The Social and Economic Structure of Contemporary Europe607the number of women employed grew by more than
one-third. The growth in the employment of women
was equally dramatic in France and Italy, and it was
very marked in Sweden, where women went from 30
percent of the labor force to 48 percent—meaning that
the number of working women grew by more than 60
percent in one generation. This transformation of the
labor market was most dramatic in regions where
women previously had limited access to jobs. Women
accounted for only 18 percent of the Greek labor force
in 1961 and nearly doubled that share to 32 percent in
a single decade. In Hungary, the employment of
women nearly doubled between 1945 and 1980. As late
as 1960, women provided 52 percent of all labor on So-
viet collective farms and produced 76 percent of all
medical doctors in the USSR. A generation later, in
1987, these numbers had declined to 43 percent of
agricultural labor and 69 percent of physicians.
The high levels of the employment of women in
the twentieth century are especially noteworthy be-
cause the two greatest job markets for women in the
nineteenth century—domestic service and the textile
industry—both collapsed. The role of textiles in west
European industry shrank by 75 percent between 1901
and 1975. Nonetheless, the participation of women in
the labor force increased, and the explanation involves
several factors. The nineteenth-century and early
twentieth-century economy had a limited variety of
jobs available to women—typically jobs deemed
similar to a woman’s role in housework, as both domes-
tic service and textile work illustrate. Much of the
explanation, therefore, is found in a new range of em-
ployment available to women. War work—demonstrat-
ing that women could effectively perform many jobs
previously denied to them—was important in this trend
but is insufficient to explain it, as the postwar demobi-
lization of women suggests. The rise of the service
economy was probably more important. Millions of
new jobs were being created, without a tradition of
being held by only one gender; so many new jobs were
being created that the demand for workers virtually
required the participation of women in the economy,
especially in government and business offices. At the
same time, demographic changes facilitated the partici-
pation of women. As the birthrate fell sharply, women
spent far less of their lives in child care, thereby making
them available for employment. At the same time that
the service economy was booming and families were
shrinking, a reinvigorated women’s rights movement in
the late twentieth century effectively advocated the
equal treatment of women. This meant that women
were not only entering new types of jobs, but they also
were obtaining more jobs requiring skill or education. It
did not mean, however, that women acquired economic
equality in the late twentieth century; women were still
typically concentrated in lower-level positions, earning
lower wages than men.The Vital Revolution of the Twentieth
Century: Mortality and Life Expectancy
The twentieth century witnessed dramatic demo-
graphic changes, continuing the vital revolution that
began in the eighteenth century and flourished during
the nineteenth century. None of these changes was
more important for understanding life in the modern
world than the falling death rate and the increase in life
expectancy. In 1900 many regions of Europe—from
Spain in the west to Poland in the east—had an annual
death rate of twenty-five to thirty deaths per thousand
population (and some regions and subcultures had even
higher rates). In the worst areas, including much of
Russia, the rate was normally greater than thirty per
thousand. In the healthiest areas of western and north-
ern Europe, mortality generally ranged between fifteen
and twenty per thousand. By the 1930s, however, the
death rate had fallen below twenty per thousand in all
corners of the continent; by the 1960s many countries
were reporting mortality figures below ten per thou-
sand (see table 30.8).Women as a percentage of total labor force
Country c. 1910 c. 1930 c. 1950 c. 1970 c. 1990
Britain 29.5 29.8 30.8 32. 4 43.5
France 36.7 36.6 33.9 33.2 42.3
Germany 30.7 35.6 36.3 37. 4 40.8
Italy 31.6 22.6 25.1 25.1 34.5
Sweden 27.8 31.0 26. 429.8 47.8
Source: Compiled from data in B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statis-
tics, 1750–1970(London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 153–63, and The Infor-
mation Please Almanac, Atlas, and Yearbook 1994 (Boston, Mass.:
Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 136.TABLE 30.7Woman in the European Labor Force,
1910–90