Ok, so here's a paper I wrote for history - take it for what it's worth...
You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!
There has never been a hotter topic of discussion with a broader range of views than that of the role of women within society. It is an issue that spans time, race, religion, and politics. It is influenced by family upbringing, history, literature, media, and personal experience. A popular ad campaign aimed at women in the 1970’s proclaimed, “You’ve come a long way, baby!” Women have certainly traveled a long road from the Victorian-influenced 1870’s to today’s modern businesswoman, encountering diverse problems and facilitating major changes in the domains of labor, domesticity, and personal freedoms.
Women in the workforce have been a sensitive area for the last two centuries. Most women married young and kept a house and family in the early to mid 1800’s. Some women filled jobs as teacher, shop clerks, and domestic servants while many worked from their homes taking in laundry and sewing. As technology advanced, women became typists and secretaries. Immigration and urbanization brought women to factories and sweatshops performing jobs such as seamstress and mill workers. The wage for women workers was low compared to the men. Often work available to women involved poor working conditions such as no ventilation, sitting for hours upon hours, no personal time due to long shifts, back-breaking duties, and a general lack of respect as a human being with human needs.
One young domestic servant in the 1880’s comments on her employment, “My trouble was, no conscience as to hours; …she had no more thought for me than if I had been a machine (Johnson, p. 66).” A paper-box factory worker gives her view, “It’s freedom that we want when the day’s work is done…Our day is ten hours long, but when it’s done it’s done, and we can do what we like with the evenings (Johnson, p. 65).” Long hours, unsatisfactory working conditions, low pay, and feelings of inferiority combined to make the working woman’s world dismal in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s.
A lack of education often reduced women to taking low-paying, menial jobs. Girls were fortunate to finish any type of higher education at all. Until the 1960’s, many universities still refused to accept female students. Betty Friedan writes in the 1966 National Organization for Women statement of purpose, “We believe that it is as essential for every girl to be educated to her full potential of human ability as it is for every boy…we consider the decline in the proportion of women receiving higher and professional education to be evidence of discrimination (Johnson, p. 270).” She goes on to describe this discrimination as taking the forms of admissions quotas, lack of parental and educator support, and denial of loans and fellowships (Johnson, p. 270).
Despite a lack of education, the labor force experienced an influx of women as the country entered World Wars I and II. As men went overseas to fight for freedom, their jobs in heavy machinery work were filled by their mothers, wives, and sisters. Nicknamed “Rosie the Riveter” during World War II, women did their duty and picked up the slack at home, gaining a new-found confidence and respect not only from the country but from government as well. As a reward for their hard work during World War I, President Woodrow Wilson “gave his support to suffrage, calling the amendment ‘vital to winning the war’…In 1919, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the vote…(Roark, p. 803).” Although women would have to give up their wartime jobs when their men returned home, this new confidence grew throughout the decades as women undertook the cause of equal rights, finally seeing change in labor policy with President Johnson’s passage of President Kennedy’s Equal Pay Act in 1963 and his own Civil Rights Act in 1964, which banned segregation on the basis of race, gender, nationality, and religion.
Armed with new legislation, women continued to advance in the workforce and in education, excelling and making history as educators, astronauts, CEO’s, Supreme Court Justices, and government officials. 1984 saw the United State’s first woman Vice-Presidential candidate in Democrat Geraldine Ferraro, and 2008 found its second in Republican Sarah Palin, as well as Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was the first woman seriously considered for the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. No doubt, the upcoming decades will produce this nation’s first woman president. However, as women have conquered the work force over the years, their victories have come at a high price, one that spurns another debate about a woman’s true place – at work or at home?
Domestically, the role of women has continued to evolve and change over the last century. Steeped in Victorian ideals, a woman’s place was traditionally in the home, taking care of her husband and children. Not only was this a social pressure, it was a moral and sometimes religious pressure as well. The roaring 1920’s birthed a new kind of woman, one who burst on the scene with shockingly short hemlines and hair – she was the flapper. With no regard for cultural boundaries, this new woman found new freedom in her social life, her sex life, and in her home life. Women were able to smoke in public and drink in speak-easies, go out on dates, live alone before marriage and control family size with birth control, and found her domestic chores lightened a little by new technologies of electric refrigerators, washers, and irons. But even though women were freer in a sense, they still felt a pressure, as World War II ended, to fulfill the cultural responsibilities of their gender.
Some saw this issue as the next Great War in America. Willard Waller states, “The battles in the coming war on women will be three: the battle for jobs, the battle of the birth rate, and the battle of personal ascendancy (Johnson, p. 205).” He goes on to assert that women must give up their wartime jobs and get back to women’s work, give up their reproductive rights in order to boost the population with “fit” citizens, and give up status within their marriages, subjecting themselves to the domination of their husbands (Johnson, p. 206-207).
It seemed this war of the sexes was all but lost during the 1950’s as the role model for women shifted to middle-class suburbia. The perfect woman was a slave to her family, keeping a spotless household and raising well-behaved, robotic children, while sporting the latest fashions and being a gracious hostess. However, the plight of women’s drudgery was still alive and expressed by Edith Stern in 1949. “One much stressed point is that satisfaction every good woman feels in creating a home for her dear ones. Well, probably every good woman does feel it, perhaps because she has had it so drummed into her that if she does not, she is not a good woman (Johnson, p. 232).” She also states, “As long as the institution of housewifery in its present form persists, both ideologically and practically it blocks any true liberation of women. The vote, the opportunity for economic independence, and the right to smoke cigarettes are all equally superficial veneers over a deep-rooted, ages-old concept of keeping woman in her place (Johnson, p. 234).”
This underlying tension towards domesticity continued into the 1960’s with the formation of NOW, the National Organization for Women. NOW championed the cause of women’s freedom from cultural stereotypes through education, new social institutions such as job training and national daycare for children, stronger images in the mass media, and an equal partnership between men and women through sharing the responsibilities of home, children, and financial burdens (Johnson, p. 269-271). Today, there are many more options available to women. Over the last forty years, our society has accepted women choosing the workplace over homemaking and in some ways has demanded it. Most families are supported by two incomes, and in some families the men are opting to either stay at home or work at home to be with their children. The irony of women’s rights domestically is in the area of choice – women wanted away from the home, but when that goal was reached, many corporate women decided they really did value home and family after all. It seems that women truly want it all – work, home, and family. More and more single women are opting to have children without a husband or father figure of any type. Whether this independence will advance women’s rights and liberation or be a detriment to society remains to be seen.
As women have found domestic freedom, they have also achieved levels of personal freedoms in the form of major government legislation. The right to vote through the Nineteenth Amendment was birthed through the blood, sweat, and tears of thousands of brave, determined suffragettes. The passage of the Equal Pay Act and Civil Rights Act were long-overdue rewards for hard-working laborers. The controversial Equal Rights Amendment of 1972, although never ratified, brought with it new awareness of women’s issues as well as legislation on state and local levels that promoted rights for rape victims, battered women and children, and abortion (Roark, p. 1055). In fact, the abortion issue has continued to be the most volatile women’s issue of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
“In 1973, the Supreme Court issued the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, ruling that the Constitution protects the right to abortion, which states cannot prohibit in the early stages of pregnancy (Roark, p. 1055).” This case continues to be at the center of political debates. Religious Right radicals have protested and even bombed abortion clinics. The Liberal Left has instituted programs giving away condoms to schoolchildren. Those in the middle argue over abstinence education and adoption. However, the issue for most women is not rights of the unborn or murder, but it is an issue of choice and control over reproductive rights. Roe v. Wade was an important victory for feminists, yet if examined closely, the emotional effects of abortion have ravaged the hearts and minds of many women. Will the next big legislation for women be some sort of change to Roe v. Wade? Only time will tell.
The evolution of women’s roles from homemaker to corporate businesswoman has come to an amalgamation of both career and motherhood. We have definitely traveled a long road full of exhilarating victories and heart-wrenching disappointments. But has the price women have paid been too high? Have we achieved our goals of equality and personal ascendancy by sacrificing our family values? These questions may never truly be answered. Each generation will testify to this end itself. As women – mothers, daughters, and sisters – we can only press on towards higher callings and pray those that follow can do the same with freedom, liberty, and equality.
