Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995

Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 19001995. By Julia Kirk Blackwelder College Station: Texas A&M University Press,1997. xv + 308 pp. Tables, illustrations, photographs, charts, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth, $39.95. ISBN 0890967768; paper, $17.95. ISBN 0890967989.

Women have always worked. Until recently the biggest puzzle for economic and business historians has been to document how, where, when and why they have worked. Today's challenge is to use the data on labor force participation to illuminate more clearly why women and men have chosen some jobs, occupations, and careers rather than others, and to evaluate how these choices have influenced the quality of their lives. Julie Blackwelder's Now Hiring advances an explanation for the gradual feminization of the workforce in the twentieth century that positions the economy as a job-creating engine and culture as a gender-biased hand-maiden.

By "feminization" Blackwelder means the takeover of jobs by women, but the long, drawn-out process of feminization includes the increasing demand for and supply of women relative to men, the entry of women into male-dominated occupations, and the creation of entirely new jobs for women. Following Valerie Oppenheimer and Claudia Goldin, Blackwelder argues that women blazed job and career paths shaped largely by the changing demands for labor. Supply factors, such as cohort size and age, marital status, race and ethnicity interacted with values and attitudes about women's work and women's social roles to determine which women filled which jobs at what particular time. They did not, she insists, determine the job and career routes that women followed over time. If the interrelated factors of supply and demand are ever-present and notoriously difficult to distinguish and to quantify, Blackwelder nevertheless succeeds in conveying a clear vision of the feminization process and its differential and unequal impact upon the private and public lives of working women from the late nineteenth to the end of the twentieth centuries.

Blackwelder traces the routes that women followed in and out of the labor force by supplementing quantitative data with a rich panoply of qualitative sources, including oral interviews, manuscript collections, government documents, and newspapers and magazines. Moreover, because she uses the data to illuminate both short and long-term labor force participation trends among different groups of women, she manages to infuse the triad of race, gender, and class with greater specificity and meaning. She makes a valiant effort to link occupational and earnings data to that associated with specific firms and industries, even though the data is far better for some occupations, such as clerical workers, nurses and domestic workers, than for others. She is alert to different patterns of participation in rural and urban areas, and across regions over time, and whenever possible identifies and compares the contributions of migrants and immigrants.

Blackwelder views the process of feminization as ineluctable, idiosyncratic, and episodic, occurring faster in some decades than others. Labor force trends emerge from structural changes in a society that is gendered, segregated, and riddled with ethnic and class differences. Whereas in the late nineteenth century African-American women held more jobs and stayed in them longer than others, younger, white, native-born single women pushed into the labor market faster than others, pulled in part by the rapidly growing demand for clerks and secretaries that quickly followed the innovation of the typewriter and its use in corporate offices. The clerical workforce force remained predominantly white until the 1930s, when more employers turned to African-American women. By that time, clerical skills had been routinized and growth rates of clerical occupations had slowed, but African-American women had little choice. With higher rates of unemployment than whites and more job opportunities than African-American men, they took work where they could find it. White middle-class married women moved in and out of the labor force before World War II, making mobility hard to track and difficult to interpret, but Blackwelder maintains that as early as the 1920s, they accounted for a larger proportion of professional women than their representation in the labor force as a whole. By then, the pace of expansion in the professions had also begun to outstrip the rate of growth of new clerical jobs.

The Great Depression set off a series of complicated contradictory pressures that pitted single against married women and men and white women against minority women, particularly black workers, in a scramble for scarce jobs that more often went to white male heads of households and to white middle-class women rather than to black working class women and men. For Blackwelder, World War II permanently changed the occupational structure for women and more importantly, buoyed women's assessment of their own abilities despite the fact that college completion rates for women dropped relative to those for men. AfricanAmerican women completed college at higher rates than black men, but this achievement, Blackwelder notes, came as early as 1940. By World War II, increasing numbers of married women had begun to stay in the labor force, regardless of whether or not they had children. Married women and mothers, Blackwelder suggests, played a more important role in the feminization process than their numbers would suggest. Because these women were linked to families, and the nuclear family had long been idealized, their behavior in the labor force attracted more public commentary and criticism, especially from the press. The more married women worked and stayed in the labor force, the more they eroded occupational barriers and shifted the status of working women. However, the War also triggered an aftershock against working women that nurtured what Blackwelder terms a "neo-domestic ideology." Although women's job opportunities expanded and diversified, the lack of low cost, adequate daycare constrained some working mothers to part-time dead-end jobs. Highly educated women became increasingly resentful of men who advanced faster, farther, and for better pay in the workplace. Betty Friedan's explosive critique of The Feminine Mystique captured these frustrations and ignited a new women's movement, but Blackwelder emphasizes that the trend toward full-time, long-term employment for most adult women continued, picking up speed in the 1960s.

Blackwelder views the 1970s as a historic turning point, a time of rapid job growth for women across all sectors of the economy, when the gender gap in earnings narrowed slightly and more women moved up the corporate ladder. Although this decade also brought significant feminist protest and legal changes that paved the way for affirmative action and comparable pay policies, Blackwelder argues that only in the case of managerial and professional women did they make much of a difference to the overall trends. Blackwelder contends without convincing evidence that professional women did not "win" jobs, but succeeded because of quotas and employers. She maintains that the Civil Rights movement helped black women more than it helped black men and other minorities and that discrimination best explains why Hispanics advanced faster than blacks. Fast-forwarding to the present, she notes that the 1980s and 1990s saw more women than ever not only pushing into male-dominated professions, but also winning recognition as leaders.

Blackwelder's most significant contribution is to show why more careful and systematic studies of institutions, particularly families, schools, and voluntary organizations, matter to the history of working women. Among the most innovative aspects of her work is the attention she gives to the ways educational institutions and a host of understudied voluntary organizations, including "tomato clubs," 4-H clubs, and the Girls Scouts of America, have "fit" young girls and women to changing job demands. Although Blackwelder is careful to credit these institutions when they have advanced women's expectations and ambitions, (as in the case of the Girl Scouts in the 1930s), she argues that they more often prepared women to be followers of demand-based trends rather than anticipatory claimants of new job and career possibilities. They focused on homemaking skills when new jobs for women demanded organizing, administrative, and technological skills. They trained women to be secretaries and clerks even as the demand for clerks declined and the demand for female managers increased. They undermined rather than boosted women's confidence about their skills and capabilities relative to those of men. Only as the demand for jobs outstripped the available supply of men, Blackwelder asserts, did women begin to enter occupations where they had been previously excluded. Only as changes in technology, demography and family structure interacted to create a broader and more diverse occupational mix was the labor force feminized. Bridge-building across gender, ethnic, and racial barriers, in other words, was no small achievement.

Business and economic historians are likely to find Blackwelder's synthesis more appealing than her description of the process by which this transformation occurred. Without systematic occupational and earnings data for men, it is difficult to know whether the supply of men did in fact shrink relative to that of women. Nor is it easy to determine who benefited more from participation in the paid-labor force, or which factors were more important in explaining the changing occupational mix and the distribution of jobs across gendered and racial divides. Until there is a more careful match between industry and labor force participation and earnings data, conclusions about business behavior and gendered patterns of employment are likely to be tentative. Women's historians, on the other hand, are likely to downplay the role of economic forces in order to highlight more of the positive contributions made by women and women's organizations in preparing women to maximize their job opportunities.

Blackwelder argues that labor force and occupational trends run in opposite directions, down for men and up for women, and that to understand feminization we need to examine in more detail just how workforce participation affects the well-being of families. Other scholars might well view this process as invariably interactive and argue that feminization of the workforce is simply another name for labor-force substitution: the substitution of lower-paid women for higher priced men, and lower-paid minorities for higher priced middle-class women. Blackwelder does not settle these debates but she points the way to a more historically-based, economically informed understanding of women and men at work.

[Author Affiliation]

Reviewed by Mary A. Yeager

[Author Affiliation]

Mary A. Yeager is associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has published a book on oligopoly and articles on the refrigerator car, bureaucracy, and trade protection. She has most recently completed an edited collection, Women in Business (forthcoming Elgar press), which includes her most recent article, 'vill There Ever Be A Feminist Business History?" as well as a critical survey of the literature and an extensive bibliography. She continues to work on a comparative history of the role of`governments in the steel industries of Brazil, Mexico and the United States.