”Man may work from sun to sun, but woman`s work is never done.”
At least 10 generations of women have recited that couplet: pioneer wives fixing breakfast before dawn; factory workers ironing after a 14-hour day;
mothers tending sick children in the dark of night; policewomen running to supermarkets after the late shift.
At the Smithsonian Institution`s National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C., researchers have been exploring the lives and work of American women, not only the famous and the infamous but also the ”ordinary” women whose experience shaped the nation.
Among those scholars are Deborah Warner, curator of the Smithsonian traveling exhibition, ”Perfect in Her Place: Women at Work in Industrial America”; Helena Wright, who is at work on the museum`s 1990 installation on the 19th Century, and Edith Mayo, who is developing an exhibition on women`s roles in the Progressive Era (1890-1925). ”Perfect in Her Place” is on view at the Naper Settlement Meeting House from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday through Oct. 30; 201 W. Porter Ave., Naperville.
In Colonial times, home and workplace were indistinguishable for men and women, rich and poor alike.
But with the Industrial Revolution and growth of cities, men left home to work, and women`s work at home began to lose status.
”Work is work, even if unpaid,” Warner says.
”But where money becomes the standard measure of worth, as happened in 19th Century America, work done `for free` is all too often seen as having low value.”
”There was a constant argument in the 19th Century about whether it was proper and appropriate for women to work,” Wright says.
Religious, scientific and political authorities informed the Victorian woman that, by divine design, her place was at home, providing a spiritual haven from the corrupt world for her husband.
”Inappropriate” work or education was supposed to damage women`s health and ability to bear children.
However, the same experts were not concerned with the drudgery endured by the average working woman, or even the average housewife.
And, ”while white Americans fussed over proper feminine behavior,”
Warner says, ”most black women worked in the fields.
”Where women are concerned,” she says, ”theory has always been easily adjusted to satisfy economic demands.”
Large-scale manufacturing required unskilled, cheap labor.
It was noted that because such ”womanly” virtues as patience and dexterity suited the weaker sex to certain tasks, a woman`s place might be in the factory.
In the early 1820s, mill girls of Lowell, Mass., were among the first American women to leave home for the factory.
Conditions were good, for the time. A 68-hour week paid more than teaching, at half a man`s wage.
Then owners lengthened hours and cut pay. By the 1840s, those New England women who had stayed in the mills, often with hearing damaged by noise or lungs scarred by lint, were replaced by immigrants desperate for work.
Women would continue to earn ”women`s” wages in a vast range of industries.
One watch manufacturer proudly reported that one girl earning $8 a week could do the work of four men employed at $25 each.
While men sometimes were successful in arguing for pay raises based on their responsibilities as breadwinners, women never got a family wage, no matter how many dependents they had.
The 19th Century prejudice against a working mother did have a core of bitter truth.
At a time when a slight infection could be fatal, a mother`s care of her family could mean the difference between life and death.
But many women had no choice. Then, as now, most women went out to work because they needed the money.
”The stories we are turning up reveal a desperation as dramatic as any Victorian fiction,” Wright says of the plight of women who were single, widowed, abandoned, married to alcoholics or simply poor.
The Industrial Revolution brought changes to the housewife`s lot, but as Ruth Schwartz Cowan reveals in ”More Work for Mother” (Basic Books, 1983), the blessings were mixed.
Labor-saving devices created new labors. The Colonial housewife stirred up a quick corn bread; the 19th Century housewife spent a day a week baking yeast-raised white bread. Similarly, more cloth meant more clothes, more sewing and more laundry.
Few women did all their own housework if they could get it done another way.
Until the 1920s, domestic service was the major paid occupation for women.
Housework was fairly well-paid, but most women valued their relative independence and preferred factory work, the second largest employment, when they could get it.
There is ”no way to estimate how many women worked at home on piecework,” Wright says.
Exploitation of seamstresses was notorious. The term sweatshop was coined in 1867 in the garment industry.
Clerical work began as at-home copying and expanded with the growth of business and government bureaucracy during the Civil War.
”A woman with education and brains could start a magazine, like Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey`s Lady`s Book, who was left a widow with five children,” Wright says. ”Lady scribblers,” often with masculine pen names, abounded.
Women worked as shopgirls, teachers and librarians, and if daring and talented, in the theater.
When they devoted themselves to the horrors of wartime nursing, that calling became respectable.
As time passed, more options opened up. And, in fact, a few intrepid women did cross the line into coal mining, blacksmithing and other male preserves.
For women unable to find a job or with too many mouths to feed, there was a grim alternative: prostitution.
”The loss of young women to the white slave trade was like the loss to drugs today,” Mayo says.
But all the efforts of middle class women to ”save the working girl”
were worth little, Wright says, without jobs or decent wages.
”Women`s experiences in the workplace and the economic freedom they found there, however meager, contributed in important ways to the women`s rights movement,” Warner says.
The women`s movement in turn was to have a profound effect on modern America.
By the late 19th Century, women had become adept at turning the traditional role rhetoric to their own ends.
” `We don`t want to enter a man`s world-we just want to be professional, good homemakers,` that was the message,” Mayo says.
Women moved into, or created, fields that were extensions of their domestic roles-home economics, public health, nutrition, preventive medicine, pediatrics and gynecology, interior design and decoration, to name a few-professionalizing what had been the woman`s sphere.
At the end of the 19th Century, faced with appalling conditions in industry and in urban areas, women took up ”housekeeping on a grand scale,” arguing for the vote on the basis that it was necessary to protect the moral and physical welfare of the family from corrupt officialdom.
Threatening to ”scrub out the cesspool of politics,” women took a stand for health, education, welfare, the international peace movement and labor reform and virtually created the consumer movement.
Networks of women from all walks of life linked reform initiatives across the country, in ”massive organizations, unlike anything we have today,” Mayo says.
Even without the vote, they had enormous political clout.
For example, in the late 1920s, powerful corporate lobbies stopped a proposed constitutional amendment to abolish child labor.
But the PTA saw to it that laws requiring compulsory school attendance were passed everywhere.
”The high-water point of political and occupational equality for women was in the 1920s,” Wright says. ”We are still fighting our way back.”
Women had excelled at ”man`s work” during World War I; they had the vote.
”More women held doctorates then than ever before-or since.” Then came the desperate years of the Depression.
In the second World War, women were called again. ”Rosie the Riveter”
was immortalized in song, a symbol of 5 million American women doing a ”man`s work.”
But even though ”that little frail did more than a male can do,” when the GIs came back, Rosie was sent home, Wright says, ”no matter how much she needed the work.”
In 1971 less than half of all women ages 18 to 54 were employed.
Today, 70 percent of women work for wages.
The figures reflect both the tremendous advance of women in the workplace and the economic pressures that sent them there. Yet issues of equal opportunity and equal compensation remain.
Woman`s place may now be, as the bumper sticker has it, ”in the House-and the Senate,” but it also still is in the home.
The average woman puts in 40 or more hours a week at work, plus commuting time, and 35 hours of housework.
Single and married working women alike wryly claim that they need a
”wife” to keep up.
Surveys suggest that few men are pitching in.
”For various reasons-economic need, personal gratification-people started doing things differently, and, as always, society is really slow at catching up with them,” Warner says.
Housework is no more likely to disappear than the home, and there is no substitute for loving parents.
Warner hopes that society ”can stop making distinctions between working and `not working` based on the exchange of money.” But all three scholars agree that one indisputable lesson of history is that prediction is impossible.
