- Perhaps we don't want to go so far as to claim
that women benefited from the Depression.
They certainly did not.
But, it isn't too much to say
that the economic downturn hurt men
in some ways more than it did women for many reasons.
First, and perhaps most importantly,
the decline affected men's jobs more quickly
than those of women.
By 1933, 13 million people,
almost a quarter of the workforce, were unemployed.
But, because job losses in men's work,
extracting raw material, steel manufacture, tin,
construction and basic manufacturing,
exceeded job losses in women's work.
And because these industries were slow to recover,
men faced unemployment faster and for longer than women.
Besides, as New Deal programs began to move forward
after 1933, the expanding bureaucracy demanded
increasing numbers of female workers.
For once, occupational segregation may have benefited women.
The majority still worked in the clerical
and service sectors where they had made places
for themselves in the '20s, and where unmanly jobs
didn't appeal to men.
A quarter of all women wage-earners worked
in manufacturing to be sure,
but even there, women rarely worked side-by-side with men.
A few men invaded the precincts of social workers,
librarians and teachers, but pink collar office
and sales work, nursing and domestic labor
all remained primarily the provinces of women.
The effect on families was devastating.
In those days, most white families,
and a large percentage of black families,
relied on male breadwinners, even if women pitched in
to earn extra income as necessary.
Many, perhaps most, men and women still believed
in male breadwinning, and women hoped
if they married and had children, to be able
to rear them at home.
That posed something of a conundrum.
Unemployment turned previously
fixed expectations upside-down.
Many women who fervently believed in male breadwinning,
or hoped to benefit from it, could not afford
to stay at home.
Other women who believed in women's independence
found jobs no longer opened to them.
But, the Depression, which so quickly
undermined male provider roles,
proved particularly devastating for masculine identities.
No longer able to support families
and not wanting to burden them,
men deserted in unprecedented numbers.
Some of the unemployed took to alcohol.
Some took to the rails, preferring to tramp
rather than to be a burden on their families.
The marriage rate as a whole declined as young men
found themselves supporting parents or siblings.
Nor could they afford to start their own families
while they were providing for others.
When young people married, they sometimes doubled up
in housing living with parents or with siblings if necessary
in order to make ends meet.
Not surprisingly, birthrates, as a result,
plummeted down from 100 live births per thousand women
at the turn of the century, to 74 live births
per thousand women in the 1930s.
If men felt increasingly useless,
respect for them declined.
Women, the married as well as the unmarried,
began to wonder what a man was worth.
Increasingly, they stayed in their jobs
or sought paid work out of absolute necessity.
The shift in the dynamic of wage-earning wreaked havoc
on family life and on the idea of the family.
Women who'd worked out of economic necessity
found their paths to marriage closed
as men, devastated by the crisis,
and who could no longer support women,
simply walked away from marriage.
A woman who had entered the labor force thinking
that she might work four or five or even seven years
before marriage rescued her from a poorly-paid job,
now discovered that she would have to stay
in the wage labor force for the foreseeable future.
If they were lucky enough to still have jobs,
the women who had worked for the joy and freedom of it
in the 1920s now found themselves supporting whole families
no longer working for their economic independence
or for the satisfaction of work.
The experience brought them closer
to that of African American women.
More than a third of African American women
had been in the labor force on a routine basis
even before the Depression.
That number did not rise very much,
but neither did it decline.
On the contrary, those women who remained
in the labor force found themselves
domino-like pushed out of reasonable jobs
and into day labor, sometimes into seeking jobs
that would last just two or three hours in a day.
In the Bronx, New York, women stood
on street corners every morning looking
for somebody who would employ them.
The potential employer might offer a minimal wage
or an hour or two of work and food
for the women in her family.
With good fortune, a needy woman might get
a whole day's work and a reasonable wage.
Even then, she was forced to return the next day
and seek work on the same corner.
Potential workers understood the phenomenon
as a slave market, and it has become known
as such to historians.
In this photograph, you can see women on the corner
and next to them a group of men
who likewise waited for jobs,
often in the construction trades.
Chrome Extension