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

Introduction

Introduction In 1933 Los Angeles police arrested striking garment worker Anita Castro for distributing union literature. She found herself in a city jail cell surrounded by other women: One women is sitting, young woman, and she’s crying and I says, “Why are you crying ? But why are you in jail?” And she says, “because I was soliciting.” But I didn’t know what soliciting meant. So [she says] “and what were you doing?” And I says, “Well, I was distributing.” [Laughs.] She’s soliciting, I’m distributing. So I ask her what she was soliciting so she told me. So I says, “Oh, gosh, why do you have to do that for? You shouldn’t do that,” I said . . . “I tell you what,” I said, “I belong to the union,” I says, “we’re garment workers, and we have a strike, but when the strike is over then there will be plenty of jobs.” I says, “You come over and see us at the union and you can get a job sewing, you don’t have to go looking for men.” Castro still vividly recalled this encounter when she was interviewed decades later. Perhaps she remembered the young prostitute because it was her first exposure to the seamier side of women’s work in the city. Or perhaps Castro remembered her because she had so desperately wanted to help the other woman find a better line of work. In either case, this encounter clearly illustrates the struggle that Southern California’s women faced when trying to make their financial way in the world. This study was designed to recover stories like Castro’s and to explore women’s contributions to the region’s history as political and social actors, as employers and employees, and as wives, mothers, and daughters. In order to 2 E A R N I N G P O W E R do this, we have to go back a century, to when Greater Los Angeles was experiencing its most rapid growth. The population of the city more than quadrupled in the 1880s, growing from 11,183 in 1880 to 50,000 a decade later, faster than any other city in the United States. By 1920 the population of the Los Angeles metropolitan area was five times as large as it had been in 1900. By 1930 metropolitan Los Angeles had “about twice as many people as San Francisco, three times as many as Seattle, and four times as many as Portland and Denver.” It ranked fifth among the nation’s cities and fourth among its metropolitan areas. This ferocious rate of growth has dominated the city ever since. Plagued with explosive growth, urban sprawl, and visual clutter, Los Angeles contradicts our cherished cultural myth of the West as an open, rural frontier. Instead, the city that has always dominated Southern California has become the prototype for the cities that now dominate the West: Denver, Houston, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, and Salt Lake City. Whether California can truly be considered a “western” state in any way other than geographically remains a subject of some debate in western historiography. But nonetheless, California’s cities played and continue to play crucial roles in the development of the region. Cities in the Far West did not evolve from rural beginnings but rather grew side by side with ranches, farms, and mines. As the fastest-growing and now by far the largest of such cities, Los Angeles is a potent symbol of both the potential and the pitfalls of urban growth. This study seeks to expand our understanding of how women negotiated both issues of gender and issues of ethnicity to gain an economic foothold in one western city. The years between 1880 and 1930 affected not only the spatial development of Los Angeles but also the opportunities and challenges facing its residents. Looking at women’s roles as workers as well as wives, mothers, voters, reformers, and so forth is critical if we are to fully understand Greater Los Angeles’s rise to national prominence. Women contributed at every level to the economic, political, and cultural life of the city, but their actions and motives were often quite distinct from those of men. Tackling women’s work in Los Angeles also helps redress the imbalance between the East and West coasts, and between North and South, in the existing scholarship. I argue that Greater Los Angeles was distinct from other American cities for three reasons. First, Los Angeles encompassed more...