Great Depression & Women in the Workplace

The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of the Great Depression on the U.S. economy, with special emphasis on women in the workplace. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context of change for the structure of the American work force that came about as a result of the Great Depression, and then to discuss levels of employment and different types of jobs available to married and single women.

From the 1929 crash of the stock market to the onset of World War II, there was a persistence of what today would be (and indeed is) called a deep recession, as well as persistence of highly traditional cultural values informing Americans' experience of economic and cultural phenomena alike. In the years after World War I, American women readily entered the workplace in significant numbers. A number of economic and social forces converged during the 1930s around the issue of women in the workplace to significantly alter employment patterns throughout American business and industry. It is widely believed that the turning point for women's presence in the labor force was World War II, when women were recruited for defense-industry work while their men went to war. And it appears certain that a palpable shift in the structure of the American economy can be seen as due in no small part to the impact of women entering the workplace because the war effort mandated it for practical and patriotic reasons.

Initially, the pool of urban unemployed, supplemented by

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small upon a hill, Where ev'ry day I had to pay another bill? And if I'm not mistaken, dear, I pay them still, Remember me?..... For I'm the boy whose only joy is loving you, Who worries till he hurries home when day is through, And I'm the guy you give your good-night kisses to19 The facts of women's experience of work, home, and hearth during the Depression demonstrate just how idealized the popularmusic environment was. According to Tallack, women's working and domestic lives, and regardless of whether their work occurred in the home or in the labor force, were characterized by discontinuity from the confidence and ballyhoo of the justpreceding Roaring Twenties.20 Tallack says that a domestic ideology reimposed the conventional wife-and-mother stereotype on the great mass of women at the very time that great masses of women were obliged to seek work outside the home or to take on work inside the home from the outside in order to make ends meet. His analysis is that the clash of popular-culture ideals with hard economic realities meant that women were very much prevented from entering the labor force on their own terms, as might have been expected from what Allen calls the "revolution in manners and morals" of the 19

Category: History - G