Learning Module 3 – Activity One
History 101[1]
The Great Depression and the New Deal:
Women, Work, and Discrimination by Race and Gender
General
Information:
·
Assessment: 20 pts.
Process:
Documents: Included
in this activity
Website: Women,
Work, and Discrimination by Race and Gender
Fueled
by massive male unemployment, the right of married women to work became
problematic during the Depression. As noted by Ruth Shallcross, many married women lost their jobs. The government
and private sector preferred to hire men. Gallup polls revealed that an
overwhelming majority of Americans believed that married women should stay
home, and that their employment took jobs away from men. Professional women, in
particular, found diminished opportunity. Even women in traditionally female
fields like teaching were affected as school districts fired married women and
hired men instead.
The
popular perception that working women deprived men of employment obscured the
reality of the sex-segregated labor market. In most cases, men and women did
not compete for the same jobs. The Depression hit the male preserve of heavy
industry with extreme force. Many married women scrambled to find work because
their husbands faced chronic unemployment. In fact, low paid
"women's" service and clerical positions continued to grow despite
the Depression. Among employed women the percentage of married women working
rose.
As
both Meridel Le Sueur and Louise Mitchell reported, millions of
desperately poor white and African-American women lived on the edge of
disaster. Generally barred by race from factory work and other occupations,
African-American domestic workers experienced some of the most desperate
economic conditions during the period. For at least some of these impoverished
women New Deal relief programs meant the difference between survival and
starvation. However, class, race and gender biases also pervaded New Deal
policies. Employed mainly as farm and domestic laborers, neither African- nor
Mexican-American workers would benefit from the old age provisions of the
Social Security Act, which failed to cover, as had the National Recovery Act,
this type of work. African-American women like Pinkie Pilcher wrote letters to President Franklin Roosevelt
protesting against the racist practices of white Southerners that prevented
impoverished African Americans from obtaining Federal aid.
In
contrast to the bleak conditions poor women faced, women social reformers found
a welcome reception in the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt. At
the top level of government, a more significant female presence existed than in
all previous administrations. With ties to the
Progressive era reform, these women clustered around Eleanor Roosevelt and
Frances Perkins, who, as Secretary of Labor became the first woman in U.S.
history to receive a cabinet-level appointment. Compassionate and responsive,
Eleanor Roosevelt personified the administration's concern for the victims of
economic disaster. Active in the promotion of racial justice, she supported the
anti-lynching effort of the NAACP. Eleanor Roosevelt also secured an administrative
appointment for noted African-American educator Mary McLeod Bethune, who helped
widen employment opportunities for minority youth. The commitment of New Deal
women to ameliorate suffering resulted in the Social Security Act's provision
for aid to dependent women and their children. Democratic party activist and
reformer Molly Dewson became the first woman to serve on the Social Security
Board.
The government's commitment to welfare
created new opportunities for women in the field of social work. In line with
the earlier tradition of women's voluntary settlement house work, the
female-designated area of social work widened employment opportunities without
challenging a traditional male occupation. As in other women's fields, gender
bias kept the status and pay scale in social work low.
It is also noteworthy that women also acted politically through community and
state organizations. For example, led by Jess Daniel Ames, women living in
southern states organized the Association
of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching and lobbied with their male
counterparts to end this terror tactic against African American men. Equally
worth noting, Franklin Roosevelt refused to propose a national law that would
make lynching a crime, as shown in Eleanor Roosevelt’s letter to Walter White.
Ruth
Shallcross, Shall Married Women Work (1936):
RUTH SHALLCROSS, Shall Married Women Work?
(1936) [3][2]
As this document reveals, a majority of Americans believed that
married women should not work. Both government and the private sector developed
employment policies that excluded married female workers. In part, this
discriminatory treatment expressed the traditional view that married women
belonged at home taking care of their families. However, many married women
sought work because their unemployed husbands could no longer provide for their
families. In what fields did married women face the greatest discrimination?
Legislative Action
Within the last few years, bills have been
introduced in the legislatures of twenty-six states against married woman
workers. Only one of these passed. This was in Louisiana, and it was later
repealed. Six other states have either joint resolutions or governors' orders
restricting married women's right to work. Three other states have made a
general practice of prohibiting married women from working in public employment
...
Extent of Discrimination
The National Federation of Business and
Professional Women's Clubs made a survey early in 1940 of local employment
policies. This was part of a general study which assembled all materials
relating to the employment of married women. The survey shows that married
women are most likely to find bars against them if they seek jobs as school
teachers, or as office workers in public utilities or large manufacturing
concerns. Only a very small number of department stores refuse jobs to married
women. However, in 1939, the Department Store Economist reported that the
sentiment against married women "is growing stronger." Opposition, it
was found, came from customers, labor organizations, women's clubs, and
miscellaneous groups of the unemployed. Despite this opposition, "nearly
all stores are either doubtful whether it would be a wise plan to announce
publicly a policy against hiring or retaining married women, or believe it
would not be helpful to public relations," This attitude may reflect the
fact that married women's employment has been advantageous to department stores
because the necessary part-time arrangements suited both parties well. Single
women usually want full-time employment, but many married women prefer to work
only a few hours each day....
Kinds of Bars
The bars against married women are of
different kinds-all of which exist for some school teachers. They may take the
form of refusal to hire married women (the most frequent), of dismissal upon
marriage, delay in granting promotion, or actual demotion, and either permanent
or temporary dismissal when pregnant. Discrimination is often difficult to
detect; a married woman may assume that her marriage is the cause of her
inability to hold a job, or to get a new one, when the real reason may lie in
her lack of ability, personality, or training.
The National Education Association has
from time to time made surveys of employment policies in local communities with
respect to married women teachers. Its material is more complete than any
other. Its survey, made in 1931, revealed that 77 percent of the cities
reporting made a practice of not employing married women as new teachers, and
63 percent dismissed women teachers upon marriage. Tenure acts protect married
teachers from being dismissed in some states. But although tenure acts may
protect teachers who marry after being employed, they do not assure a new
teacher that marriage will not be a bar to getting a job, The National
Education Association reported in 1939 that teachers in at least thirteen
states are legally protected by court decisions from being dismissed for being
married. Kentucky seems to be the only state where the contract of marriage is
deemed "the very basis of the whole fabric of society" and hence is
not an obstacle to employment. ...
Studies show that men have been affected
by unemployment to a much greater extent than have women, because unemployment
has been more acute in the heavy industries (steel, oil, mining, etc.) where
men are mostly employed.... The administrative and clerical jobs connected with
these industries, which are partially filled by women, have not been eliminated
to anything like the same degree as production jobs.
Consumer and service industries (textile,
food, beauty parlors, telephone service, to name only a few), where women are
mostly to be found, were not affected seriously as heavy industries by the
Depression. The government's recovery measures, based on artificially
increasing purchasing power, chiefly stimulated the consumer and service
industries, thus opening up relatively more opportunities for women than men.
As a result, women have fared better than men in getting new jobs....
State and federal employment offices also
give evidence of the relative ease with which women have obtained jobs compared
with men, and indicate that men have been unemployed for longer periods of time
than have women. One study of a community of 14,000 people in the West makes
this point specific. Women's work in the town increased during the early years
of the Depression in the needle trades and textiles, as well as in the service
occupations, while men's work in glass declined sharply. Another study in a
steel town showed much the same thing. Few of the people who oppose married
women's employment seem to realize that a coal miner or steel worker cannot
very well fill the jobs of nursemaids, cleaning women, or the factory and
clerical occupations now filled by women. Unhappily, men accustomed to work in
the heavy industries have not been able to fill the jobs in consumer and
service industries. Retraining of these men has been practically negligible,
and could not have been done in time to benefit them immediately. Expenditures
for defense are now once more increasing opportunities in heavy industries, so
we may expect to see a fundamental change in the situation in the coming
months.
Meridel Le
Sueur, The Despair of Unemployed Women (1932). This writing is part of Le Sueur’s article, “Women on the
Breadlines.” It was publishing in New
Masses, which was left-wing, socialist magazine.
MERIDEL LE SUEUR, The Despair of
Unemployed Women (1932)[4][3]
Born in Iowa in 1900, Le Sueur was a journalist, poet and
novelist. This document is an eyewitness account of the desperation of
unemployed women seeking domestic work. New Deal legislation addressed the
needs of unemployed men, but unemployed women who were responsible for their
own survival were a forgotten segment of the population. What life experiences
do these women share? Would they benefit from any New Deal programs?'
I am sitting in the city free employment
bureau. It's the women's section. We have been sitting here now for four hours.
We sit here every day, waiting for a job. There are no jobs. Most of us have
had no breakfast. Some have had scant rations for over a year. Hunger makes a
human being lapse into a state of lethargy, especially city hunger. Is there any
place else in the world where a human being is supposed to go hungry amidst
plenty without an outcry, without protest, where only the boldest steal or kill
for bread, and the timid crawl the streets, hunger like the beak of a terrible
bird at the vitals?
We sit looking at the floor. No one dares
think of the coming winter. There are only a few more days of summer. Everyone
is anxious to get work to lay up something for that long siege of bitter cold.
But there is no work. Sitting in the room we all know it. That is
why we don't talk much. We look at the
floor dreading to see that knowledge in each other's eyes. There is a kind of
humiliation in it. We look away from each other. We look at the floor. It's too
terrible to see this animal terror in each other's eyes.
So we sit hour after hour, day after day,
waiting for a job to come in. There are many women for a single job. A thin
sharp woman sits inside a wire cage looking at a book. For four hours we have
watched her looking at that book. She has a hard little eye. In the small bare
room there are half a dozen women sitting on the benches waiting. Many come and
go. Our faces are all familiar to each other, for we wait here every day.
This is a domestic employment bureau. Most
of the women who come here are middle-aged, some have families, some have
raised their families and are now alone, some have men who are out of work.
Hard times and the man leaves to hunt for work. He doesn't find it. He drifts
on. The woman probably doesn't hear from him for a long time. She expects it.
She isn't surprised. She struggles alone to feed the many mouths. Sometimes she
gets help from the charities. If she's clever she can get herself a good living
from the charities, if she's naturally a lickspittle, naturally a little docile
and cunning. If she's proud then she starves silently, leaving her children to
find work, coming home after a day's searching to wrestle with her house, her
children.
Some such story is written on the faces of
all these women. There are young girls, too, fresh from the country. Some are
made brazen too soon by the city. There is a great exodus of girls from the
farms into the city now. Thousands of farms have been vacated completely in
Minnesota. The girls are trying to get work. The prettier ones can get jobs in
the stores when there are any, or waiting on table, but these jobs are only for
the attractive and the adroit. The others, the real peasants, have a more
difficult time.
Bernice sits next to me. She is a Polish
woman of thirty-five. She has been working in people's kitchens for fifteen
years or more. She is large, her great body in mounds, her face brightly
scrubbed. She has a peasant mind and finds it hard even yet to understand the
maze of the city, where trickery is worth more than brawn. Her blue eyes are
not clever but slow and trusting. She suffers from loneliness and lack of talk.
When you speak to her, her face lifts and brightens as if you had spoken
through a great darkness, and she talks magically of little things as if the
weather were magic, or tells some crazy tale of her adventures on the city
streets, embellishing them in bright colors until they hang heavy and thick
like embroidery. She loves the city anyhow. ! It’s exciting to her, like a
bazaar. She loves to go shopping and get a bargain, hunting out the places
where stale bread and cakes can be had for a few cents. She likes walking the
streets looking for men to take her to picture shows. Sometimes she goes to
five picture shows in one day, or she sits through one the entire day until she
knows all the dialogue by heart.
She came to the city a young girl from a
Wisconsin farm. The first thing that happened to her, a charlatan dentist took
out all her good shining teeth and the fifty dollars she had saved working in a
canning factory. After that she met men in the park who told her how to look
out for herself, corrupting her peasant mind, teaching her to mistrust
everyone. Sometimes now she forgets to mistrust everyone and gets taken in.
They taught her to get what she could for nothing, to count her change, to go
back if she found herself cheated, to demand her rights.
She lives alone in little rooms. She
bought seven dollars' worth of secondhand furniture eight years ago. She rents
a room for perhaps three dollars a month in an attic, sometimes a cold house.
Once the house where she stayed was condemned and everyone else moved out, and
she lived there all winter alone on the top floor. She spent only twenty-five
dollars all winter.
She wants to get married but she sees what
happens to her married friends, left with children to support, worn out before
their time. So she stays single. She is virtuous. She is slightly deaf from
hanging out clothes in winter. She had done people's washings and cooking for
fifteen years and in that time saved thirty dollars. Now she hasn't worked
steady for a year and she has spent the thirty dollars. She had dreamed of
having a little house or a houseboat perhaps with a spot of ground for a few
chickens. This dream she will never realize.
She has lost all her furniture now along
with the dream. A married friend whose husband is gone gives her a bed for
which she pays by doing a great deal of work for the woman. She comes here
every day now, sitting bewildered, her pudgy hands folded in her lap. She is
hungry. Her great flesh has begun to hang in folds. She has been living on
crackers. Sometimes a box of crackers lasts a week. She has a friend who's a
baker and he sometimes steals the stale loaves and brings them to her.
A girl we have seen every day all summer
went crazy yesterday at the Y.W. She went into hysterics, stamping her feet and
screaming.
She hadn't had work for eight months.
"You've got to give me something," she kept on saying. The woman in
charge flew into a rage that probably came from days and days of suffering on
her part, because she is unable to give jobs, having none. She flew into a rage
at the girl and there they were facing each other in a rage, both helpless,
helpless. This woman told me once that she could hardly bear the suffering she
saw, hardly hear it, that she couldn't eat sometimes and had nightmares at
night.
So they stood there, the two women in a
rage, the girl weeping and the woman shouting at her. ...
Pinkie
Pilcher, Letter to President Roosevelt (1936)
PINKIE PILCHER, Letter to
President Roosevelt (1936) [5]
During the Great Depression local communities administered Federal
relief assistance. In the South, African Americans, representing some of the
nation's most desperate, found white administrators adopting a pro-white color
line for distributing relief. An impoverished black woman wrote the following
letter to President Franklin Roosevelt. Not only a plea for help, the letter
also informs the Federal government of the racist practices that added to the
African-American struggle for survival. What examples does the writer give of
the unfair practices that made it impossible for her to get help? What role did
white women play? In what ways did poor whites benefit from Federal aid?
117 Ash St.
Greenwood, Miss.
Dec. 23, 1936
President Roosevelt
Dear Sir:
We are wondering what is going to become
of this large number of widow women with and without children. These white
women at the head of the PWA are still letting we colored women when we go to
the office to be certified for work to go hunt washings....
I was in the office a few days ago. A
woman was there she had five children and a husband not able to work. They told
her to go hunt washings.... The white people don’t pay anything for their washing.
She can’t do enough washing to feed her family. I was reading an article in the
paper enquiring why colored men did not show up on WPA projects in some places.
You all are not down here. So you have to take these white people word....
I know we have had men here in Greenwood
to walk [to the relief office] several weeks then white women and men would
tell them come back tomorrow come back Monday. Finally they would say what are
you Nigers [sic] keep on coming up here for. We can’t take on any more go hunt
you some work. Then they will write you all our men and women can’t be found.
Good many of our men have told me they would eat grass like a cow and drink
water before they would go back to any of the relief offices, let them white
people dog them again. We have old people can’t get any help. If the old people
go, they will say go to your children if the children go to the relief they
will tell them we can’t take on any more. Like my father is old. Last week he
came to me for help. He is on relief but can’t get nothing. He lives in Carroll
County.
. . . can’t get work. I could not help him
and he can’t help me. I was at the coat house last week said to be the “colored
people day to get cloth.” They had about a dozen gowns at the coat house in a
little draw they give the real old men and women one gown. I saw that with my
own eyes if you all keep on sending cloth here these white people will have enough
to last the next century. They are making themselves whole.
Now about a month ago they employed two
white women, one to sit at the coat house. [She] then employed another under
her [whose job was] to come visit the colored people. The money you all payout
for poor white women visiting the colored people you could throw it in the
river or in the fire for what it do us....
I visit my sick people because I feel like
it is my duty. The white woman got mad with me because she thought I was taking
note of how they was being treated. Come to my house to raise a fuss. Told me I
better not take any note of the sick people she visit, if I did what she was
going to do....
Louise
Mitchell, Slave Markets in New York City (1940)
LOUISE MITCHELL, Slave Markets in New York
City (1940) [6][5]
The journalist Louise Mitchell, who wrote
this account, compared the exploitation of African-American domestics to that
of slaves. For the majority of African-American women, domestic employment was
their sole means of survival. In major cities throughout the nation, desperate
women stood on sidewalks waiting for white women to employ them. The extremely
low pay and long hours that characterized domestic employment illustrate how
class and race have divided women. Why did Mitchell describe African-American
women wage earners as the nation's "most oppressed group"?
Every morning, rain or shine, groups of
women with brown paper bags or cheap suitcases stand on street comers in the
... bargain for their labor.
They come as early as 7 in the morning,
wait as late as four in the afternoon with the hope that they will make enough
to buy supper when they go home. Some have spent their last nickel to get to
the comer and are in desperate need. When the hour grows later, they sit on
boxes if any are around. In the afternoon their labor is worth only half as much
as in the morning. If they are lucky, they get about 30 cents an hour
scrubbing, cleaning, laundering, washing windows, waxing floors and woodwork
all day long; in the afternoon, when most have already been employed, they are
only worth the degrading sum of 20 cents an hour.
Once hired on the "slave
market," the women often find after a day's backbreaking toil, that they
worked longer than was arranged, got less than was promised, were forced to
accept clothing instead of cash and were exploited beyond human endurance. Only
the urgent need for money makes them submit to this routine daily.
Throughout the county, more than two
million women are engaged in domestic work, the largest occupational group for
women. About half are Negro women...
Though many Negro women work for as little
as two dollars a week and as long as 80 hours a week ... they have no social
security, no workmen’s' compensation, no old age security....
The Women's Bureau in Washington points
out that women take domestic work only as a last resort. Largely unprotected by
law, they find themselves at the mercy of an individual employer. Only two
states, Wisconsin and Washington, have wage or hour legislation. But
enforcement is very slack. ...
The tradition of street corner markets is
no new institution in this city. As far back as 1834, the statute books show a
place was set aside on city streets, where those seeking work could meet with
those who wanted workers. This exchange also functions for male workers.... At
present, markets flourish in the Bronx and Brooklyn, where middle class
families live. However, this method of employment is also instituted in
Greenwich Village, Richmond and Queens....
The prosperity of the nation can only be
judged by the living standards of its most oppressed group. State legislatures
must pass laws to protect the health and work of the domestic. A world of
education is still needed, both for employees and employers.
Many civic and social organizations are
now working toward improving conditions of domestics. Outstanding among these
is the Bronx Citizens Committee for Improvement of Domestic Employees. The YWCA
and many women's clubs are interested in the problem. Mayor LaGuardia ... must
be forced to end these horrible conditions of auction block hiring with the
most equitable solution for the most oppressed section of the working
class-Negro women.
[1]
Created: fall 2007; updated: 10/16/2011
[2]] From Women and the
National Experience, 2nd edition, an anthology of primary
sources by Ellen Skinner. Minor
modifications made to the introduction by Susan Oliver.
[3]
*From Ruth Shallcross, "Shall Married
Women Work?" National Federation of Business and Professional Women's
Clubs, Public Affairs Pamphlet No. 40, New York, 1936. Reprinted by permission
of Business Professional Women/USA, Washington, D.C.
[4] From Meridel Le Sueur, "Women on the Breadlines."
Originally published in New Masses, January 1932. Reprinted by permission.
[5] From Pinkie Pilcher, "Letter to President
Roosevelt," December 23, 1936. From the WPA Collection of the Manuscript
Division of the Moorland-Spingam Research Center, Howard University. Reprinted
by permission.
[6]
"From Louise Mitchell, "Slave
Markets Typify Exploitation of Domestics," Daily Worker, May 5, 1940.
Reprinted by permission of Long View Publishing.