TOWARD THE END OF the 1970s, The Wall Street Journal devoted an eight-part, front-page series to “the working woman”—that is, the flood of women into the paid-labor force—as the greatest change in American life since the Industrial Revolution.
Many women readers greeted both the news and the definition with cynicism. After all, women have always worked. If all the productive work of human maintenance that women do in the home were valued at its replacement cost, the gross national product of the United States would go up by 26 percent. It’s just that women, especially white women, are now more likely than ever before to leave the poorly rewarded, low-security, high-risk job of homemaking (though we’re still trying to explain that it’s a perfectly good one and that the problem is male society’s refusal both to do it and to give it an economic value) for more secure, independent, and salaried jobs outside the home.
Obviously, the real work revolution won’t come until all productive work is rewarded—including child rearing and other jobs done in the home—and men are integrated into so-called women’s work as well as vice versa. But the radical change touted by the Journal and other media is one part of that long integration process: the unprecedented flood of women of all races into salaried jobs; that is, into the labor force as it has been male-defined and previously occupied by men. We are already more than 41 percent of it—the highest proportion in history. Given the fact that women also make up a whopping 69 percent of the “discouraged labor force” (that is, people who need jobs but don’t get counted in the unemployment statistics because they’ve given up looking), plus having an official female unemployment rate that is substantially higher than men’s, it’s clear that we could expand to become half of the national work force by 1990.1
Faced with this determination of women to find a little independence and to be better paid and honored for our work, experts have rushed to ask: “Why?” It’s a question rarely directed at male workers whose basic motivations of survival and personal satisfaction are taken for granted. Indeed, men are regarded as “odd” and therefore subjects for sociological study and journalistic reports only when they don’t have work—even if they are rich and don’t need jobs, or are poor and can’t find them. Nonetheless, pollsters and sociologists have gone to great expense to prove that women work outside the home because of dire financial need, or, if we persist despite the presence of a wage-earning male, out of desire to buy “little extras” for our families, or even out of good old-fashioned penis envy.
Job interviewers and even our own families may still ask salaried women the big “Why?” If we have small children at home or are in a job regarded as “men’s work,” the incidence of such questions increases. Condescending or accusatory versions of “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” have not disappeared from the office or factory.
How do we answer these assumptions that we are “working” only out of some pressing or peculiar need? Do we feel okay about arguing that it’s as natural for us to have salaried jobs as for our husbands—whether or not we have young children at home? Can we enjoy strong career ambitions without worrying about being thought “unfeminine”? When we confront men’s growing resentment of women competing in the work force (often in the form of such guilt-producing accusations as “You’re taking men’s jobs away” or “You’re damaging your children”), do we simply state that a decent job is a basic human right for everybody?
I’m afraid the answer is often no. As individuals and as a movement, we tend to retreat into some version of the tactically questionable defense: “Womenworkbecausewehaveto.” It’s a phrase that has become one word, one key on the typewriter—an economic form of the socially “feminine” stance of passivity and self-sacrifice. Under attack, we still tend to present ourselves as creatures of economic necessity and familial devotion. “Womenworkbecausewehaveto” has become the easiest thing to say.
Like most truisms, this one is easy to prove with statistics. Economic need is the most consistent work motive—for women as well as men. In 1976, for instance, 43 percent of all women in the paid-labor force were single, widowed, separated, or divorced, and working to support themselves and their dependents. An additional 21 percent were married to men who had earned less than ten thousand dollars in the previous year, the minimum then required to support a family of four. In fact, if you take men’s pensions, stocks, real estate, and various forms of accumulated wealth into account, a good statistical case can be made that there are more women who “have” to work (that is, who have neither the accumulated wealth, nor husbands whose work or wealth can support them) than there are men with the same need to work. If we were going to ask one group “Do you really need this job?,” we should ask men.
But the first weakness of the whole “have to work” defense is its deceptiveness. Anyone who has ever experienced life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member. Yet the will and self-confidence to work on one’s own can diminish as dependency and fear increase. That may explain why—contrary to the “have to” rationale—wives of men who earn less than three thousand dollars a year are actually less likely to be employed than wives whose husbands make ten thousand dollars a year or more.
Furthermore, the greatest proportion of employed wives is found among families with a total household income of twenty-five to fifty thousand dollars a year. This is the statistical underpinning used by some sociologists to prove that women’s work is mainly important for boosting families into the middle or upper middle class. Thus, women’s incomes are supposed to be used for buying “luxuries” and “little extras”: a neat double-whammy that renders us secondary within our families, and makes our jobs expendable in hard times. We may even go along with this interpretation (at least, up to the point of getting fired so a male can have our job), because it preserves a husbandly ego-need to be seen as the primary breadwinner, and still allows us a safe “feminine” excuse for working.
But there are often rewards that we’re not confessing. As noted in The Two-Career Couple, by Francine and Douglas Hall: “Women who hold jobs by choice, even blue-collar routine jobs, are more satisfied with their lives than are the full-time housewives.”
In addition to personal satisfaction, there is also society’s need for all its members’ talents. Suppose that jobs were given out on only a “have to work” basis to both women and men—one job per household. It would be unthinkable to lose the unique abilities of, for instance, Eleanor Holmes Norton, the distinguished chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.2 But would we then be forced to question the important work of her husband, Edward Norton, who is also a distinguished lawyer? Since men earn more than twice as much as women on the average, the wife in most households would be more likely to give up her job. Does that mean the nation could do as well without millions of its nurses, teachers, and secretaries? Or that the rare man who earns less than his wife should give up his job?
It was this kind of waste of human talents on a society-wide scale that traumatized millions of unemployed or underemployed Americans during the Depression. Then, a one-job-per-household rule seemed somewhat justified, yet the concept was used to displace women workers only, create intolerable dependencies, and waste female talent that the country needed. That Depression experience, plus the energy and example of women who were finally allowed to work during the manpower shortage created by World War II, led Congress to reinterpret the meaning of the country’s full-employment goal in its Economic Act of 1946. Full employment was officially defined as “the employment of those who want to work, without regard to whether their employment is, by some definition, necessary. This goal applies equally to men and to women.” Since bad economic times are again creating a resentment of employed women—yet also creating more need for women to be employed—we need such a goal more than ever. Women are again being caught in a tragic double bind: We are required to be strong and then punished for our strength.
Clearly, anything less than government and popular commitment to this 1946 definition of full employment will leave the less powerful groups, whoever they may be, in danger. Almost as important as the financial penalty is the suffering that comes from being shut out of paid and recognized work. Without it, we lose much of our self-respect and our ability to prove that we are alive by making some difference in the world. That’s just as true for the suburban woman hostess as it is for the unemployed steel worker.
But it won’t be easy to give up the passive defense of “weworkbecausewehaveto.”
When a woman who is struggling to support her children and grandchildren on welfare sees her neighbor working as a waitress, even though that neighbor’s husband has a job, she may feel resentful; and the waitress (of course, not the waitress’s husband) may feel guilty. Yet unless we establish the obligation to provide a job for everyone who is willing and able to work, that welfare woman may herself be penalized by policies that give out only one public-service job per household. She and her daughter will have to make a painful and divisive decision about which of them gets that precious job, and the whole household may have to survive on only one salary.
A job as a human right is a principle that applies to men as well as women. But women have more cause to fight for it. The phenomenon of the “working woman” (that is, salaried woman) has been held responsible for everything from an increase in male impotence (which turned out, incidentally, to be attributable to medication for high blood pressure) to the rising cost of steak (which turned out to be due to high energy costs and beef import restrictions, not women’s refusal to prepare the cheaper, slower-cooking cuts). Unless we see a job as part of every citizen’s right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, we will continue to be vulnerable to someone else’s idea of what “need” is, and whose “need” counts the most.
In some ways, women who do not have to work for simple survival, but who choose to do so nonetheless, are on the frontier of asserting this right for all women. Those with well-to-do husbands are dangerously easy for us to resent and put down. It’s easier still to resent women from families of inherited wealth, even though male heirs generally control and benefit from that wealth. (There is no Rockefeller Sisters Fund, and no J. P. Morgan & Daughters. Sons-in-law are the ones who really sleep their way to power.) But to prevent a woman whose husband or father is wealthy from earning her own living, and from gaining the self-confidence that comes with that ability, is to keep her needful of that unearned power and less willing to disperse it. Moreover, it is to lose forever her unique talents.
Perhaps modern feminists have been guilty of a kind of reverse snobbism that keeps us from reaching out to the wives and daughters of wealthy men; yet it was a few such women who refused the restrictions of class, and financed the suffragist wave of revolution.
For most of us, however, “womenworkbecausewehaveto” is just true enough to be tempting as a rationalization.
But if we use it without also staking out the larger human right to a job, we will never achieve that right. We will always be subject to the false argument that independence for women is a luxury that can be afforded only in good economic times. Alternatives to layoffs will not be explored, acceptable unemployment will always be used to frighten those with jobs into accepting low wages, and we will never remedy the real cost, both to families and to the country, of dependent women and a massive loss of talent.
Worst of all, we may never learn to find productive, honored work as a natural part of ourselves and as one of life’s basic pleasures.
—1979
1. This turned out to be an underestimation. By 1990, females of all races made up 57.5 percent of the labor force. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, this has in-. creased slightly in the 1990s, and is projected to reach 63 percent by the year 2005. Nonetheless, more media attention has been paid to a statistically insignificant trend of women leaving paid work to raise children—something parents, women or men, should be able to choose, especially in the absence of flexible work schedules and adequate childcare—than to women’s positive reasons for staying in the paid labor force.
2. Now the representative of the District of Columbia in the U.S. Congress.