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Now Hiring The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900–1995 by Julia Kirk Blackwelder |
The emergence of women from the home into the workforce is one of the most important social changes of the twentieth century. In Now Hiring, historian Julia Kirk Blackwelder traces the century-long evolution of the American occupational structure and the ensuing rise in demand for female workers as society and economy shifted from Industrial Revolution to postindustrialism.
Decade by decade, Blackwelder traces the main lines of the development of the female work force and its interactions with education, family life, and social convention. Her analysis includes the differential patterns for various ethnic, racial, age, and socioeconomic groups.
Through vignettes of individual women, given context by statistical data that place them within larger patterns of work and family life, Blackwelder presents her arguments "with flesh on them." She offers a pioneering consideration of non-paid employment as part of the picture of women and work and incorporates an intriguing case study of the evolution of the Girl Scout organization. In a distinctive contribution to the study of working women, she analyzes the interaction of race, class, gender, and economic forces as part of every discussion, rather than isolating them as afterthoughts.
Portraying the larger economy as the premier driving force behind female employment, Blackwelder demonstrates that the reconfiguration of the women's labor market followed the shift of the leading sector from agriculture to manufacturing and eventually to service industries. In addition, she shows how changes in the labor market redirected female education and transformed family structures in the United States and how these changes in turn contributed to the further restructuring of job opportunities and salary structures.
Blackwelder analyzes how gender conventions have affected the employment of women: what industries would hire them, in what positions, and for what pay. She examines how entry into the labor force has gained for wives more authority within marriage but has also meant heavier responsibilities for the financial support of their families. As rising rates of separation and divorce further burdened mothers (who generally had child custody), women's economic advances paradoxically worsened their overall financial well-being.
In her conclusion, Blackwelder summarizes the effects of a century of change in women's employment and delineates the social and economic challenges that will confront women and families of the twenty-first century.
JULIA KIRK BLACKWELDER is associate dean and professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Emory University and is the author of Women of the Depression, published by Texas A&M Press in 1984, as well as many articles and book chapters on women's history.
Now Hiring
+ 0-89096-798-9 paper $22.95s
6x9. 320 pp. 24 b&w photos. Bib. Index.
Women's Studies. Labor History.
Publication Date: November 1997.
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