Great Depression & Working Women

But as work ram down went into military service, new sources of workers were needed and old prejudices had to be overcome, as President Roosevelt made clear in his Columbus mean solar day speech in 1942: "In some communities employers to hire women. In others they are-reluctant to hire Negroes. We can no longer afford to fluff much(prenominal) prejudice."1

Howalways, a study of selected mothers and daughters by Bennett and Elder leads them to the terminal that the economic crisis had as much impact on increase female employment during and after the struggle as the war did.2 Drastic changes in family life, notably the fathers' and husbands' loss of employment and the mothers' and wives' agonistic search for ship canal to bring money into households, caused permanent changes in the perception of women's friendly roles on the part of such women and their daughters. Indeed, changes in women's employment that began in the Depression influenced such changes during the war: "Eventu exclusivelyy, half of the women defense workers were drawn from the ranks of women who were already in the work force before the war."3

According to Milkman, women's jobs were accommodated by America's postwar expansion,4 but the particular that jobs reckon to have been sex-segregated in ways consistent with traditional neighborly roles had an effect on employment patterns of the economy and social attitudes toward women's employment more generally during the Great Depressi

rat, Deborah, and Schwieder, Dorothy. "Iowa Farm Women in the thirty-something: A Reassessment." history of Iowa 49 (1989) 570-590.

Farm women constitute something of a special oddball of working women during the Depression. Some rural households appear to have existed in such great poverty for so many eld before 1929 that the Depression itself was hardly noticed. Schwieder and Fink say that do work women in Nebraska and South Dakota had by 1930 already sound accustomed to stretching very limited resources. Like women of all classes in other parts of the country, these women were expected to tolerate the mental depression of the family and at the same time find ways of lessening the experience of poverty within the household.

37 Elsewhere Fink and Schwieder trace 40 per cent to 50 per cent of middle west farm incomes during the 1930s to women's cash-management strategies or labor in such areas as poultry and dairy production.38 Conservative social attitudes, however, appear to have prevailed inasmuch as their efforts were frequently marginalized as "women's work."39 It was ever thus, and everywhere.

14William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper & Row, 1963) 129.

Bennett, Sheila Kishler, and Elder, Glen H., Jr. "Women's Work in the Family Economy: A Study of Depression Hardship in Women's Lives." Journal of Family History 4 (1979) 153176.

on. milkman suggests that inflexibly confining women to support- round or menial functions had the effect of allowing employers to retain their services during the economic contractions of the 1930s even though male management or manufacturing staff might have become unemployed.5 Because employment was already super segregated by sex by the time of the Depression therefore aggravated from a social standpoint the economic impact of widespread male unemployment.6 This aspect of U.S. employment patterns had consequences for social attitudes toward women. The fact that those attitudes
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