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- The prevailing response to what was soon seen
as a crisis in the family was a surge
of institutional support for families.
Marital clinics, child guidance clinics,
parent education, birth control,
and maternal and infant hygiene all drew attention.
The first marital clinic opened it's doors
in Los Angeles in 1930.
But it was quickly followed by programs in many states
that led, finally, to the National Conference
on Family Relations in 1938.
All these programs drew attention to the break down
of traditional family functions.
It was, said the expert,
only one remaining role for the family
to provide happiness for mates and to raise the young.
Traditionalists interpreted this remaining function
as a mandate for women to stay in families
to help them develop sufficient affective
and inner strength to withstand economic buffeting.
Changing attitudes turned what had been
a joyous discovery of freedom to work
for women of the 1920s into a bitter debate
over who had the right to a job.
The issue was no longer one of individual satisfaction
or autonomy but of how to participate
in resolving a larger set of social issues.
If there were relatively few jobs to be had then,
went the common wisdom, those jobs should go
to those who needed to support families.
Married women, it was thought, really had two jobs.
And in their households there were two incomes
instead of one shared income.
This, thought many, was fundamentally unfair.
Married women with working husbands should never be hired.
Virulent opposition to married women who earned wages
emerged early in the depression years and spread rapidly.
But married women were not the only victims.
In some sense, need, as opposed to ambition
or work satisfaction or qualifications for the job
was the criterion by which the 1930s measured women
who sought to earn wages.
A woman who didn't need a job,
who didn't need to support a family should stay at home.
But the broad popular consensus agreed,
that women's work should be conditioned,
not by her own needs but by those of her family.
The slogan that a woman's place is in the home
became once again popular.
The wage work of married women, it was thought,
would jeopardize family life.
It would deny women sufficient time
to cultivate womanly arts
and to care for their children.
Barring the threat of starvation or eviction,
women who could not or did not stay home
with their children would, it was thought,
raise incorrigible truants and thieves.
She had an obligation to remain at home, moreover,
because venturing into the workforce was selfish,
depriving needy women and men of jobs
and their husbands of companionship.
At least that was the thought as the idea
of economic need rationalized who might legitimately
be entitled to work.
Predictably, those ideas had economic consequences.
Most auto companies, by the early part of the 1930s,
had adopted the Ford company's plan
to pay married working men a five dollar a day wage.
You'll remember that was a pretty good wage in the 1920s.
One sufficient to support a family.
Single men might be hired if they had marriage in view
or were supporting elderly parents.
But the company required wives of those
who earned five dollars a day to stay at home.
This worked fine in a decade of prosperity.
When the Ford Motor Company reduced hours
for men in the 1930s,
some wives decided to find jobs.
Not long after, the company simply fired
all its female workers.
It wanted turnover among women, had paid women less,
it could not afford to keep women,
who by virtue of seniority,
would begin to earn higher wages.
Neither did it want to pay them a family wage.
As a result, it was easier to fire
both, married, and single women.
The married women went first.
General Motors followed suit, firing married,
divorced, and widowed women in that order
before it determined to dismiss
or retain the women they wanted on the basis
of company need rather than on the basis of marital status.
GM did so by simply accusing women
it didn't want to keep on any longer of inefficiency
or lack of cooperation.
The electrical industry, which had expanded dramatically
in the 1920s by employing large numbers
of mostly single women,
began in 1930 to dismiss women
who it deemed to be adequately supported by parents.
It dismissed married women as well.
One famous set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant
in Chicago, revealed that women argued
over the marriage distinction.
In the view of women working in the company,
the company had an obligation to protect anyone,
married or single, responsible for supporting a family.
But in fairness, they argued,
married women with working husbands
should be the first to go.
Such a policy was difficult to enforce.
Some women who married during the course
of their employment simply hid their marriages.
A few got divorced or moved into separate residences
from their husbands in order to keep their jobs.
In 1932, the federal government passed
an economy act designed to save money.
Section 213 of that act argued that in case
of retrenchment, employers,
including the federal government,
should dismiss people whose spouses were employed
by the government.
The law was ostensibly gender-neutral.
But in practice, the one spouse designated
to lose a job was invariably the lesser earning spouse.
Almost always the female partner of a male employee.
Hundreds of women were in fact dismissed
under the Federal Economy Act
before section 213 was rescinded in 1937.
In the same years, teachers and government employees
at the municipal and state levels
were routinely dismissed if they were discovered
to be married.
Clauses denying municipal governments the right
to hire married women prevailed everywhere.
And in private industry this was true, too.
These policies drew general approval.
Informal pressure, especially on married women
to give up their jobs, was everywhere to be seen
and everywhere admired.
The women's magazine carried articles
from some women who declared, "You can have my job,"
a feminist discovers her home,
Such articles suggested the return of the leisured woman
who valued her duties at home above those of wage labor.
Harper's Magazine, in 1933, published a piece
by the critic Norman Cousins
who declared that women were home-minded.
They were opposed to anything
that tends towards preserving the family,
against anything that might weaken the family,
or the traditional unit of our civilization,
Cousin's argued.
Depression unemployment, he argued,
could be solved simply by removing the 10 million
women, then working in the labor force, from their jobs.
After all, he said, if those 10 million women were fired,
there would be 10 million jobs for unemployed men.
Of course, he was wrong about this.
Men and women simply didn't move smoothly
into each other's jobs.
But his arguments suggest something of the irrational anger
that surrounded women who took jobs.
In fact, women managed to keep their jobs
in much larger numbers than anyone had imagined they would.
Despite public policy, women's employment numbers
inched up slightly during the depression.
They'd been a little more than 24% of all workers in 1930.
By 1940, they had passed 25% of all workers.
And though the wages of both men and women
fell in the early depression years,
women's wages did not fall as fast as those of men.
Even as the manufacturing sector declined,
the sectors that employed women expanded.
And this was particularly true
in the new federal bureaucracies that were created
by the New Deal as well as in municipal government
and other areas.
Employers in those areas needed low wage workers
and happily paid lip service to the family wage ideal
for male workers even as they filled their jobs
with women.
And women, for their part, grabbed jobs that they needed
in order to support their families.