Women at work. "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?" Looking at women (and men) in the workplace, and modern work itself, with a long lens.
Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?
I am so tired. . . I want to put my feet up. .
She says it, struggling back heavy tears.
A couple of things before we go on to analyze this topic, and people's reaction to her cri de coeur.
First, my initial guess was that this probably would have resulted in a flood of people making fun of the young woman, but in fact, there isn't much of that. Lots of women actually posted back with complete sympathy.
A few men posted, too, in this one instance, stupidly:
Jacob McCoombe
Who thought ANYONE should have to work? We should all be sitting on the beach eating cheese and wine ๐ญ
6-61453Reply
AtticusMax123
but... there would not be any cheese or wine .. ๐ฑ
6-9 64Reply
Jacob McCoombe
I’d classify it as a hobby. If I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t mind at all making homemade cheese and wine
6-950 Reply AtticusMax123
but that's work. it's where we have gone wrong. all worried about money, instead of worrying about actually enjoying and being passionate about
Ahh. . .that age old belief that farming and agriculture is not work. . . from urbanites. Farmers, of course, believe hte same thing about people who have office jobs in town.
But I digress.
Quite a few replies were like this one:
Fr why did they do that๐คจ I would have been completely chill running a household cooking, going shopping, cleaning stress free like ugh I hate working
One of the most interesting replies was this one:
๐ฅ๐ธ๐๐พ๐๐๐ฅ
we just wanted the option we didn’t want to HAVE to work ๐ญ๐ญ๐ญ
So I'll start my comments here.
Secondly, therefore, the question, answered straight, and then I guess through a technological analysis and economic analysis. . . or I suppose I'll look at all of these simultaneously.
Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?
Well, proto feminist and early feminist did that. The reason that they did it, as understood by them at the time, was that they lived in a world that had been heavily impacted by industrialization which had removed men from home based enterprise, for the most sake, and sent them off to "work places" of various types during their working shifts. This vested economic power in men, and in turn the economic power equated with political power and societal power. Arguably, it was the power aspect of this that most concerned early feminist and proto feminist, as that imbalance of power worked heavily to the detriment of women in all sorts of ways.
At the same time, however, technological advances made women's labor in the homes greatly reduced, as we have described here:
Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two
So, basically, feminism rose up in the 20th Century as part of a long, slow, female emancipation movement that began prior to the Civil War but which really took root in the very late 19th Century and very early 20th Century just as technological changes made it possible for fewer women to be required to be employed in the household, a necessity which had greatly increased, ironically enough, when industrialization mandated men to leave the household.
Put another way, consider this. Once men worked in factories, or town jobs, there was no way that they were really available to lend any kind of hand with domestic matters. This was so much the case, that boarding houses were a staple of men's lives if they were single. Indeed, they were so much a staple that they inspired a long-running cartoon which would now make no sense to most Americans.
Indeed, boarding houses were so common that they were the souse of a folk song noted by Mark Twain, which went:
There is a boarding-house, far far away,
Where they have ham and eggs, 3 times a day.
O, how the boarders yell,
When they hear that dinner bell
They give that landlord –@#$3
Three times a day.
– The American Claimant, Chapter 17*
This brings up another aspect of this, however.
Women have always worked, and some women have worked outside their households for time immemorial. Indeed, as the thread linked in above discussed this:
That's correct. Nearly 20% of women worked outside their households as early as 1900.
Of that remaining 80%, at that time, you have to keep in mind that the farm population was much higher than it is today, its decline as a percentage of the population being one of the sad realities of the barbarity of modern life. Even this is a bit deceptive, however. PBS's American Experience relates the following:
1870 The 1870 census shows that farmers, for the first time, are in the minority. Of all employed persons, only 47.7 percent are farmers. As farming becomes more mechanized, farmers rely more on bank loans for land and equipment.
1880 U.S. population reaches 50,155,783, with farm population estimated at 22,981,000. Forty-nine percent of all employed persons are farmers, and of those, one in four is a tenant, despite the Homestead Acts. With the development of barbed-wire fencing and windmills, plow farming reaches the Great Plains.
1893 U.S. experiences an economic crisis: 642 banks fail and 16,000 businesses close. As produce prices plummet, tens of thousands of small farms go under.
1900 There are 5.7 million farms in the U.S., with an average size of 138 acres.
1920 The number of farms has grown to 6.5 million and is home to roughly 32 million Americans, or 30 percent of the population. This would soon change. Migration, mostly by young people who left for the cities, escalated over the next ten years.
What this shows us, of course, is that farmers as a percentage of the American public peaked in the late 19th Century, dropping to 30% by 1920. 1919 was the last year of economic parity for American farmers. Still, for our discussion here, this is significant. 1920 was the year that the 19th Amendment was ratified in the United States, and women got the right to vote throughout the country. At that time 20% of women were employed outside the household, and approximately 30% of them lived in farm families, and women in farm families most definitely worked. That would mean, therefore, that about 50% of women were actually working in some fashion in addition to maintaining their households, and that's at a bare minimum.
Indeed, if we consider the fact that family run businesses were much more common in the first half of the 20th Century than they are now, that figure increases even more. For families that owned small businesses, whether they be stores, or restaurants, etc., the entire household was employed in them in some fashion. There may have been a division of labor in those households, but it was not as great as might be imagined.
Even for professionals, this was true to some degree. Doctors, for example, frequently had their offices in their homes up into the first quarter of the 20th Century. Medicine was more primitive to be sure, and the practice was not as lucrative as it was to become. Quite frequently, jobs preformed by hired help today, were preformed by a spouse. A person might expect the receptionist, for example, to be married to the physician. "He married his nurse" or "he married his secretary" was a common line for doctors and lawyers, and other professionals. The businesses were much less lucrative, and the family connections, and the natural inclination for couples to work together well expressed.
So, in terms of "Whoever fought, for women to get jobs. . . . why?. . . . why did you do that?", well, women didn't have to fight for "jobs". Having a job, one way or another, was a condition of life for most women well before women are regarded as having entered the workplace.
So what's up with that perception, then, we might ask as our third topic.
Well, what's up with it is that as farming as the primary occupation of people declined, and men began to have no choice but to work in other capacities, an unnatural economic division of resources occured. A division of labor, quite frankly, is natural. Men and women really are different, vegan eating emaciated weenies views aside. But men working daily away from their families are not. The economic power, therefore, vested in men, and that created an odd unnatural living condition that still prevails in some quarters. The Rust Belt life of going to work in the factory early, for a good paycheck, getting off work late, hitting the bars with the guys in the Rust Belt Tavern where the workers would get blotto and make wolf whistles at the bar maids, before going home blitzed and demanding dinner from their wives came about.
And while that is clearly an exaggeration, it's not all that unrealistic of a depiction of the height of the American blue collar era. The point isn't to unfairly condemn it, but rather to note that money, the motivator for crawling out of bed every day and heading to the GM plant, vested primarily in the hands of men and not women. That was a problem.
In addition to that, what we've already noted above occured. Domestic machinery came about, which made female household labor surplus.
While we haven't addressed it yet, of the 50% of women not employed on the farm or outside the home, the remainder tended to be actually "employed" in the true sense of the word, in the heavy labor of just keeping a household going. Indeed, the 20% that were employed outside the home tended to be actually employed, as maids and servants, in the houses of those who could afford it. And employing domestic help was surprisingly common.
Americans of a certain age will have watched The Andy Griffith Show, in which, of course, Aunt Bea is a resident of the widowed Sheriff Taylor's household, and acts as the woman of the house. In the very first episode of the show, she's introduced when Taylor's prior live in female servant has left to get married. Sheriffs don't make a vast amount of money, of course, but the audience would not have thought this odd, as it wasn't that unusual. Other television depictions of the same era have similar depictions.
In my own family, my mother's family in Montreal employed several domestic servants. Now, in fairness, they were doing very well at the time, but again this wasn't unusual. With a large number of children, and before our current era in every way, she employed a collection of Quรฉbรฉcoise who cooked and cleaned in the house. They were not servants, in the English manor house manner, but domestic labor.
And this gets us to the next facet of this discussion. Prior to the 1950s, and even well after that, female labor outside of the household fell into a fairly limited number of occupations, and that is what feminist were struggling against. Women of lower means, including married women, often found employment as servants and maids. By the first quarter of the 20th Century, they were finding employment in offices. Poor women found employment in certain types of factories, often featuring extremely dangerous working conditions. Women of greater means, but not wealth, had teaching and nursing open to them.
Indeed, it is that last fact that demonstrates what really occured, and what the "fight" was actually about. Young middle class women finishing school, and more women than men finished school, who wanted to work could choose to teach or nurse. If they were Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican (Episcopalian) or Lutheran, they might choose to become nuns. We don't tend to think of Protestant denominations having nuns, but they in fact do, and this opens up another aspect of this. Nearly all women married at the time, and nearly all women still do. It's a natural institution. But not all women wish to marry. Just as we've discussed with the topic of male homosexuality, religious institutions offered an acceptable way to avoid marriage and still have a career. That may well mean that not all had deep religious vocations (certainly most did), but that was an honorable path for them.
What was not possible, generally, was to become a physician, lawyer or the like. Professions were closed to women. Most occupations outside of those noted were, which was a legacy byproduct of the early stages of the industrial revolution. Men were forced outside of the home for heavy labor, but some had the option of working outside the home in "desk jobs". While these jobs were in particularly less subject to gender differences than those involving heavy labor, the concept that they were was absent and women were excluded.
Eliminating that exclusion is what feminist were "fighting for".
That fight, we might tell our youthful distressed TikToker, was one worth fighting for. In the end, it's not that the fight was to allow her to work, the fight was to allow her to work at something other than scrubbing floors.
But all battles are always subject o the law of unintended consequences.
Feminism, its battle, grasped the economic nature, and the prejudicial nature, of men having every career open to them and women not having it. But they never looked for a second at the history of how that came about. The assumption always was that men had grabbed these occupations for themselves and retained them by brute force. In reality, however, the vast majority of male occupations had been forced upon them. Where this was not true, in and in the original professions (law, the clergy, and medicine), the circumstances of Medieval life and biology, where in fact women had far more power in a generally more equal society than that of the early industrial revolution, caused this to come about.
Failing to understand this, feminists created the Career Myth, which is that not only did men make a lot more money than most women, which was true, but that a career was the gateway to secular bliss. Find a career, women were told, and you'd be perpetually happy. Promotion of the myth was so skillfully done that it became a culturally accepted myth by the 1980s. Even well into the 1980s, young men were told that they should work to find a "good job" so they could "support a family". The idea almost universally was that the point of your career was to support a future family. Almost nobody was expected to get rich, and frankly most professionals did not expect to. Already by the 1960s the next concept was coming in, however, and by the 1990s the concept of Career Bliss had really set in.
The problem with it is that it's a lie. Careers can make people miserable, but they rarely make most people happy. Perhaps the exceptions are where a person's very strong natural inclinations are heavily aligned with a career, and certainly many female doctors who would have been nurses, for example, have benefited from the change, as just one example.
The additional problem is corporate capitalism.
Corporate capitalism became so dominant in American society that by the 1970s it had swamped the original purpose of the economy and converted human beings into consumers. Often missed in this is that while corporations need people to have enough money to buy products, it needs labor to be as cheap as possible, or even better nonexistent. In this fashion, capitalism's two driving forces are actually pitted against each other.
Be that as it may, the freeing up of female labor from the household after World War Two was a boon to capitalism. More workers within the same population meant reduced labor costs. Combined with a new societal imperative pushing women into the workplace, the rise of birth control which inhibited one of the primary reasons they were not, and the creation of a child warehousing industry, capitalism, along with socialism, drug women out of the household who didn't want to be in it, and put them into jobs which had little value in terms of the feminist dream of "fulfillment".
Indeed, the ultimate irony of the entire effort was that at the end of the day, corporate interest most benefitted. Feminist never supported a movement that would "allow" women to work, but which actually compelled them to be required to, believing somehow that every woman who worked would find a high paying professional job. In reality, doubling the workforce within the same overall population depressed wages in non-professional categories and ended up forcing all women to work, including in families in which there were children, which ended up being most families. Feminism, ironically enough, had a mostly male view of the world, and a mostly Hefnerescque few of it, and the general assumption was that women wouldn't have children, and wouldn't even get married, but live a variant of the Playboy Philosophy, albeit without the huge boobs and dumb girl next store, but rather with an anorexic career woman in that role.
So in the new, in the dominant Anglo-American Culture, all women must now work and there's really no other easy economic option. While plenty of families opt out of this, at least for at time, many cannot. The big lie of "career fulfillment" has become a cultural norm, and interestingly enough has lead to personal misery on the party of many, who abandon all else for a career that, in the end, is just a job, but one without purpose or meaning. And more than a few women have been left embittered by being forced into a labor/employment lifestyle that they resent and feel is unnatural. Indeed, we've noted that here before:
So what does the TikToker do?
We don't know, but it's apparently physically fatiguing. A quick look at her TikTok page (and it is quick, as TikTok is weird) suggests that she works in something in which she interacts with customers, so perhaps sales.
So is her cri de cลur misplaced?
Well, at least partially, and probably substantially. Unless she was born into wealth, and there's no reason to believe that, she was not going to escape all work in the first place. The nature and the purpose of it would be different, however. More likely than not, if she was her current age in 1923, she may have worked outside the home a bit, but then would probably find her work, and it is work, would be at home. If it were 1823, on the other hand, or 1723, her work for her entire life would almost certainly be at home, unless she was born into severe poverty or wealth, neither of which seem to be the case.
So is her complaint about nothing?
Well, like a lot of female cries in this area, and there are a lot of them, the answer to that is no.
One thing that the feminists crossed into, at some point, although they've started to cross back due to the unintended results of their success, was a war on women as women. People remain people no matter what. Truth be known, a lot of people don't want to be career people, they just want to live their lives and for a lot of them, those lives are close in their minds to the historic norm. The authors of Cosmopolitan may have imagined all women living lives of professional independence, sterile, and free of any commitments to anything, but sane human beings don't imagine lives like that. So most people end up marrying sooner or later. Truth be known, in people's younger years, they spend a lot of time worrying about this topic and hoping to find somebody.
But the world brought about by the Sexual Revolution and the Feminist Revolution doesn't really accommodate that very well. So women who would have preferred the more traditional roles are punished as society won't allow for it. Beyond that, the logical conclusion of a sexless society is a gender bending one, and we now see disturbed men trying to cross into female status, as in spite of everything women are allowed societally breaks on the demands that men still remain subject to.
In the end, while things were achieved that needed to be, perhaps in part because of the era during which they were achieved, they were overachieved. Women were allowed ultimately into every role, including some, such as combat soldier, which history and genetics would naturally preclude.
All in all, what we've never figured out is how to deal with the aftershocks and destruction that followed in the wake of massive societal change in the West following World War Two, and more particularly the Revolution of 1968. As societies don't really tend to debate what direction they're headed in, at least cleanly, this creates a titanic mess. But stepping back from one sad girl with sore feet, what we should be seeing is a host of things. One is that feminism combined with Hefnerism, pharmaceuticals and corporate capitalism to the detriment of everyone. The late stages of that contribute to the warp and woof of our times as the left pushes to destroy what remains of evolution and biology and the varying elements on the right grasp to restore it, without really understanding what happened. Society isn't going back to any particular date in the past, and there never was a perfect one, but most likely evolutionary biology and deeply ingrained human nature will recover an awful lot of it, in some new sort of compromise.
Footnotes:
*It seems a little disputed, but the same tune may have been used by, or came from, There Is A Happy Land, which was a religious themed tune.
There is a happy land, far, far away,
Where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day;
Oh, how they sweetly sing, worthy is our Savior King,
Loud let His praises ring, praise, praise for aye.
Come to that happy land, come, come away;
Why will you doubting stand, why still delay?
Oh, we shall happy be, when from sin and sorrow free,
Lord, we shall live with Thee, blest, blest for aye.
Bright, in that happy land, beams every eye;
Kept by a Father’s hand, love cannot die;
Oh, then to glory run; be a crown and kingdom won;
And, bright, above the sun, we reign for aye.
There is a Boarding House was adopted for the classic soldier's song Old Soldiers Never Die.
There is an old cookhouse, far far away
Where we get pork and beans, three times a day.
Beefsteak we never see, damn-all sugar for our tea
And we are gradually fading away.
Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die
They just fade away.
Privates they love their beer, 'most every day.
Corporals, they love their stripes, that's what they say.
Sergeants they love to drill. Guess them bastards always will
So we drill and drill until we fade away.
It's worth noting that the Army, prior to World War Two, and indeed for some time thereafter, shared certain common features with boarding room life in that it was largely all male, and the occupataion took care of room and board.
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