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Other women received posts in every agency from the diplomatic corps and the U.S. Mint to the Consumers’ Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration , an economic agency that was part of the New Deal program. Under Roosevelt, a higher percentage of women received government appointments than ever before, except during World War I. Perkins had graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1902, worked in settlement houses in Chicago, and then studied and conducted research for her master’s degree in sociology and economics at Columbia University. In 1918 Governor Al Smith appointed her to the New York State Industrial Commission.
In May, fifteen hundred WPA workers voted to take a one-day holiday to protest the cuts.They formulated demands for the reinstatement of laid-off workers and an increase in relief work budgets, and they planned a march for June 2. On that day, more than five thousand workers gathered in front of the Minneapolis WPA office. Workers on the Minneapolis state fairgrounds put down their tools and drove from one WPA project to the next, urging a general WPA strike. The next day, eight thousand Minneapolis workers stayed away from work, nearly closing all of the city’s projects, and joining almost 125,000 relief workers on strike across the country. The ILGWU had excluded black women from its Boston union as recently as 1933, and a victorious strike there had put black presser Mary Sweet out of work. However, a coalition of unions in New York City had created the Negro Labor Committee to advance the condition of black workers, and in 1934 the ILGWU asked Sweet to help them organize black women into the union. By the end of the year, ILGWU locals—not only in Boston but in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—included black women, and some had black officers.
All the objects—the real women, mannequins, purses, hats, and scarves—line up parallel and close to the picture plane. All are treated with the same loose sketchy brushwork, a combination of the nervous flickering patches of chiaroscuro that define the forms, and Marsh’s agitated strokes, drawn in and actually hovering above the solid forms they define. Surfaces are further unified by Marsh’s limited palette, primarily grays, pale blues, rusts, and browns. Together the painting techniques and the packed, unfocused composition make a tightly woven surface matrix of objects and shapes.
Elise Johnson Mcdougald Essay Date 1 March
Thus they use as their sources economic data such as employment statistics, census records, business reports, union records, and account books, and also more subjective records such as letters, diaries, newspaper editorials, advertisements, and personal memoirs. The history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century should prompt us to rethink the period between 1940 and 1970, when inequality declined. In the decades after the Second World War, many students used public higher education to access industrial and white-collar jobs, just as students used high school education as a ticket to white-collar employment at the turn of the twentieth century. However, expanding education was only a partial contributor to the decline in inequality. More important was a surge of worker power—not in the form of exclusive craft unions, but through the new, inclusive industrial unions led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The power of workers in this period ensured that jobs had living wages and improved working conditions. It also provided the base of support for minimum-wage laws, federal social-welfare programs, and the progressive taxation necessary to pay for them.
Although the total number of women in manufacturing jobs declined by nearly a million between spring 1945 and winter 1946, there were still one million more women workers in the nation’s factories shortly after the war than in 1940. By the end of the decade the proportion of women at work had increased to 32 percent as opposed to 27 percent a decade earlier.
So far I haven’t noticed a difference in office politics, perhaps because they’re both women. But I confess that I probably have the worst vantage point for evaluating what goes on below the surface.
Using Degas as his prototype, Soyer in the 1930s resurrected the historical stereotype of the exploited shopgirl that contrasts with the 1920s model of the department store saleswoman portrayed by Miller, whose model of middle-class success more closely fit the discourse of new womanhood. Foucault’s concept of discourse and discursive field makes it possible to show how seemingly different texts or arguments share the same assumptions. Thus, as part of showing how new womanhood is constructed in the paintings, this study will also ask how such representations work within or against other constructions of new What is bookkeeping womanhood in other texts, other discursive fields, and other levels of ideological practice. These images have been constructed within the discursive field of art—one that includes texts on art criticism and theory, artists’ biographies, and the practices of educational institutions and museums. But the New Woman as shopper and worker has also been constituted within other historically specific texts. I set these texts against one another to show how the pictures embody contemporary attitudes and perceptions about women’s lives, reinforcing or, occasionally, challenging dominant patriarchal assumptions.
I have argued that these artists inserted themselves into this theater of aesthetic and social mediations. Thus, though Kenneth Hayes Miller’s generalized and capacious matron was never a model for a wide audience, she personified the new woman as consumer and represented social values of normalcy, nurture, domesticity, and companionability. Many of these values were prescribed for home and family in the prosperous 1920s by conservative pundits who sought an alternative to the boisterous boyish flapper.
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Typically, life in the New World was far more difficult on parents than on children, and the Soyer family was no exception. The powerful perception in the discourse of revised new womanhood that women had achieved equality with men thanks to the franchise blinded both Breuning and Read to the inegalitarian conditions of the art world and the art market, not to mention sanctions against married women following careers. Moreover, both writers accepted the companionate ideal promoted by social scientists and psychologists, who labeled “female-centered sociability as deviant.” To operate successfully, these critics seemed to claim, one needed to participate in the “normal” art world of male-female relationships.
Just as she would not commit herself to ideologies, she would not discriminate among her experiences. When we try to get down to some hard definitions of female realism as Richardson understood it, we are faced with a difficult task. For one thing, her own antipathy to definitions and schools was an obstacle to, and an evasion of, any personal effort to sort out her ideas.
- Her wistful hopes, reflected in part by the warm luminosity that suffuses the painting, are fed by the myths of the magazine.
- Black married women had long been forced by economic necessity to work for wages, and among agricultural worker families, 60 percent of Chicanas with children worked in the fields.
- A pink-collar worker is someone working in the care-oriented career field or in fields historically considered to be women’s work.
- Determined and fiercely independent, she was a business executive, devoted to her family, a dedicated consumer of every conceivable new technology, and clear about women’s proper roles—everthing imaginable but the priesthood and the presidency.
- A vital force in women’s clubs, in 1924 she was elected president of the National Association of Colored Women .
- They seem buoyed up by their jobs and the new opportunities available to them as working women.
I learned, when I finally spoke to the recruiter, that the title I was using – Product Development Engineer – while synonymous with Design Engineer jobs that have been feminized, such as teaching or secretarial work, are also referred to as at my old company, had a specific meaning at the new company. Once I cleared that up, I became a viable candidate for the positions I was seeking.
The American Scene
Always in social evolution, as in other evolution, the external form suited to earlier needs is but slowly outgrown; and the period of transition, while the new functions are fumbling through the old organs, and slowly forcing mechanical expression for themselves, is necessarily painful. Whatever did not tend to promote family life, and did tend to provide for the needs of individuals not at the time in family relation, we have deprecated in principle, though reluctantly forced to admit it in practice. O’Hagan also observed (p. 253) that employers always tried to hire women who lived at home with male wage earners so as not to threaten their belief that she worked for spending money. Though she earned early critical and financial success in the mainstream art world—jurors for important national exhibitions awarded her prizes for both graphics and painting, and major museums purchased her works—she was always characterized as America’s best woman artist. Most reminded the public that she was Kenneth Hayes Miller’s “pupil” and had made “slow” progress. Henry McBride spoke of Bishop working “the little plot of ground she has preempted” and of her “restricted” range. In 1937, one critic even claimed that Bishop’s most obvious qualities were “modesty and charm.” Critics, colleagues, and friends alike attributed to her the very prerequisites for success that she had inscribed in her subjects.
Miller had come to artistic maturity in the 1890s and adopted the canon of old master painters taught him by his instructors Kenyon Cox and H. With few exceptions, they favored Italian Renaissance artists like Raphael, Michelangelo, and the Venetians Titian, Giorgione, and Veronese. Miller also professed admiration for Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Ingres, and, among more recent painters, Renoir. These painters provided the direct prototypes for Miller’s Fourteenth Street shoppers.
In developing an interpretive model for the Fourteenth Street School paintings, I am drawn back to the works themselves. Their pictorial language simultaneously accommodates and conflicts with the feminisms and gender ideologies of the inter-war period. Because I see the works as sites of contradictory discourses on new womanhood, I use a model of analysis that allows me to encompass the contradictions and to see history as a process of transformation rather than normal balance as a totalizing triumph or failure on the part of one group over another. Even as gender relations were negotiated and changed during the period, power remained unequally apportioned. They also staffed the enormous bargain emporiums and small specialty stores that surrounded Union Square, and they served as secretaries in the banks and insurance and utility companies. Nationwide, the clerical worker and saleswoman were well established in the labor force.
The military, fire services, and just about every public service organisation, together with many private bodies as well, have all been infected with the same rot. The gendered meaning of work affected not only middle-class urban residents but lower-class ones as well. Domestic industry—particularly in cloth production—expanded in many cities as well as the countryside in the early modern period, with households and individuals hired to do one specific stage of production. Those stages regarded as “women’s work,” such as spinning and carding, were paid less than those regarded as “men’s work,” such as weaving. Spinners’ wages were kept low by employers seeking to reduce the costs of their products and by the number of women seeking employment in spinning as other occupations were closed to them. Employers and government officials seeking to increase production and exports also justified low wages by asserting that spinning was simply a substitute for poor relief or a stopgap employment until women found a man to support them. They also argued that keeping wages low would prevent unmarried spinners from being able to live on their own, and would force them to live in proper, male-headed households where their activities could be more easily controlled.
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Photographers Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Wolcott took pictures for the Farm Security Administration. Other women worked in government-funded positions in hospitals, nursery schools, and cafeterias or cleaned public buildings and organized city records.
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Their efforts resulted in works that cut across the political spectrum without fully advocating revolutionary social change. Where Laning’s contemporary classical realism allowed him to mask the tensions of the Union Square rally, Soyer’s updated Ashcan school realism draws the viewer close to his subjects and suggests the complexity of their situation.
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Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Henderson spent his days shuttling between unemployment offices and job interviews, wondering what his daughter might be doing at any given moment. In 1950, roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded. Historically, this is because it was assumed that their income was supplementary, or that they were earning money to put a brother through college or have something to start out on when marrying. In other words, it is very possible that teaching, social work, and customer service work, among others, pay less than other professions at least in part because they have traditionally hired women, and employers have traditionally been able to pay women less than men. Women, they say, gravitate towards lower-paid industries such as nursing, cleaning, teaching, social work, childcare, customer service or administrative work, while men choose to work in politics, business, science, and other manly, well-paid industries. Those who propagate this idea usually aren’t interested in a solution, since they see no problem, but if asked to provide one, they might suggest that women behave more like men, one aspect of this being to take up careers in male-dominated industries that are more well-paid .
For his part, Franklin Roosevelt wanted to be the first President to appoint a woman to the cabinet. In Frances Perkins he found an ideal candidate with connections to both political and reform networks. The media, which had made married working women invisible in the 1920s, now often vilified them. During the 1920s, married women had experienced discrimination at the local level, particularly income summary as teachers. The federal government’s 1932 Economy Act required that when personnel reductions took place in the executive branch, married persons be the first discharged if their spouse also worked for the government. Women earned less than men, even for the same job, so given the choice, a family would logically retain the higher-salaried man’s job and let the wife go unemployed.
In 1939, during a record-breaking heat wave, nearly all 430 women workers, most of them Mexican Americans, walked off their fruit-canning jobs. The tremendous solidarity of this union local was built on ethnic, kinship, and neighborhood as well as gender lines. They shared the experience of slippery floors, itchy peach fuzz, and the ever-swifter pace of production, in addition to sexual harassment. Those workers who were not Chicanas, the Russian Jews, lived in Boyle Heights in East Los Angeles. The two ethnic groups lived on separate blocks but met at the same streetcar stops in the early morning.