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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   5140 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 24, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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My understanding is that there used to be fewer women in the workplace and more at home. When people say that before the 1970's, women had fewer rights than men in America, I assume that this is what they're referring to.

But it just occurred to me that there was no Jim Crow equivalent for women. Was anything stopping women from entering the workplace before? Was there anything that propelled them to do so?

Likely most of the barrier was on the part of employers. In my previous job there were zero women in a firm of about 80 people. Not an exaggeration. Of different companies across the industry, similar policies prevailed. In 18 months I saw exactly one woman doing the same job as me (she did it badly). I also had more than one person tell me they wouldn't want to work with a woman.

All of course, illegal - but despite that, the situation persisted, despite the absence of any formal barrier.

Why limit yourself to the workplace? Women's rights were limited in multiple ways. The workplace has been where I have encountered the most bumps, but my mom and grandmothers ran into serious problems with financial independence and access to education.

In the workplace, as others have said poor women always worked. My grandmother was from a wealthier class and when her dad abandoned the family and she was left without an "appropriate" introduction to a spouse, one of her brothers fortunately paid for her to train to be a librarian so she could support herself in her spinsterhood. (WW2 also meant marriageable men were in short supply for women who had been raised to be pliant and pretty.) She worked as a librarian until she met my grandfather after he got home from the war. Once married she had to leave her job (she was now to make a home and babies, who cares if she also loved her job?). Society and men exercised a great deal of control even over the relatively privileged women. If my grandmother's brother had not stepped in to rescue her she would have had no resources and extremely limited agency to establish herself. The plural of anecdote is not data but you might be surprised at the stories of your older female relatives. My mother (silent gen) was not able to establish her own financial life outside of my father until after I was born (genx). Sure, my dad could co-sign but why should that have been required? When she was in high school her parents had to assure the school she was allowed to take advanced academic courses, because she was going to go to college - and not to get her Mrs. In HS my parents had to pressure the school to let me take advanced shop classes because girls weren't allowed. Notably neither my father nor brother have similar stories. I am aging out of the carefully asked questions in job interviews about whether I was going to have or already had children, without breaking the law. My husband and I work in the same field and comparing this stuff has been interesting. Somehow there's never been a concern about any family obligations or expectations, errrr, I mean anything that might interfere with his ability to do a job. I tend to think my not wearing a wedding ring (assuming no kids) and having a gender neutral name (getting past the girl cooties resume rejection) helped me get more than one position.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on Saturday, March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men [emphasis mine - ox] – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, falling, or jumping to their deaths.

As @2rafa wrote, prole women have been working for wages since they lost the fight to the spinning jenny and later to the sewing machine. It's the middle-class women who got the chance to have a career and not just a teaching job to keep them busy until they invariably got married and became a homemaker.

They're also referring to things like women being barred from most elite colleges or being unable to open bank accounts or lines of credit without male co-signers.

I didn't know about those. Were they unable to open lines of credit because the law prohibited them, or was this something banks chose to do?

I know one dear lady who bemoaned the fact that she could not get a credit card of her own. She was a stay-at-home mom and would be relying on her husband's income to pay the bill when it came due. Knowing the context of that particular situation, it was very much a, "We want the name of the income-earner on the account, so we have suitable recourse upon default," type of situation. Unfortunately, also knowing her shopping proclivities, it was probably a responsible risk assessment. Obviously not all situations are going to be the same, and I'm not aware of details of laws that might have been in effect in other jurisdictions.

Both, depending on jurisdiction, since a lot of it was state-by-state. Once the USG passed the Equal Opportunity Credit Act of 1974, some banks tried an end run around that by simply marking women as high-risk lendees, since it was still legal to just fire a woman if she got pregant regardless of marital status.

Historically poor women have always worked, and have worked outside the home in large numbers in cities since the Industrial Revolution made the previous system of cottage industries economically untenable. In the US, single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930, so well before the sexual revolution. The archetypal Victorian factory - if in textiles, paper, pottery or a number of other industries - also employed large numbers of women. A lot of female labor force participation graphs from the mid-20th century also limit the y axis to somewhere around 45-75%, so the growth looks larger as a proportion of the starting number. Even in the 1960s, a substantial number of women worked outside the home.

People who talk about the civil rights era and women usually have no idea what they’re talking about. Equality of the sexes was inserted as a poison pill by a Southern Democrat in the 1964 act, but it passed anyway and nobody paid it much attention. Profession specific bars were dropped for a variety of reasons, while prosecution of sexual harassment in the workplace was more of a cultural shift than a legal one, since a lot of it had always been a crime under various other terms.

That makes sense. Thank you for your answer. This opens up another question, though: if not much has actually changed for women, what explains The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness?

Careers don't make most women happy in the long term, which is why you can see a trend of highly competent and successful women leaving their extremely lucrative and successful careers by the time they reach their 30s. For example, when you look at lawyers, 30% of women with JDs are unemployed from the ages of 36-40 compared to just 4% of men.

There's a recent survey of women lawyers leaving their firms that indicated that 82% of women left due to lack of flexibility and work/life balance. The article on the survey tries to paint the picture that women aren't leaving for the commonly held belief to be stay-at-home moms, but it's clear the high-stress and workload jobs at the top law firms aren't making women happy, because if it made them happy, why would they quit? The men aren't quitting, in fact, they'll gladly work 60-80 hours a week because the men in these professions are highly conscientious competitive people who find their sense of worth from dominating their chosen area of competence and will put in those extra hours to beat the guys that don't. You don't see them complain about work/life balance because to them it's one aspect they can use to win against their competition. Jordan Peterson talks about women who quit their careers in this 11 minutes video and is worth watching if you want more reasons why women leave their careers. There are a lot of interesting tidbits in that video that I don't want to bother quoting right now.

Something to keep in mind is that a lot of guys also wouldn't be happy working 60-80 hours a week. That's why most men aren't CEOs, doctors, lawyers. But there are enough men with that drive, and those men outnumber women with that kind of disposition. Men also find fulfillment in providing for their families, which is why many men deliberately choose to work overtime if they can, to earn more money for their family. Women can show their love and support for their family, but they'd rather do it in the presence of their family rather than slave away at a job where they are away from their family.

What feminism has done is tell women that they don't need a man, they don't need to do traditionally female tasks, and they can go out there and work and compete just like men in all those highly respected and sought-after professions and fields. As a result, a bunch of women pursued extremely tough and competitive careers, only to find out that it didn't make them happy. Is it such a surprise that working a highly stressful, competitive job with a lot of responsibility is really, really tough and doesn't give you time to do much else? Most men wouldn't want to do those jobs, which is why most men don't do those jobs. Feminism took a slice of the male population, a slice that is highly irregular, and told women that they should all be just like these highly competitive conscientious men. And they'll be happy doing so.

Women in general would be much happier raising a family than working a highly stressful job. Women prefer to work and be with people, and properly raising a family ensures that you'll have people around you well into your deathbed. However, because feminism has pushed women to pursue a career and actively put disdain on traditional female roles, more and more women are delaying or ignoring the idea of being a mother. By the time these women realize that careers don't make them happy and that they might want children, it might be too late. And if they're lucky enough to still be able to have children, well they still have to find a suitable partner to be their husband. Women tend to date across or up the social ladder, so if you're a highly successful woman, your options become quite limited. And their success is to their detriment, as men don't care how much the woman makes, and men prefer younger women. Thus, we're seeing the rise of childless old women and as they get older they slowly lose their social connections and without having a family they become more and more isolated. As a result, we see more and more women get depressed as all they to show for their life is a career they don't care about and the bitter truth that feminism lied to them, as their now aging bodies are too old to have children.

Some women resort to freezing their eggs so that their age won't be a problem, but there are many issues related to egg freezing. If the frozen eggs no longer work, as it hasn't for so many women, then they truly have no option to bear children as by the time they do go ahead and use their eggs their bodies are too old to have children.

Other ideas may have factored into "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness" such as social media, the use of drugs and anti-depressants, the sexual liberation of women, dating and casual sex, marriage and divorce, and the decline of religion, but I'm not going to explore these ideas further right now.

Great post! Thank you!

No low effort "Great post" posts, please.

Is this a new rule? I haven't been around much recently but I don't recall it from the earlier days of ssc/themotte. No judgment here, just curious.

Low effort posts have always been against the rules, though it's not one of the most strictly enforced rules. But we do want to avoid allowing one-line "I agree!" or "No" posts cluttering up threads.

Thanks for the context. I guess the ones I'm remembering being an accepted part of community norms were a little more lyrical than "Great post thanks", but the content was roughly the same.

Social networks declined, and this has a bigger effect on female than male happiness.

Also working "outside the home" was not the only kind of work - it's easy to think of being a homemaker in the 21st century as just essentially being a glorified doer-of-chores, but apart from the idle rich women who worked at home were near-constantly busy with domestic tasks. Before the advent of the commercial washing machine, laundry was an enormously labourious task. Sewing and mending clothing was the norm. Food preparation was much more involved and complicated. Work at home, depending where one lived, also involved a myriad of tasks ancillary to agriculture, or forms of cottage industry.

“Single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930” shouldn’t be surprising, though. What’s more interesting is the quality of job (front-end clerk? barista?) and what the labor force participation was for married women. It’s not like single women throughout history were unoccupied from work, just lounging around reading books.

The point is that both single and married women worked through history in ways that have and haven’t been captured by official data in various forms. And the main thing that spurred women’s work outside the home was that traditional industries (widget production, most commonly textiles etc) that women (single and married) did from home were automated by new industrial technology that required workers at a central factory instead of dispersed at home. The second thing that happened in the 20th century was that the invention of labor saving technologies at home like dishwashers, refrigerators, modern ovens and microwaves, washing and drying machines, vacuums and so on meant that once children were no longer extremely young, the task of running a household was significantly less labor intensive than it had been, and it’s this that also led to increased workforce participation.

For a specific subset of upper-middle class and wealthy women, labor participation was indeed largely cultural rather than driven by material need. But this is only a minority of women, and was itself spurred in part by the fact that declining inequality meant that a Victorian PMC lifestyle (which involved many more servants than the average modern upper middle class American has) was no longer as sustainable on one income, so the choice was more between becoming a maid for your own household or working to be able to hire help; many women still face that choice and prefer the latter.

This is actually new to me. Thanks for dropping the facts.

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