Sounds impressive and very wise but is it accurate, like, at all?
Everyone laboured, sometimes for money and sometimes for trade and sometimes for self. I don’t see a ton of women getting paid to do the kind of labour women were doing when they were demanding jobs. So to say they fought to be paid for the Labour they were already doing, when that labour never actually paid and still doesn’t, makes little sense.
Only some labour is paid and women fought for access to the paying kind of labour so they could independently engage with an economy that was moving toward exchange through money and not trade. The labour women get paid for now is the same that men did, labour that paid. Women were being left behind by not having access to the new consumer economy that was emerging, because they didn’t do the kind of labour that anyone paid for. They did the kind of labour you trade favours for, builds relationships over and do for personal reasons. The skillset of a pre industrial age, when villages still existed, instead of cities. The women’s movement didn’t come from rural communities but from urban women because it became a significant disadvantage to not be able to engage with the new consumer economy that worked through the exchange of money, not the agricultural, village trading done through relationships, which was the skillsets developed in most women at the time.
It’s actually pretty complicated. One notable critique of this entire discussion is that racialized and poor women have always worked outside the home at least, during the industrial era (discussing divisions of labor prior to industrialization is just going to devolve into a discussion about how those economies worked at all). But yeah during the world wars, latge numbers of middle class women were called into the workforce to engage in “masculine” labor. But by that point you’d already started seeing women fighting for educational equality and the right to certain careers of passion such as research.
Additionally, certain industrial labor was always “feminine” labor, such as secretarial work, but also plenty of types of working on factory floors. Many textile factories only hired young women for example, even in the early days.
Women worked, particularly working class and poor women, almost always. Some of that was paid as well. Losing so many men to the war created a circumstance to access different kinds of paid labour that women were generally not selected for, and possibly didn’t want, normally. It had a significant impact on employment but wasn’t exclusively the cause of women entering the workforce but definitely accelerated the transition.
Sounds impressive and very wise but is it accurate, like, at all?
Everyone laboured, sometimes for money and sometimes for trade and sometimes for self. I don’t see a ton of women getting paid to do the kind of labour women were doing when they were demanding jobs. So to say they fought to be paid for the Labour they were already doing, when that labour never actually paid and still doesn’t, makes little sense.
Only some labour is paid and women fought for access to the paying kind of labour so they could independently engage with an economy that was moving toward exchange through money and not trade. The labour women get paid for now is the same that men did, labour that paid. Women were being left behind by not having access to the new consumer economy that was emerging, because they didn’t do the kind of labour that anyone paid for. They did the kind of labour you trade favours for, builds relationships over and do for personal reasons. The skillset of a pre industrial age, when villages still existed, instead of cities. The women’s movement didn’t come from rural communities but from urban women because it became a significant disadvantage to not be able to engage with the new consumer economy that worked through the exchange of money, not the agricultural, village trading done through relationships, which was the skillsets developed in most women at the time.
Huh. And here i thought women started working because the men were sent to die off in wars and there was no one left to maintain production.
It’s actually pretty complicated. One notable critique of this entire discussion is that racialized and poor women have always worked outside the home at least, during the industrial era (discussing divisions of labor prior to industrialization is just going to devolve into a discussion about how those economies worked at all). But yeah during the world wars, latge numbers of middle class women were called into the workforce to engage in “masculine” labor. But by that point you’d already started seeing women fighting for educational equality and the right to certain careers of passion such as research.
Additionally, certain industrial labor was always “feminine” labor, such as secretarial work, but also plenty of types of working on factory floors. Many textile factories only hired young women for example, even in the early days.
Women worked, particularly working class and poor women, almost always. Some of that was paid as well. Losing so many men to the war created a circumstance to access different kinds of paid labour that women were generally not selected for, and possibly didn’t want, normally. It had a significant impact on employment but wasn’t exclusively the cause of women entering the workforce but definitely accelerated the transition.