Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization

Chapter 4. Women, Work, and National Policies

4. Women, Work, and National Policies All over the world women are participating in paid labor in greater and greater numbers. Today, in many countries throughout the world, women make up approximately half of the paid workforce; however, they do not participate on an equal footing with men. Even the most cursory examination reveals that paid labor is by and large divided into “men’s” jobs and “women’s” jobs. And men’s jobs are better paid. In the United States, before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it was commonplace for jobs to be explicitly advertised as “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female.” Today, such explicit discrimination is rare, but gendered patterns of employment stubbornly persist. A trip to nearly any dentist’s of‹ce reveals the same scenario: whether or not the dentist is a man or a woman, the receptionists, hygienists, and assistants are almost always women. Similarly , an examination of jobs in factories in developing countries such as Indonesia, Mexico, or Nigeria reveals that most of the low-wage production workers are women, while the supervisors and managers are men. Such gendered patterns of employment are neither natural nor coincidental. They re›ect deeply entrenched social hierarchies based on gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Social hierarchies are also intrinsic to globalization, a phenomenon that has had a profound impact on the patterns of work over much of the world. Today, transnational corporations are able to move their low-skill, lowwage production operations to countries in the developing world characterized by low wages and business friendly political regimes. This new international division of labor is the subject of chapter 6. In this chapter we are mainly concerned with women’s paid employment within the industrialized countries. 56 Labor Force Participation One of the most remarkable and persistent changes in the late twentieth century was the feminization of labor, the steady increase in the number of women participating in the paid labor force. Although women have long worked outside the home, and their work has been important in providing themselves and their families with the income to purchase food, clothing, and shelter, their large-scale participation in the paid labor force is a relatively recent phenomenon. During the nineteenth century, with the exception of a few women in the arts and professions, most women in the paid labor force were there because they were poor. Many were women of color or immigrants, and they worked as maids, laundresses, day laborers, and factory workers, all low-wage jobs with deplorable working conditions. Poor women who were fortunate enough to have an education or family connections became governesses or schoolteachers. Other than factory work, much of the work that women did—picking cotton, taking in boarders, selling handicrafts, cooking, and cleaning in the houses of the well to do—lay outside of the of‹cial de‹nitions of paid labor and hence was not reported in of‹cial statistics. Paid work was generally considered the prerogative of men.1 Gradually, however, employment opportunities for women improved. The growth of the modern corporation, and the bureaucracy accompanying it, generated a need for scores of clerical workers to ‹le, type, answer telephones , and keep records. As women’s employment opportunities outside the home increased, the type of work in the home changed. More and more of the goods and services necessary for everyday life were being massproduced and sold in retail stores. Shopping became a central part of women’s work and with it the need for income to buy the increasing array of consumer goods. It should be remembered here that these new employment opportunities were generally opportunities for white women. It would take decades of struggle before women of color could avail themselves of these jobs.2 World War II, like World War I, had a huge impact on women’s social and economic positions. The shortage of men directly exposed the pretense that women could not do male jobs. In the United States the image of “Rosie the Riveter” was the icon for working women. In Europe, and other theaters of action, women’s paid labor was even more important. Even in Nazi Germany, where party policy extolled the virtues of the good Aryan Women, Work, and National Policies 57 wife and mother, the demands of war forced the state to employ women in factories.3 Today, the feminization of labor is commonplace. Women...