Earning Power: Women and Work in Los Angeles, 1880-1930

Image Plates

Cover of Sunset magazine, January 1905. Collection of Sunset Magazine. Portrait of Mrs. Robert Burdette, date unknown. Special Collections, Libraries, University of Southern California, Doheny Memorial Library. Maria de Lopez. Los Angeles High School yearbook, Blue and White, Summer 1913. Los Angeles Unified School District Archives. Bessie Bruington Burke, back row far left. Burke was the first African American teacher in the Los Angeles City Schools. She is shown with the graduating class of Holmes Avenue School, June 1924. Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, Shades of L.A. Meeting of female employees, Bullocks Department Store, Los Angeles, ca. 1920. Bullocks Department Store Collection, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The Los Angeles ywca Clark Memorial Home. Author’s collection. Women working at sewing machines in a garment factory in Los Angeles, ca. 1928. Special Collections, Libraries, University of Southern California, Doheny Memorial Library. Mexican American woman workers at the Side Way Baby Carriage Company, 1922. Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, Shades of L.A. English class for Korean women at ywca International Institute, 1922. Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, Shades of L.A. Colors: C M Y K Light blue 35 0 10 10 Gray 80 65 65 0 Tan 10 25 60 15 Orange 0 50 100 10 Trim Size: 6 x 9.25 inches Panel width: 6-3/16 inches Spine width: 7/8 inch Panel depth: ` 9-3/4 inches T he half-century between 1880 and 1930 saw rampant growth in many American cities and an equally rapid movement of women into the work force. In Los Angeles, the city not only grew from a dusty cow town to a major American metropolis but also offered its residents myriad new opportunities and challenges. Earning Power examines the role that women played in this growth as they attempted to make their financial way in a rapidly changing world. Los Angeles during these years was one of the most ethnically diverse and genderbalanced American cities. Moreover, its rapid urban growth generated a great deal of economic, social, and political instability. In Earning Power, author Eileen V. Wallis examines how women negotiated issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to gain access to professions and skilled work in Los Angeles. She also discusses the contributions they made to the region’s history as political and social players , employers and employees, and as members of families. Wallis reveals how the lives of women in the urban West differed in many ways from those of their sisters in more established eastern cities. She finds that the experiences of women workers force us to reconsider many assumptions about the nature of Los Angeles’s economy, as well as about the ways women Women and Work in Los Angeles 1880-1930 E I L E E N V. WA L L I S WALL I S NEVADA EARNING POWER EARNING POWER Praise for EAR N I NG POWER “The intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and class are front and center in Eileen Wallis’s important new book on women in Los Angeles workplaces. Not only does her study capture the multicultural West, but also the different development of LA’s economy within the context of Progressive Era reform.” Joanne Goodwin associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers’ Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA PRESS EARNING POWER EARNING POWER participated in it. The book also considers how Angelenos responded to the larger national social debate about women’s work and the ways that American society would have to change in order to accommodate working women. Earning Power is a major contribution to our understanding of labor in the urban West during this transformative period and of the crucial role that women played in shaping western cities, economies, society, and politics. EILEEN V. WALLIS is assistant professor of history at California State Polytechnic University , Pomona jacket illustration: Mexican American woman workers at the Side Way Baby Carriage Co., 1922. Collection: Shades of LA Archives / Los Angeles Public Library. jacket design: Kathleen Szawiola 9 7 8 0 8 7 4 1 7 8 1 3...