Women's history: key events and figures

U.S. Women in 1930s-1940s

Women's History and 19th Amendment

On August 26, 1920, Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby quietly signed the Nineteenth Amendment into law. By guaranteeing all Americans the right to vote "irrespective of sex," the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment capped more than half a century's worth of struggle by finally recognizing a woman's right to vote.

The Nineteenth Amendment was an important milestone in women's rights. However, the suffragettes who thought that equality would be achieved through the vote were sadly mistaken.

This paper examines how despite the passage of the right to vote, the structures of sexual and gender-based inequity continued. It examines women's experiences from the Great Depression through the Second World War, giving particular focus on the activism and experiences of poor women and women of color.

Working Women in the 1930s

In the book Gender and Jim Crow, Glenda Gilmore points to a separate ideal of womanhood that existed between black and white women. For example, due to economic need and less educational opportunities, many African-American women already worked outside the home long before women had begun to agitate for equal rights in the workplace.

By the 1930s, the growing number of immigrants had changed the American workplace. Since few immigrant or working-class families could make ends meet on a single salary, many wives and daughters worked outside the home to augment the family income.

However, this opened the door for many discriminatory practices. Many poor and immigrant women labored in factories, under sweatshop conditions. Female farmworkers were also targets of discriminatory wage practices, often receiving only a fraction of the daily wages of their male counterparts.

Because of these inequalities, many working women began to organize and form trade unions. In 1929, for example, 300 female workers in a rayon plant in Elizabethton, Tennessee, walked out of their jobs at a rayon manufacturing company. The plant was forced to close down. When the striking women ignored orders to go back to work, national guardsmen broke up the picket with arrests and tear gas.

Strikes like these continued around the country, throughout the Great Depression, as women found it harder to make ends meet. In 1938, Chicana pecan shellers in San Antonio, Texas went on strike, demanding better pay and better working conditions. One year later, Mexican female workers staged a walkout at the Cal San cannery in Los Angeles, California.

In summary, the institution of the right to vote did not have an immediate impact on the many women whose lives were defined by poverty. In the field of labor, for example, women continued to work under hazardous conditions and longer working hours without commensurate pay. In addition, other avenues for advancement remained restricted for many women. Higher education, for example, remained a limited option as institutions like Stanford University practiced a strict quota system of one female student for every three male students.

New Opportunities in World War II

For many women, the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of the war also ushered in new opportunities for paid labor. In addition, the new realities of war helped ensure fairer labor practices and more women-friendly government policies.

As the war lasted longer, more women were recruited into the wartime economic workforce, giving rise to the enduring cultural icon of Rosie the Riveter. After having to beg for work and being forced to make do with sub-level wages, many women suddenly found their labor in demand. The period during the war saw women take up tasks long-thought to be the purview of men, such as welding and shipfitting. Headlines from newspapers like the Business Week proclaimed, "Surveys show they [women] not only can do the job but that they often do it better. Obstacles to employment are giving way."

To keep the economy moving, the government actively sought to recruit more women into the workforce. In 1941, it took Congress a record two weeks to set aside federal funds for child daycare, so more women could direct their labor to the war. Through this program, wealthy children received education while poorer children received medical and other therapeutic care. To accommodate the mothers' working hours, these programs were open from 10-12 hours a day, six days a week. The day care program also provided work for unemployed teachers and child development experts.

Though this period seemed to usher in new opportunities for women, most of the female laborers were fired by the end of the war, as the men came home to reclaim their jobs. Congress gradually cut back on the funding for federal child care centers, until the program was scrapped altogether in 1964.

World War II also provided conflicting opportunities for restriction and education for many young Japanese-American women who were relocated into interment camps. During the war, Japanese-Americans lost much of their civil rights as the United States government challenged their national loyalty.

This suspicion, however, was much stronger against Japanese-American men because of prevailing notions of Asian women's passivity. Thus, elder Japanese-American men were largely confined to camps, while younger Nisei proved their loyalty by enlisting in the war.

The relocation camps caused a shift in the partriachal family structures. The communal setting in the camps, for example, freed many women from traditional domestic chores. This allowed many young Nisei women to take advantage of a privately-funded scholarship fund, which financed college education. Because many colleges were hesitant to admit Japanese-American men during wartime, many young Nisei women benefitted from the program and went on to get college educations.