. I bet they have no way to quantify paying work like taking in washing, sewing, seasonal as opposed to daily domestic labor, selling eggs and extras from the garden, part time paid elder care, working side by side running small family businesses with their husbands, raising livestock to sell milk, cheese, preserved meat and wool, knitting and selling by the piece, etc. Not to mention plowing and planting was not a one man job.

[dawbs]

Even now, how do you define things?

I mean, my great-aunt quit taking in laundry about 5 years ago. It was probably never reported on taxes (I don't know, and I sure as hell wasn't going to ask her--she'd have thunked me in the head w/ her tailor's ham). Was that working?

What about when I was unemployed and my husband ran a landscaping business and I did all of his books, the webpage and went out to help cut grass? What about when I had another job plus doing that, was that 'working', or just helping?

Or when my grandma 'worked' at my gramps' gas-station, pumping gas and manning a register...she didn't officially have a 'job', she was just 'helping'--was she working?

what about when she was doing all teh 'women's work' on the farm, growing up? Or when she was a live-in-nanny (which we know wasn't possibly recorded or paid taxes on)

Trying to pin down the facts gets pretty impossible, pretty fast...

But I will say that my grandparent's generation of people that I am personally related to of had about 10 women in it , that I knew personally--and every one of them worked between 1940-whatever, when they came of age and when they hit 'retirement age'--at least part of that time, as full time employees.

But I'm not sure that data would reflect that.

[DGayle]

Exactly. I bet they have no way to quantify paying work like taking in washing, sewing, seasonal as opposed to daily domestic labor, selling eggs and extras from the garden, part time paid elder care, working side by side running small family businesses with their husbands, raising livestock to sell milk, cheese, preserved meat and wool, knitting and selling by the piece, etc. Not to mention plowing and planting was not a one man job.

This is only about working outside the home. Raising livestock to sell is working at home. Our dear fundies like to talk about how a wife should be at home, and weren't ever really holding jobs outside of it. Evidence is strong that women have always worked outside the home, even if not in numbers as high as today.

So this makes sense. Women back then weren't idle, and running a home was a major, full-time job. It used to make sense for a spouse to stay home, which would usually be the one who was pregnant and recovering from childbirth and nursing. But this didn't mean doing nothing otherwise. Laundry was back-breaking, a lot more work than tossing a load in a washing machine, then a dryer, then folding. The fundies who want to talk about how more women used to stay home also need to look at how much work they did. There wasn't time to write on blogs. Even modern farm wives have a lot less to do. Dishwashers, washing machines, vacuums, even things like taking a bath or shower take less time because you don't have to haul in wood and boil several pans of water. Wives back then had less daylight, so had to do a lot more work in a lot less time. Then you also had a lot of women who took in the washing of bachelors, and did mending from home for other people. Working outside of the home in a shop or something would have been so much easier!

[DGayle]

I've got a big pet peeve about how working always means working outside of the home, usually for someone else. Run a business from home, and you're not working. Work for someone else outside your home, and you're working.

[O Latin]

This is only about working outside the home. Raising livestock to sell is working at home. Our dear fundies like to talk about how a wife should be at home, and weren't ever really holding jobs outside of it. Evidence is strong that women have always worked outside the home, even if not in numbers as high as today.

So this makes sense. Women back then weren't idle, and running a home was a major, full-time job. It used to make sense for a spouse to stay home, which would usually be the one who was pregnant and recovering from childbirth and nursing. But this didn't mean doing nothing otherwise. Laundry was back-breaking, a lot more work than tossing a load in a washing machine, then a dryer, then folding. The fundies who want to talk about how more women used to stay home also need to look at how much work they did. There wasn't time to write on blogs. Even modern farm wives have a lot less to do. Dishwashers, washing machines, vacuums, even things like taking a bath or shower take less time because you don't have to haul in wood and boil several pans of water. Wives back then had less daylight, so had to do a lot more work in a lot less time. Then you also had a lot of women who took in the washing of bachelors, and did mending from home for other people. Working outside of the home in a shop or something would have been so much easier!

Did you maybe mean they were more dependent on the daylight and had a lot more to get done during daylight hours due to having less advanced forms of artificial light? Otherwise I'm curious how they had less daylight. Even daylight savings doesn't change the number of daylight hours every day, just which end of the day gets more of them.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I don't know, the map is too simplistic. Does this show only full-time employment or include part-time employment as well? The map shows a small number of women workers in 1930 and before. Is this only for women laboring for outside employers? I am sure it doesn't include women laboring on their own family farms producing animals and crops for market or women in factory towns taking in boarders (which in the old days meant cooking them 3 meals a day from scratch and washing & ironing their clothes). The map paints a false picture that most of America was composed of middle class, white collar, one-income households, and that was just not the case. Poor and working class women frequently worked, they didn't have a choice. One thing I found interesting about the map is that in the past the South had the highest percentage of "working women". I would hazard to guess this was due those states having large populations of African-American women engaged in domestic work for white households or working as field laborers.

Agreed.

I also wonder what would happen if you did a similar map for working fathers for the same time periods.

Men leaving the house every day to go to an outside job is also a new thing. The 20th century saw a massive demographic shift of people into cities.

The Leave It To Beaver era was really quite short. It was only in the post-war era that suburbs really got established, and that you had middle-class, and not just upper-class, white women who were able to stay home and not do a huge amount of labor.

Don't forget, by some definitions, someone like Pa Ingalls was not a "working father", because most of the time he didn't have outside paid employment. In cities like New York, the garment industry used families who did piece work sewing out of their tenement apartments. Families that owned stores usually lived in the same building, and took turns serving customers.

[SamE]

I don't know. My grandma, who was born in 1900, was a sharecropper for almost her entire life. SHe picked cotton, cherries, and apples. She finally quit sharecropping in the late 1960's.

To me, that is working outside the home.

[cindyluvs24]

These gals who blog about such perfect days of yore would do well to check their own family trees. I doubt their grandmothers or further back sat on verandahs sipping tea brought by the household staff.

[debrand]

I like to research my family history. According to one census, during the 1930's my great grandmother worked in a mill. She also was a widow who owned a farm and was a midwife. I know she owned the farm and was a midwife from my grandmother's history, not because of the census.

My own grandmother married an abusive alcoholic which meant that Nan had to work outside the home in low paying jobs.

Poor and lower class women have always worked but they haven't always gotten credit for their work.

[Georgiana]

Anachronism alert!

In most cultures, a non-working woman was a sign of high status. It meant you had enough resources to live comfortably without the female members of the family having to do labor. So in many places, this caused the term "working woman" to have a stigma that many people didn't want to identify with. Some methods of obtaining income for women were not always classified as "work" for women because they were acceptable for well-bred ladies. Generally, I would say that up until the sexual revolution, a "working woman" in the West was one who was doing "man's work" aka something either considered to be highly masculine and/or outside the home or someone doing tasks that were deemed socially inferior (sex work, etc).

aka: Our definition of what constitutes a "working woman" is modern. The definition of a working woman has changed over time, and it is hard to measure how many people fit OUR definition of a working woman in past eras because THEY didn't use our definition.

Example: my great-great grandmother was abandoned by her husband and ran an incredibly upscale "boarding house" in St. Louis. She single-handedly ran an incredibly profitable establishment and collected a great deal of income off it, but she would have DIED if you called her a working woman. Because she was in the upper levels of society and because the work she did was a. not physical (she had servants) and b. inside her own home, she was not considered at all to be a working woman by the standards of her society (late 1800's early 1900's). She would not have been measured. However, we would want to include her because she certainly fits our modern definition.

No woman in her right mind is going to let her family starve when there are ways to prevent that. This has always been the case, and women have always assisted in supplementing familial resources. The change is really in what tasks were deemed acceptable ways for women to support their families. As a poster has pointed out, there are still ways for women to obtain an income that are not classified as work (though the stigma is much lessened on that word).

[cindyluvs24]

Poor and lower class women have always worked but they haven't always gotten credit for their work.

Amen to that! I doubt the owner of the mill objected to women working . The current anti- working women camp seems to object now that we're in nice offices and boardrooms.

[Arete]

I am trying to imagine on what planet my maternal grandmother would have been able to homeschool her children in between sips of tea like some of these fundies imagine.

Frankly, she needed the kids in school so she could milk the goats, get the water, tend the garden, make cheese to sell, take in sewing for cash, cook, preserve, produce a year's worth of wine, oil, and vinegar, do the wash and tend to her aging parents in peace. Thank goodness her headship spent a lot of time in the merchant navy, so continuous arrow production wasn't in the cards. The ones they did have were work enough.

Oh, and she always said she preferred coffee to tea, because at least she could buy that instead of growing it herself. A regular June Cleaver, she was.

[Ave Maria]

No, it isn't a demographic shift. Unless you know nothing about farming. Or being poor in a city. Women have always worked, and worked hard. It wasn't recognized, it wasn't counted, but the fact remains. And no, it was never shocking, it was just a fact of life. As for divorce... just because my Catholic family called it "separation", doesn't make it any more, or less shocking. It happened. None of my business. That's it.

Yet working on the family farm, helping the hubby with bookkeeping, babysitting for other families, or taking in the washing and mending of other families doesn't tend to keep mothers away from their children the way working outside the home does. So that is a shift, especially where children are concerned.

Even legal divorce did happen in the 1800s and early 20th century. Heck, it happened in my family in the 1930s. But the fact that it has risen so much since then is a bit eye popping and worth taking a look at.

[samurai_sarah]

Yet working on the family farm, helping the hubby with bookkeeping, babysitting for other families, or taking in the washing and mending of other families doesn't tend to keep mothers away from their children the way working outside the home does. So that is a shift, especially where children are concerned.

Even legal divorce did happen in the 1800s and early 20th century. Heck, it happened in my family in the 1930s. But the fact that it has risen so much since then is a bit eye popping and worth taking a look at.

You have never worked on a farm, have you?

[Ave Maria]

You have never worked on a farm, have you?

I went to school with a lot of people who did, but not personally, no. Their mothers were able to watch the kids without the use of daycare, etc, though.

[samurai_sarah]

I went to school with a lot of people who did, but not personally, no. Their mothers were able to watch the kids without the use of daycare, etc, though.

Thanks for confirming that you know nothing about farming.

[Hane]

Even legal divorce did happen in the 1800s and early 20th century. Heck, it happened in my family in the 1930s. But the fact that it has risen so much since then is a bit eye popping and worth taking a look at.

This conversation ties into a discussion I once had with my mother: She insisted that WWII was the biggest cultural shift for women; I insisted that the development and legalization of the Pill was.

As a result of industrialization and the business model, widespread jobs in urban centers of all sizes were made available, and women were available to fill them. During the war, even more women stepped into this new form of workplace, so the idea of a woman working a "9-to-5" became common.

Then came The Pill. In addition to knowing that they could support themselves if need be, women could control their reproduction. We were no longer stuck in bad marriages because we had little hope of earning our own money, or because we had no way of knowing when we might end up pregnant (and even more vulnerable) again.

If I were a member of my mother's generation of '50s post-WWII housewives (almost all the moms in our old neighborhood were SAHMs married to factory workers), I'd have been stuck in a horrible marriage to a mentally ill alcoholic who worked only sporadically.

In the old neighborhood, the wife of the only known alcoholic divorced him and took the kids. Surprisingly, none of the other women had a negative thing to say about it, even though most of them were Catholic. One mom grew dissatisfied with the limitations of her family life (her husband was a good guy who worked his 40 hours a week but wasn't a world-shaker), so she took an office job once her kids were in school fulltime and earned money to put herself through college to become an art teacher. One mom was married to a ne'er-do-well who quit his job every time someone looked at him crosseyed, so she took a job at the phone company a mile or so from home.

One big reason for the rise in divorce is women's realization that we could indeed say "THE HELL WITH THIS!" and get out and support ourselves and our kids. I have always been able to support myself better than either of my husbands ever could.

[dawbs]

*snip*

One big reason for the rise in divorce is women's realization that we could indeed say "THE HELL WITH THIS!" and get out and support ourselves and our kids. I have always been able to support myself better than either of my husbands ever could.

Tangent:

I know how cynical this sounds, but know what is awesome? Every day of the 11 years I've been married, I could have left.

I'm not saying anything bad about long marriages---but what I am saying is that I'm not with my husband because I *have* to be (I don't. I am the primary breadwinner and I'd be able to make it without him. It'd be tough, but I could), I'm staying with him because I *want* to. (which isn't to say that he and I haven't had our ups and downs...but, overall, I'm here because I choose to be)

I have some relatives who were married for 50 years because they couldn't manage it without each other. They didn't love each other--Hell, they didn't even LIKE each other. But she couldn't pay her bills without him (and she would have had church ostracism); he couldn't function without her (and he would have been accused of abandoning the family). THe "oh look, they were married for 50 years" wasn't a celebration of successful marriage, it was a 'celebration' that no one had died (or murdered each other) as they acted hateful to each other for 50 whole damn years.

On the flip side, my (^above mentioned :)) grandmother could have, any day, have left my grandfather (she had her own jobs, her own money, and her own skills). And he could have left her (he was capable by himself). And their 50 year anniversary was bittersweet for a whole lot of reasons (that mostly revolve around dementia being a bitch), but, overall, it was a celebration of 2 people who had put each other first for 50 years.

I'm planning on being married to Mr. Dawbs forever and all that...but overall, it's awesome that I *CHOOSE* to be here, rather than being trapped here.