A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

1. The Wage Conceived: Value and Need as Measures of a Woman’s Worth

1 The Wage Conceived Value and Need as Measures of a Woman’s Worth When a person complains that a certain wage rate is unduly low, he may be making that judgment in the light of what he thinks is due the kind of person performing that work, e.g. a married man. Others may regard the same rate as not unreasonable in view of the kind of work it is. —Henry A. Landsberger1 In 1915 New York State’s Factory Investigating Commission asked some seventy-five prominent individuals—economists, social reformers , businessmen, and publicists among them—what factors determined the rate of wages. The answers varied. Some suggested that workers’ organizations were most important; others believed the size of a business’s profits could enhance or restrain the wages of employees . Another key factor was the standard of living anticipated by workers . But the majority of those interviewed believed the efficiency of the worker and the supply of labor constituted by far the two most powerful determinants of wages.2 These traditional explanations for wage rates would have found favor with the proponents of the economic theory then popular. Widely accepted wage theory at the turn of the century was rooted in, though not limited to, the law of supply and demand. If that phrase, 8 a Woman’s Wage as economic historian Arnold Tolles implies, does not do economists justice, it does, at least, convey the economists’ belief “that the reward for every kind of human effort is controlled by some kind of impersonal and irresistible force, similar to the force of gravity.”3 Theory held that wages would rise or fall in response to employers’ fluctuating willingness to pay. That willingness in turn was predicated on what employers thought they could earn from labor as well as on how much labor was available at different wage rates. Thus, in theory, the demand for labor (measured by the additional revenue labor could produce) and the supply (which took into account the differences in education and training of the worker) together determined the wage.4 Despite the apparent certainty of economists such as Professor Roy Blakely of Cornell, who testified before the commission that “wages tend to approximate the value of what they produce,”5 the theory left room for a substantial degree of subjective judgment on the part of employers as to the value of particular workers. A critical part of the chemical mix that determined the wages of workers in general involved something intangible called “custom.” If a male worker was paid according to some formula that reflected the value of what he produced and the difficulty of replacing him, he was also paid according to what he and other workers thought he was worth. Custom, or tradition, played an acknowledged but uncalculated role in regulating the wage. But custom and tradition were gendered. They influenced male and female wages in different ways. And especially in the female wage, they played a far larger role than we have earlier been willing to concede. The women’s wage, at least for the early twentieth century, rested in large measure on conceptions of what women needed. The distinction alerts us to the rich possibilities contained in the wage conceived as a social rather than as a theoretical construct. If the wage is, as most economists readily acknowledge, simultaneously a set of ideas about how people can and should live and a marker of social status, then it contains within it a set of social messages and a system of meanings that influence the way women and men behave. We are all familiar with the capacity of these social meanings to reduce the wages of recent immigrants, of African-Americans, and of other groups. But, partly because it is so apparently natural, the capacity of the wage to speak to issues of gender is less clear. Yet the language with which a The Wage Conceived 9 woman’s wage is conceived throws into relief the same process that exists for men. The wage frames gendered messages; it encourages or inhibits certain forms of behavior; it can reveal a system of meaning that shapes the expectations of men and women and anticipates their struggles over power; it participates in the negotiations that influence the relationships of the sexes inside and outside the family. In all these capacities, the wage functions as a terrain of contest over visions of fairness...