An American History

700 ★ CHAPTER 18 The Progressive Era

The Working Woman

The new visibility of women in urban

public places— at work, as shoppers,

and in places of entertainment like

cinemas and dance halls— indicated

that traditional gender roles were

changing dramatically in Progressive

America. As the Triangle fire revealed,

more and more women were working

for wages. Black women still worked

primarily as domestics or in southern

cotton fields. Immigrant women were

largely confined to low- paying factory

employment. But for native- born white

women, the kinds of jobs available

expanded enormously. By 1920, around

25 percent of employed women were office workers or telephone operators,

and only 15 percent worked in domestic service, the largest female job cate-

gory of the nineteenth century. Female work was no longer confined to young,

unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women

working for wages, one- quarter were married and living with their husbands.

The working woman— immigrant and native, working- class and

professional— became a symbol of female emancipation. Women faced special

limitations on their economic freedom, including wage discrimination and

exclusion from many jobs. Yet almost in spite of themselves, union leader Abra-

ham Bisno remarked, young immigrant working women developed a sense of

independence: “They acquired the right to a personality,” something alien to the

highly patriarchal family structures of the old country. “We enjoy our indepen-

dence and freedom” was the assertive statement of the Bachelor Girls Social

Club, a group of female mail- order clerks in New York.

The growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career,

wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her influential book Women and Eco-

nomics (1898), offered evidence of a “spirit of personal independence” that

pointed to a coming transformation of both economic and family life. Gil-

man’s writings reinforced the claim that the road to woman’s freedom lay

through the workplace. In the home, she argued, women experienced not

fulfillment but oppression, and the housewife was an unproductive parasite,

little more than a servant to her husband and children. By condemning women

to a life of domestic drudgery, prevailing gender norms made them incapable

of contributing to society or enjoying freedom in any meaningful sense of

the word.

Table 18.2 Percentage of Women
Workers in Various
Occupations, 1900–1920

Occupation 1900 1920

Professional,

technical

8.2% 11.7%

Clerical 4.0 18.7

Sales workers 4.3 6.2

Unskilled and

semiskilled

manufacturing

23.7

20.2

Household

workers

28.7 15.7