When did women enter the workforce?

In recent history, women began to enter the workforce in dramatically larger numbers during the 1960s, a trend that continued through the 1990s. There was a significant uptick in female labor force participation during World War II as men were away during the war.

The modern corporate context and expansion of the white-collar working class is what most people now identify as the workforce. From this vantage point, it was only after World War II that women gained a foothold in the modern workplace and began to steadily increase workforce participation over the latter-half of the 20^th century. Unprecedented growth in female labor force participation peaked in the 1990s. Today, while women comprise the majority of the college-educated the workforce, there is an overall stagnation if not slight decline in women’s workforce participation.

In this context, it appears that women entered the workforce in the 1950s and beyond. That said, long before Dolly Parton was singing about “Working 9 to 5” in the iconic 1980 movie, women were a mainstay of the United States economy and held significant economic power.

In an article for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, authors Elisa Jacobs and Kate Bahn write, “For women in the United States, labor force participation rates have not followed a straight path. It has been a complicated narrative, deeply affected by women’s family roles, by discrimination, by the changing economy, by technological change, and by their own choices.” The idea that women were on the sidelines for the first 150 years of American history and then all became underpaid secretaries in 1960 is oversimplified to say the least.

As other writers have also noted, especially utilizing the research of Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, there was widespread labor participation among women in the United States in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. This was largely due to the home-based economy in which families grew and produced items for commerce. A pictorial example of this economy can be found in Donald Hall’s 1979 children’s book The Ox-Cart Man. In the book, which won a Caldecott Medal, the historically accurate illustrations by Barbara Cooney show an early-19^th century New England family’s year-long process of growing, collecting, and making various products to be sold at market.

In The Ox-Cart Man, as in life for many people at that time, women’s and children’s contributions to the family economy were vital to family’s economic success. Historians emphasize that women in these agricultural, home-based economies were not confined to what we might consider feminine roles of spinning, weaving, and candle-making. Many women contributed through difficult and physically demanding work growing crops and tending farm animals. For many mothers, the only reprieve from these tasks came with the birth of a child and the physical recovery such an event required.

Historians point to the Industrial Revolution as the major catalyst for change from these family-centered economic systems to a consumer culture that resembles much of the world today. The phrase Industrial revolution was coined by 19^th century historian Arnold Toynbee to describe the economic development that occurred in Britain from 1760 to 1840. Since Toynbee popularized the term, it has come to be applied to a much broader time period and series of economic developments in many parts of the world.

During the Industrial Revolution, husbands and wives no longer worked in their own cooperative but instead men often left the family during working hours to produce goods outside of the home for pay. Gradually, economies moved from agrarian-based to consumer goods produced in factories.

This change spurred a fundamental shift in the family home. Women became primarily viewed as consumers rather than producers. Of course, many women (and children) also worked in factories produced goods like textiles and metal objects like nails, but they were not the majority. Even today, while women make up nearly half of the workforce, they remain only one-third of workers in the manufacturing industry.

During the 19^th and early 20^th century, many women who did work continued to work out of the home, finishing factory products by hand and doing laundry out of their homes or other domestic labor for pay. Much of this work is not well documented, but there are historical records and female labor organization to show how widespread these practices were. However, into the 20^th century the emphasis became on allocating money outside the home and purchasing consumer goods for the household. For much of this time, what work women did do did not earn wages equal to men, in part because of the societal presumption that men were primary breadwinners and women were supplemental. While social welfare was scarce, there were several charitable organizations in urban areas that focused on providing assistance to widows and orphans.

Events like the Great Depression prompted many women to step back from labor force participation, because it was thought that what jobs were available should be offered to men.

In the next decade, international affairs provided another reason for work. The somewhat ironically named War Manpower Commission, a federal agency in charge of increasing production of war materials, focused, despite “manpower” in the name, on recruiting women for manufacturing lines throughout the United States as part of the war effort.

In the postwar years, they tell us, there was a blossoming of opportunity for women. Mitra Toossi, an economist in the Office of Occupational Statistics and Employment Projections, Bureau of Labor Statistics, writes:

Rapid economic growth vastly increased the demand for labor. The civil rights movement, legislation promoting equal opportunity in employment, and the women’s rights movement created an atmosphere that was hospitable to more women working outside the home. The combination of all of these factors created strong inducements for women to join the workforce, significantly affecting their participation rate.

The story of women’s role in the work place is not a straightforward one and not one that is a path of ever-escalating heights.

It’s also worth noting when looking around the world that every single person was carried into the world by a mother. Surely, that labor counts for something in the tally.