Queen Green
MNGT 5950
June 7, 2007

WOMEN AT WORK IN CONNECTICUT: 1880-1920

In 1977 the average women could expect to spend 27.6 years of her life in the work force, compared with 38.3 years of men.
Women workers are concentrated in low paying dead end jobs. As a result, the average women worker earns only about three-fifths of that a man does, even when both work full time year round (U. S. Department of Labor, “20 Facts on Women Workers,” 1980).
How did women inherit this inferior position in the United States work place? Has it always been this way? Has their position improved since the country industrialized at the turn of the century? Do male or female workers have control over the types of jobs they get and the working conditions they find there?
Though most American women have always been relegated to low-level, subservient jobs in and out of the home, many have been able to exercise varying degrees of choice in their work lives. Between 1880 and 1920 the choices available to women expanded due to the change in job definition, technology, the production pressures of World War 1, the growing militancy of women workers riding the tide of labor unrest during the war, and the increased acceptance of women in the work force.
The period of 1880 to 1920 is of particular importance in our economic history because the structure of our present economic world developed at that time. Many new jobs were stereotyped by sex, while many jobs opportunities opened up for small number of women in various formerly all-male fields.
Women in the Work Force Before 1880
Women’s work was diverse and endless. They looked after the cleanliness of the house, made, mended and washed the clothes, prepared meals on the open fire, preserved foods, made soap, candles, and most medicines well into the 19th century, and also helped the men in the fields at planting and harvesting time. On top of this, they would bear and rear an average of six children (www.yale.edu/ynhti.html).
With the rise of industrialization at the beginning of the 19th century, and the flowering of capitalism, labor began to be viewed as a product which could be bought and sold at the marketplace. This change established a new hierarchy for work between paid and unpaid labor because for the first time large numbers of men and some women began to work for wages outside the home. Some of the products women had produced in the home were now produced in factories. But, by the 1800s, though many working class women worked outside the home, there was a clear acceptance by middle class society that women’s place was in the home, where work has less value (www.yale.edu/ynthi.html).
In the early 19th century, textile mills in New England provided the first opportunity for large number of women to work outside the home in non-domestic labor. Until the 1830s many women between sixteen and twenty-one lived with other families as servants and nursemaids to save money for a dowry before marriage. The opening of the textile mills provided an option for single women which many chose. Though closely supervised at the mills, the women were independent of family; they made more money; and they worked shorter hours. For employers, they provided a cheaper source of labor than men. Until the first immigrant wave of Irish in the late 1830s, it was respectable for native born white single women to work in these factories. However, it was always understood that they would return to domestic pursuits after marriage (www.yale.edyu/ynthi).
Middle class women were bound to their culturally defined “proper sphere” at home. They saw respectability only in such jobs as teaching and nursing and felt working class women were involved in activities inherently lacking in virtue and purity. Working class women saw their worth degraded even more when they discovered their wages were one-fourth to one-third those of working men doing the same jobs.
In 1880, the largest number of wage-earning women in the U.S. was employed in manufacturing and domestic work. In the factories they were concentrated in the production of clothing, boots and shoes, and food processing. Wage labor outside the home was sanctioned to a certain degree if it was merely a continuation of work within women’s sphere. The second largest group of women worked as domestics in private homes, a continuation of work they had always done. Working as a servant, however, had little prestige and less attraction.
Even so, there were so few good jobs open to women in 1880 that many had no choice but to enter domestic service. If women did have an alternative, they grabbed it and as the 20th century dawned, new options did open due to economic and technological change.
For black women, employment opportunities were even fewer. Though a black woman was at least twice as likely to work, and worked for more years than a white woman, most were consigned to domestic and agricultural work. In Connecticut, many black women worked in the tobacco fields, but few were allowed in factories (www.yale.edu/ynthni.html).

Women’s Changing Role Between 1880 and 1920
Though the percentage of women workers in the paid labor force in Connecticut only rose 23.7 percent to 26.3 percent between 1880 and 1920, the total number of women working in tripled, while the state population did little more than double. Society began to accept the fact that single women could and should work, and could do so without ruining their Reputations. The increase in the number of women workers however, it not nearly as significant as the shift in occupations, which, however left unchanged the low status of women in the work force.
Throughout the period, the proportion of women working in the paid labor force in Connecticut was greater that in the U.S. as a whole. And, because Connecticut was such a strong manufacturing state, more women worked in manufacturing and fewer in agriculture than elsewhere. In 1910 Connecticut was the leading producer of firearms and ammunition in the U.S.; produced almost half of the brass, bronze and silverware products; and produced the more value in clocks and watches than any other state (www.yale.edu/ynthi/html).
The most notable change is the shift of our domestic work, into clerical work. The percentage of women in manufacturing and agriculture gradually decreased. There is a dramatic decrease in percentage and numbers in the domestic area, and an even more dramatic increase for women in the clerical field. Trade and transportation, and professional and public service show moderate increases (www.yale.edu/ynth.html).
Clerical Work
While the industrial output of the country grew and consolidated so rapidly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, business operations became more complex. With this expansion came a growing need to correspond, keep records, and manage offices to a degree never before imagined, thus creating a demand for an expanded clerical labor force. In 1890 in Connecticut twice as many females graduated from high school than males. Up until this time, the only acceptable job for these women was teaching. There was then, a large literate pool of workers just waiting to be tapped.
Many women took up clerical work, making clerks the second largest female occupation in 1920. In Hartford, due to the growth of the insurance industries, particularly during the war, the number of clerks grew four-fold between 1910 and 1920. Clerks increased their share of the Connecticut work force from 9.1 percent, 10,929 workers, to 21.5 percent with 31,506 workers. In the nation the percentage of female clerical workers grew from 7.3 percent in 110 to 16.7 percent in 1920 (U.S. Department of Labor, “20 Facts on Women Workers).
Typewriters facilitated the entrance of women into the clerical work force. Typing, a sex-neutral job because it was new, was soon considered “women’s work.”
The entrance of women into clerical jobs only reinforced attitudes outside the office where men held positions of power. As in most other work places of the 1910 to 1920 decade (and of today) the division of work into less and less skilled jobs offered a way into the work force for women. But it also promoted the continued control of masses of clerical and factory workers by a small group of managers, almost always men. The ideology that women, by virtue of their “feminine docility” were naturally suited to fill low lever jobs made it difficult for them to get well-paying jobs and act independently.
Lives of Working Women
Attitudes about women did change to a limited degree. It became acceptable for single women to work. Women were hired at jobs which left them in a submissive role in the work place to reinforce male-female relationships in the larger world. They left the direct submissive role of domestics and entered the not-too-subtle subservient roles as clerical workers. The economic power structure, consolidated during this period, was able to keep women in dead-end-jobs. Women were somehow able to survive, and some were strong enough to risk their jobs in a fight for more control and a desire for a better life. It is these women who laid the building blocks for the continued challenge of women today to sex stereotyping in jobs, pay, working conditions and society.

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