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…