A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

5. The Just Price, the Free Market, and the Value of Women

5 The Just Price, the Free Market, and the Value of Women I used to have a woman for a full day. But now they charge so much! We have to just make do. . . . Domestics make too much money now. You know, I’m a teacher and I don’t make as much an hour as some domestics do. It’s gotten all out of hand. . . . It’s unskilled labor; you don’t need training for it. Maybe there was a time when domestics weren’t paid enough but now it’s gotten to the opposite extreme. Do you think that’s right? That an unskilled worker should make more than a teacher?” —Chestnut Hill schoolteacher1 For feminist historians the 1980s could be described in the words with which Charles Dickens introduced A Tale of Two Cities: they were the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, the creative outpouring of historical scholarship on women became a source of energy and of continuing pressure for change. In the absence of a mass political movement, the enormous extension of historical knowledge (of which women’s history remains the center), if it does nothing else, should ensure that women’s orientations are permanently imprinted in the vocabulary of the past. But there is another hand: our sense of purpose seems to have wavered, our direction to be unclear. The feminist community no longer looks to history as the leading edge of scholarly 106 a Woman’s Wage research. Post-modern forms of literary criticism seem to have moved into that exalted rank. And even within the profession, women’s history seems to have lost some of its shine as accusations of partisanship and fears of politicization limit our courage and restrict our vision. And yet this is a moment when the voices of historians of women are needed more than ever. Some of the most significant social issues on the political agenda—family life, abortion, reproduction, and a range of issues having to do with economic equality—have a special meaning for women. As these become grist for legislative committees and judicial decisions, lawyers and policy makers increasingly invoke the past. In their hands the history of women emerges as something other than the product of historians. Women appear historically as well as philosophically “other,” as a single, unified whole, instead of an amalgam of diverse experience. A few examples will illuminate the issue. Feminist lawyers have disagreed sharply about whether to struggle for special treatment for women in the work force or to opt for equal treatment with men. In 1986 and 1987, the argument focused on pregnancy disability leaves. In the case of the California Federal Savings and Loan Association v. Mark Guerra et al. (commonly known as the CalFed case), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law that provided such leaves for women without providing comparable time off for disabled men. Feminists , who came down on both sides, agreed in repudiating protective labor legislation that “classified men and women based on stereotypical notions of their sex roles.” But they differed dramatically on the message of the past. One side drew a parallel between pregnancy disability legislation and the discredited protective laws, arguing that special treatment for women had distorted the contours of the labor force, encouraging employers to discriminate against them and contributing to occupational segregation in the labor market. Opposing lawyers insisted that a law that provided pregnancy leaves differed from earlier legislation in that it focused on “how women’s unique reproductive role affects them in the work place.” Pregnancy disability laws would not repeat the history of discrimination, this group suggested, but would, instead, enhance the possibility of achieving equality for women.2 In a second 1987 decision, the Supreme Court sustained the affirmative action plan of Santa Clara County, California. The plan The Just Price, the Free Market, and the Value of Women 107 included gender among the qualifications an employer could consider in assessing candidates for promotion and hiring. The majority affirmation of this moderate plan evoked a blistering dissent from Justice Antonin Scalia, who called attention to the central issue underlying such cases: “It is a traditionally segregated job category,” he noted of the road dispatcher’s job in question, “not in the Weber sense, but in the sense that, because of longstanding social attitudes, it has not been regarded by women themselves as...