A Woman's Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

3. Providers: An Exploration of Gender Ideology in the 1930s

3 Providers An Exploration of Gender Ideology in the 1930s There are a lot of other boys and girls out of jobs now. There are lots of women who are working in the mills who have husbands working every day, and the men are making enough money to support them. Why not get these women out of the mills and give the young girls a chance. There are a lot of women working just for pleasure and for cars. Why not stop all of that and give the girls who really need the work to pay for board and clothes a chance. —Mother of four girls, all jobless1 On May 10, 1933, Earl Leiby of Akron, Ohio, wrote to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president of the United States: You are probably aware of the fact that homes are being wrecked daily due to the fact that married women are permitted to work in factories and offices in this land of ours. You and we all know that the place for a wife and mother is at home, her palace. The excuse is often brought up that the husband cannot find employment. It is the writers’ belief that if the women were expelled from places of business, . . . these very men would find employment. These same women’s husbands would 54 a Woman’s Wage naturally be paid a higher salary, inasmuch as male employees demand a higher salary than females.2 Like other people who chose the early months of a new administration to pass on suggestions for relief to the president, Mr. Leiby was convinced that the solution to three long years of economic depression lay in a return to old values. For him, as for others, a restoration of women and men to their appropriate spheres would return peace and prosperity to the land. But if Leiby’s belief in a particular form of domesticity was widespread, it was not universal. Consider the following letter from Mrs. Blanche Crumbly, a weaver of McDonough, Georgia, who wrote to FDR on October 26, 1933. The letter, written in pencil on lined foolscap paper, protested the failure of her textile mill employers to pay her an expected $12 a week. “I am sending you my checks to show you what I made,” she wrote. I want to let you see that they didn’t pay me enough. I worked eight hours a day and you will see they have me marked up forty hours a week and didn’t pay twelve dollars and by law they were supposed to pay twelve dollars whether you operated one machine or not but I worked in the weave shop and run five looms so I want you to see that I get my money that is due me for I am just a poor woman and was working trying to make some money but they didn’t pay enough to keep me working so I want you to write right back to me and let me know what you can do.3 Nothing in this letter speaks to the values of domesticity. If the subtext has the ring of humility, the message is insistent and demanding . Mrs. Crumbly wants action, not on the basis of her place in the household, but as a matter of workplace justice. She had worked in the weave shop running five looms; she had earned her pay; she was a poor woman who needed the money. These letters seem to reflect opposing positions on the issue of domesticity: the first assumes its inevitability and explicitly validates it; the second fails even to acknowledge its existence, much less its role in shaping the labor force. From the perspective of the first letter writer, Providers 55 the world appears to be structured around the household whose effective regulation would have a salutary effect on the economy. In that of the second, work and wages are central—their just resolution by state agencies is demanded independently of the writer’s household role. Taken together, these letters raise questions about the validity of the notion of separate spheres—a notion that has dominated American women’s history for the past two decades. Traditionally, “separate spheres” connotes a middle class world of privatized households in which women, excluded from the public arena, protect the values associated with morality and virtue and nurture against a competitive, aggressive, and individualistic world. Historians who first perceived separate...