Throughout history, women across the world have played an invaluable role in supplying businesses, services, and goods. Countries who empower women in their economies see greater economic growth and success in all sectors. Without women in the economy, global and regional economic realities would look very different.

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Prior to the Industrial Revolution in the United States, the household was considered the center of production in society. Both men and women had important roles to play in keeping the household running successfully. However, as industrialization emerged in the US and men increasingly began to work outside the household, the work women did at home became more and decreasingly valued, despite the important role it played in keeping the economy afloat behind. Although the Industrial Revolution saw more women working in the manufacturing sector, the dominant ideology was that women should work in the home and domestic work was very time consuming.

Women's jobs varied considerably by race and class. Respectable work was really only available to educated middle class women, which included teaching, writing, and nursing. American women from working class families found gainful employment in factories, thanks to technological innovations that allowed for mass production, especially in the food and textile industries. Factory work sometimes offered higher wages than domestic work, so young women sought factory jobs. This wasn’t always the case though. Some factories paid women very little, so their entire family had to work to survive. Some cities offered better paid jobs as domestics compared to other southern cities, so women did the math and did domestic work. Women of color found limited opportunities for work in the factories; thus they primarily worked in domestic service or owned their own businesses. Although essential to the mills, women were paid less, worked long hours, and efforts to improve their condition were thwarted not only by their bosses and the male dominated government, but also by other male unions that worked to protect their wages at the expense of women workers. But women, of course, fought back.

 

One of the best ways women could earn a wage in the first half of the 19th century was as a teacher and writer, especially on topics of moral importance. Female teachers were held to strict moral standards and expected to maintain a respectable image. They were often subjected to moral scrutiny and faced societal pressures regarding their appearance, conduct, and personal relationships. Any behavior deemed inappropriate or deviating from expected norms could result in criticism or dismissal. Female teachers received significantly lower salaries compared to their male counterparts. They were often paid less for performing the same job, reflecting the prevalent gender-based wage discrimination of the time. This wage disparity persisted despite women's qualifications and experience. Men typically occupied administrative roles and held higher-paying positions, while women were predominantly employed as lower-paid teachers in primary schools (this remains true today).

 

Teaching was often viewed as a temporary occupation for unmarried women, seen to acquire some income or secure future marriage prospects. Female teachers were required to sign contracts that included "marriage clauses" which stipulated that they must resign if they got married. Such restrictions were intended to ensure that married women would prioritize their domestic duties and conform to societal expectations. Once married, it was expected that female teachers would leave the profession to focus on their roles as wives and mothers. This perception reinforced the notion that teaching was not a long-term career path for women and justified their lower pay. As a result, their authority was sometimes questioned or undermined due to societal beliefs about women's perceived weaknesses and inability to exert control over students, particularly older boys.

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Educated women also wrote poetry, children’s stories, advice, columns, for other women, and novels. Sarah Josepha Hale became the editor of Godey's Lady's Book after her husband died in order to provide for her children. She was famous for authoring "Mary had a Little Lamb," and writing an advice column to women, in which she ironically told them not to have ambition and to keep to the home. Of course, she herself wrote widely, and had a very public life. In fact, many of these women who became published, are noted for their enthusiasm for promoting a proper woman’s place.

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Women also became journalists and reported on everything from society to war. One of the most famous American journalists of the period was Margaret Fuller. Fuller wrote about abolition and was a war correspondent. Fuller sought to challenge traditional gender roles and expand opportunities for women. She emphasized the importance of women's education and their active participation in society. In her influential book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845, Fuller examined the social, political, and cultural constraints placed on women and called for their liberation and equality. Tragically, Margaret Fuller's life was cut short when she, along with her husband and young child, died in a shipwreck in 1850. However, her contributions to literature, feminism, and social reform left a lasting impact. Fuller's writings and ideas continue to be studied and celebrated, highlighting her significance as a pioneering feminist and intellectual of her time.

 

The world of business was rapidly changing in the 19th century, and many entrepreneurs found ways to get ahead using unscrupulous methods. Ida Tarbell became the first investigative journalist, well known for her exposé of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Published in a number of installments for McClure’s Magazine, this meticulously researched piece revealed the brutal policies that Standard Oil used to force rivals out of business, including her father. Tarbell later compiled those pieces into a two-volume book in 1904. As a result of her investigative reporting, the federal government brought a case against Standard Oil for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act which prevented the formation of monopolies and the Supreme Court ordered the break-up of the oil company into 34 separate companies. Rockefeller hated Tarbell whom he dismissed as an angry lady, but she won and protected the US from being overrun by monopolies.

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But of course, most of these women were white and middle class. And the bulk of the industrial revolution was built on the back of lower-class women. Most people point to the Lowell Mills as a major turning point both for labor in general, and for women. Millwork popped up along rivers all throughout New England. The mills attracted women from poor farms in the region. As industrialization led to mechanized farm equipment, it freed up the labor of daughters on a farm. Thus, girls left home for a wage and to help support their families. In this time, departing from the protection and oversight of their families to live and work at the mills, as well as doing less respectable work for wages, could hinder their reputations as “good” women. The promise of a wage was persuasive however and the mills worked to counter the negative narratives about the reputations of their women workers.

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The danger of mill work was readily known to the girls, they saw it. One girl who worked at the Lowell Mills wrote home, “Last Thursday one girl fell down and broke her neck which caused instant death. She was going in or coming out of the mill and slipped down it being very icy. The same day a man was killed by the [railroad] cars... Last Tuesday we were paid. In all I had six dollars and sixty cents paid $4.68 for board. With the rest I got me a pair of rubbers and a pair of 50.cts shoes…”[4] In the end, she had earned about a dollar and a half, which she would send home to her family.

 

In their first attempt at strike, the bosses emerged victorious. The management possessed enough power and financial resources to quash the strike. Within a week, the mills were operating almost at full capacity. Things seemed to calm until they cut wages again in 1836. The second strike was better organized and caused more disruption to mill operations. Nonetheless, the bosses maintained control. 

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Although these were significant setbacks, the mill girls refused to surrender. In the 1840s, they adopted a different strategy—political action. They established the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association to advocate for a shorter workday of ten hours. Despite women's inability to vote in Massachusetts or anywhere else in the country, the mill girls persisted. They conducted extensive petition campaigns, gathering over 2,000 signatures on a petition in 1845, and more than double that number the following year, urging the Massachusetts state legislature to pass a law limiting the workday in mills to ten hours.

Their efforts did not cease. They established chapters in other mill towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, published "Factory Tracts" to expose the deplorable conditions in the mills, and provided testimony before a state legislative committee. Furthermore, they actively campaigned against a state representative who staunchly opposed their cause and soundly defeated him. In 1847, New Hampshire became the first state to pass a law mandating a ten-hour workday, but its enforcement was not effective.

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The Muller v. Oregon (1908) case firmly established the legal precedent for protective legislation. In 1903, the state of Oregon passed a law that made it illegal for employers to keep female factory and laundry workers on the job for more than ten hours a day. Laundry owner Curt Muller, convicted of violating the Oregon law, challenged its constitutionality and claimed that it violated his right to freedom of contract under the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court heard the case in January 1908. Louis Brandeis, representing the state of Oregon, prepared a lengthy brief, arguing that the state could curb the freedom of contract to protect the health and welfare of its citizens. The Brandeis Brief used “facts” to demonstrate that women had “special physical organization” (anatomical and physiological differences) and were “fundamentally weaker” than men (according to physicians at that time). According to Brandeis, long hours were not only dangerous to the physical health of women, who could suffer from “pelvic disorders” that would jeopardize their ability to give birth, but they might also succumb to lax moral behavior as well. The argument ends with the reasonableness of the ten-hour day for working women as good for the welfare of the country. Six weeks later, the Supreme Court upheld the Oregon law, making women wards of the state. Many states already had some protective laws on the books and more would do so after the Muller decision. By 1914, twenty-seven states regulated some aspect of women’s work, from hours, to night work, limits on carrying weights, and working in dangerous or morally hazardous places (bars/saloons, meter readers for the gas and electric companies, streetcar conductors, and elevator operators for instance).

 

By 1920, fifteen states passed minimum wage laws to protect the moral health of working women. Most male union officials supported protective legislation for women because it limited women's competitiveness in the labor market. Importantly, the Muller decision reflected the long efforts of women reformers like Florence Kelley to improve the lives of working women. Limiting the grueling hours for women, these reformers believed, was a first step toward ensuring a broader social agenda for working people. Despite trying, they were never able to get the Court to protect limited hours for all workers. But as you can see, getting legal limitations on how long women could be forced to work came at a terrible cost, enshrining gender inequality into law. But for working women, perhaps that cost of this legal principle was one they were willing to bear if it meant their rights to worker protections were recognized by the Supreme Court. 

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One of the unintended consequences of the protective laws became clear in the garment strikes in Lawrence, MA in 1912. Massachusetts legislators, in response to reformers and the AFL, successfully lobbied for the maximum work week to be reduced from 56 to 54 hours for women and children. When the law went into effect on January 1, 1912, thousands of workers at the American Woolen Company, many of whom were women, walked off the job in protest of losing money from their paychecks. 

 

Wage-earners at American Woolen could not afford to lose any of their pay, since they lived in dire circumstances in the company town controlled by the company’s president, William Wood. Workers lived in crowded dingy company tenements and their workplace conditions proved not to be any better. Workers had to pay for drinking water, and were docked pay for being a minute late to work. Infant mortality rates were high in the company tenements and the accident rate on the job was high as well. The work pace increased and in spite of a $3 million profit margin in 1911, Wood refused to raise workers’ wages for two fewer hours of work. While the difference in the pay amount seemed small, thirty to forty cents, for the workers that was the equivalent of four loaves of bread, which was significant to these workers who lived paycheck to paycheck. 

Pearl McGill, Circa

 

Like the earlier shirtwaist strikes, the strike in Lawrence received a lot of attention due to the cooperation of the Polish, Italian, German, Lithuanian, and Syrian workers, and the presence and support from the IWW. Many IWW activists were present in the town during the strike. "It was the spirit of the workers that was dangerous," wrote labor reporter Mary Heaton Vorse. "They are always marching and singing. The crowds flowing perpetually into the mills had waked and opened their months to sing."

 

Publicity came when the striking workers sent their children to sympathetic families in New York City and Vermont, when the strike conditions worsened. American Woolen used their own security force and relied on the local police to battle with the workers.

 

The first group of children to leave on the “children’s exodus” paraded in the streets of NYC with pro-strike banners. When the next group of children and mothers arrived at the train station on Feb. 24th, many of them were beaten and taken into custody. Police tore children from their parents, threw women and children into a patrol wagon, and detained 30.  One woman testified: "The children, two by two in an orderly procession with the parents near, were about to make their way to the train when the police...closed in on us with their clubs, beating with no thought of the children who were in desperate danger of being trampled to death. The mothers and the children were thus hurled in a mass and bodily dragged to a military truck and even then clubbed, irrespective of the cries of the mothers and children."

 

Pearl McGill, went to Lawrence after the strike began, through her position as a speaker for the WTUL. McGill first gained recognition for her activism in the button workers strike in Muscatine, Iowa in 1911. Congress investigated the strike because of the publicity received in early March 1912. Faced with negative publicity, the American Woolen Company negotiated a settlement with the strikers. Employees received a pay increase between 5 to 25 percent depending on the job. Those who participated in the strike faced no reprisals from the company. The strike lasted nine weeks.​​

 

In the roaring twenties, inside the white, middle-class home, married women had access to new conveniences such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines that allegedly made housework easier.  As the distance between home and men’s work increased, suburbs that served as bedroom communities for nearby cities thrived. Women’s work was homework, and the greater ease of housework was facilitated by electricity in the home. Women learned of the new labor-saving devices through advertising. Many companies targeted women in advertisements in popular magazines and on the radio. Ads sold household gadgets and processed food products that were intended to make running a household less of a chore and tied consumption to acceptance, success, and social status. Even rural women far from the newest department store could fulfill their basic needs through the Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs that promised the latest styles in fashion and new-fangled inventions for the home.

 

Madame C. J. Walker, America’s first self-made female millionaire, whose beauty products company gave Black women the ability to control their image. The Walker Manufacturing Company’s line of hair care products was designed specifically for Black women, and Madame Walker used her considerable fortune to fund scholarships and promote the cause of African American self-help and entrepreneurship. While many women had been millionaires before Walker, almost all had achieved that status through inheritance.

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The world wars, and especially World War II transformed women’s role in the workforce as women kept the economy producing through the war. The labor, goods, and services that women supplied to both the domestic and global economy were imperative in maintaining the war effort. Poor women moved into better paying jobs as men left to fight abroad. Middle class women entered the workforce for the first time. In both cases, when the men returned, it proved hard to get women to leave their posts. One persistent myth about the 1950s is that women returned to the home, when in reality, they continued pursuing degrees and used those degrees in greater numbers than before. The post war world was changed; women had experienced economic freedom and opportunity and had proven the economy ran well on their labor.         

 

[1] Lewis Wickes Hine, Globe Cotton Mill, Augusta, Ga (1909) Woman was “with child.” According to reports, women work until the day of childbirth, Photograph, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Globe_Cotton_Mill,_Augusta,_Ga._Woman_was_with_child._01639v.jpg.

[2] C. Upham, “Educational Progress in Virginia,” Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Wikimedia Commons, July 21, 1883, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_Progress_in_Virginia%E2%80%94The_Schools_for_Colored_Children_in_Richmond.jpg.

[3] Ida Tarbell, Circa 1904, Photograph, Public Domain, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97509168/.

[4] “Mary Paul Letters.” Vermont Historical Society. Montpelier, Vermont. Retrieved from https://www.albany.edu/history/history316/MaryPaulLetters.html.

[5] 2 Young Women (Tintype) Lowell mill girls photographed with a tintype, Circa 1870, Photograph, Public Domain,  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2_Young_Women.jpg.

[6] Three African American women in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance, Circa 1925, Photograph, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Three_Harlem_Women,_ca._1925.png.

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