Mr. B’s Notes on the Impact of the Great Depression on
Women
1920s
 To begin the story, we need to look back to the 1920s, before the stock market crash, and describe the
stage on which Americans were playing out their gender roles.
The Twenties seemed to mark a new era for women:
 Younger middle-class women were increasingly demanding equality in the social and economic
realms. “Fifty-fifty marriage” became an increasingly popular phrase which meant that their
husbands would do a share of the housework and of the childcare. Marriage should be a
partnership. A family should become a more democratic institution where the father did not
necessarily know best.
 Women also finally won the right to vote in 1920.
1930s
 Male workers began losing their jobs, month after month by the thousands and hundreds of thousands.
The unemployment rate climbed mercilessly into double digits. Men stood in lines that stretched down
an entire city block and around the corner, waiting for a bowl of soup.
 What was the solution to this breakdown? An increasing number of Americans said send women
home. Congresswoman Florence Kahn put it this way: “Woman’s place is not out in the business
world competing with men who have families to support.” According to a nationwide poll, 82 percent of
Americans agreed. Indeed, 40 percent said that women should not hold a job even if their
husbands were unable to support them!
 Opinion soon turned to action:
A) Banks and factories dismissed married women.
B) Most cities across the nation excluded wives from teaching positions.
C) The U.S. Congress passed a law saying that two married persons could not both work for the
government. Although a “person” could be either male or female, in fact 80 percent of those fired
were wives.
 But the war against working married women mostly hit innocent victims (single working
women.) In reality, the majority of working women fired were single, supporting
themselves. But in the panic of the Depression, most Americans didn’t acknowledge these facts.
 Traditional gender roles assumed that all women were members of families with a male
breadwinner at its head, but that description did not always match reality. Women who
were divorced or whose husbands had deserted them struggled to keep their families afloat; single
women had to fend for themselves. These women were truly on the margins, practically invisible.
 Women who sought relief or paid employment risked public scorn or worse for supposedly
taking jobs and money away from more deserving men.
 Even the terrible economic crisis could not derail the trend of women increasingly
working for pay outside the home:
1. According to census figures, the percentage of employed single women actually
rose by about 10% during the depression.
2. Even more dramatically, the number of working married women doubled
during the depression.
 However, working wives and mothers were seen as a “temporary measure during hard times”, and the
significant increase in the number of working married women should not be viewed as a
significant change in their role or status.
 Unfortunately, the rise in the employment of women during the great depression
was in stereotypical female jobs (nursemaids, cleaning women, clerical jobs etc.) and
therefore came with a price: it reinforced traditional stereotypes of what constituted
women’s work.
 Only a small minority of women chose to use their right to vote in the 1930s. Most
stayed home on election days because they said they weren’t interested in politics or because
they thought politics was men’s business. A few more women were elected to state legislatures,
but political power remained a male monopoly.
Relief ?
 When Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, his New Deal forged new ground in expanding the
presence of the federal government in the economy and making concrete connections between federal
programs and the lives of everyday citizens.
 But women were not treated as equal citizens when trying to qualify for these new federal
programs.
 25% of National Recovery Administration (NRA) codes set lower minimum wages
for women than men performing the same jobs.
 New Deal agencies like the Civil Works Administration (CWA) gave jobs almost
exclusively to men.
 Social Security benefits were structured around a traditional model of a male breadwinner
and dependent female housewife, which disadvantaged women who didn’t fit that
profile and implied that women deserved economic rights only in relation to men.
Eleanor Roosevelt
 President Franklin Roosevelt’s wife Eleanor is credited with increasing the place for women in
government (but not society as a whole.)
 The needs of women might have been forgotten entirely were it not for the efforts of an informal
network of women administrators who held important positions in the New Deal:
 Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman in the cabinet, oversaw many of the
social welfare initiatives that benefited women.
 Ellen Sullivan Woodward supervised women’s relief projects for the Works Progress
Administration (WPA).
 The effectiveness of these women administrators was dramatically enhanced by their
access to Eleanor Roosevelt, who used her position as First Lady to advance the causes of women,
blacks, and other marginalized groups.
Which women?
 When talking about women as a group, it is always important to ask “which women?” when
generalizations are offered.
 Women experienced the depression differently based on their age, marital status, geographical
location, race and ethnicity:
 “We didn’t go hungry, but we lived lean.” That expression sums up the experiences of most
American families during the 1930s: they avoided total starvation but still struggled to
get by. The typical woman in the 1930s had a husband who was still employed, although
he had probably taken a pay cut to keep his job.
 The 1930s urban housewife had access to electricity and running water, while the 1930s
rural housewife usually struggled with the burdens of domesticity without such modern
conveniences. Only one in ten farm families in 1935 had electricity. Farm families also
struggled with declining agricultural prices, foreclosures, and a terrible drought
that contributed to the Dust Bowl migrations of that decade.
 African Americans, long subject to discrimination and prejudice, often viewed the
depression differently from whites. Times had always been hard, and suddenly they just got
a lot harder. In 1930, 90% African American women worked in agriculture or
domestic service, both areas hard hit by the depression. Housewives who
previously hired servants began to do their own housework. Sometimes white women
competed for jobs previously abandoned as too undesirable to black women.
For African American women, the choice was often one of “survivalist
entrepreneurship”: in response to exclusion from the labor market they were forced to
form their own business. The two most prominent businesses for African American
women were boarding houses (often within their homes) and beauty parlors that
catered to the needs of black women. White-owned beauty salons did not cater to
black women leaving the field open for entrepreneurs. Boarding houses and beauty parlors
required little or no capital investment and often were about keeping one’s home and
feeding the family.
 In the South West, Mexican-American women (U.S citizens) who were at the bottom
step of the economic ladder faced similar conditions, but with an added dimension: the
threat of deportation back to Mexico because of fears about competition for jobs and relief.
In the depths of the depression, perhaps one-third of the Mexican-American
population (about half-million people) returned to Mexico, straining family ties
and causing extreme financial hardship.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Great Depression was a period that only served to reinforce the traditional role of
men as the wage-earners, even while many women took on the responsibility of providing for the
family…