Wornen, Work, and the Social Order
ALICE KESSLER-HARRIS
In colonial New England, women routinely kept taverns. worked as compositors. operated printing presses and ran their husbands’ business affairs. Not infrequently, they also ran mills, served apprenticeships, and worked in saw mills. Yet in 1825. a young farm girl who wished to earn extra money by working in a textile mill had to board in a house where she was governed by stringent rules. Each girl had to sit at table during meals at a place assigned her according to the length of time she had worked in the factory. Doors were closed at 10 P.M. and boarders expected to retire then. Anyone “habitually absent from public worship on the Sabbath” was subject to discharge.’ Not long thereafter, women were told by Sara Jane Clarke that the “true feminine genius is ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent: a perpetual childhood.”’
“Acceptable employments,” pointed out one prominent ladies’ magazine, were to be pursued only before
marriage and in case of dire need.’ But in World War I women successfully replaced male trolley drivers
who had joined the army. Shortly after the men returned, they went out on strike to protest the fact that
the women had not immediately been fired. During World War 11. women “ran lathes, cut dies, read blueprints, and serviced airplanes. They maintained roadbeds, greased locomotives . . . worked as stevedores, blacksmiths. . . and drill press operators.”4 After the war, a best-selling book proposed government programs to bolster the family, cncourage women to bear children and revive the lost arts of canning, preserving, and interior decorating. In contrast, the contemporary women’s liberation movement insists on equal opportunity, an end to the sex-stereotyping of jobs, and changes in family structure which would free all women who want to work outside the
home.
How can we explain these dramatic changes in the kinds of work done by women? How can we understand accompanying shifts in attitudes toward working women? What are the relationships of these two to the work that men do? This essay will explore the interaction between ideas about women and their labor force participation. It will consider women’s work in the context of changing economic needs, and explore the relationship between work outside the home and changing family functions. For each economic stage in America’s past, it will attempt to understand both the ways in which women have participated in the labor force, and the ways in which working women of different classes and ethnic groups perceive their experiences.
The relationships among these factors are complex. While ideas about women’s proper roles have historically confined women to work within the home and community, to exclude them from paid labor altogether would have deprived the industrializing process of workers badly needed in an American labor market characterized by chronic scarcity until the closing decades of the 19th century. For all women to work would threaten the integrity ofhome and family on which social order was believed to rest. Clearly some women had to be socialized into staying at home while others were encouraged to work. The varying needs of the economy as well as the changing functions of families have increasingly led women into the labor force. The resulting tension between family and work roles has been resolved historically in a variety ofways and with different consequences for women of various classes and ethnic groups. At the same time, women as a group have always worked in the lowest-paid. least prestigious sectors of the work force. This essay will attempt to comprehend both the unity and the diversity of women’s work experiences by exploring the interaction between the changing labor-force requirements of employers and the family’s relationship to society.
The family had been a keystone of social order in Puritan New England. The Massachusetts Bay Colony
self-consciously encouraged families to be “little cells of righteousness where the mother and father disciplined not only their children. but also their servants and any boarders they might take in.’.’ Unmarried men and women were required to place themselves in the home of a family in order to be guided by them. Family members were encouraged to supervise each other to guard the morals of the community as a whole. John Demos sums up his study of the Plymouth colony by noting that the family functioned as a business, a school, a training institution. a church, and often as a welfare institution. “Family and community . . . ,” he concludes, “formed part of the same moral equation. The one supported the other and they became in a sense indistinguishable.”‘
While the functions of the family changed toward the end of the 18th century, certain assumptions remained. A pre-industrial society assumed that, except among the aristocracy, all family members would work as a matter of course. So widely accepted was this practice that colonial widows -almost routinely took over businesses left by their deceased husbands, and in at least one instance the Plymouth Colony General Court revoked the license of an innkeeper whose wife had recently died. The court judged that without her services, the husband was not capable of keeping a public house.‘ But work for women was inseparable from the home and family. When Alexander Hamilton argued that putting women and children to work in incipient manufacturing enterprises would save them from the curse of idleness his idea was scorned.
As the agrarian I8th-century society moved into the early industrialization of the 19th century, a growing mythology confirmed women’s attachment to their homes. On a functional level. this is readily explained.
Industrialization and concurrent urbanization increased the number of men who worked in impersonal
factories beyond the immediate surroundings of home and community. With men removed from contact
with children during the lengthy and exhausting day, women had to fill the breach. Simultaneously, laissez-
faire economic policies which emphasized individu- alism, success, and competition, replaced the old Puritan ethic which emphasized morality, hard work. and community. Men who worked hard and strove for success required wives who could competently supervise the household and exercise supportive roles as well. Ideas about what women should do conformed to these new societal requirements. In what Bernard Wishy calls a reappraisal of family life that took place after 1830, motherhood rose to new heights, and children became the focus of womanly activity. Mothers were asked to give up wealth, frivolity. and fashion in order to prepare themselves for a great calling. “The mother was the obvious source of everything that would save or damn the child; the historical and spiritual destiny of America lay in her hands.”’
Simultaneously. the woman became a lady. Meek and submissive, modest and silent. women were expected to submerge their wills into those of husbands and fathers. Piety, purity. and submissiveness became the ideal. The art of homemaking now reached mystical proportions, with some educators arguing that women must be trained to that end. Homemaking became a profession. There could be no higher calling.’ Girls of all classes went to school to learn to read, write, and do simple math: but those whose parents aspired to the middle class were treated differently from their brothers. Since they inhabited “a realm different from that of men, their education must also be different.”’” For the affluent. a little music, literature, and embroidery added to the three R’s were enough.
”Home. duty to the family. and religion” were the only concerns fit for women.
For a woman to neglect her duty meant social chaos. As one popular 19th-century schoolbook argued. ”when a woman quits her own department . . . she departs from that sphere which is assigned to her in the order of society, because she neglects her duty and leaves her own department vacant. . . . " Consistent with this feeling, one state after another, beginning in New York in 1778. and ending with New Jersey in 1844, deprived women of the suffrage rights they had possessed in the early years after the revolution. When the suffragists asked for their lost political rights in 1848, they were met with ridicule and antagonism. As Aileen Kraditor has argued. “it was not that social order required the subordination of women, rather.. . it required a family structure that involved the subordination of women.”’? Until 1850. the decennial census recorded all data by families. In 1850, the name ofeach person was enumerated, but only the oc- cupations of males over I5 were recorded. Finally, in 1860, occupations of females were included.”
Women became factory workers at a time when the family was understood as the basic social unit, essen-
tial to social order. Millowners, like most other Americans. had a large stake in preserving social order, and
removing women from their homes did not prove appealing to an affluent and largely agrarian population
with a coherent conception of woman’s role. But the need for labor was undeniable. In the early years after
the revolution, New England millowners hired whole families. many of whom worked only during slack seasons on the farm. Independent farmers were reluctant to adapt to the discipline of the factor).. and proved to
be an unsatisfactory labor supply.”
The unmarried daughters of New England farmers seemed to be the only alternative. Could one reconcile
the moral imperative of the home with the use of these young women in factories? It was the genius of Francis
Cabot Lowell to conceive of a way of doing so. He appealed to the young single daughters of farm families
in a way that played into both their sense of family responsibility and into the ethic of hard work. For the
mill which finally opened in Lowell, blassachusetts, in 1821, he proposed carefully supervised boarding
houses for girls who would spend a few years before marriage at the mills, and he offered salaries which
were to be saved for their trousseaux. or used to help pay off mortgages. or send a brother through college.
At the same time, parents were assured that their daughters would be given both hard work and discipline, experiences that would make them into better wives and mothers. The mills attracted a reliable labor force, easily disciplined in industrial routines, and far less expensive than male breadwinners. In return, they promised a training ground in morality.
The millowners’ needs conspired with their conviction that they were providing a service for the nation. Millowners repeatedly stated ”that one of their prime purposes in launching the textile industry was to give
employment to respectable women to save them from poverty and idleness.”’’ They argued that they were in
fact preserving republican virtues of hard work and raising the moral and intellectual tone of the country.I6
The mill girls themselves, at least in the early years, seemed to believe the rationale. In a manner reminiscent of the early Puritans. they “supervised” one another, ostracizing those whose morals were in question.” They were said to read poetry and to study together. The factory became a reputed cultural oasis.
For a variety of technological and economic reasons. employers could not long maintain high wages and good working conditions. Within 20 years after the mill’s opening, the Lowell women complained of excessively long hours, wage cuts, and extra work. These complaints were echoed in textile mills throughout New England. Workers who had country homes to return to refused to work under deteriorating conditions. When Lowell operatives organized themselves into the Female Labor Reform Association in 1845, the millowners deserted their moral stance. Taking advantage of increasing Irish immigration, they rapidly eliminated the old work force. As late as 1845, only 7 percent of the employees in the eight Lowell mills were Irish. By 1852. the old New England mill girl had gone. The pages of the Lowell Offering, a worker-run but factory-supported paper, reveal the degree to which employers had chosen to place a cheap labor supply above their previous moral convictions. Some operators still continued to believe in 1849 that corporation owners would raise wages so as “to attract once more
the sort of girl who had made the industry what it was.’”’ Skeptics felt that the mills had lost the respect of the community because standards of morality and the old spirit of mutual surveillance had declined. Caroline Ware, historian of the textile industry, assesses the position of the employers: “Necessity had forced them to gain and hold the respect of the community in order to attract the requisite workers, and they were only too eager to be relieved of that necessity by the advent of a class of labor which had no standing in the community and no prejudice against millwork.”’
The rapid replacement of New England women by lower paid and more tractable Irish male and female
workers illustrates the double uses of the moral code by channeling the labor force as the 19th century pro-
gressed. By the mid 18jOs, “respectable” women would not work in factories or as servants. The only
sanctioned occupations for women were teaching and, when genteel poverty struck, dressmaking. The labor
force needs of employers encouraged class divisions which were reflected in the prevailing myths about
women. None of the extensive and elaborate network aimed at preventing the middle-class woman from
leaving her sphere applied to immigrants, working- class. or black women. These women constituted the
growing number who. from 1850 on, took jobs in expanding industries.” While financial need drove them
into the labor force, their practical exclusion from the moral code which defined a woman’s role had a number of tangible benefits for employers.
In the first place, the existence of the moral code and the middle-class feminine ideal of domesticity provided employers with a labor force of women who, for the most part, were convinced that their real calling lay in marriage and child-rearing and had only a transient interest in their jobs. The drive toward respectability provided working women with a set of aspirations (equivalent to upward mobility for men) which mitigated class consciousness and complaints about present exploitation. For those who were married and working, the desire to stay home provided a goad to prod unfortunate husbands into working harder and earning more.
Second, insisting that women belonged at home permitted employers to exploit working women by treating them as though their earnings were merely supplemental. Any examination of women’s wages, which were always substantially below those of men and seldom sufficient even for a single woman to support herself, reveals that this was the common practice of employers. Thus, John Commons estimated that while in 1914 a living wage for a single person was defined as eight dollars per week, 75 percent ofall female wage earners received less than that,‘ and 50 percent received less than six dollars per week. A 20 percent unemployment rate further reduced these wages.” The assumption that women belonged at home occasionally led employers to ask that the help received by women living at home be taken into account in calculating “living wages.”” The same assumption led
employers to refuse to train women to perform skilled jobs and to deny their aspirations for upward mobility.”
A third effect of the domestic code was to keep women out of unions. Since many felt their work life to be temporary, women had little incentive to join one another in a struggle for better conditions. Employers clearly felt this to be a tangible benefit, for in the few instances in the 19th century where women created successful unions, they were quickly crushed. Because unions would negate the advantages of low wages and docility they could not be tolerated.’4
Fourth, employers gained an inestimable advantage from the dual work force in their relationships with male workers. Working men argued that women workers held wages down. Repeatedly in the 1830s they insisted that wages paid to them would be higher if women were excluded from the work force. In 1836, a National Trades Union Committee urged that female labor be excluded from factories. After explaining that the natural responsibility and moral sensibility of women best suited them to domesticity, the report argued that female labor produced “ruinous competition, . . . to male labor” whose end finally would be that “the workman is discharged or reduced to a corresponding rate of wages with the female operative.”” The report continued:
One thing.. . must be apparent to every reflecting female, that all her exertions are scarce sufficient to keep her alive; that the price of her labor each year is reduced: and that she in a measure stands in the way of the male when attempting to raise his prices or equalize his labor, and that her efforts to sustain herself and family, are actually the same as tying a stone around the neck of her natural protector, Man, and destroying him with the weight she has brought to his assistance. This is the true and natural consequence of female labor when carried beyond the family.26
The president of the Philadelphia Trades Association advised women to withdraw altogether from the work
force: ‘I , . . the less you do, the more there will be for the men to do and the better they will be paid for doing it, and ultimately you will be what you ought to be. free from the performance of that kind of labor
which was designed for man alone to perform.””
Male fears of displacement and of wage reductions seemed justified. While men and women normally did not compete for the same jobs, employers often substituted one for the other, over a period of time. The work force in New England textile factories, which was 90 percent female in 1828, was only 69 percent female in 1848.” In Massachusetts, 61 percent of the teachers were male in 1840; by 1865. 86 percent were female.’
Finally, the “cult of true womanhood’’ glorified a family structure and stability that encouraged, even coerced the male head to work harder, in order to support his family and provide for his wife. For one’s wife to be working meant that the husband had failed. The need to preserve the wife’s position on a pedestal pushed men into an endless search for upward mobility and financial success. Sacrificing for one’s family became a pattern still prevalent among working-class americans. The idea that women should be able to atay at home, the bertter to mother their children, justified hard work, long hours, economic exploitation, and a host of other evils for male workers.
The moral injunction that confined women to their homes served many purposes. It maintained social order by providing stable families. It kept mosst married women out of the labor force, confining them to supportive roles in relation to the male work force. It divided women from each other along class lines and helped to ensure that those woemn who did work would stay in the labor force only briefly, remaining primarily committed to their famiies and satified with low-paying jobs. The special position of women and the least paid and least skilled members of the work force induced hostility froom unskilled male labor. Afraid that women might take their jobs, some workingmen might have hesitated to demand justice from intrnasigent employers.
For most of the 19th century, the tension between the need for labor and the need for social order was contained by the domestic code. Toward the end of the century, a number of factors operated to break down the code so that it could no longer contain the underlying contradiction.. The industrial strife that enveloped America in the late 19th century led many contemporary observers to fear that social order was giving way. Under these conditions several factors seem to have had special significance for women.
Increasing immigration had provided a plentiful labor supply of precisely the kinds of men and women who fell outside the moral code. But as employers took advantage of the labor supply to lower wages and to coerce hard work out of this group of people, striking spread and public attention was drawn to their grievances. Newspaper exposes and government investigations nnoted the injurious effects on all workers, but especially on women, of harsh working conditions, and of wages insufficiient to keep body and soul together. some investigtors pointed to spreading prostitution as one consequence of low industrial wages. Others argued that stunted and warped mothers endangered the health of the unborn, and objected to "latchkey" children. Pressure for legislations to "protect" these women began to build up.
Simultaneously, it became apparant both to the investigators and to male workers that women were finding it increasingly necessary to work. Sickness, accident, and death rates among industrial wowrkers reached all-time highs between 1903 and 1907.. Unemployment fluctuated cyclically. Despite rises in real wages after 1897, wages remained too low to meet normal family needs. Whether consequently or not, the proportion of married women in the nonagricultural work force almost doubled between 1890 and 1920. Workingmen now voiced new fears that women would undermine the male labor force. While a fewmade sporadic attempts to organize women into trade unions, most spported legislation that would effectively limit women's participation in the labor force by raising their wages, limiting the hours they could work and prescribing the kinds of jobs in which they could be employed.
A further breakdown in the moral code and an explanation for women's increasing participation in the work force lay in the character of the immigration population. Ambitious and anxious to fulfill the American Dream, women from pre-industrial origins whose traditions incorporated both strong family loyalty and strong work orientations saw little need to play confined roles. Though the kinds of jobs they would take often depended on their ethnic origins, they were both willing and eager to work at least before marriage and often before having children.” To convince them of their errors, movements to “Americanize” the immigrant, of which the social settlement was a prime example, appeared in the 1890s. Those movements continued through the 1920s and were often directed at
teaching the immigrant woman the arts of homemaking, bathing and caring for children, sewing, and cooking. All seemed designed to convince immigrant women that in America women stayed at home.
But probably the most telling failure of the moral code to contain the contradictions between the need for social order and the need for labor lies in its rejection by some middle-class women. While social values dictated leisure and an absence of work for women, these things themselves bred a challenge to social order. The number of women by the end of the 19th century exceeded the number of men. What were spinsters to do? For wealthy married women, affluence. servants, and a decline in the birth rate all added up to boredom. Excess energies spent themselves in ways which often had significance for working women. Some women, seeking the suffrage, allied themselves with working women, thus momentarily breaking down class barriers that had consistently divided
them. Their involvement in the trade-union movement not only contributed markedly to the success of
women attempting to organize themselves but revealed the common disabilities of the two groups. Other women became reformers, investigating and exposing conditions of child labor and the abuse of women, and as a consequence. publicizing the conditions on which their own leisure rested.
Still a third group crossed class lines more dramatically, attracted by new jobs opening in offices. Between 1890 and 1920. the percentage of women employed as clerks. saleswomen, stenographers. typists, bookkeepers, cashiers, and accountants increased from 5.3 percent of the nonagricultural female work force to 25.6 percent.” During the same period, among the women who worked, the proportion who were born in America of native parents also increased rapidly (35.3 percent to 43.8 percent); the percentage of native-born women of foreign parents increased slightly (20.9 percent to 24.9 percent); the percentage of foreign-born women dropped slightly (19.8 percent to 18.8 percent), and that of Negro women dropped markedly (33.4 percent to 17.6 percent).” Increases were accompanied by enormous shifts to the clerical sectors of the work force. The needs of employers for people who were both relatively well educated and willing to work for relatively low, pay seem to have encouraged the creation of a new market. In part this was met by rising educational levels among immigrant
daughters who had traditionally worked. But in part it was met by native white women entering the labor
market for the first time.
Changing needs of employers. on the one hand (which encouraged the influx of native Americans into the labor force). and an overabundant labor supply of unskilled and semiskilled workers on the other (providing leisure for the middle class and encouraging exploitation of immigrants) seein together to have cracked the moral code which had served so many useful functions in the 19th century. The compromises which emerged from this period of uncertainty indicate new attempts to preserve social order in some sectors while providing new freedom to work in others. They are best seen in the context of broader value changes then affecting the whole society.
In the early 1900s America moved from laissez- faire economic policies to government regulation in a corporate state. The change reflected growing public willingness to accept corporate efficiency and rationality as the basis for industrial society. Large-scale industry encouraged both the homogenization of the labor force (by devaluing and removing control from skilled labor) and the artificial creation of distinctions among workers (by emphasizing expertise. credentials, and ethnic and sexual characteristics). The division of the labor force in this way, effectively limiting occupational mobility for many groups, was sanctioned by legislation which legitimized these new hierarchies. State licensing requirements for medicine and social work as well as for many technical training schools illustrate this trend. So does protective labor legislation for women.
“Protective” legislation served the twofold function of segmenting the labor force and of returning some women to their homes by regulating the kinds of jobs they could hold. From about 1900 into the middle 1920s women found themselves subject to an increasing barrage of legislation limiting their working hours establishing minimum wages, and defining the sanitary conditions under which they could work. Whatever its real value in eliminating the most gruesome abuses against a large working population, legislation effectively served to channel women into selected areas of the labor force.
Many women even then declared that protective legislation discriminated against working women. Supporters quite specifically argued that these laws were in the best interests of the state. Oregon, for example, preceded its minimum wage law with a preamble: “The welfare of the State of Oregon requires that women and minors should be protected from conditions of labor which have a pernicious effect on their health and morals. and inadequate wages . . . have such a pernicious effect.”’8 John Commons interpreted the principle as follows: ”In proportion as certain classes of laborers . . . are recognized by the courts as suffering an injury, and in proportion as the injured
persons are deemed to be of importance to the public as well as unable to protect themselves. then legislation requiring the employer to remove the injury and prohibiting the laborer from even voluntarily consenting to the injury.. . begins to be sustained as ‘reasonable.”’-’’ Men did not benefit from minimum wage laws in this period. and courts repeatedly struck down legislative restrictions on hours which applied to men. Clearly the state’s vital interest in women placed them in a special category. Protective legislation affected deeply the unskilled poor working woman. while it had minimal effect on the new office clerk. Workingmen favored minimum wage legislation for women because it effectively reduced a downward pull on their wages.4o As one authority phrased it, ”The wage bargaining power of men is weakened by the competition of women and children, hence a law restricting the hours of women and children may also be looked upon as a law to protect men in their bargaining
power.”“
In other ways too, legislation recognized the needs of employers. A Federal Vocational Education Act passed in 1917 which provided for both men and women was widely supported by educators, manufacturers, trades unionists, businessmen. social workers, and philanthropists. Schools and professional agencies opened their doors to women who were encouraged to become teachers and social workers. Corporations and the state took over some social-insurance functions formerly provided by the family. Women got the vote. The 1920s witnessed an elaborate reappraisal of the free-spirited. now middle-class, office girl cion flapper. But married women and poor women were encouraged not to work unless absolutely necessary, and employers. discouraged by minimum wage rules and short hours, often looked elsewhere for labor. That compromise satisfied both employers with an abun-
dance of immigrant labor and workingmen. It maintained the tenuous compromise between social order vested in the home and passed down by women, and the need for labor, by arguing that women’s place was in the home, most of the time. Between 1900 and 1940, the percentage of women participating in the work force rose only very slowly.” When it increased dramatically under the impetus of war in the 1940s, it was accompanied by elaborate justifications.
Since World War 11. changing economic needs have simultaneously opened new jobs and altered the nature of families and of women’s functions within them. Job structures have shifted dramatically from primarily blue-collar and manual labor before World War I1 to white-collar and service work in the postwar period. Teaching. social work, the human services, health. publishing. advertising: these expanding sectors have long bcen considered the preserves of women. While the spread of mass education and the demand for office workers of various kinds have encouraged women to enter the labor force. the concomitant need that these workers not seek advancement or
high compensation has nevertheless encouraged the belief that their work experience is and ought to be second to their home roles.” Popular magazines. advertising. prevalent truths about child-rearing, and the glorification of femininity have conspired to support this belief. Together they add up to what Betty Friedan has called the “feminine mystique”: the belief that a woman’s satisfaction rests in competently and creatively running the household. For the most part the myth has served its purpose. Until the present. women have not agitated for more responsible jobs, higher wages. or release from their family roles. Even professional women who are married had until recently routinely accepted channeling that kept them out of the top reaches of their professions.
But the feminine mystique seems no longer able to contain the contradictions that have emerged from the
ongoing tension between the need for labor on the one hand and the belief that social order is vested in the
family on the other. Large numbers of women, as opposed to the relatively few turn-of-the-century pioneers for women’s rights, seem dissatisfied with their family roles. Increased affluence and improved household technology as well as expanding consumer services have reduced the need for women to work at home. Longer life spans for men and women and declining birth rates have reduced the proportion of a lifetime spent in child-rearing. Changes in life styles raise questions about how to socialize children and what values to instill in them.
As the family changes, more and more women begin to work.” Working women as a group are becoming older, better educated, less likely to take time off for babies, and more likely to be married and to have children. Available job opportunities raise questions about proper roles for women. The expansion of jobs in precisely those sectors in which women have been working leads to demands for upward mobility. Women with seniority rights and prior experience become discontented when they are consistently over-looked for top jobs.
Changes in the family as well as changes in perceptions ofjobs seem to have produced the women’s liberation movement. Its demands for more jobs and equal opportunities may help to satisfy the needs of the expanding service sector of the labor market for secretaries, clerks, and assistants of various kinds. There is some evidence that jobs for women are opening faster than they can be filled by the available pool of single or childless women.” Short of a dramatic re- channeling of men toward secretarial and low-level office jobs (which would involve major adjustments in social values), large-scale bureaucracies will have to make allowances for women with children if they wish to fill jobs. In some ways, these women may be ideal candidates for the secondary labor force. Their education and values have groomed them for office jobs, yet their primary commitments to children forestall claims to advancement. There is little evidence that the number of women holding prestige jobs has in-
creased or that women’s wages have risen in comparison with those of men. Moreover, government responses to working women seem to preserve class lines. Recent federal legislation encourages women who can afford the cost of child care or household help to work, while current executive action deprives those who are poor of federally financed day-care centers.
The enormous number of women now working prompts questions about whether their commitments to jobs will undermine the basis of the family and whether the family is any longer crucial to maintaining social order. Rising divorce rates, the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion, and public affirmations of homosexuality all testify to increasing conflict about the traditional role of the family. Attempts to alter sex- role stereotypes and to create communal shopping, child-care. and housework facilities; questions about mass-consumption psychology and the rejection of material goods: demands for individual fulfillment and authenticity-all emerge from the changing func-
tion of the family and challenge its relationship to prevalent ideology. Because the leaders of the current
movement question the ideology that upholds the family, women’s liberation may have the potential for
long-term change.
Changes in women’s participation in the work force must be understood partly as a function of the ideology of the family and therefore of the roles that women, like men. are convinced they must play. That ideology emerges both from the objective needs of families and from a complex of societal goals which derive from a changing political economy. Women are used in the work force in ways which encompass the ideological justifications of a whole society and its immediate labor-force needs. These together provide part of the complex reality that translates back into class divisions among working and nonworking women and into specific policies as they affect women
workers.