A Woman’s Wage

When a person complains that a certain wage rate is unduly low, he may be making that judgment in the light of what he thinks is due the kind of person performing that work, e.g. a married man. Others may regard the same rate as not unreasonable in view of the kind of work it is.

—Henry A. Landsberger¹

In 1915 New York State’s Factory Investigating Commission asked some seventy-five prominent individuals—economists, social reformers, businessmen, and publicists among them—what factors determined the rate of wages. The answers varied. Some suggested that workers’ organizations were most important; others believed the size of a business’s profits could enhance or restrain the wages of employees. Another key factor was the standard of living anticipated by workers. But the majority of those interviewed believed the efficiency of the worker and the supply of labor constituted by far the two most powerful determinants of wages.² These traditional explanations for wage rates would have found favor with the proponents of the economic theory then popular.

Widely accepted wage theory at the turn of the century was rooted in, though not limited to, the law of supply and demand. If that phrase, as economic historian Arnold Tolles implies, does not do economists justice, it does, at least, convey the economists’ belief “that the reward for every kind of human effort is controlled by some kind of impersonal and irresistible force, similar to the force of gravity.”³ Theory held that wages would rise or fall in response to employers’ fluctuating willingness to pay. That willingness in turn was predicated on what employers thought they could earn from labor as well as on how much labor was available at different wage rates. Thus, in theory, the demand for labor (measured by the additional revenue labor could produce) and the supply (which took into account the differences in education and training of the worker) together determined the wage.⁴

Despite the apparent certainty of economists such as Professor Roy Blakely of Cornell, who testified before the commission that “wages tend to approximate the value of what they produce,”⁵ the theory left room for a substantial degree of subjective judgment on the part of employers as to the value of particular workers. A critical part of the chemical mix that determined the wages of workers in general involved something intangible called “custom.” If a male worker was paid according to some formula that reflected the value of what he produced and the difficulty of replacing him, he was also paid according to what he and other workers thought he was worth. Custom, or tradition, played an acknowledged but uncalculated role in regulating the wage. But custom and tradition were gendered. They influenced male and female wages in different ways. And especially in the female wage, they played a far larger role than we have earlier been willing to concede. The women’s wage, at least for the early twentieth century, rested in large measure on conceptions of what women needed.

The distinction alerts us to the rich possibilities contained in the wage conceived as a social rather than as a theoretical construct. If the wage is, as most economists readily acknowledge, simultaneously a set of ideas about how people can and should live and a marker of social status, then it contains within it a set of social messages and a system of meanings that influence the way women and men behave. We are all familiar with the capacity of these social meanings to reduce the wages of recent immigrants, of African-Americans, and of other groups. But, partly because it is so apparently natural, the capacity of the wage to speak to issues of gender is less clear. Yet the language with which a woman’s wage is conceived throws into relief the same process that exists for men. The wage frames gendered messages; it encourages or inhibits certain forms of behavior; it can reveal a system of meaning that shapes the expectations of men and women and anticipates their struggles over power; it participates in the negotiations that influence the relationships of the sexes inside and outside the family. In all these capacities, the wage functions as a terrain of contest over visions of fairness and justice. This essay will attempt to illustrate some of these processes in the early twentieth century.

The structure of wages that emerged in the course of industrialization in the late nineteenth century reflected a long tradition that revolved around what has become known as the family wage—the sum necessary to sustain family members. That sum had been earned by several family members for most of the history of capitalism. Family income was typically pooled and then redistributed by one family member. But the dream of a family wage that could be earned by a male breadwinner alone had long been an object of struggle among organized working people who thought of it as a mechanism for regulating family life and allowing women to work in their own homes.⁶ Ideally, and sometimes in practice, the family wage was a male wage, a wage that went to a male breadwinner.⁷

What then of a woman’s wage? It reflected not what was but what ought to be. That men ought to be able to support wives and daughters implied that women need not engage in such support. They ought to be performing home duties. Thus, if a woman earned wages, the normal expectation was that she did so to supplement those of other family wage earners. Theoretically, at least, the decision as to who would and would not earn was regulated by the family unit. The wage belonged to her family. Until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, U.S. law and practice reflected these assumptions. Typically, a woman’s wage was legally the property of her husband or father. The average wage of women workers was little more than half of the male wage. And even the most skilled women rarely earned as much as two-thirds of the average paid to unskilled men. If a woman lived independently, her wage was normally not sufficient to support her. Nor was it intended to do so.

The nineteenth century fight for a family wage was thus simultaneously a fight for a social order in which men could support their families and receive the services of women; and women, dependent on men, could stay out of the labor force. Historians have debated the advantages and disadvantages of this mode of thinking, but for our purposes it is important to note only that the family wage reflected popular thinking—a sense of what was right and just.⁸ Widely supported by working class men and women at the end of the nineteenth century, it rested on what seemed to many to be a desirable view of social order.

Its incarnation in the form of the living wage more clearly isolated the female role. Though the content of a living wage varied, like the family wage, it was imbued with gendered expectations. John Ryan, the Catholic priest who was the United States’ most prolific exponent of the living wage, for example, asserted the laborer’s right to a “decent and reasonable” life that meant to him “the right to exercise one’s primary faculties, supply one’s essential needs, and develop one’s personality.”⁹ Others were somewhat more specific. British economist William Smart thought the living wage ought to pay for “a well-drained dwelling, with several rooms, warm clothing with some changes of underclothing, pure water, a plentiful supply of cereal food with a moderate allowance of meat and milk and a little tea, etc., some education, and some recreation, and lastly sufficient freedom for his wife from other work to enable her to perform properly her maternal and her household duties.”¹⁰ John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers union, was somewhat more ambitious. The wage, he thought, ought to be enough to purchase “the American standard of living.” This included, but was not limited to, “a comfortable house of at least six rooms,” which contained a bathroom, good sanitary plumbing, parlor, dining room, kitchen, sleeping rooms, carpets, pictures, books, and furniture.¹¹

For Ryan, as for other proponents of the living wage, the “love and companionship of a person of the opposite sex”¹² was an essential element of what a living wage should purchase. The bottom line, according to Ryan, was the laborer’s capacity “to live in a manner consistent with the dignity of a human being.”¹³ The Shoe Workers’ Journal proposed that “everything necessary to the life of a normal man be included in the living wage: the right to marriage, the right to have children and to educate them.”¹⁴

As the family wage held the promise of female homemaking, the living wage, which explicitly incorporated wife and children, excluded the possibility that female dignity could inhere either in a woman’s ability to earn wages or in her capacity to support a family. Because the living wage idealized a world in which men had the privilege of caring for women and children, it implicitly refused women that privilege. And, because it assumed female dependency, to imagine female independence impugned male roles and male egos. Ground rules for female wage earners required only self-support, and even that was estimated at the most minimal level. Champions of the living wage for women counted among her necessities food, clothing, rent, health, savings, and a small miscellaneous fund.¹⁵ Nothing in the arguments for a female living wage vitiates the harsh dictum of John Stuart Mill. The wages of single women, asserted that famous economist, “must be equal to their support, but need not be more than equal to it; the minimum in their case is the pittance absolutely required for the sustenance of one human being.”¹⁶ “Women who are forced to provide their own sustenance have a right,” echoed Ryan, “to what is a living wage for them.” Their compensation, he argued, with apparent generosity, “should be sufficient to enable them to live decently.”¹⁷

At the time Ryan wrote, women constituted close to 25 percent of the industrial work force. More than one-third of wage-earning women in urban areas lived independently of their families, and three-quarters of those living at home helped to support other family members. False conceptions of women who needed only to support themselves did a particular disservice to Black women, who were eight times as likely to earn wages as white women. For Black women racial discrimination and its attendant poverty meant that more that one-third of those who were married would continue to earn wages, and virtually all of those who earned wages participated in family support.¹⁸ Yet the real needs of these women were rarely acknowledged. Nor did the brief, dismissive commentary on “a woman’s living wage” mention recreation or comfort or human dignity or the capacity to care for others.

Ryan readily conceded that men without families to support and/ or with other means of support were entitled to draw a living wage because “they perform as much labor as their less fortunate fellows.”¹⁹ His proposals generously allocated a living wage to men who never intended to marry because “rights are to be interpreted according to the average conditions of human life.”²⁰ But the same generosity was not evident in notions of the living wage for women workers. Rather, it seemed fair to reduce women to the lowest levels of bestiality. Advocates of the living wage confidently explained that women’s “standard of physical comfort, in other words, their standard of life” was lower than that of men. While her ideals were “naturally higher” than those of men, “her physical wants are simpler. The living wage for a woman is lower than the living wage for a man because it is possible for her as a result of her traditional drudgery and forced tolerance of pain and suffering to keep alive upon less.”²¹ Women, with a single set of exceptions, were to be paid only according to their most minimal needs. Only to women who were employed in the same jobs as men did Ryan concede the need for equal pay because, he argued, “when women receive less pay than men, the latter are gradually driven out of the occupation.”²²

Ryan failed to acknowledge that in attributing to women “average conditions” that reflected social myth rather than reality he undermined his own cause. While his vision and that of most living wage advocates came from a desire to protect the home, not from antagonism to the pitiable condition of those women who worked for wages, his proposals left the home vulnerable. “The welfare of the whole family,” he noted, “and that of society likewise, renders it imperative that the wife and mother should not engage in any labor except that of the household. When she works for hire, she can neither care properly for her own health, rear her children aright, nor make her home what it should be for her husband, her children, herself.”²³ Theoretically, that might have been true; but in practice, by reducing women’s potential capacity to earn adequate incomes, he diminished their ability to support themselves and their homes.

Without negating the good intentions of Ryan and others on behalf of the family and without imposing anachronistic judgments about their desire to protect the family and to place family needs ahead of women’s individual rights, one can still see that the consequences of their rhetoric for women who earned wages were no mere abstractions. They assumed a hard and concrete reality, for example, in discussions of the minimum wage for women that took place between about 1911 and 1913. To alleviate the plight of women workers, social reformers attempted to pass legislation that would force employers to pay a wage sufficient to meet a woman’s minimal needs. Between 1912 and 1923, thirteen states and the District of Columbia passed such legislation in one form or another. Each statute was preceded by a preamble that declared the legislators’ intentions to offer protection that ranged from providing a sum “adequate for maintenance” to ensuring enough to “maintain the worker in health” and guaranteeing her “moral well-being.” Whatever the language of the preamble, and whatever the mechanism by which the wage was ultimately to be decided, the minimum was invariably rooted in what was determined to be a “living” wage for women workers.²⁴ But the discussion required some estimate of what a living wage might be. Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, who surveyed working women in Pittsburgh in 1907, suggested that a woman could “not live decently and be self supporting” at a wage of less than $7 a week. Three years later Louise Bosworth estimated the living wage of Boston’s women ranged from $9 to $11 a week—the first amount would keep a woman from dying of cold or hunger; the second provided the possibility of efficiency at work and some minimal recreation.²⁵ The question, said social pundit Thomas Russell, was whether “it is to be an amount that shall provide only the bare necessaries of life or shall it include some provision for comforts, recreation and the future?”²⁶

The budgets drawn up by experts generally opted only for the necessities. Arrived at after extensive surveys to uncover the actual expenditures of “working girls,” and heavily reliant on language and imagery that reduced women to perpetual girlhood, they included almost nothing beyond the barest sustenance.²⁷ A typical survey was undertaken by Sue Ainslee Clark in 1908 and published by Clark and Edith Wyatt in the pages of McClure’s magazine in 1910.²⁸ The authors focused on the effortful struggle to make ends meet, turning survival itself into a praiseworthy feat. They exuded compassion for the girl who “ate no breakfast,” whose “luncheon consisted of coffee and rolls for ten cents,” and who, as “she had no convenient place for doing her own laundry, . . . paid 21 cents a week to have it done.” They estimated her regular weekly expenditure as follows: “lodging, 42 cents; board, $1.40; washing, 21 cents; clothing and all other expenses, $1.97: total, $4.” ²⁹ Such estimates encouraged social investigators to define precisely how much a female wage earner might spend for everything from undergarments to gifts.

The debate over the minimum wage revealed what this outward order dictated: to live alone required the strictest exercise of thrift, self-discipline, and restraint. The budgets warned fiercely against expectations of joy, spontaneity, pleasure, or recreation. Even the carfare that might provide access to a walk in the country was rigidly restricted. The wage prescribed a spartan lifestyle, sufficient, it was hoped, to preserve morality for those destined to earn but not so generous as to tempt those in families to live outside them. It limited fantasy to the price of survival and held open the door of ambition only to a meagre independence. Its effects are grimly reflected in a series of snippets selected by and published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1908 under the title “The Girl Who Comes to the City.”³⁰

Offering to pay $5 for each one it used, the magazine solicited brief essays “written by those girl readers who have gone through the experience of coming to the city, and either succeeding or failing there during the last ten years.”³¹ Success, in these pieces, is measured in small and treasured doses. Mere survival emerges as a potent source of satisfaction. In a period when most experts estimated a living wage at around $9 a week, a pay envelope that amounted to $10 a week could yield happiness. A $2 a week raise, accompanied by a kind boss, and perhaps the chance to improve oneself by reading occasionally at work seemed to be the height of ambition.³² At the top of the wage scale, a bookkeeper could aspire to $65 a month, enough to ensure a small cash balance in the bank if one limited social excursions to one night a week and carefully selected clothes from among sale items.³³ The stories reveal justified pride and accomplishment in the ability to sustain oneself. But they also tell us something of the limits imposed on women’s aspirations. “I had,” boasted one contributor about the period before she returned home, “made both ends meet financially for five months and I had saved a modest sum for the purchase of a winter suit.”³⁴ Even women who needed help in the form of occasional contributions of clothing felt they had managed very nicely.

And yet, in practice, survival was the best, not the worst, that the wage embodied. The estimates made by well-intentioned reformers and the efforts of the most well-meaning women were compromised by the refusal of most employers to concede a woman’s need even to support herself. Evidence for this is part of the folklore of the female labor market before World War II and has frequently been recorded by historians.³⁵ The Harper’s Bazaar series is no exception. There, as elsewhere, women recalled how difficult it was to ask for reasonable compensation. A stenographer described how a lawyer had refused to pay more because “he expected young women had friends who helped them out.” A budding news reporter was told by a potential employer that his “rule is never to employ a woman who must depend entirely upon my salaries.”³⁶

The aspirations of young women thus fell victim to the self-confirming myths that enforced their dependence. Nineteenth century British economist William Smart described the process succinctly. Part of the reason a woman’s wage is low, he suggested, was “because she does not require a high wage, whether it be because her father partly supports her, or because her maintenance does not cost so much.”³⁷ Employers routinely acted upon this myth. “We try to employ girls who are members of families,” a box manufacturer told social investigator and economist Elizabeth Butler, “for we don’t pay the girls a living wage in this trade.”³⁸ Historian Joanne Meyerowitz summed up the prevailing attitude this way: “Employers assumed that all working women lived in families where working males provided them with partial support. It profited employers to use this idealized version of the family economy to determine women’s wages.”³⁹

For all the elaborate theory justifying low wages, the bottom line turned out almost always to be the employer’s sense of what was acceptable. Men, as Elizabeth Butler noted, came into occupations at a wage paid for the job. Women came into them at a wage deemed appropriate for female workers—not, that is to say, at the customary wage level of the occupation but “at a level analogous to that paid women generally in other occupations.”⁴⁰ New York City social worker Mary Alden Hopkins told the Factory Investigating Commission that the sex of the employee was one of the most important influences on women’s wages. “In laundry work, factory work, some mercantile establishments and home work, efficiency has little and often no effect upon wages,” she declared.⁴¹ The hardest woman’s job, in her judgment, was the lowest paid, and an increase in worker productivity and employer profits led less often to rewarding workers than to discharging high-paid workers in favor of those who could be paid for less. The young Scott Nearing summarized the process this way: “No one even pretends that there is a definite relation between the values produced by the workers and the wage which he secures.”⁴² Samuel Gompers would have agreed: “Everyone knows that there is little connection between the value of services and wages paid; the employer pays no more than he must.”⁴³

While from the economist’s perspective this may be a gross oversimplification, employers, workers, and observers all accepted the critical importance of custom in the wage structure. A vice-president of the Pullman Company, speaking before the commission that investigated the great strike of 1894, acknowledged as much. Piece rates, he said, were based on the company’s estimates of a “reasonable wage for ten hours . . . for a competent workman.” If the company discovered “that at the piece price fixed the known less competent and less industrious workmen are regularly making an unreasonable day’s wage, it becomes apparent that the piece price allotted is too large.”⁴⁴ At issue here was what was “reasonable” and “unreasonable,” not the productivity or efficiency of the worker. In this context, that part of the content of custom should rest on the sex of the worker appears to be merely natural. An official of International Harvester, testifying before an Illinois investigating commission in 1912, described his company’s efforts to set a minimum wage for female employees. His company’s desire, he claimed, “was to establish a minimum that would be fair and reasonable.” But the constraints of what was deemed reasonable were established as much by the nature and characteristics of the worker as by the company’s financial spread sheets. “The girls affected by lower wages,” he said in mitigation, “are mostly of foreign birth. They are not required to dress up for their employment. Many of those to whom we will pay $8 could not earn a dollar downtown.”⁴⁵ Presumably, the same kind of reasoning led to paying Black women less than white women. Although occupational segregation accounts for most of the wage differential between Black and white women, Black women who worked on the same kinds of jobs routinely received one dollar a week less.

Nor was the weight of custom in setting wages a hidden dimension. Rather, the comments of employers and others reveal it to have been quite conscious and available. Several respondents to the Factory Investigating Commission’s survey noted its influence in setting wage rates, pointing out that wages could not be set without reference to such factors as the “needs of the individual and family,” the influence of “local or trade union conditions,” and the differential requirements of “pin-money workers.” Edward Page, an officer of the Merchants’ Association of New York, thought that the “customary or habitual rate of wages which prevails in the group to which the workingman belongs and which is usual in the industry under consideration . . . is by far the most important factor in the determination of wages.”⁴⁶ On their face these factors were gender neutral. But since each embodied deeply rooted aspects of gendered expectations, the wage both reflected and perpetuated gendered behavior.

If the role of custom in fixing wages is not surprising, and we can take for granted that sex played a part, then we need ask only to what degree the sex of the worker influenced custom. When it came to women, one might argue that custom played not the smallest but the largest part in determining the wage. William Smart placed the factors that determined the wages of women in the category of “wants.” The wage scale in a modern industrial economy, he suggested, was typically determined by “what a worker does.” But for a woman “what the worker is” was the gauge of wages. The difference made him uneasy. “If a male worker,” he asked, “is supposed to get a high wage when he produces much, a low wage when he produces little, why should a woman’s wage be determined by another principle? We cannot hunt with the individualist hounds and run with the socialist hare.”⁴⁷

Yet women’s wages at the turn of the century clung stubbornly to what Smart would have called her “wants” rather than to either the value of the product or the level of the worker’s productivity. For if custom was inscribed into the wage and the wage was conceived male, what women earned was not in the same sense a “wage” as it was for men. In the minds of employers and of male workers, the wage was to be paid to those who supported families.⁴⁸ If part of its function was to reflect the value of the product made, another and equally important part was to make a statement about the value of the worker who made the product. As long as female workers were not—could not be—male workers, their wages could not hope to touch those of their male peers.

We can guess that employers thought of it that way by their responses to questions about how much they paid women. Louise Bosworth cited the case of a woman who told her employer, “We cannot live on what we earn,” and was asked in response, “Then what wages can you live on?”⁴⁹ The same paternalistic assumptions appear among employers who testified before the commission that investigated Illinois’s white slave traffic in 1912. The employers interviewed reported unhesitatingly that they paid their male and female workers on the basis of what they estimated each needed. Julius Rosenwald, head of Sears, Roebuck and Company, then a mail-order house, told an investigative commission that “the concern made it a point not to hire girls not living at home at less than $8 a week.”⁵⁰ A Montgomery Ward vice-president echoed the sentiment: “We claim that all our employees without homes are on a self-supporting basis, and if we discover they are not we will put them there in an hour.”⁵¹ One department store executive described how his store asked all job applicants to sign a form “giving their estimate of necessary expenses in addition to family particulars. The girls who are not receiving sufficient to live on come to us. There are many instances of such receiving an increase.” No one ever investigated the accuracy of the application forms, and even the commission chair was dubious as to who the procedure protected. A girl might readily lie about home support, he noted, “to assure herself of a job.”⁵² But at bottom, this was less the issue than the prevailing assumption that “girls” could and should be paid at a minimum that relied on family subsidy rather than on what their labor was worth.

If employers and popular opinion are any guide, and the question of what appeared to be reasonable lay at the heart of the wage structure, then all wages—not only those of women—contained a greater proportion of wants than most of us have recognized. Women’s wages, then, are only uniquely vulnerable in the sense that they participate in popular definitions of gender that denigrate the needs of one sex. The wage simultaneously framed job-related expectation in the light of existing gender roles and shaped gender experiences to avoid disappointment in view of the prevailing wage structure. More than exploitation of women, or paternalism toward them, the wage reflected a rather severe set of injunctions about how men and women were to live. These injunctions could be widely negated only at the peril of social order. Thus, part of the function of the female wage was to ensure attachment to family. The male wage, in contrast, provided incentives to individual achievement. It promoted geographical mobility and sometimes hinted at the possibility of social mobility as well. The female wage allowed women to survive; the male wage suggested a contribution to national economic well-being. These messages affirmed existing values and integrated all the parties into a set of understandings that located the relationships of working men and women to each other.

Some of these messages are powerful. Existing wage fund theory posited a limited sum available for all wages. It reduced the incentive to provide a higher wage for women by suggesting that their gain would come at the cost of male raises and therefore threaten the family’s well-being. Smart put it this way: “Women’s wages are, after all, part and parcel of the one share in the distribution of income which falls to labor.”⁵³ What followed from that, of course, was that raising women’s wages would merely reduce those of the men in their class by a similar proportion, leaving families in the same place economically and depriving them of maternal care to boot. Samuel Gompers translated this into a warning to members of the American Federation of Labor: “In industries where the wives and children toil, the man is often idle because he has been supplanted, or because the aggregate wages of the family are no higher than the wages of the adult man—the husband and father of the family.”⁵⁴

If women’s wage gains could come only at the cost of the family, then their low wages affirmed and supported existing family life. As the renowned economist Alfred Marshall put it, a higher wage for women might be “a great gain in so far as it tends to develop their faculties, but an injury in so far as it tempts them to neglect their duty of building up a true home, and of investing their efforts in the personal capital of their children’s character and abilities.”⁵⁵ To Marshall the clear social choice implicit in the wage payment was between individual achievement and family well-being. His statement affirms the use of wages to preserve what is desirable to him: that all women are or will be married, that marriage is a normal state, that women will be continuously supported by men with sufficient wages, and that under these circumstances a wage that might be translated into an incentive not to marry or remain within families poses a challenge. Moreover, Marshall’s view reflected the prevailing belief that a man was entitled to a wife to serve him and their home. It contained the assumption that a female who did not have a husband had erred. The differential female wage thus carried a moral injunction, a warning to women to follow the natural order.

The absence, by choice or necessity, of a family of her own did not excuse a woman from adherence to familial duties or morals, nor did it impel a more generous attitude toward wages. In fact, the level of the wage, which signaled an affirmation of family life, simultaneously threw out a challenge to preserve morality. In a March 1913 letter to the New York Herald, the head of Illinois’s vice commission commented that “our investigations . . . show conclusively that thousands of good girls are going wrong every year merely because they can not live upon the wages paid them by employers.”⁵⁶ But this was not necessarily an invitation to raise wages. Since many imagined an unattached woman who did not live within a family to be immoral, they construed the wage as a contribution to family life. A higher wage might logically contribute to immorality. An ongoing debate over the fine line between a wage high enough to tempt women into supporting themselves and one so low that it could push the unwary into prostitution placed the wage in thrall to morality. Social worker Jeannette Gilder found herself in the awkward position of testifying against a pay raise for working women because “it seems to me to be paying a pretty poor compliment to the young women of this country to suggest that their virtue hangs upon such a slender thread that its price can be fixed somewhere between $6 and $8 a week.”⁵⁷ And yet those who insisted that a low wage was an invitation to prostitution dominated the debate.

The wage also transmitted messages about the workforce. Employers feared that a rise in women’s wages would trigger a demand for higher wages for men. As the wage captured social restrictions on female aspirations at work, so it conveyed the male potential for advancement, promotion, loyalty, and persistence. Contemporaries understood this well. When Elizabeth Butler remarked that “boys are often preferred to girls . . . because they can be relied on to learn the trade and women cannot,”⁵⁸ she captured the notion that implicit in the wage is the assumption that a man’s wage is an investment in the future, while a woman’s wage assumes only that the work at hand will be done. Economist Francis Walker said this in a different way. If a man marries, he “becomes a better and more notable workman on that account.” In contrast, if a woman marries, “it is most probable that she will . . . be a less desirable laborer than she was before.”⁵⁹ Yet these statements promote the self-fulfilling function they simultaneously reflect. Lacking a man’s wage, women were not normally given the opportunity to demonstrate that they too could be an investment in the future. Such experiments would be dangerous. Not only would a higher wage for women convey an inaccurate estimate of the potential occupational mobility of females, but it might inhibit the employer’s capacity to use wages to construct the workforce to his liking.

Finally, the wage made a familiar statement about female personality. Holding the stereotypical male as the norm, it claimed recompense for the costs of translating female qualities into the marketplace. Francis Walker exaggerated but caught the point when he insisted that the wage reflected women’s character traits as well as their domestic orientation. It took account, he noted, of personalities that were “intensely sensitive to opinion, [and] shrink from the familiar utterances of blame.” Coldness and indifference alone, he thought, were often sufficient to repress women’s “impulses to activity.”⁶⁰ These qualities of character exacted supervisory costs of the employer that were recaptured in the lower pay of women. As Charles Cheney, a South Manchester, Connecticut, manufacturer, put it, part of the reason women were paid less than men was because “they are sensitive and require extraordinarily tactful and kindly treatment and much personal consideration.”⁶¹

Restrictive as the messages thrown out by a woman’s wage were clearly intended to be, they were by no means the only messages that reached women. The very existence of a wage, the possibility of earning income evoked a contrary set of images: images that derived some support from the promise of American success. The same wage that evoked a struggle to survive and placed a lid on social mobility, the same wage that obscured women’s visions of independence and citizenship had the capacity to conjure contrary images as well. It could even point the way to potential equality for women. These tensions are visible in the huge strikes that wracked the garment industry beginning in 1909–1910, in the energy of young female labor leaders, and in the quest of more affluent women for lives that combined career and motherhood. Such events indicate that the notion of wages rooted in wants existed in a contested sphere—tempered by a broader ideology of individualism. They lead us to wonder about the role played by a woman’s wage in a period of changing wants and rising levels of personal ambition.

The wage that in some measure helped to affirm and construct gendered expectations in the period before World War I continued to play that role afterward. But the dramatic social changes that came during and after the war, particularly the rise of a consumer culture, created their own pressures on the structure of gender. Because for most people the wage offered access to consumption, it mediated some of the tensions in gender roles that emerged in the 1920s. While public perception of a woman’s wage remained conceptually “needs-based,” continuing to limit female expectations, it quickly became clear that changing needs demanded some concessions to women’s individual aspirations. These mixed messages contributed to arguments among women about who deserved a wage.⁶²

In the statistical tables, the war appears as a small blip in the history of working women. New entrants into the labor force were relatively few, and the teens ended with little apparent increase in the numbers of women who earned wages. But the big surprise lay in the numbers of women who switched jobs. About half a million women, it seemed, chose to move into men’s jobs. The New York Times commented on these figures with surprise: “The world of men woke up and took a second look at the world of women during the World War. It is still looking.” And, it continued, “the Great War has in many cases been responsible for a change of premise as well as job.”⁶³

The primary explanation for these job shifts seems to have been the attraction of the male wage. Historian Maurine Greenwald estimates, for example, that women who became streetcar conductors immediately increased their wages by about one-third over those they had earned in traditional female jobs.⁶⁴ Daniel Nelson, who has explored the transformation of the factory, notes that after 1915 “the wages offered by machinery and munitions makers” drew an increasing number of women who had worked in traditional women’s fields.⁶⁵ Though women’s productivity was frequently acknowledged to be as high as that of the men they replaced, women were not, on principle, offered the same wage. A twenty-six-city survey by the New York State Industrial Commission at the end of the war revealed that fewer than 10 percent of the women who replaced men received pay equal to that of the men who had preceded them. The commission reported that “in many cases the production of women was equal to that of men, in others it was greater, and in still others, less. The wages paid had little, if anything, to do with productive efficiency.”⁶⁶ Since women who were paid less than men still earned far more than they could have earned at women’s jobs, few of those who benefited from wartime opportunities complained. But the pressure of a dual wage structure on male wages posed a problem. Fearing a breakdown of social order, men and women began to call for a wage paid for the job—or equal pay. This slogan, as we will see later, was designed primarily to reduce pressure on men’s wages.

Though most of the wartime job shifts proved to be temporary, they signaled an incipient dissatisfaction among some wage-earning women over the issue of wages—a dissatisfaction that could no longer be contained by rationalizations over social role. These struggles frequently pitted women who earned wages against those who did not, revealing something about contested definitions of womanhood among white women. For example, when female streetcar conductors in several large cities waged largely futile battles to hang on to their high-paying jobs, they were fighting not only the men who wanted their jobs back but a conception of womanliness that restricted access to outdoor work. And the female printers in New York State who successfully struggled to exempt themselves from legislation that precluded their working during the lucrative night hours simultaneously attacked rigid conceptions of family life.

Such campaigns were opposed by clear signals from government and corporations to women not to expect too much. The Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor offers a case in point. In 1920, when the bureau was created, it received a meagre $75,000 lump-sum appropriation and distributed it as effectively as it could. In 1922 a House proviso “stipulated that no salary in the Women’s Bureau should be more than $1800, except three at $2000, and the director’s and assistant director’s salaries which have been fixed by statute.” If effected, the proviso, as the Women’s Bureau pointed out, would have left it with “no staff of technically trained, experienced people to direct and supervise its work.” But more important, the bureau noted that other agencies of the government paid their male employees with the same qualifications “very much higher salaries than any that have even been suggested by the Women’s Bureau—twice as much in many instances.”⁶⁷

Such policies were routine in industry. In the electrical industry of the 1920s, Ronald Schatz reports that “corporations maintained separate pay scales for men and women. Male wage keysheets began where female keysheets left off; the least skilled male workers earned more than the most capable female employee.”⁶⁸ Still, the point for women was that even this low pay exceeded that of such traditionally female jobs as laundry work and waiting on tables. “For this reason, many young women preferred jobs in electrical factories.” When the Ford Motor Company instituted a $5 day for its male employees after the war, it deliberately omitted women workers. According to Vice-President James Couzens, women “are not considered such economic factors as men.”⁶⁹

Corporations carefully distinguished between the kinds of social welfare programs offered as extensions of cash wages to women and men. General Electric and Westinghouse offered men programs that stressed financial and job security such as a 5 percent bonus every six months after five years of service; a pension after twenty years, and group life insurance and paid vacations after ten years of service. Women, for whom longevity was not encouraged and for whom it was thought not to matter, got programs that emphasized sociability such as “dances, cooking classes, secretarial instruction, picnics, clubs, and summer camps.”⁷⁰

The not-so-subtle relationship between policy and practice is beautifully illustrated in the self-confirming apparatus in effect at the General Electric company where President Gerard Swope defended his policies on the grounds that “our theory was that women did not recognize the responsibilities of life and were hoping to get married soon and would leave us, and therefore, this insurance premium deduction from the pay would not appeal to them.”⁷¹ As historian Ronald Schatz notes, because GE compelled women to quit if they married, women rarely acquired enough seniority to obtain pensions or vacations with pay. Women’s aspirations could not be entirely stilled by these measures. The Ford Motor Company, according to historian Stephen Meyer III, “considered all women, regardless of their family stakes, as youths: that is as single men under twenty-two without dependents, and therefore ineligible for Ford profits.” Yet “as the result of criticism from women’s rights advocates, the company eventually allowed some women, who were the heads of households, to participate in its welfare plan.”⁷²

One result of such policies and an instrument in their perpetuation as well was that women carefully rationalized their increasing work force participation and defended themselves by comparing their wages only to those of other women. The model was familiar. The numerous investigating commissions of the prewar period had already asserted the injustice of paying women as much as men. Thus, investigators exploring the feasibility of a higher wage for women raised such issues as what, for instance, a firm would “have to pay a man with a family if it paid $2 a day to girls with no one but themselves to support?”⁷³ This does not seem to have inhibited women’s desire for higher incomes. But it seems to have channeled their grievances away from men who earned far more than them and toward women instead. Among Western Electric workers interviewed in the late 1920s, a typical female who complained about wages tended to be distressed not at her absolute wage but at how it compared with those of other women. As one female employee complained, “the girl next to me, her job pays $39.80 per hundred, and mine pays $28.80 and I work just as hard as she does. I don’t see how they figure that out. She makes ten cents more on every one she makes.”⁷⁴

These powerful and sometimes explicit barriers extended across race lines and to the social wages offered by modern corporations. In their presence Black women were paid less than white women for the same or similar jobs. Employers utilized them to sanction distinctions in the amenities they offered to Black and white women. An early survey of the tobacco industry in Virginia reflects the value of such circumscribed comparisons. “Tuesday and Friday,” the report noted matter-of-factly, “the white girls have 15 minutes extra in order to dance, but the 15 minutes is paid for by the firm.”⁷⁵

What kept the “wage” pot bubbling, then, was not women’s desire to achieve male pay but their urge to satisfy more concrete wants. As mass production jobs and clerical work opened up to white women, some factory jobs became available to Black women. New, relatively well-paying jobs and rising real wages for both men and women contributed to the advent of the consumer society and helped to create a new definition of wants that drew on a prevailing individualism from which women could hardly be excluded. Marketing techniques, installment buying, and the increasing value placed on consumption replaced thrift and postponed gratification as appropriate spirits of the time. New definitions of wants attracted new groups of women to the work force and suggested new rationales for staying there.

The changing population of female workers challenged perceptions of a wage that spoke to simpler needs. To women for whom the prewar women’s wage had offered little apart from the despair of poverty, the wage now stretched to encompass the hope of individual achievement measured by material goals. Defined in prewar practice as the minimum required to sustain a single woman partially supported by her family, the postwar wage at least suggested the capacity to earn a living.⁷⁶ Ronald Edsforth, who studied auto workers in the 1920s, notes that government investigators discovered among the women working in auto factories in the 1920s a “genuinely modern level of individual materialism . . . guiding . . . life-shaping decisions.” They concluded that “jobs in the auto factories were most desired simply because auto workers’ earnings were high.”⁷⁷ But even the rising wage was clearly inadequate to reconcile the competing needs of an increasingly heterogeneous group of female wage earners. Less immigrant than native born, containing a small but steadily growing proportion of married women, and with a still tiny but slowly growing representation of Black women in mainstream jobs that had long been closed to them, women with competing views of the wage attempted to participate in what some called the “American standard of living.” In the process they helped to establish a new set of gendered definitions about self and others.

For middle class, single, adventurous women, work and a wage meant escape from boredom, a bit of rebellion, a purpose in life—the means to a relatively autonomous existence. Fuelled by the rhetoric of the women’s movement and energized by a successful campaign for the vote, single women, no longer subsidized by families and increasingly eager to live outside them, craved the independence that wages potentially offered. To some, participation in wage work offered to contribute economic equality to the political citizenship they had won with suffrage.⁷⁸ To others, as economist Theresa Wolfson suggested, the wage bought the liberty to live “comparatively free lives outside of their working hours.”⁷⁹

For poorer women, including immigrants and women of color, and for most of the married women who earned, the wage became a measure of the capacity to participate in an increasingly pervasive consumer society. “I would like to work,” commented one young assembly line worker, “until I get my furniture paid for. My husband is young and hasn’t got much of a start yet and I want to help him.”⁸⁰ A woman’s wage represented, still, a supplement to male earnings—an extension of family life. Less a vehicle to sheer survival in the 1920s, it promised access to the new wants generated by an ethic of consumption. If it still continued to preclude freedom for most women, it offered a way to sustain and even enhance family life and exacted, in return, the price of women’s continuing commitment to the work force.⁸¹ It should not surprise us then that the changing material content of the wage did not diminish either the effort to earn it or its importance in women’s lives. And it dramatically expanded the numbers of women willing and able to earn wages. A young woman who had worked at the Western Electric company for a year complained that her feet swelled on the job. She didn’t want to sit down, however, because “I can’t turn out the rates when I sit down.” She had, she said, returned to Western Electric after a year at another job because “I couldn’t earn near as much money, and I couldn’t save any.”⁸²

Because a woman’s wage had to serve the increasingly fragmented needs of a diverse array of women, the rhetoric surrounding it became more complex. It is best uncovered in the efforts of the newly created Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor to represent women workers of all kinds. The bureau’s official position consistently upheld wages for women based on the value of the job. Yet its public posture simultaneously affirmed the need for a minimum wage based on the needs of the worker. Wages, wrote Mary Anderson, head of the bureau, “should be established on the basis of occupation and not on the basis of sex or race.” At the same time, she added, the minimum wage rate that was available to women only, if at all, “should cover the cost of living in health and decency, instead of a bare existence, and should allow for dependents and not merely for the individual.”⁸³

The compromise, then, appeared to lie not in abandoning a needs-based assessment of women’s wages so much as in an effort to understand that any definition of “wants” encompassed a broad range of human needs. While fewer than 15 percent of all married women, and about 30 percent of Black married women, with wage-earning husbands were regularly employed before the 1930s, those who earned wages had a complicated series of wants. For example, well-paid male and female hosiery workers in the Piedmont Valley of North Carolina and Tennessee flaunted their capacity to buy consumer goods.⁸⁴ In the same region, the poorly paid white textile workers could and frequently did hire Black women to take care of their children while white husbands and wives worked in the mills.⁸⁵ Black women used their tiny pay to feed and clothe their children and to support those who cared for them in their absence. Such enormous differences in the uses of wages notwithstanding, the image of women paid at a rate regulated by public perceptions of abstract needs helped to perpetuate the sense that, in the competition for jobs among women, what was at stake was not skill or the nature of work but the capacity to contribute to family support. This image perpetuated a low wage for all women. In exactly the way that employers had earlier chosen to believe that young, single women were supported by their parents, so, in the period after World War I, an idealized image of marriage with its attendant financial subsidy served to define a woman’s role and threatened to regulate the level of wages for all women.

Partly in consequence, single women, inside and outside the Women’s Bureau, were haunted by visions of married women subsidized by their husbands and therefore able to accept lower wages. Public debate over the wage question in the 1920s turned on the issue of whose needs the wage was intended to meet—the married woman working for “pin money” or the independent self-supporting woman of all classes. Neither category encompassed the reality of women workers, more than three-quarters of whom, according to contemporary studies, supported themselves and their families. While in the prewar period, questions about “workers who are in part supported by parents or other members of the family”⁸⁶ had captured a certain unease about independent women who transcended traditional roles, the 1920s attack on “pin money” workers focused on the distress of single working women who feared competition from women whose families partially supported them. The competition, muted by the prosperity of the 1920s, did not explode until the 1930s. In the meantime, the question of married women in industry was argued pro and con, with such stalwart champions of working women as Mary Gilson, Melinda Scott, and Sophonisba Breckinridge protesting that married women ought not to be in the labor force. Breckinridge proposed instead “a living wage for men based on their own needs and those of their wives and a standard family of three children; disciplinary measures for husbands who are unwilling to work, and state aid for wives of those who cannot work.”⁸⁷

In the face of the commitment to a needs-based wage, proponents of individualism and some champions of the Women’s Bureau fought a losing battle for “a rate for the job.” The new consumerism required a more complex set of messages than simple individualism. While it offered support for raising the wage enough to accommodate both new social relations and new needs, it would not, and did not, challenge conceptions of the wage that sustained family life. Thus, one group of women struggled to elevate a woman’s wage by asking that all workers receive value for the job, while a second declared itself in need of protective legislation and advocated a minimum wage to legitimate women’s capacity to work at all. A woman’s wage still refused to incorporate the capacity to earn a living. At most, it offered a fling at independence to those who did not need to contribute to family support. For the poor it could enhance a family’s standard of living. But in no sense was a woman’s wage intended to promote the desire for a self-sufficient existence.

Yet to women who worked, the capacity to improve the standard of living was not mere ideology. The reification of an “American” standard of living offered a rationale for continuing wage work among married women. As consumer expectations rose, the purchase of what some might have called pin money goods became not luxuries but part of the quality of life. Because a woman’s wage appeared as largely contributory, it neither undermined male egos nor fomented female independence. Men understood the wage as an indication of whether they were “getting ahead.” Women understood it as an indication of whether they could keep up with their work, their status among their peers, and their position in the eyes of the boss. And yet women’s capacity to enhance the family standard contributed to denuding the notion that the family wage either could or should be earned by men alone. At the same time, women established new sources of comparisons that enabled them to maintain status and self-esteem even as they continued to earn less than two-thirds of the wage of the average male worker.

But women’s wages, restricted by an ethos of need and locked into comparisons with other women, still could not rise high enough to compete with the wages of men. If the message of the wage differed for men and women, it failed to prevent women from seeking the same kinds of material gains acquired by men. At some level the “woman’s wage” decisively relegated females to a plateau of citizenship that could not be equated with that of men. As much as suffrage had seemed to extend citizenship to women, a woman’s wage suggested the limits of their aspirations and assigned them to sometimes objectionable social roles. A “rate for the job”—a wage equivalent to that of similarly situated men working in the same firm—would have trumpeted a message of aspiration and ambition that few in the 1920s were ready to hear. But the value that a woman worker created was never the central issue of women’s wage work. Rather, the wage sought to identify the boundaries within which economic inequality could be used to constrain the prerogatives of citizenship. The sex of a worker remained safely more important than what that worker did. With some few exceptions, equality was not at issue; the wage did not contest male prerogatives in the workplace. Rather, it symbolized the limits of political citizenship.