A Lady’s Life in 1920s America, Part 2: A Wednesday at Work

In our last episode, we spent some quiet time in our New York apartment on a lazy summer day in 1923. But now it’s a Wednesday morning, and we’re going to head into the office in our smartest suit and skirt set to get down to some money-making business. Grab a coffee, pull up those stockings, and shake out those typing fingers. Let’s go traveling.

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  3. Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Concise History, Chicago: University of Illinois, 2018. 

  4. David E. Kyvig, Daily Life in the United States, 1920-1940: How Americans Lived Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004. 

  5. Nancy F. Cott, No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 

  6. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/gilman/economics/economics.html

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  8. Linda M. Perkins, “‘Bound to Them by a Common Sorrow’: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement,” The Journal of African American History 100, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 721-747. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.4.0721

  9. Lynn D. Gordon, “The Gibson Girl Goes to College: Popular Culture and Women’s Higher Education in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920,” American Quarterly 39, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 211-230. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2712910

  10. Linda M. Perkins, “The National Association of College Women: Vanguard of Black Women’s Leadership and Education, 1923-1954,” The Journal of Education 172, no. 3 (1990): 65-75. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42742186

  11. Marybeth Gasman, “Swept under the Rug? A Historiography of Gender and Black Colleges,” American Educational Research Journal 44, no. 4 (Dec. 2007): 760-805. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30069414

  12. John L. Rury, “Vocationalism for Home and Work: Women’s Education in the United States, 1880-1930,” History of Education Quarterly 24, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 21-44. https://www.jstor.org/stable/367991

  13. John Thomas McGuire, “Gender and the Personal Shaping of Public Administration in the United States: Mary Anderson and the Women’s Bureau, 1920-1930,” Public Administration Review 72, no. 2 (March/April 2012): 265-271. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41433303

  14. K.E. Campbell and H.J. McCammon, “Elizabeth Blackwell’s Heirs: Women as Physicians in the United States, 1880-1920,” Work and Occupations 32 (no. 3): 290-318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888405277634

  15. Cynthia Grant Bowman, “Women in the Legal Profession from the 1920s to the 1970s: What Can We Learn From Their Experience About Law and Social Change?” Cornell Law Faculty Publications (12): 2009. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=facpub

  16. Kylie Turner, “The 1920’s Woman, Progressive or Submissive? Women on the Conservative Campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln During the Roaring Twenties,” The Historian Craft 250, (Fall 2019). https://unlhistory.unl.edu/exhibits/show/1920s-woman/1920s-women#:~:text=The%201920s%20is%20the%20time,schooling%20as%20their%20male%20counterparts.

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episode transcript

WE GOTTA WORK

Work, you say? In the 1920s, a huge number of women are working hard in the household. How many of us are also ladies of business? Women have always worked, of course, and mostly out of necessity. But more and more women have been pouring into the American workforce since just after the Civil War. That was when certain woman-employing industries exploded, such as the garment industry. Also, the Civil War ended slavery, which meant that black women were finally working for wages, low as they may often have been. The 1880s saw a huge swell in immigration numbers, bringing in a wave of ladies who needed to earn a crust. Decades later, in 1917, thousands of American women entered the workforce to fill jobs left by men serving in World War I. Some were middle-class white women, many of whom had never worked before, and they found they liked being able to financially support themselves. When the war ended, they didn’t particularly want to give it up. 

The 1920s brings a whole new flood of WHITE MIDDLE-CLASS women choosing to leave home and go to work, joining up with the thousands of working class women who are, and long have been, already there. By the 1920s, 8.2 million women work outside the home; they account for some 20% of the workforce. And why not? After all, we’ve just gained the vote, giving us a flush of hope for all the things we can achieve. It’s important to remember, of course, that just because the 19th Amendment granted suffrage for all women on paper, in practice, only white women are guaranteed the right to vote. Plenty of black women (especially in the South), are still unable to vote because of things like poll taxes and literacy tests that operate to keep them from voting. Equality amongst us ladies is…well, not really equality at all. Still, many women hope that gaining the right to vote is the first step toward helping us achieve it, especially in the form of financial independence. We are coming to understand that taking control of our finances is the key to an all-around better life. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in her book, Women and Economics, we feel: “The increasing desire of young girls to be independent, to have a career of their own, at least for a while, and the growing objection of countless wives to the pitiful asking for money, to the beggary of their position…The spirit of personal independence in the women of to-day is sure proof that a change has come.” 

HITTING THE BOOKS: Women and Education

But before we jump into our work day, and the many frustrations it’s bound to bring us, let’s talk a little about our education. It’s only with high school diplomas and degrees that we can claim the white-collar jobs many of us are striving for. More women are starting to work in this era in large part because more of them are going to college. The quality of your education in America during this period depends largely on your race and whether or not you live in a rural or an urban area. While the 1920s sees the beginning of things like after school clubs, higher teaching standards, and elective classes, as well as the advent of the school bus, many students are also still learning in one-room schoolhouses. The progressiveness of this progressive era doesn’t apply to us all. The good news is that most young girls have at least some schooling – 

Some 66% of white girls aged 5 through 19 attend high school, and 55% of nonwhite girls. The illiteracy rate in 1920 for white adults is just 6%, while it’s 23% for black adults. Still, only about 17% of Americans (both men and women) are actually graduating from high school. But that’s better than the 2.5% from back in 1880.

Still, about 283,000 women enrolled in institutions of higher education in 1920: that’s 47.3% of all students enrolled. The percentage of women aged 18-21 attending college in 1920 is 7.6%: that’s double the amount that attended in 1910. By 1930, 10.5% of American women will be attending college: that’s about 481,000 women. That leaves 90% who are not attending, so college girls are still in the minority, but it’s worth dipping our toes into the collegiate waters to find out what they’re like. 

Who are these lucky college gals? Mainly middle class girls from families with parents who are doctors, lawyers, or professors. Most are white, but plenty of Black women attend black colleges. White women attended for a variety of reasons; many simply go to have fun. Black women, though, almost exclusively attend to earn a living, and the majority will earn their degrees in order to become teachers. College is definitely not affordable for poorer, working-class ladies, and because most really wealthy women don’t need to earn a living, they don’t attend in large numbers either. 

But going to college does become the cool “thing” to do for many women in the 1920s. This enthusiasm for female education represents a massive change. Before the 1860s, women were not allowed to attend college. A handful of schools began accepting them in the late 1800s, and women’s colleges began forming. State universities outside the South started admitting them after the Civil War, but that doesn’t mean they were particularly welcoming. They certainly did not extend them invites into the medical, recreational, or physical education facilities: those were for men only. After all, we wouldn’t want to make our ladies sterile! Dr. Edward Clarke, in his 1870s book called Sex in Education Or A Fair Chance For the Girls, wrote that women who studied the same subjects in the same manner as men might do their reproductive organs permanent damage. Women who went ahead and risked their baby making bits to get an education were often bullied over it. They were blamed for the decreasing marriage rates and increase in divorce rates nationwide. Most university gals were told they were destined to be barren spinsters. When Annie Nathan Meyer, the future founder of Barnard College, told her father in 1885 that she got into Columbia University’s Collegiate Course for Women, he said sadly, “You will never be married… Men hate intelligent wives.” Columbia didn’t allow women to sit in on lectures, just exams, but Annie got her degree anyway. And then she got married. Suck it, dad. 

Between the late 1800s and the 1920s, the college girl experienced a major “rebrand.” By this point, the conservatives are starting to realize that nothing they say is going to stop women from going to college. We’re flat out ignoring all the dramatic warnings that it might “desex” them, make them unmarriable, and lead to civilization’s total collapse. The New Woman and the flapper couldn’t care less about such stodgy opinions. So educational critics change tack - they start talking about how women might benefit from higher education without giving up on wife and motherhood. Women’s magazines and newspapers give the college girl a little makeover, making her more feminine and attractive; They help turn the college gal from a severe maiden trying to get her doctorate into a cute co-ed looking for a husband in poly-sci. This image is far less scary to the insecure man who worries about the societal dangers posed by educated women. Women can attend college AND remain, well, womanly. Magazines underscore the point by focusing on the frivolous aspects of college life for the ladies. Articles often feature pictures of dorms with embroidered pillows, of women attending home economics classes, and of friends hosting late-night fudge parties. Don’t worry, dad, we aren’t spending our days reading Machiavelli; we’re having pillow fights and learning to make fudge for our future husbands!

We have two school choices in this era: co-ed or a women’s college. Many articles of the time warn that we should attend single-sex institutions, where we won’t be tempted to imitate men's lives.They’re considered the safest places for good girls to learn things…an assumption which proves to be dead wrong. Female students have much greater intellectual freedom at women’s colleges than at co-ed schools. This is partly because many of those severe spinsters of the first generation are now teaching at them, and they are spreading all sorts of radical, feminist thoughts. It’s also partly due to the fact that women’s colleges have a distinct absence of men telling them what they can and cannot do. Free thought flourishes at these institutions. Funny how that works.  

That said, two-thirds of us attend coed schools, which enforce a much more gender conforming curricula. Men and women have separate clubs, sports fields, and living quarters. Many of the classes they’re expected to take aren’t the same. Even the aims of some of the classes that look the same, on the face of it, are broken out by gender. The Cal Poly catalog from 1916-1917 specifically states that “It [the campus] offers a strong course in Engineering-Mechanics which trains young men for life in the shops, power plants and the various branches of the electrical industry” and “to the young woman it offers practical training in housekeeping and homemaking; in fact in all phases of Household Arts.”

We are almost always required to take home economics classes. In his editorial, "The College and the Stove," Mr. Edward Bok complains that college women who can’t cook stand “before the world …without the real knowledge that every normal woman should possess.” Said like a man who should probably learn how to make his OWN damn sandwich.  Harper’s Bazaar approves, writing, “We don't know what young men will do with their lives, but we do with women-we should use that advantage to plan education intelligently for them. Now that women have been brought into higher education, we are ready to move on to the improvement of family life.” 

All colleges are expected to keep young women within accepted boundaries of morality – many have dress codes, curfews, and rules against women smoking and drinking. Many require they have a chaperone when going off campus. In 1923, University of Wisconsin female students hold mass protests against this requirement until it’s abolished. Are you regretting teaching us about the political process? Too bad. 

HAVING IT ALL: The Career vs. Marriage Debate

So what are these collegiate women doing after graduation? Most are, in fact, getting jobs. The first generation had to choose: uneducated wife and mother or childless, educated spinster; it tended to be presented as an either-or proposition. Curious, then, that by 1930, some 40% of working women will be wives, and 11% of them will be mothers. It seems that whole either/or thing was a lie. Whaaaat? In 1928, when over 3,000 female alumni are asked if they believe a woman can successfully combine marriage and a career, nearly 75% will say “yes”. “We are coming to see, I believe, “the President of Radcliffe wrote in 1929, “that marriage is essentially far more compatible with the continuation of a woman’s career than has been assumed.” By the 1920s, society seems to accept that women can have it all…well…kind of. 

The majority of women work for a few years after college, but they also quit as soon as they tie the knot. It’s okay for single women to work, but the idea of MARRIED women doing it is still a little too shocking. The overwhelming belief remains that wives should be at home. (That’s ignoring the fact that many married black and immigrant women have to work out of financial necessity - a thing the upper class just loves to do.) And so it becomes this big debate: Can a woman successfully have a career and a marriage? SHOULD she? Sue Shelton White, a lawyer in 1926, complained of this choice, “Marriage is too much of a compromise; it lops off a woman’s life as an individual. Yet the renunciation too is a lopping off. We choose between the frying pan and the fire- both very uncomfortable.” 

This debate rages on in the 1920s… except that it isn’t really a debate at all. Marriage has, in fact, already won it. Most college women still claim they aspire above all else to the role of wife, and overwhelmingly, they choose to quit their jobs as soon as they get married. If they don’t quit then, they definitely quit upon having children. Society is very clear on this. If you’re a wife, you probably shouldn’t work outside the home. If you’re a mother, you definitely shouldn’t. Again, we see society imposing middle-class standards on everyone, completely ignoring that many poorer mothers have to work to feed their children. 

And so, even though plenty of women are going to college, most find themselves right back where their mothers started… at home. The transition is often incredibly jarring. Elsie Frederickson, a Smith graduate, wrote, “And while I am ready to admit that I have an awfully good time with my nice husband and my little house and my silver and my funny daughters, I feel like a hopeless slacker all the time.” Unable or unwilling to join the workforce, many begin looking for other ways to utilize their degrees, either by assisting their husbands at work, volunteering, doing social work, or joining women’s clubs. And, of course, there is plenty of work to do at home. But we’ll talk more about 1920s housewife life in our next episode: for now, let’s get down to business.

WORK IT: Women with Jobs

Who are the majority of women workers? Most are from lower income, working-class families. Most are single. But some are married, especially immigrants and African American women. White middle-class women might be stymied by the question of how to have a career AND a marriage, but black women have been doing it out of necessity for centuries. More than 50% of adult black women worked in 1920; 33% of married black women are ladies of business, compared to only 6% of married white women. 

So what kinds of jobs are we doing? Although WWI destroyed the myth that women lacked the physical stamina or intellectual prowess for typically “male” jobs, most of us are still shoehorned into occupations considered most suited to women. Nursing, for example, is over 90% female, social work around ⅔rds female, and elementary/secondary school teaching 3/4ths female. The top occupations are 1) domestic service (maids and servants), 2) teachers, 3) stenographers and typewriters, 4) clerks, 5) farm laborers, 6) laundresses, 7) saleswomen 8) bookkeepers and cashiers 9) cooks and 10) farmers. 

By 1930, this list will look very similar, with two notable changes. First, laundresses would drop to the number 10 spot, thanks to the advent of the affordable washing machine. This change will affect mainly black women, as ⅔rds of black women employed in the North work as either maids, domestic servants or laundresses. These positions are often the only job option open to them, which they take up despite its many detractions. The second notable change is that in 1930, the top occupation for women will no longer be in domestic service, but working as an “operative.” AKA women working in factories, usually in apparel or textile manufacturing. Many prefer factory work over domestic service for a variety of reasons, which we’ll talk about a bit later. 

Some of these jobs have always been around, but the 1920s saw the rise of a few new occupations that attracted women in droves. Namely, the “professional” or “white collar” jobs that involved office or clerical work. Clerical work grew by over 450% in the U.S. between 1900 and 1930, by which women will hold 52% of all clerical jobs. By 1910, 77% of all stenographers and typists were women. How did they come to dominate the industry? And when did men decide they were incapable of using a typewriter? Let’s find out. 

MADAM SECRETARY: Women and Clerical Work

Before 1900, clerks were almost exclusively men, because most of the work was done in small, family-run businesses. As offices grew in size and complexity, and new technologies (like the typewriter) were invented, businesses realized that there were not enough qualified men to fill these roles, so they reluctantly began to hire women. Initially, men were dead set against employing them in offices, because they feared women would be a distraction. However will I work effectively with women swanning around? But then they realized something delightful: they only had to pay them about half as much as men. Neat! They took away the bits of the job that required critical thinking, like bookkeeping, which left female clerks with the repetitive tasks they could “handle,” like typing. Promotions were nonexistent. Employers liked to claim that women didn’t want promotions: it wasn’t in their nature to be ambitious. And obviously, we don’t need to be paid more because we don’t have a family to support. Yeah, ok. And because these clerical positions are now considered dead-end jobs with downgraded status and lower pay, few men apply to them, and it became “women’s work” because women were the only ones willing to do the work at that level of pay. Men have successfully feminized clerical work. And thus we are allowed to work alongside men, no problem…as long as we stay in these non threatening, low-paid roles. 

Most male employers actually prefer female clerks. Clerical work is considered something that  requires a woman’s touch. A female office worker is expected to dress well, have a sweet temperament, and be at her boss’ beck and call without ever demanding a raise. One employer wrote, “I pay my stenographer to work six days out of every seven and I expect her all the while to radiate my office with sunshine and sympathetic interest in the things I am trying to do.” Look nice, smile, and help out the men? Clerical work becomes socially acceptable for women because it’s a job that is uniquely compatible with what many expect of women’s behavior. That’s why these office roles are considered good for women – employers effectively advertise them as good preparation for marriage. They argue that working for a few years after college will make us better wives, rather than desex them as many social critics fear. As one male manager put it, “it will make her a companion for a brainy man– and that is worth more than anything else.” 

In the 1920’s, then, office work is considered the perfect job to do for a few years until you get married: at least that's what all the magazines say. And so, by 1930, 82% of clerical workers are single, and most are under the age of 25. In fact, male employers are very vocal about preferring younger, single women (shocker!), and many companies refuse to hire married women or require them to resign upon marriage. The faulty logic behind these sketchy practices is that a married female employee’s priority will always be her family and not her work, with one employment agent explaining, “A man wants an unmarried woman of attractive appearance… a married woman’s attitude towards men who come to the office is not the same as that of an unmarried woman.” By which I assume he means she isn’t as interested in putting up with nonsense. This attitude justifies the limited training, scanty promotions and poor pay clerical women receive. It’s convenient for employers to maintain the narrative that these jobs are just a temporary pit stop, and not a permanent career choice, rather than simply paying their female employees an equal wage. 

This all sounds deeply suspect, but being an office girl is actually a dream job for many women in the 1920s. Popular imagery glamorizes the life of office girls; it becomes the emblem of exciting middle-class womanhood. Getting outside the house, using your college degree, working alongside men in suits, and collecting a paycheck? It’s independent and sexy, even if the work is boring and the check is small. Clerical work is also appealing because it’s better paid than most work available to women, and it has better job security and higher social status than, say, being a maid. And unlike factory work, it’s mental, not manual labor, with a safe, clean working environment and shorter hours. 

That all sounds pretty good, right? Right… except these jobs aren’t open to everyone. Because popular culture portrayed clerical jobs as desirable roles for young, educated, white girls, that’s exactly who ends up getting them. Clerical workers need to be literate and numerate, so many businesses require a high school diploma, a college degree, or some sort of commercial school training (like a typing course certificate). These requirements exclude many black and immigrant women. Similarly, although telephone operator is one of the fastest growing positions of the era, (there were over 170,000 female operators by 1920), black women are largely kept out of the industry. Immigrant women are also excluded because many have accents, and operators are expected to have perfect elocution. So, you know, it’s good work, if you can get it.

WOMEN’S WORK

And what if you didn’t want to be a clerical worker? What other careers are open to you? The glamorous few are working as silent film stars, dancers, and musicians, some of whom we’ll talk about in future episodes. Writing is probably the most socially acceptable choice, and there are many female writers in the 1920s who have brilliant careers. Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Warton, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker are among the most well known; of the nine Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction awarded in the 1920s, five will go to women. Journalism is still largely a boy’s club, though, with most female journalists relegated to the advice columns or the society beat. Elizabeth Meriwhether Gilmer is a notable exception – she begins her career covering murder trials as a crime reporter before becoming wildly popular for her advice column, Dorothy Dix Talks. By the middle of the ‘20s, her hot takes on marriage and home life make her the world’s highest-paid writer.

Teaching is a female-dominated profession, the world of academia is still largely controlled by male deans and professors, who enjoy denigrating their female coworkers with gems like, “They are forever housewives or society matrons. The female dimension of their personalities is always dominant. Even in the most formal academic situations they behave more like housewives than skilled professionals. Most of them shy away from any duty or involvement that might interfere with family affairs.” Rather than work with sexist colleagues at coed universities, many professors prefer to teach at women’s colleges. Interestingly, many black coed colleges actually have more black female professors than male ones! There is a massive shortage of teachers for black public schools in the South, which are incredibly underfunded and overcrowded due to segregation laws. Thus many black women seek out higher education, hoping to become teachers. By the 1930s, black women have actually become the majority in most black colleges. Many of these women will go on to teach in local schools in their communities, but some women will continue on to receive their doctorate and become professors. One of these was Lucy Diggs Slowe, who became the first Dean of Women at Howard University in 1922. Slowe was the first black woman to serve in that position at any university in the United States, and she held it for 15 years. Slowe helped found the National Association of College Women, the Association of Advisors to Women in Colored Schools, and the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, the first sorority founded by black women. She was an outspoken leader for black female education, spoke out against gender-based salary discrimination, and demanded equal living conditions for women at Howard. Lucy was also a queer woman – she and her partner, Mary P. Burrill, a playwright and educator, lived together for 25 years, and their home became a salon for many prominent black activists. Do we all want to be friends with Lucy? Yes, I think we do.

Other female scholars preferred field work to teaching. Take Harriet Chalmers Adams, who spent years exploring South America, publishing tales of her adventurous exploits in National Geographic. She remarked, “I've wondered why men have so absolutely monopolized the field of exploration. Why did women never go to the Arctic, try for one pole or the other, or invade Africa, Thibet, or unknown wildernesses? I’ve never found my sex a hinderment; never faced a difficulty which a woman, as well as a man, could not surmount; never felt a fear of danger; never lacked courage to protect myself.” Mexican-American botanist Ynes Mexia wholeheartedly agreed – she spent the 1920s traveling all over the Americas, and eventually discovered around 500 new plant species. In 1928, anthropologist Margaret Mead will publish her renowned book, Coming of Age in Samoa, after receiving her PHD from Columbia and traveling to Samoa to study the behaviors of tribal women. 

Unfortunately, there were other fields that, while technically open to women in the ‘20s, are still incredibly difficult to pursue. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to graduate from medical school way back in 1849, but by 1930, only 4.4% of physicians in the U.S. will be women. They have little chance, given that medical schools impose a quota – female students can make up no more than 5% of a class, and few hospitals accept female interns. If you want to be a lawyer, you’re out of luck as well. By 1920, all states admitted women to the bar, and many women graduate from law school, but most firms refuse to hire female lawyers. In 1920, only 1.4% of lawyers are female, and most are forced to join their husband’s or father’s practices. The same holds true for many fields, such as business, law enforcement, government, and STEM. Colleges have no problem issuing women degrees in these areas, but employers consistently refuse to hire them. But every now and then, a woman breaks through. Edith Clarke became the first professionally employed female electrical engineer in the US in 1922. She’s the first woman to graduate from the Electrical Engineering masters program at MIT. Watch your step, ladies. There’s some broken glass up in here. 

THE WOMEN’S BUREAU: Protective Laws and Continuing Barrier

While women like Edith Clarke might have achieved their dreams at work, we ladies have to fight tooth and nail to climb in a career job, because society (aka men) are not happy about it. As banker Elizabeth Cooke wrote, “They have a terrific fear that women will eventually take the place of men.” Typical of the period, one 1925 Newark newspaper article read, “Away goes another man’s job, she’s the first of her sex to hold a Senate position.” No congratulations, then? Just shade? These men try hard to gate-keep what they see as their jobs; for example, court reporters are nearly all men, though stenographers are nearly all women. The skillset is exactly the same, but court reporting is more prestigious and higher paying. How do the men try to keep women out of it? By claiming they can’t handle the pressure of a courtroom, and that “the testimony is so revolting that the courts will not permit a woman to be present.” How convenient. 

Other excuses aren’t so precious. Sometimes employers refuse to hire women and simply blame it on the toilets. Public restrooms aren’t officially gender segregated until 1927, and there aren’t that many for women: they’re considered unnecessary in many offices or factories. Even after 1927, most buildings have far fewer women’s bathrooms than men’s, so we have to leg it several floors away from our work stations just to use the necessary. Better not to hire women at all if it means having to turn a gent’s bathroom into one meant for women. We can’t hire a girl, Kevin: after all, where will she pee

Informal discrimination practices like these make things difficult, but formal discrimination is even worse. Some states, like Michigan and Ohio, pass so-called “protective laws,” banning women from jobs that (men) have deemed too “dangerous” for them. It becomes illegal in these states for women to become: taxi drivers, pool hall workers, or bowling alley employees, all of which are positions that necessitate coming into frequent contact with men late at night. Which, as we all know, might compromise their virtue or lead them into lives of sin. It’s interesting that the “danger” these laws are trying to protect women from is men, who can’t be expected to control themselves if women are all up in their business. Got it. Ironically, the one form of protection women workers do need won’t exist until decades from now. Legal protection for pregnant workers won’t come around until 1978 in the United States; in the ‘20s, most employers will just fire pregnant women, anticipating a loss in productivity. In a desperate attempt to keep their jobs, some try to hide their conditions. Advertisements for maternity clothing feature loose styles that will help women be, “entirely free from embarrassment of a noticeable appearance during a trying period,” and presumably help them keep their jobs for longer.

When it comes to our money - the right to make it and keep it - we ladies are often at the whim of men. In 1923, whether or not you can legally open a bank account depends entirely on the state you live in, whether you’re married or single, and on the color of your skin. Most banks view us as less viable candidates for credit than our male counterparts, and they discriminate accordingly. Good luck applying for credit without a man’s signature in this decade. We’ll talk more about the history of women and their bank accounts in an upcoming bonus episode, but I can’t let this moment pass without talking a little more about our 1920s rights. 

It might seem like, like it or not, being married means more rights for us ladies in this era. But when it comes to rights and freedoms, being married presents more hindrance than help. Single women can get a passport with their maiden names, but married women are issued a joint passport with their husbands, referring to them as “the wife of” their husband’s name. And get this: before 1922, if you married a man who was not an American citizen, you automatically lost your own citizenship and were declared an enemy alien: imagine how super fun that status was during World War I! Similarly, many states ban married women from holding government jobs in the ‘20s, and the majority of school boards refuse to hire married teachers. On job applications, telephone companies seeking new operators ask women whether or not they have their husbands’ permission to be working. Clearly, progress still needed to be made.

Enter the Women’s Bureau, a federal agency established in 1920 to promote the rights and welfare of working women. It investigates working conditions in a variety of industries, gathers statistics, and publishes reports on everything from wages to working hours, which helps shape state and federal policies. The Bureau is directed for 24 years by Mary Anderson, a Swedish immigrant who started her career as a factory employee and trade union leader, fighting for safer working conditions and higher pay. Under Mary, gender-based minimum wage laws are enacted in many states, much to the chagrin of the National Women’s Party, who reject the idea of a minimum wage law for women in favor of their Equal Rights Amendment. 

The Women’s Bureau is also in favor of gender-based labor laws, or so-called protective laws, which Mary sees as the best way to protect women from being underpaid and forced to work in dangerous conditions. The Women’s Bureau supports laws like New York’s overnight law, which prohibits women from working as waitresses between 10pm and 6am (entertainers and bathroom attendants are exempt from this law after one Anna Smith takes her employer to court for firing her from her night position in 1924.) Indeed, although the Women’s Bureau supports many of these laws in the hopes they’ll make working conditions safer, oftentimes they backfire. When the Massachusetts state legislature mandated a nine-hour workday for cleaning women, on the grounds that their bodies are too delicate to handle longer hours, many employers decided not to bother changing their attitudes and instead to replace all their cleaners with men.

The Bureau is more successful in fighting to ensure that all federal government examinations (and positions) are open to women, and that reports on the earnings gap are published. But the sad truth is that a lady’s paycheck is, on average, much lower than her male counterpart. By the end of the ‘20s, white women earn 61 cents for every dollar that a white man earns. Black women earn only 20 cents for every dollar a white man earns. In factories, it’s common for white men to make about 40 cents an hour, whilst white women are paid about 25 cents for doing the same job. The idea, of course, is that men deserve more money because they have to support their whole family. Even Henry Ford, who pays his women pretty well, has a sexist reason for doing so: “I pay our women well so they can dress attractively and get married.” Thanks, I guess? 

Part of this inequity has to do with the fact that labor unions help men negotiate for higher wages, and many unions refuse to allow women to join. When unions did allow it, they often don’t take their labor issues seriously. In 1927, when Ann Washinton Craton, a union organizer, gets arrested during a strike at a factory job, the union men said, “Let her stay in jail…She’s all right. Let her stay until we can have a nice, quiet little executive board meeting without her. Then we will get her out. Ladies should stay at home. If ladies won’t stay at home, let them stay in jail.” YIKES. Female workers often have no choice but to turn to the National Women’s Trade Union League, which had been established in 1903. The Women’s Bureau works closely with the NWTUL in the 1920s to establish shorter working hours, higher pay, and safer working conditions. The NWTUL pick up the slack and support female workers on strike where other unions don’t. They also successfully fight for an 8 hour work day, the abolition of child labor, and the end of overnight work for women. They also establish summer schools to train female labor union leaders. Ladies helping ladies…we love to see it.  

conclusion

The New Woman of the 1920s was going to college and working outside of the home in ever increasing numbers, in a variety of different fields. But she was still doing so in a society that consistently underpaid and disrespected her, and that persisted in telling her that she could no longer work once she got married and had children. Even so, the working women of the 1920s were slowly but surely destroying the idea that “work” would somehow “desex” women. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman noted dryly, “If it could be shown that the women of to-day were growing beards, were changing as to pelvic bones, were developing bass voices, or that in their new activities they were manifesting the destructive energy, the brutal combative instinct, or the intense sex-vanity of the male, then there would be cause for alarm… But the one thing that has been shown in what study we have been able to make of women in industry is that they are women still, and this seems to be a surprise to many worthy souls… The "new woman" will be no less female than the "old" woman, though she has more functions, can do more things, has more intelligence.” 


20th centuryKate J. Armstrong1920s