Women's history: key events and figures

Women's History

This report aims to present my views on the fact that wage work during the late 19th and early 20th centuries have more or less reinforced women's roles within their families or more accurately, have provided an extension to their familial roles. The objective of this work is to therefore present an argument that contradicts a belief held by many historians that wage work actually enabled women to develop a new sense of individualism as well as economic independence. These liberations are supposed to have liberated women from their roles in the traditional home. The report also attempts to incorporate how the effects of race and/or ethnicity come into play in this situation.

First and foremost, the idea of wage work and non-wage work must be explored to give credence to the topic at hand. Women have traditionally been unpaid for the bulk of their work while they served in their roles as homemakers. In my opinion, that contribution could easily have been considered a form of slavery throughout history and certainly deserved some form of compensation. Without women's unpaid work throughout history, entire nation's economies could have been in jeopardy -- yet, society has always seemed to overlook the role that women played by their contribution in the home.

When women took on wage work during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the familial roles did not simply go away. Women had to work both at home while not getting paid and at the office for their pay. In other words, women still had to fulfill their traditional roles before and after normal office hours. Basically, wage work did not produce independence for women because their roles at home were not abolished because they became executives or cleaning ladies. Their responsibility for the family actually increased.

The key is to not forget that, of course, there are exceptions to all rules. Wage work did allow many women to be in a position to now decide that they did or did not want children because their careers came first. But, in the sense that families are the point of observation here, if children were in the picture and in the majority of cases, women took care of breakfast before school and dinner after school, the laundry and the bulk of the traditional family requirements.

The fact is, added income produced our modern day childcare industry and our dinners now come in the form of a TV dinner or McDonald's, but that did not change the fact that someone had to make the drop off at the local Goddard and the oven does not preheat itself or the pick up window needs to be visited. The responsibility within the family setting of doing the laundry, helping the kids do their homework, paying the bills and being around when the plumber needs to clear a drain still fell on the female gender even after wage work allowed more women into the workforce during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Economic independence seems a normal outcome when wage work is given as an option. But, the problem is that wage work often puts people into an even worse economic setting. Consider that minorities such as black or Mexican women for example were not going to get executive level positions in the majority of cases so they could only get jobs that provided a minimum wage. Thus, wage work actually put these types of women already being discriminated against for the simple fact that they were women into a work environment that could take advantage of them. Minorities could only get poor paying jobs that required long hours and awful working conditions. The hours alone added an additional burden on the existing family roles.