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the Effective
Use of Womanpower

Report of the
Conference

—

March 10 and 11, 1955

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
James P. Mitchell, Secretary




WOMEN’S BUREAU
Mrs. Alice K. Leopold, Director
Bulletin 257

the Effective
Use of Womanpower

Report of the
Conference

—

March 10 and 11, 1955

UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR




James P. Mitchell, Secretary
WOMEN’S BUREAU
Mrs. Alice K. Leopold, Director
Women’s Bureau Bulletin No. 257




I

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i

CONTENTS
Foreword

Page

v

MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION
Welcome, by Mrs. Alice K. Leopold
Today’s Challenge, by The Honorable James P. Mitchell_______________
Horizons for Women—Panel
Leo H. Bartemeier, M. D_________________________ ______________
Florence R. Kluckhohn, Ph. D_______ _
Marie Jahoda, Ph. D__________________________________________19
Question period_____________________________________________ ____

1
2
5
10
22

MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION
The Woman Who Works—Panel Discussion
Winifred G. Helmes, Presiding
Mrs. Gertrude G. Michelson, Moderator
Virgil Martin
Peter Henle
James T. O’Connell
Anne Gary Pannell, Ph. D.
Mrs. Helen Berthelot
Miss Louise Watson

26

MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION
An Address by The Honorable Arthur Larson
Question period

48
60

MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION
Shortage Occupations: New Opportunities for Women—Panel
Eli Ginzberg, Ph. D., Moderator
63
Brig. Gen. David Sarnoff
66
Irving H. Siegel, Ph. D
69
Roland R. Renne, Ph. D
72
Mirra Komarovsky, Ph. D_____ ,

76

MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION
Mrs. Frances M. Lee, Introducing Mrs. Chaves
81
Welcome, by Mrs. Maria Concepcion de Chaves
81
Women in Today’s World—Panel
83
Mrs. Elizabeth S. Carpenter, Moderator
Olga Monsani, LL. B.
Georgette Barbizet, LL. B.
The Honorable Frances P. Bolton
Susan B. Riley, Ph. D.
The Status of Women Around the World, by Mrs. Lorena Hahn-----------Closing remarks, by Mrs, Alice K. Leopold------------------------------------------




m

93
99

IV

CONTENTS

APPENDIX
Program------ -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------Biographies of speakers
103
List of organizations represented
110




page

100

Foreword

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The program of the Conference on the Effective Use of Womanpower, reported here, was planned to give an up-to-date summary of
trends and directions in which our economy is moving, with particular
reference to women’s place in that economy. Held on March 10 and 11,
1955, in Washington, D. C., the conference brought together approxi­
mately 600 persons representing women’s national organizations, civic
and professional groups, labor and management groups, and our own
and other governments.
We are indebted to the men and women, each outstanding in his or
her particular field, who brought us their own sincere and challenging
viewpoints. In response to numerous requests for this information,
research, and individual opinion, we have reproduced the contributions
as fully as space permits, rather than summarizing them.
At the conference, those things which women consider most im­
portant in their working relations were analyzed. The look into the
future forecast new horizons for women who work which should
broaden the scope of their employment opportunities. Such oppor­
tunities must be met, however, with a higher degree of skill since, as
a Labor Department survey indicates, the skills of our work force,
both men and women, have not kept up with our industrial techno­
logical development.
Therefore, it would seem that one of our objectives should be to
raise the level of skill of working women until each individual has
been developed to her highest potential. Some of the ways and
means of accomplishing this were suggested by our guest speakers but
many problems of demand and supply—of relating the need for
skilled and professional women to the source, womanpower—are still
unsolved.
Labor-force estimates for April 1955, released by the United States
Bureau of the Census just as this report goes to press, underscore the
urgency of the questions considered at the conference. Women in the
labor force number half a million more, and men half a million fewer,
than had been forecast. The number of women workers has again
passed the 20 million mark. The trend toward employment of older
women is accentuated, with a smaller proportion of women under 25
and a larger proportion of women over 45 in the woman labor force
than was anticipated.




v

VI

FOREWORD

Eesponsibility for promoting the interests of these women workers
is entrusted, within the Federal Government, to the Women’s Bureau
of the Department of Labor, which holds a congressional directive “to
formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of
wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their
efficiency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.”
But even this mandate does not encompass all that we want for
women and for what they represent—families and homes. To meet
this broader responsibility all of us, as individuals, and in government,
private enterprise, and communities, can work together.




The Effective Use of Womanpower
Report of the Conference, March 10 and 11, 1955

MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

Welcome
Mrs. Alice K. Leopold, Assistant to the Secretary of Labor for

Women’s Affairs
We have asked you to meet with us today to help us plan the future
work for the Department of Labor and for the Women’s Bureau, par­
ticularly in the development of womanpower in the most effective and
intelligent way possible. We meet in a changed atmosphere from the
days when women first started to work because today woman suffrage
has been in effect for many years. The right of a woman to work and
the acceptance of her accomplishments are widely recognized.
By their performance in the political and community life of our
nation, by their record of accomplishments as members of the working
force, women have gained acceptance—individually and collectively—
as people who perform to the limits of their considerable abilities, once
given the opportunity.
Those of us who are here today, I mean in this year of 1955, know
that we have departed from the traditional undervaluation of women.
We are arriving at the day when we recognize that both men and
women have something to contribute; that each has his or her special
talents; each can excel; neither need be ignored nor cast aside in favor
of the other; in fact, they can work together side by side.
Not only can men and women work together side by side, but in this
era our Nation needs this kind of working partnership. The con­
tribution of both men and women to the economy is necessary, if our
Nation is to maintain its high level of productivity, its great capacity
to use new methods, its high standard of living and of good working
conditions, particularly at a time when the world is troubled by ideo­
logical conflicts which none of us, individually, can resolve.
I firmly believe that each of us can contribute to the resolution of
those conflicts if we plan with vision and energy how best to use our
human resources for the general good.
I think all of us here have accepted the premise that people—
whether men or women—work for the same reason. They work for
their economic survival. Hopefully, they work at jobs that interest
them, that give them a feeling of accomplishment.




1

2

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Women, no less than men, have family responsibilities which make
their employment a necessity. Our latest data show us that in 1953 a
woman was the head of the family in nearly 4 million families through­
out the Nation—or about a tenth of all family groups.
In many instances, particularly with young people just starting
out their married life, it is necessary for both husband and wife to
contribute to the family income, either to maintain a decent standard
of living or to permit the husband to finish an education interrupted
by military service. These young people have certainly accepted the
fact that a woman’s place is not necessarily only in the home.
Women now comprise about 30 percent of all workers. Many of
the women now in the labor force are members of professions. The
employment of women is on the increase. They are constantly moving
into new occupations—as bank tellers, as engineers, as medical tech­
nologists. They will be needed in other occupations as scientific ad­
vances and new discoveries bring those occupations into being.
We feel that these are extremely challenging times. We know that
the future will always be uncertain, and yet I think we all look to that
future with hope born of the conviction that the human resources of
our great land will be equal to whatever test they may be put.
It was Marcus Aurelius who said that “everything is the result of a
change . . . there is nothing Nature loves so well as to change existing
forms.”
It is in the spirit of these changing times that we assemble here. We
have a strong conviction that all of you, women and men, because of
your interests in the mainstream of our national life, can help us to
plan wisely for the best use of the enormous potentials of the Nation’s
womanpower. We assemble here therefore to bring your collective
wisdom to bear on the future, in the light of the past, but not bound
by it. It is our task to look, with all the vision we can muster, at the
effective use of womanpower in a future which holds great promise
for us all.

Today’s Challenge
The Honorable James P. Mitchell, Secretary of Labor
It seems hard for me to realize, as I stand before this opening ses­
sion of the Conference on the Effective Use of Womanpower, that
40 years ago such a conference would have been considered a visionary
dream.
It was not until March 4,1913, that the Department of Labor came
into being. And at that time the Department of Labor concerned




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

3

itself vastly more with the welfare of the workingman than with that
of the workingwoman.
I am glad that time has brought change; that womanpower is now
an essential part of our national planning. And I am glad that the
Department of Labor seeks in every way that it can to consider the
individual worth, as well as the individual contribution, which our
manpower and womanpower constitute in our national economy.
A review of the growth of the status of women in this country is
hardly necessary in a gathering of this kind. However, it is interest­
ing to note that women received the voting franchise in 1920, and in
the same year the Women’s Bureau of the Department of Labor was
founded. Since 1920, women have entered more and more directly
into the economic and political life of our country.
During the Second World War, when industry in this country was
asked to produce more than ever before in its history, at a time when
over 13 million men and women were serving in the Armed Forces
of the United States, women entered the war plants and helped in­
dustry break one production record after another. I saw that work,
firsthand, and women should be very proud of the contribution that
they made to the war production of this country.
Today 20 million women are included in our labor force. They
constitute approximately one third of our workers.
A woman is serving in the Cabinet of the President of the United
States. Another is serving in the United States Senate. A number
are in the House of Representatives, as you know.
A total of 304 women are serving in State legislatures, the highest
number on record in our history. All but five States have at least one
woman serving in their legislatures.
Moreover, it is estimated that in the executive branch of our Federal
Government some 1,200 women hold positions of high importance and
administrative authority. At the present time, there are 65 women
in top-level positions. Of these, 44 are Presidential appointees.
Through the years, as women’s employment grew, the Department
of Labor has used every means at its disposal to improve their working
conditions and to increase their opportunities for profitable employ­
ment. And over the years improvements have been made, especially
in the field of labor standards, minimum wage, equal pay, safety and
health, hours of work, and other conditions affecting the welfare of the
woman who works.
In all of these fields, women particularly have made tremendous
advances.
Our main object today is to seek ways and means of broadening the
scope of women’s employment opportunities. Of every 10 women in




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

the labor force, 3 are doing some type of clerical work, 2 work in indus­
try, and 1 each is doing service, professional, private household, sales,
and miscellaneous work.
Over the years, women have been going into new occupational fields
and can be found in almost every kind of job. Most women, how­
ever, are concentrated in a relatively few occupations. It seems
that one of the problems that this conference might well undertake to
discuss is how that area of service may be broadened.
The demand for women’s services has been growing in industry at
a rapid rate, and it will continue to grow, very much, as our labor
force strives to meet the increasing demands being made on it. Women
will be asked in the future to fill new jobs, jobs they have little chance
of obtaining today.
One of the interesting studies that we have been conducting in the
Labor Department recently has been a survey of the skills of our
Nation’s work force, and we have been astounded at some of the results.
The findings indicate that the skills of our workers have not kept pace
with the technological improvements in our industrial processes. As
we move into the age of the atom and of greater technological ad­
vances, a higher degree of skills will be required on the part of the
people who develop a product, research it, and make it. And we
feel that our Nation’s workers, both men and women, will need more
adequate training in terms of skills to meet the demand which is going
to be placed on them.
It is there, I think, that women in industry, women in employment,
can make the greatest contribution. Because, aside from a few dental
and medical technicians, as distinguished from the professional people,
there are very few women, percentagewise, in the skilled work force of
the Nation. It seems that one of the objectives should be to raise the
level of skill of the womanpower of this country so that as a national
asset, as a national resource, we have developed each individual to the
highest potential he is capable of achieving.
I think it is our duty to plan now for the wise use of womanpower
in the future. In this respect, we must remember that in addition to
the 20 million women now at work, it is estimated that there are some
11 million women between the ages of 18 and 64 available for work,
in the event that our economy has to expand rapidly in case of a
national emergency.
I believe it is our duty to perceive the contribution these women are
capable of making and seize on them for the good of the country.
This conference, I am sure, can make a valuable contribution toward
that end. It can clear the air for the future, set new goals, and make
the public more conscious of women’s worth in our economy.




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

5

We in the Department of Labor have given women, we believe, the
long-needed recognition that they deserve. The position of Assistant
to the Secretary for Women’s Affairs has been created and is now being
capably filled by the head of onr Women’s Bureau, Mrs. Leopold. We
have done this to emphasize the intention of the Department to give
women equal consideration in all of its programs. Conferences such as
this, sponsored by the Women’s Bureau, can accomplish a great deal
toward that end. I am happy to see so many people from the Nation’s
most distinguished associations and some of our Nation’s most dis­
tinguished citizens here at this conference. Out of this meeting of
minds can, and I am sure will, emerge valuable suggestions as to how
we may best use our human resources for the general good.
I am sure that you will have a successful and worthwhile conference,
and I want to assure you that the Department of Labor, all of us, Mrs.
Leopold, myself, Mr. Larson, and all of my associates, are tremen­
dously interested in what you do here.
We are conscious that you represent the potential for the develop­
ment of one of our greatest resources, and that is womanpower in
industry.

Panel—Horizons for Women
I
Leo H. Bartemeier, M. D., Medical Director,
The Seton Psychiatric Institute, Baltimore, Md.
One morning this week I entered the dining room of a well-known
hotel and was immediately ushered to my table by an alert and
friendly hostess. As I sat there for a while, two well-nourished and
apparently well-rested waitresses were leaning against a sideboard
chatting with each other in a leisurely fashion. They were not more
than 10 feet from my table and directly in my view, and they looked
at me from time to time as they continued their conversation. After
more time had passed, the hostess told one of them to take care of a
customer. As the waitress approached my table, she said, “I wouldn’t
want you to think that I don’t want to wait on you. I am not your
waitress.”
But the way she placed my plate on the table, and the way she spilled
the coffee into the saucer, showed how she felt about having to do the
work of another. The waitress to whom she had referred was hurry­
ing about looking after the needs of a group of eight men at a nearby
table.




6

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

When I returned to my room in the hotel, I noticed the March issue
of a magazine called Guideposts on my writing table. On the cover,
1 read the title of the leading article, “Life Without Marriage.” And,
in small type, “There are 11 million women of marriageable age in
the United States, not counting divorcees. Let us face the fact that
most of us are never going to get married. Why? Because there is
a higher ratio of females to men in the world. Many of us aren’t even
going to get the chance to say yes or no.”
Then I thought of the waitress. I recalled that she wore no ring.
She had not looked unhappy while she and her friend were chatting
together, but I did notice the change in her expression when she was
ordered to wait on the customer. I remembered the excellent maga­
zine article by Anita Colby. She is single, happy, and successful.
She takes on work gladly, in contrast to the waitress who wanted to
do only what she was supposed to do.
The waitress’ attitude toward work is familiar and quite character­
istic of all too many workers of our time. They are the people who
work only under the influence of immediate direction. They are
intelligent and know what needs to be done, but as long as they are
not supervised they do not work. Many adults manifest the same
attitude toward their foremen, their supervisors, or department heads
in their employment situations. Their attitude has become so wide­
spread that it constitutes a rather serious problem.
To explain my experience in the restaurant by assuming that the
two waitresses belonged to a union organization and that their indif­
ference to my need is typical of union workers is, in my opinion, quite
unsatisfactory. That they may have belonged to a union is not only
likely but perhaps even probable. But in every unionized restaurant
there are the same differences in the attitude of waitresses toward
customers that one observes in restaurants that are not unionized. It
is so easy to blame the unions.
To say that the waitress was probably just lazy, or that her parents
never taught her to work is also unconvincing, because it is too facile.
Everyone would agree, however, that the experience which I have
related is familiar and that its prevalence in our society is one of the
great handicaps to our national effectiveness, and a frequent source of
dissatisfaction in our personal and business relations.
TVe do not seem to know how to correct it, and perhaps we do not
understand it as thoroughly as we would like.
In the light of my professional experience, it is a problem which
originates in childhood and which may be described as an unconscious
expression of resentment by children toward their parents, which is
later transferred and expressed toward people for whom they work.




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

7

Much earlier in their development this same feeling of resentment
is displayed by their inability to eat what is served them. Being too
fearful of their own antagonistic feelings toward their parents, many
children develop difficulty in eating what their mothers prepare for
them. These children readily eat the same foods when they visit their
grandparents or the homes of neighbors or other friends of the family.
Toward these persons they are not hostile and therefore not fearful.
The problem of passive aggression toward persons in authority in
employment situations represents an enormous loss of human energy
which might otherwise be channelled into effective work. This loss
of human energy is not due exclusively to those who fear dissatisfac­
tion such as many children experience in connection with their parents.
It is frequently provoked, for example, by the attitudes of employers,
by the influence of fellow-workers, by low morale in the employment
situation, or by other factors which are less discernible. It is a feeling
which most men and women experience as a lack of interest in working,
or a difficulty in fulfilling tasks assigned them, or as an inability to
learn the procedures while in training to become skilled workers.
The workers are unaware that their dislike of working, their tend­
ency to work as little as possible, their frequent forgetting to carry
out the instructions, and their lack of a sense of responsibility, are
expressions of antagonistic feeling toward their employers. Out of
a sense of guilt they may unintentionally provoke someone to dis­
charge them, or their services are so repeatedly unsatisfactory that
they are discharged for this reason.
This widespread problem in our society can be prevented as parents
develop a better appreciation of the emotional needs of their children
and as they learn to accept the fact that, in addition to the love which
their children have for them, all children experience angry, hostile,
destructive feelings toward their parents. This is natural, and, in
fact, it is instinctual in all. To permit a reasonable expression of these
feelings without retaliating by threats, or by punishment, is one of
the most difficult problems of parenthood; but at the same time it is
the best preparation for later living and work. Children who are
raised in this fashion tend to have a wholesome respect for authority.
It has been evident for some time that a rapidly increasing number
of women with small children are trying to span the two worlds of
motherhood and careers outside the home. For some, this may be
dictated by the necessity of supporting the family, but the much larger
number appear to be motivated by neurotic competition. They feel
that they must have the luxuries which other women possess, and they
manifest a similarly strong competitive attitude toward other workers
in their employment situations. They rationalize their neurotic de­




8

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

mands by their belief that these material luxuries will be of benefit to
their children, and that if their husbands earned more they would not
have to work. They are satisfied to have someone else look after their
children in their absence and they are proud to be able to augment the
family income.
These mothers are quite convincing, but they are unaware that in
their ceaseless efforts to gratify their competitive strivings they simul­
taneously deprive their young children of the basic emotional require­
ments, and thereby interfere with the wholesome development of their
personalities. Examinations of many adults and adolescents who
suffer because of their inability to adapt themselves to their surround­
ings and who are lacking in their feeling for others, frequently disclose
that they are the victims of emotional deprivation in the early stages
of their development.
There is an enormous amount of well-documented evidence that
prior to the age of 4, children should not be separated from their
mothers. Even after they have begun to go to school, they continue to
need their mothers in the home. Every experienced school teacher
in the lower grades has observed the striking difference between those
children whose mothers are engaged in occupational pursuits and
those who reflect the trust and the security of their mother’s love and
devoted care.
When a child is older and has begun to enter the world of other
children and other interests outside the home, he needs to free himself
gradually from dependence upon his mother and to become somewhat
self-reliant. If at this period of growth and development the mother
decides to divide her energies between family and career, she may be
capable of fulfilling her responsibilities in both areas without harmful
effect on her children.
The women who achieve this spanning of their lives most success­
fully are the mothers who know from previous experience that their
children have learned to tolerate their absences on many early occa­
sions, and that they are sufficiently mature for their respective ages
to care for themselves and each other. Mothering always affords the
satisfaction of being useful and provides a sense of being needed and of
course worthwhile. When children have grown to be independent,
and their interests are entirely outside the home, it is essential for the
health and the well-being of mothers that they continue to be helpful
and effective by contributing their energies to the welfare of the
communities, in which their services are always sorely needed. They
can contribute to the work of the professions, afford relief to over­
worked teachers in the public schools, or secure employment in the
business world.




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

9

Many far-sighted mothers make ample preparations for this period
in their lives and thereby avoid the depression to which many succumb
when their time of motherhood has reached its natural termination.
Through years of experience with their children, they have attained a
quality of maturity and stability which enables them to make valuable
contributions to the lives of many individuals and groups who are
desperately in need of their services.
If, perchance, mothers have paying positions in business or in or­
ganizations that serve the community, they may expect to meet with
the reactions of executives or officials who, because of their own per­
sonal conflicts, feel threatened by having to work with them. In
these situations, they need to recognize the insecurity of others and
do what they can to dissipate it. If they react emotionally to the
interferences which are aimed at their becoming effective, they are
likely to fail in their objectives. They have learned how to cope with
similar situations with their children and they need to realize that
their personal relationship with men and women in the professional
and business worlds is quite similar.
The subject of how to improve the effectiveness of womanpower
can never be disassociated from a discussion of woman’s relationship
with her husband and his role as father. This basic problem has
not been discussed because on this occasion I decided to devote my
remarks to one of our great problems, the attitude toward work.
On another occasion, however, I pointed out that while it is true
that a woman’s attitude toward pregnancy, childbirth, and mother­
hood has been definitely molded and determined by her relationship
with her own parents, it is equally true that her emotional need in her
relationship with her husband is of major importance for her sense
of well-being. How adequately or inadequately his relationship with
her satisfies these needs determines very importantly how well or how
poorly she functions as a mother to their children.
There are women whose needs cannot possibly be satisfied by their
husbands because they are already too severely conflicted from their
childhood. They are the exceptions. The women I have in mind are
the ones whose conflicts are less deeply rooted and less intense. Their
emotional security is improved by a good marriage.
To give consistently to her child the love he needs, a woman needs
the consistent love of her husband and the certainty of his love for
their child. From a psychological point of view, she and the child
are one, and disinterest on the part of her husband toward their child
is experienced by her as a lessening of his love. The father’s influence
on the mother-child relationship has been too frequently overlooked
in our evaluation of the factors contributing to the dissatisfaction




10

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

that so many infants and little children experience at the hands of
their mothers. It has been overlooked because it is too painful for
men to admit that they may have indirectly brought about severe
disturbances in the personalities of their own children. While it is
true that mothers exert the most important influence during the first
years of life, when the basic character structure is in the process of
formation, it is equally true that the quality of their influence is de­
termined very considerably by the husband’s attitudes. It is no
longer possible to blame mothers exclusively for everything that
happens to their children.
To improve the effectiveness of womanpower, it is necessary that
women have larger quantities of their psychic energy available for
productive and creative work. So long as much of this energy is con­
sumed in worries, in fears, and in efforts to maintain some degree of
stability, this much energy is not available for effective living and
working.
The fact that woman’s entire physical and psychological develop­
ment is more complex and therefore more difficult to achieve than is
man’s, contributes to this problem of energy distribution.
Many women, and men, are inhibited beyond their conscious con­
trol in both their thinking and their actions, in their playing and in
their working. They are tied and fettered from within. They are
not free within themselves. It is a tedious, painful, time-consuming,
and expensive task to effect permanent improvement in the personal­
ities that develop, and it is neither practical nor possible for the great
majority.
What is possible, and what is available to all, is the prevention of
distortions in character formation in the earliest years. This implies
wholesome mothering and fathering during infancy and childhood.
This offers the best hope for an optimum of adult effectiveness.

II
Florence R. Kluckhohn, Ph. D., Laboratory of Social Relations,

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Perhaps I should state first that my approach to this problem is a
little broader than the utilization of womanpower in industry and
business. The role of the American woman in the society as a whole is
a fascinating subject.
I come to it as a cultural anthropologist, mainly, and as a sociologist.
As such, in analyzing the woman’s role in the United States, I think I
always have in mind the woman’s role in other cultures. While there




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

11

is neither time nor opportunity at a meeting of this short duration to go
into any kind of comparative analysis, I think we should always keep
in mind that the problems we have are characteristic of our own cul­
ture; that other cultures do not have the same problems, but very
probably have different ones that are just as bad.
The American woman has been a subject of controversy for a very
long period of time. The number of individuals at a meeting of this
sort is evidence of this fact. Mention the subject of woman and it is
like hanging up flypaper for flies.
I do not need to give a great deal of evidence on this controversy to
an audience of this degree of sophistication. I might just mention
that there is a good deal of criticism of what women in the United
States are doing, from newspapers and magazines and from pulpits
and agencies.
Many people fear that 20 million working women—the figure quoted
in labor statistics—is a danger mark; that it represents a feminine in­
vasions of man’s last stronghold. Two or three years ago, an article
(supposedly quoting a social scientist) warned that within a genera­
tion or two, the society would be entirely dominated by women. Labor
statistics were used as evidence, as was the fact that so much property
in the United States is now owned, if not actually controlled, by
women.
On the other side there are, of course, many arguments: that women
still do not have equal opportunities with men; that wage rates are
different; that women get bypassed on ladders of promotion and very
often shunted off into types of jobs that men do not want; or that
once a woman invades a field, it becomes defined as a feminine field,
such as schoolteaching and certain clerical jobs.
A complaint of another kind and a very real one is that women feel
the work they do in the home has much less prestige value than what
men are doing in the occupational world. Finally, many complaints
today have to do with the isolation that women feel in the home. It is
a serious problem.
If we were not so entangled with even more serious international
problems, there would be more agitation than there is about the defi­
nition of the feminine role, because it is a badly defined role, and a
great deal of confusion exists about it. For a maj ority of women, there
is some little doubt as to what they expect of themselves or what
society expects of them.
But I' am no alarmist, and I think the prognosis for the definition
of this role in the future is good; certainly the problems women face
today do not equal those of 100 years ago. In other words, progress
has been made, when viewed in historical perspective.
345983—55------2




12

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

I would like to approach, this from three main tangents. I would
like to separate the total feminine role into its components, because it is
composed of a rather ill-assorted set of parts. Before attempting to
straighten it out in the future, we must define this role within the
context of the value orientations of the society in which we live. These
values are different from the values of other societies. We must also
look at the historical evolution of the several parts of the role and
see what kind of sense they make.
There is not time to do all that this morning, so what I would like
to do first is to break down these components, then pick them up in
relation to the value system, touching only on the historical antecedents
of aspects of the conflicting parts of the role. Then I would like to
state some of the issues as I see them at the present time.
A number of years ago, Prof. Talcott Parsons at Harvard Univer­
sity analyzed the components of the role. I have made some emenda­
tions and changes, but the first component and definitely the oldest is
the domestic one, which in the colonial period of American life was
a total role of housewife, wife, mother. It was a unit. This has now
been split, with mother on the one side (because it is as a mother that
woman is idealized much more than as a wife) and, on the other side,
the housewife role. The former has very high prestige, I would say
almost sentimental prestige. The other, very low. Every time a
woman says, “I am just a housewife,” she is voicing her opinion of
what she thinks is society’s opinion of this role.
The second is the career component of the role, which has loomed
more into prominence since the late 19th century and on into the 20tli
century. The conflict between these has already been mentioned.
Then there is what Professor Parsons labels the glamour component
of the role. This is a fairly late addition to the role, in some part
created by the “flapper” generation, but with antecedents in the 19th
century.
There is then the aspect of the role which he has labeled the “human­
istic” and which I call the “culture-bearer” aspect of the role. Here,
women have been made the custodians of all those necessary aspects
of life: the esthetic, the intellectual, and the moral, which businessmen
in the market place feel are a fine thing to have, but for which they
have no time. This was described brilliantly by Thorstein Veblen a
long time ago.
The last, which also is a Veblen statement, is the definition of woman
as a man’s status symbol. As Veblen put it, woman became the symbol
of the husband’s ability to pay. And in herself, she became an item
of conspicuous consumption. This aspect of the role cross-cuts the
others.




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

13

The history of the feminine role is really the history of these com­
ponent parts, and I assure you that it has not been an evolutionary
development. It is not at all the kind of thing you can compare with
the evolution in women’s rights and political rights, where they have
steadily gone forward. Women must never confuse legal and polit­
ical status with social status and the more pervasive social customs.
Before going further, let me state what I mean by values. I am
talking about the basic assumptions, the correct values of a society
which underlie almost every bit of our concrete behavior. If there is
a single thing that social science has taught us dramatically in the last
two decades, it is that societies and peoples vary widely in the way
in which they approach common human problems, and in the way in
which they develop value orientations. There are definite limits to
the range of possibilities of various ages between societies', and there
is a good deal of variation within societies as well.
When I talk about our dominant values, I mean those that are char­
acteristic of the typical middle-class citizen. There are many varia­
tions within this. As Dr. Bartemeier mentioned this morning, indi­
viduals have different attitudes toward working. This is because
their basic values are different—it is not just neuroticism, in my
opinion.
Peoples differ widely, for instance, in the way in which they demon­
strate it to be right and proper for man to be related to man. They
differ also in their concept of man’s relationship to nature and the
supernatural, the man-nature relationship. They differ also in the
types of personalities and activities they value most highly. They
treat the problem of time—the past, present, and future—very differ­
ently, and they differ again in what they define basic, innate human
nature to be, whether evil, good-evil, or good.
Now, to take the Core of our own value system, or basic state: There
is an emphasis1 upon individualistic human relationships; a belief that
natural forces are to be exploited, or at least harnessed by man for his
own use; a great stress upon action, or the “accomplishment-type” of
personality. In other wrnrds, we are an achievement-success-oriented
people. There are many peoples in the world who are not, and many
individuals in our own society who are not.
We have a concept of humanity as being in need of perfection
through self-control, an evil-but-perfectible idea of humanity. We
also have a firm conviction that it is always the future which one must
look to and strive for. These, I think, form the solid core of our
dominant value system. They are taken so much for granted by most
of us, held at such an unconscious level, that we seldom call them into
question. Since we do not call them into question, we do not stop to
realize that there is a great deal of variation.




14

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

The feminine role in contrast to the masculine role can, when
analyzed in these terms, be seen to be a variant role in some respects.
I would like to pick up three of these orientations and analyze the
differences they point to.
First, the individualistic type of human relationship. We are as­
suming that the most important type of goal structure is that of the
individual as he works autonomously. This does not mean we are not
cooperative. What it does mean is that a man in a business firm or
in my department at Harvard University is in there to pursue his own
goals of making money for himself and his family; increasing his
prestige, doing his own writing. While he is there, we assume he will
have a positive attitude toward the goals of the group, the goals of
the organization, and that he will have a positive attitude toward
cooperative work with his fellow workers.
That is as far as the assumption goes. If that man is offered a job
in another firm, in another university, where the status is higher, the
money return higher, research opportunities greater, most Americans
would think him peculiar indeed if he did not move. It is a case of
picking up one’s individualistic self and putting it down in another
collateral grouping. This is impossible in many societies of the
world, where the group goal is what is essential, be it lineally defined
or collaterally. In some societies, the individual’s goal must be first
the goal of the group as a whole.
Now, there is a real difference between the masculine and feminine
role in regard to this value, a difference which is also discontinuous
in time. The man is steadily the boy-child, trained for autonomy and
individualistic behavior. The girl is also trained for this as a child,
and through her school years. But when she marries, and starts to
have a family, the assumption is that she now switches over, gives up
individual autonomy, and accepts collaterally defined group goals—
those of the family. Instead of being an autonomous individual,
operating in terms of autonomously defined goals (which do not mean
selfish goals, by the way), she is expected to put the interests of that
collateral group always ahead of her own and act as a representative
of the family in the community, in parent-teacher associations, and
bo on.
This is a terrific shift to ask anybody to make in a society that ideally
predicates equality of the sexes. It is a clue, really, to a lot of confu­
sion in the role, and to some of the reasons why women are insisting
upon interests outside the home.
Another orientation relates to the nature of value activity, or of the
valued personality type. As I have already said, we are a people
who predominantly prize an action-orientation accomplishment, such




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

15

as success. Look at all the stock phrases: “Let’s do something about
it!”; “What has been done about it?”; “What does it do?”
Whenever you appraise an individual, almost always the first ques­
tion is one of placing him in your orbit: “What does he do ?”; “Where
is he in the dominant system of our society, the occupational system?”
Yet in other cultures what I would call the being and becoming
orientation, rather than a dogmatic orientation, is paramount. In
such societies the emphasis is upon the intellectual, the esthetic. There
you will find, not the businessman as the prestige figure of society,
but the artistic individual or the intellectual type of statesman.
Still another type of orientation is the one I have found so char­
acteristic of Mexico, a culture in which I am intensely interested.
There, you do not ask what a person does; you do not even ask what
kind of personality development he has achieved. You just ask who
he is and take him as he is.
The ideal type in this dominant occupational system of ours is the
successful businessman in the business world. During and since the
19th century, the feminine role has meant the custodianship of various
interests deemed to be secondarily important in our society, such as
intellectual and esthetic interests. These things were looked upon by
businessmen as embroidery—necessary, but embroidery none the less.
From a historical viewpoint, it is almost as if people had got together
and come to a rational decision that this was what would happen.
Obviously, no cultural change occurs this way. Women became the
“culture bearers” of the Nation, but in so becoming they were chiefly
appreciators and not creators. Our intellectual and esthetic achieve­
ment, compared with other cultures, has not been great even to this day.
As far as future time is concerned, there is one other difference.
Our emphasis is upon the future, not the present, as is the case with
Mexicans, nor the past, as is the case with many traditionalistic socie­
ties in the Far East and even in Europe. But that future and those
goals of the future are defined primarily in terms of the masculine
role, and apply to the girl only through her school years, which I
think is a serious discrepancy.
Now the question is, “Why has this variance between the masculine
and feminine roles been maintained so long in spite of many persistent
efforts to break it down?” An analysis of history is essential to an
understanding of this. The 19th century was the critical century for
the formulation of the parts of this role and for the creation of con­
flicts in it. There were three different trends which, in different
ways, worked toward equalization within the family, toward making
the status of the wife equal to that of her husband.
One of these trends, which had a delayed effect, was industrial




16

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

development, which took many women outside the home for the first
time. They happened to be women of the lower-income groups, who
were not the prestige symbols for the society as a whole, so the dent
made in the thinking of the times was not great and was slow in
coming.
The second was the pioneer movement. As the frontier developed
and the role of woman was defined in frontier homes, there was a very
great increase in the equalization of women’s status within the home.
This went so far that some people feel we have feminine domination
inside the home with a vengeance.
Third was the feminist movement, starting with greater rights for
married women and finally creating what Ethel Howes called, in
1922, “The feminine dilemma of the time: marriage or career”—with
the word or underlined.
But there were countertrends, pulling in almost diameterically
opposite directions. One of them was the development of women’s
status as the symbol of her husband’s ability to pay. We were a
people becoming more engrossed in the affairs of the market place—
mass production. There was a terrific increase in our production rate
from 1850 to 1950. And here is where the man’s interest was focused.
Women became leisure symbols. In most societies, a separated-out
group of both men and women developed, who represented the leisure
class, who went for refinements with a capital R—the idle window
shopper and bridge player whose creative powers were unused.
There was also the 19th-century romantic ideal, and our interpre­
tation in American cultural terms of the European romantic move­
ment. We can use Pearl Buck’s phrase for this development, “Angel
on a pedestal,” the idealization of woman as something too pure to
have anything to do with the market place (which was growing ever
and ever more dirty), too pure to understand or have any interest in
sexual matters. This was the woman who fainted at the drop of a
hat, who was terribly fragile. I have read many reports of that time
which actually said that a woman was much more attractive and more
desirable, if, for instance, she had a touch of tuberculosis.
These trends were pulling in opposite directions and still are, to a
certain extent. Three wars helped clarify the situation, because
women were called out on an emergency basis.
Here I would like to comment regarding something our Secretary
of Labor said this morning. It has to do with a very critical problem:
the way in which women in the United States are educated.
I will be bold and say they are educated on a contingency basis.
They are educated very much in accordance with masculine patterns
of education, on the assumption that they must be ready to look after




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

17

themselves, if they belong to the group mentioned this morning, who
do not marry, or who are widowed; this is the group of 4 million
women who are the heads of families—whether as the result of divorce
or death or war. In other words, women must be ready for an
emergency.
Interestingly enough, women are always good in an emergency. But
whether it be a war or a family crisis, every time the assumption is:
“We hope they don’t have to do it; it is much better if they stay home,
and just be ready to take over.”
Woman takes up what is really her life career (which for the ma­
jority of the women in the United States still is motherhood) and then
we tell her: “We are very sorry, but you can’t go on acting as you
were trained to act. You have to take up a different set of patterns”—
for which she has not been educated, or has been very badly educated.
This stems from the depreciation or devaluation of the realistic side
of the feminine role.
I see some real evidence of a trend in the opposite direction at the
present moment. I do not know how strong it is yet. The depreciation
of the feminine side of the role which goes with motherhood began
in the 19th century. “Mother” was separated from “housewife” in
prestige terms. It was very much of an issue in the latter part of the
19th century to push all the housewife drudgery aside as something
that you did only when you had to.
The education that many of our women have had, and that our young
girls still are getting at home and in school is again instilling a nega­
tive attitude toward this kind of activity. One characteristic remark
summarizes many I have heard on this subject. A woman came to
me when I was talking in one of Boston’s metropolitan suburbs on
the feminine role. She said: “I have heard that you think women
should be more interested in domestic affairs than they are, and be
better trained for them. I share your attitude. I have a 16-year-old
daughter and I am doing my level best to get her to learn how to cook.
I tell her I hate it, but we do have to learn to cook and it is better to
learn it now than later. But I can’t get her in the kitchen.”
This woman could not understand why her daughter was not the
least bit motivated.
Much of the education we are giving in women’s colleges seems to
be a kind of negative appreciation of homemaking activities. I am
not in the least in favor of turning college courses into domestic science
or home economics courses. It is the attitude I am talking about.
This has been a very brief glimpse at some of the trends and counter­
trends in the 19th century which are to me among the most fascinating
aspects of United States history.




18

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Now, let me rephrase some of the major issues. I think you will see
that I have a somewhat different interpretation from that of Dr.
Bartemeier. It is no accident that there has been constant pressure,
from the 17th century right through into the 20th, for women in the
United States to take a more active part in the economic occupational
area of society. With our value system it was inevitable and it should
have been predictable.
After every war, there is a definite increase in the pressure. The
development of women’s clubs after the Civil War was important, for
it led into community work. Women recognized this as an area that
is important, is exciting, and gives women the feeling of belonging
and of prestige. When you consider the negativistic attitude toward
the housewife, you could predict that this development would occur.
There is also the problem of isolation that the woman feels when
her husband is away and her children are gone. This is one of the
problems that women in the United States have been trying to solve
by some kind of partial participation. There has been a rephrasing,
in the last two decades, of what has been called the “marriage or
career dilemma.” Now women are saying, “How can we work this out
so that we really have an integrated role?” I do not think I would
use Dr. Bartemeier’s expression of spanning it so much as of trying
to integrate the two, of finding some way to have the outside interest
play into the inside.
There is a problem as to whether this can be worked out satisfac­
torily for a great number of women. I rather suspect that, given the
kind of genius in the household that we have in technological develop­
ments, it can. To me, it would appear to be a partial solution, in rela­
tion to our value system, because you cannot go on insisting that women
play a variant role and participate variantly in all the main streams
of life.
The education of women I would pose as another problem: the way
in which they are being educated largely on a contingency basis.
Let me briefly mention one other thing. You will find many people
saying, “Women should be able to find satisfaction in community work
outside of the home, without having to push over into the occupational
world.” It is not the same thing, given the prominence of the occupa­
tional world. Women know this.
Furthermore, there has been a trend for some time for men to say,
“Let the intellectual and esthetic things be taken care of by women.”
This has developed into a plethora of book clubs and lectures to
women. It has become big business in the United States.
But there is something of a tendency for men to take the same atti­
tude toward community work. “Let women go ahead and manage




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

19

this. Let them manage the committees. If the going gets rough, and
things become difficult, then we will step in and put it on a businesslike
basis.”
This is all right, as the women do quite a successful job. But I am
pointing out that here is one more place where the two roles become
isolated from each other. To me, the serious problem in the family
structure of the United States is defining masculine and feminine roles
in such a way as to let us break through the tendency toward segrega­
tion and have a more satisfactory husband-wife relationship.

Ill
Marie Jahoda, Ph. D., Associate Director, Research Center for

Human Relations, New York University, New York, N. Y.
I think Dr. Kluckhohn has given you a valid analysis of the problem
of the American woman, placed it in history, and shown you its various
components.
Let me try to simplify the picture from one particular point of view.
Unfortunately not all women know what Dr. Kluckhohn knows and
what we can learn from her. They have to face their life problems
without the realization of the particular moment in history at which
they come into the picture. The conflicts that women experience today
are colored by their knowledge of diverse patterns of living and by
their particular position as they see it, which is not always identical
with the way scientific analysis sees it.
It helps me in my simplification to refer to the entire past only in
terms of the generation of the 1920’s, that won for women the right to
vote, the right to be elected. The psychological situation of women
before they had won the legal right to equality in public life and public
behavior was one of dissatisfaction with their prescribed role. The
psychological problem of the woman now is completely different. The
problem today lies in their lack of knowledge of what their role is.
They no longer know what is considered to be the right and proper
behavior of a woman in our society.
Even though subtle redefinitions of the female role, as Dr. Kluck­
hohn explained, are constantly going on, these redefinitions are not
a part of the awareness of women confronted with the necessity of
making various choices. They find no clearer-cut pattern for living.
You may think this is too much of an oversimplification, because,
particularly in the smaller communities in this country, there still
is a very clearly prescribed way of living: A woman ought to go to
school as long as she needs to, she ought to get married, she ought to




20

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

have children, she ought to bring up the children, and she ought to
lead a respectable life.
Now, the interesting thing about this is that none of us really leads
such an isolated life any longer. The mass media of communication
(movies, television, radio), speeches, and lectures provided a growing
awareness that some women live differently; that, in fact, many women
live differently.
“Why should I live this way?” women ask. “Is my way the right
way ? Is her way the right way ? Am I missing out on life by doing
what I am doing, and wouldn’t life be much more wonderful and
rewarding if I were not in my particular position?”
I think wo should accept as a psychological fact this absence of a
clear-cut yardstick for the behavior of women in our society. The
next question, then, is how can one possibly understand what this
means for women with a burden of decision on them, with no yard­
stick for what they really ought to do, with suggestions from many
sources that other things, too, are worthwhile in a woman’s life ?
Again, it helps me here to simplify. We all realize that there is a
tremendous variation in the patterns of life that women follow in this
country. They can be put into about four overall categories, through
the combination of two major functions: there is the dominant female
sex function: being the mother of children, the wife of a husband.
Secondly, women can function in areas of work interests and partici­
pation in community life, which have been traditionally more a male
affair.
I am sorry that Dr. Bartemeier isn’t here, because I would like to
take exception to one phrase he used in that connection, namely, that
functioning in areas in which traditionally men have functioned
mainly, is by and large motivated by neurotic competitiveness. I
do not think so. But I am sure we could come to an understanding
if he were here to discuss this particular point. These two functions
may or may not be combined, which gives us four possibilities: The
mother and housewife; the career woman without a family; the work­
ing woman who combines having a family with her contribution to
and participation in community life; and, perhaps the most tragic
human relationship, the woman who does not make a contribution in
any of these roles.
This last category is predominantly an age problem, as we all know.
It covers the woman who is middle aged or a little beyond, who is now
widowed, no longer has a family to look after, and who has not found
a way into another situation where she can make a contribution.
It seems that these four types (with all sorts of variations) are the
types from which women today have to choose, and that each of these




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

21

types has its necessarily inherent, inevitable, and serious conflict
possibilities.
It also seems to me that each of these types has its necessarily in­
herent and gratifying rewards. The problem arises in the choice
among these four types, to the extent that women have a choice (we
know that women are very often, by life’s circumstances, pressed into
one of these patterns). However, in choosing they are not looking
for inherent rewards and conflicts, if any, in the pattern; they are
asking, “What is the right thing to do? What should a woman do
nowadays?”
The burden of decision making could, under appropriate circum­
stances, really be regarded as something tremendously positive;
namely, as the greater freedom of choice in the life patterns of women
today, as compared with the past. But I am afraid it would be an
overoptimistic and psychologically untrue picture to tell you that
women have now grown up to be aware of the possibility of the
wider choice; that they have actually in their own lives a greater de­
gree of freedom than men, who do not have so many recognized possi­
bilities to choose from. This is not true. Most women experience the
choice as a difficult burden, as a terrible thing, mainly because they
cannot find out what is the right thing for them to do.
To the value analysis that Dr. Kluckhohn has given you, I would
like to make one addition: the need we have in this country for coming
out with one right answer—something that we can all agree on with­
out conflict, without controversy. However, I want to suggest that
diversity, even if it means controversy and some conflict, is essential
for living. This is exactly the idea that we have to emphasize in our
culture with regard to the patterns of living for women.
The ideal picture (and I do not know how we can reach it) would be
one in which the unmarried woman who fills a job successfully gets the
same prestige, the same recognition, can feel as proud of herself in our
society as the mother who has brought up six children and never has
had much time to go outside the house.
I think that, in the ideal picture, we have a problem with the last
type, the woman who does not make a contribution in any area. The
problem is to help that woman, even late in life, decide to do some­
thing that she still can do to give sense and purpose to her life. But
we are very far away from this at present.
It is necessary, if we want to have various patterns of living with
equal prestige in our society, that we take up systematically one con­
flict after the other as it is inherent in these patterns; that we make it
explicit; and that we think about how our culture can recognize the
need for variety of living patterns. I would like to say that, even if




22

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

we do this, I am convinced conflicts will remain. Conflicts are here
to be solved and dealt with; efforts to avoid them altogether are futile.

Question Period*
Mrs. Leopold—Presiding
Question for Dr. Jahoda: Are young women more interested today
in determining their correct niche, or in reaching for rewards in pres­
tige and/or money ?
Dr. Jahoda: I did not mean to paint the hopeful picture that
young women are looking for the absolutely right thing to do. But
they are looking for outside approval of their choice, since they find it
difficult to make up their minds among the four broad patterns that I
have indicated. This is, of course, only true by and large.
There will be some women who look into themselves and for more
lasting values when they make their decisions, but by and large it is a
wish not to have the burden of choice on oneself but on somebody else,
so that people will approve.
Question for Dr. Ivluckhohn: How do you suggest we go about
getting our young women to embrace, not reject, the idea of being
housewives; in other words, give the role prestige ?
Dr. Ivluckhohn : There is another related question here: “Can a
married woman do justice to a paid job when she has a family to attend
to, with all of its problems?”
There are a good many people consciously concerned with the evalu­
ation of the domestic side of the American home.
My students used to analyze advertisements for household gadgets
in some of our papers, many of which did make the home sound like a
mild variety of penal institution, which you ought to get out of as fast
as possible and stay out of as long as possible. The ad on the auto­
matic cookstove was the one that really hit me. It showed a woman
putting on her hat and going out, and coming back to find the dinner
all cooked. The advertiser did not tell you where she had been!
There is an interesting countertrend going on in our society at the
present time, starting with the upper brackets of the middle class.
The trend is toward a larger family, a greater interest in domesticity
and the home. A part of this which it would be interesting to discuss
is to what extent the husband is now being given a domestic role. This
is in part related to technology.
Taking the other question: “Can a woman with a family do justice to
*I)r. Bartemeier, because of a previous commitment, could not be present for the dis­
cussion.




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

23

a job?” I think that—and let me phrase this cautiously—some
women can; perhaps an increasing number. With the kind of
technological development we have, there is no reason why running a
house should be a full-time job. It will be even less of a full-time job
if women are better trained for it, can organize it better, and have a
more positive attitude toward it. I think these two things have to go
on concomitantly.
I think we have only one way out of this problem, if basic values stay
the way they are in the United States. A woman is going to have to
have some stake in an occupation. I think for the majority of women
it is going to have to be defined in limited scope. This cannot be done
unless there is a more positive evaluation of necessities as they relate to
the majority of women.
I agree completely with Dr. Jahoda that career women should be
in the occupational world on an equal basis with men. If the counter­
trend that I see coming up continues very far, we will have a change
in basic values. This is speculative, but there is enough evidence
for it to interest me as a fundamental system in the culture.
Question for Dr. Jahoda: “The three speakers stressed the need for
revising the education of women to include integrated programs of
home and family living. Why ignore the education of men? Don’t
men also need to have functions and appreciations of this type of
training as well?”
Dr. Jahoda: Yes, they need it. They are getting it nowadays and
will get it in increasing amounts through their participation in what
Dr. Kluckhohn has just referred to as the domestication of man.
The problem is going to get more acute because of what is happening
to hours of labor. This will give more chance to involve the husband
in problems of running the family life.
By and large, we now work shorter hours than we worked 20 years
ago. There is some reason to believe that in the not-too-distant future
the workweek will be about 30 hours. This will inevitably mean that
both husband and wife—if she is working—will have a greater amount
of spare time at home to try to solve some of the problems which the
woman now has to face alone.
The right type of education for this is a real difficulty. We can
see that the absorption of knowledge and ideas in our colleges for men
takes up a terrific amount of time. It is not easy to fit courses on
how to be a sensible husband and father into the usual college schedule.
The other problem is that most of the men really will not like it.
This is something that they ought to learn about when they are in a
life situation which makes it really meaningful. I do not think this
is a leal solution. I think it will probably come through the young




24

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

women having gotten in their education a better understanding of the
possibilities for cooperation between husband and wife in the home.
Question for Dr. Kluckhohn: Isn’t the fact of wifehood and
motherhood, and all its enriching experience, what pushes the girl
from individualism into group orientation? Does she not find this
group orientation much more satisfying than individual orientations ?
Do not men change, too, in their orientation ?
Dr. Kluckhohn : This is raising the same issue that I was suggest­
ing : Are we getting a change in value orientations? I do not know.
I do not feel it is true, in any simple sense of the word, that the
enriching experience of wife-motherhood pushes women into it. I
think it is true that practically all women, in the United States,
certainly all those who marry, expect to be mothers, and they have a
positive attitude toward motherhood. I see no change in this.
But there are so many frustrations and disappointments that go
with this that I do not think wife-motherhood can be looked at just
as an enriching experience which throws a woman into a group situa­
tion. The lack of training, the isolation, when she faces many of her
problems, makes for an awful lot of unhappiness on the part of the
woman, and a wish to get out from under it, at least in part.
The increased family orientation of men, probably brought about
both for the sake of the children and of the husband-wife relation­
ship, is a good thing. I do not know how far this has gone through
the culture as a whole yet. I do not know what the end result is going
to be, if you attempt more equalization of these two roles. It is an
interesting psychological problem. We were recently discussing the
question of what kind of cultural process our children are going to
have to go through to get into identifiable sex roles, if the roles are
equalized too much. There is a real problem.
Question for Dr. Jahoda: Will you please give educators some
suggestions on helping adolescent girls to understand the choices they
can make, to value college education for their own training and to
resolve the conflicts in social status and social attitudes?
Dr. Jahoda : This is a tremendously important question. I cannot
give you a definite answer. The efforts I have observed in this direc­
tion appear to be relatively fruitful in bringing to adolescent girls
an increased awareness of these problems. Do not forget that unless
you make it clear to them that these are real problems concerning
them, most of their expectations and dreams about the future will
probably be built by the literature, by better or worse novels, by some­
thing that makes the courting period in a girl’s life the peak, the
dream, the goal, the most important thing; followed by nothing, in




MARCH 10, MORNING SESSION

25

terms of a realistic description of how the lives of women look after
this wonderful period is over.
I think that the American Council for Education, through its
Committee for the Education of Women, is actually quite systemati­
cally working on these ideas. The only approach that I would feel
safe in supporting now is that of making girls aware of what the situa­
tion is, of not letting them form a picture of what their future lives
may be like from casual information in the culture.
Question for Dr. Kluckhohn: You said that women are usually
educated on a contingency basis, because some emergency has arisen
At this moment, the industrial nurses of the United States are desper­
ately trying to open up avenues of education so that they may become
more skilled in their daily jobs. Must we wait for another war, an­
other emergency ?
Dr. Kluckhohn : This raises a question about the whole American
educational system. Most of our colleges emphasize the liberal-arts
education. I for one, would certainly hate to see a liberal-arts em­
phasis be replaced by vocational education, in training either men or
We do have developments in many fields of more technical profes­
sional training at a different level than college. In some fields there
has been a lag, especially, I suspect, in some of the fields in which
women are interested. I think we need more education for skills
ol '™“e”for thckws 01 iobs tiiat




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

Panel Discussion—The Woman Who Works
Winifred G. Helmes, Ph. D., Assistant Director, Women’s

Bureau, U. S. Department of Labor—Presiding
This afternoon we are concerned with the topic “The Woman Who
Works, As Others See Her, and As She Sees Herself.” Three women
who work and three men representing labor and firms hiring many
women will discuss the topic.
Dr. Anne Gary Pannell is President of Sweet Briar College, and
one of the few women college presidents in this country. She is cur­
rently the only woman among nine college presidents selected to the
Scholarship Board of the Ford Motor Company Fund and is a member
of the National Committee for Faculty Fellowships on the Fund for
Advancement of Education.
Mrs. Helen Berthelot is the Legislative Representative of the Com­
munications Workers of America, CIO. Mrs. Berthelot was the first
Chairman of the Labor-Management Committee. She is also a member
of the National CIO Legislative Committee.
Miss Louise Watson works in a relatively new field for women. She
is an Investment Adviser for R. W. Pressprich and Company in New
York. She was Business Manager of Bryn Mawr College and at one
time was affiliated with the Guaranty Trust Company of New York.
Mr. Virgil Martin, Vice President and General Manager of Carson,
Pirie,' Scott and Company in Chicago, represents a firm which hires
a good many women. He is a member of the Boards of the Welfare
Council for Metropolitan Chicago, the National Health and Welfare
Retirement Fund, and Illinois-Wesleyan University.
Mr. Peter Henle is the Assistant Director of Research for the
American Federation of Labor.
.
During the war, he served as Statistical Officer for the Air Force
and has worked with the Department of Labor as Executive Assistant
to the Labor Members of the Labor-Management Manpower Policy
Committee.
Mr. James G. O’Connell is Vice President of Publix-Shirts Corpo­
ration in New York where he is responsible for union negotiations and
relations, industrial engineering, and personnel management.
During World War II he served on the General Staff Corps and was
responsible for the direction and coordination of the program for the
development of civilian personnel management by the United States
Forces in the European Theater.

26




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

27

The moderator of this panel, Mrs. Gertrude Michelson, is Manager
of the Labor Eelations Department for E. H. Macy and Company
in New York. She is one of the few Management Eepresentatives
in the labor relations field.
Mrs. Michelson has a law degree and has taught a course in employee
relations'at New York University.
The speakers have agreed upon the points of discussion. Neces­
sarily they will not be able to cover the entire field, which will leave
time for questions.
Mrs. Michelson, the rest of the afternoon is in your capable hands.
Mrs. Michelson : I am delighted to have the opportunity to be your
moderator for this afternoon’s panel, “The Woman Who Works.”
I am both delighted and impressed with my feminine colleagues on
the panel, each a very distinguished woman in her chosen field, and
the equally distinguished masculine members of the panel who will
present their points of view on “The Woman Who Works, As Others
See Her.” All of us, I think, will learn a great deal from their insight
into the problems that we encounter and perhaps do not realize that
we encounter.
It is axiomatic that a moderator should have a moderate, tempered
attitude toward the problems under discussion. If that is the case,
I probably ought to disqualify myself, because I do not feel very
moderate. A general forum such as we are having this afternoon to
discuss the position, the problems, and the accomplishments of women
as a group, may serve a useful purpose when we talk as a group. But
I think by and large the woman worker does a greater service to her­
self and the career which she chooses to follow if she thinks of herself
as a member of the working community and not as a career woman. I
do not think that as a general rule a highly self-analytical attitude
is a useful one.
Dr. Helmes has asked if I could give my definition of a successful
career woman. In my opinion, she is not necessarily the prototype of
the Hollywood fashions, in a glamorous, unusual pursuit; she is one
who enters upon a course of aggressive achievement in any chosen field
and who receives satisfaction from her contribution. That satisfaction
does not necessarily stem from generous remuneration or from unusual
recognition. A successful career woman may apply her efforts to a
repetitive, straight-line production machine job or to a highly creative
occupation.
I submit that the test of the success of any career woman should be
the satisfaction which she receives from performing her job, whether
as an executive or a member of a profession or a member of the general
345983—55------3




28

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

working population. If a woman does her job well, likes what she is
doing, is interested in continued progress on the job, and retains those
qualities which enhance her position as a woman, she is my notion of
a successful career woman.
The questions which I shall address to the members of the panel
have been submitted by them, to serve as guides for our discussion.
I am going to address the first question to Miss Watson: “What
are the characteristics that are most acceptable in a workingwoman ?
Does she like people and does she want to cooperate with both men
and women ? Is she willing to help other women advance ? Does she
ignore prejudice against her sex?”
Miss Watson : Perhaps I should preface my remarks by saying that
the financial world is still a man’s world. Women entered this field
during the First World War, and the Second World War gave them
another boost. But the numbers of women who are vice presidents of
banks or partners or heads of investment counsel firms can still be
counted on the fingers of two hands.
In the financial world a woman works with the men in her firm and
also with the public, both men and women. Next to being competent
in her job, it is of the greatest importance that she like people and
enjoy working and cooperating with them. This statement may ap­
pear obvious, but there is evidence that more people are fired for
character traits than for lack of ability. For many reasons they can
neither get along nor cooperate with other people.
When I asked one of the three women vice presidents of New York
banks—and there are only three—what she felt a woman could con­
tribute most in the field of finance, she gave me what I consider exactly
the right answer: “To my mind,” she said, “she must like people, for
this field is one of the great service occupations. And what the woman
can best contribute is the kind of service which complements that
offered by the man.”
For instance, recently one of the men officers and I were helping
a woman client with the settlement of her husband’s estate. She never
had been trained to think along financial lines. But I knew what her
special problems were and how to answer the questions that she was
uncertain how to ask. The man officer was quite unaware of these
particular problems. His approach was along different lines. To­
gether I believe we sent her away with a feeling of security and a peace
of mind that she would not have had if we both had not been on the job.
If a woman genuinely enjoys working with the men in her office,
she usually has a degree of understanding and a sense of humor that
enables her to combat prejudices. She has some appreciation of the
average man’s point of view. Just why should he make way for her




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

29

in his bailiwick ? The fact that he often does reveals that he is fair
and liberal.
The antagonistic reasonableness of his point of view and hers is un­
derstandable to her. When he cannot see his way clear to granting
her request and says “Don’t be difficult,” she can laugh, even though
it does not necessarily change her long-range objective.
When she encounters a genuine prejudice against her as a member
of the feminine sex, on the part of either a man or a woman, she en­
deavors to overlook it. Here I should like to stress what we all know:
that women, all women, can help raise their status as women, and es­
pecially the status of their working sisters, by backing them to the
hilt.
Men will help other men get ahead. I have seen many a bright boy
singled out and helped to advance by those higher up. They are
always on the lookout for unusual ability, eager to train it for use
m a greater capacity.
My experience has been that many workingwomen are very conscious
of the obligation to help other women get ahead. This is not true
of every woman, of course. But those who do help other women ad­
vance speed up a little the time when more corporation executives will
search for bright young girls as they now search for bright young
boys.
Mrs. Michelson: Mr. Martin, in your business do you find that
women help other women to advance ?
Mr. Martin : Not as specifically as men help other men to advance.
1 think that we are now getting into the area where there might be
some disagreement. Miss Watson has outlined very well the methods
whereby women can progress. And what she has said about the
factors that make for progress of women in the financial world is
true of any other kind of business, and it is equally true of men.
But it seems to me that women are more subjective and more in­
hibited in their relationships with each other. We have a number
of women executives. And we have a General Management Council
which reviews the people who are being proposed for promotion from
within.
It has been my experience that women executives are more likely
to keep their eyes open for the likely young male executive than they
are for the likely young female executive. I am saying that from a
purely impersonal viewpoint. It may be that they still feel too un­
sure of themselves. They are afraid they would bring greater criti­
cism to themselves by proposing a young woman executive who does
not succeed than a young man executive who does not succeed.




30

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Mr. Henle : Maybe that is a good thing, because maybe the women
are sort of taking over anyway. If they really push themselves they
would take over a lot sooner.
Mrs. Berthelot : I think probably one of the reasons women do not
help each other as much as the men do is that each feels “Perhaps I
am only here by mistake.” The job opportunities for women at the
top are so few that each has a natural fear that perhaps she is the
only one who will be considered.
Mr. O’Connell : You think the problem is more one of unnecessary
identification as to whether they are male or female, whether they are
men or women.
I heard Miss Watson say that the male officer was unaware of the
problems of the female. Maybe we are unaware, but we are not
insensitive. In our business, practically all our employees are women,
so it makes it rather easy to become an expert.
In talking to our women executives, I find they do not consider the
male particularly prejudiced, so long as he can pay them less and get
along better! They have no quarrel whatever with the way in which
they are treated, except on Friday morning or the first of the month,
whenever they get their pay check. Of course I maintain, as any good
personnel man would, that we never notice in our wage or salary ad­
ministration whether the person is male or female. Jobs are set up
for what the person can do. If there are limits to what a woman can
do, those limitations are on the job sheet; and, therefore, she gets prop­
erly paid.
Mrs. Michelson : I was going to ask you about that subject. This
is one of your favorite subjects, I know: equal pay for equal work.
Would you like to comment on that, Mr. Henle ?
Mr. Henle: This brings up a subject that has been a bone of con­
tention throughout labor relations for many years. I think on the
whole we have the issue licked. We feel that our unions have done
a great deal toward eliminating any discrimination on the job against
women. For example, in a recent issue of The Machinist, published
by the International Association of Machinists, it says “IAM scores
victories for woman job rights.” The paper tells the story of a girl
who had been refused a job as production tracer at a New York plant.
The local union, of which she was a member, filed a grievance charging
that she was passed over because of her sex. But the company refused
to see it that way. The local union officials then processed the griev­
ance through regular procedures and eventually had to take up the
matter with the national officials of the IAM here in Washington,
who were then meeting with the national company officials. After




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

31

hearing the case, the company executives agreed that the union was
right, awarded the girl her promotion, and gave her back pay
amounting to nearly $900.
We do not like to draw morals on this panel, but we might draw the
simple one that we feel women workers will be able to lick the problem
of discrimination on the job if they join a union.
Mrs. Michelson : I think the point of view as expressed by the men
who represent industries in which there has been a greater infiltration
of women probably reflects a different sort of experience from that
of Miss Watson because of the newness of women in her field.
Do you feel that there is any amelioration of the problem in the field
of finance, Miss Watson, in terms of either prejudice or the question
of acceptance ?
. Miss Watson : Oh, yes. I think that we have made great strides
in the last 35 years. And I think after these years of spadework, if
young women come along who have more than usual ability and a
determination never to let anything stop them, who refuse to see any
stone walls, women will go further in the next 10 years in this field
than they have ever gone in the past.
Mr. Martin : My general observation about women executives is
that basically they are as tough minded as men executives. But, Miss
Watson, your use of one phrase bothered me a little, because I have
had quite the opposite experience. Perhaps it is a tipoff as to how
more women can go higher and faster in the financial field. It is so
seldom that anyone has to say to a woman, either an associate or on the
executive level, “Don t be difficult.” In fact, one of my quarrels with
our female executives is the fact that they always get the better of
me but they are not difficult; they outmaneuver me.
A male executive will come in and meet me head-on in an issue and
I don t say Don’t be difficult” to him. I just use a few choice mid­
western adjectives and he understands what I mean. But generally
the v oman executive does not like to encounter head-on the managerial
decision. In fact, she is inhibited by the possibility that someone
might say to her, “Don’t be difficult.” And, therefore, she will take
about 2 or 3 days to get to the point. We will ultimately do what
she wants us to do. That always happens.
But my observation on women, both when I was working as a super­
visor and in the executive group, is that they are not difficult enough.
They do not understand a man’s psychology. A man is a “head-on”
creature. He wants to face the problem and get it out of the way.
A woman is more subtle. Sometimes I think a male executive might
pay more attention to the female executive if she would smack him




32

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

right on the chin, and he would have to say “Look, Susie, don’t be
difficult.”
.
Miss Watson : Ours is a field in which we have to be very inde­
pendent and in which we have to fight for our point of view. We
wouldn’t get very far if we didn’t.
Mr. Martin : Could that be a reason why it has been difficult for
women to establish themselves in that field ?
Miss Watson : I suppose in every field the psychology of the average
workingwoman does not give her the courage to stand out against
customs, prejudices, and the judgments of others.
Mrs. Michelson: I have another question, for Dr. Pannell. “Does
the average workingwoman have the courage, determination, and
ability to accept herself at her own valuation rather than that of a
man?”
_
Dr. Pannell: The average workingwoman is a very difficult object
to define. I represent one of the great traditional service fields for
women, the schoolteacher. This is a field where there are many open­
ings today. We have a shortage of trained teachers, so that the aver­
age woman who is equipped to teach can certainly get a job in the
classroom today.
_
This does not mean, however, that there are not intricacies and dif­
ficulties to be faced in the teaching profession as well as in other fields
for the workingwoman. The classroom is open to the woman teacher.
But certainly the woman educational administrator does not have an
easy part. There are very few women superintendents of schools.
There are very few women college presidents in the United States.
There is, I believe, one woman president of a coeducational teachers
college. So far as I know, there is no woman president of either a
coeducational university or a man’s college.
So, I still think there is a lack of opportunity for women to rise
to the top in education. Certainly, I think that the average woman
in education—and particularly in educational administration has to
be aware of the opinion of men. Just as in any other occupation, she
has to work with men. She cannot regard herself as a woman work­
ing alone without regard for masculine opinion.
I am the head of a college for women. The young women who
attend our college have fathers who support them, who pay their school
fees. Our college has men professors, men members of the staff. And
the young women who attend the college also have masculine friends
in nearby institutions. So, their opinions of what goes on in the col­
lege are somewhat colored by the opinions of the men in their lives.
Men interested in ideas, those who are associated with colleges, I




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

33

think, are perhaps freer to accept new ideas, to work cooperatively
with women, and to have respect for the opinions of women. But, on
the other hand, men’s opinions have to be respected, and men have
to be consulted.
I would agree with the gentlemen who have pointed out that per­
haps women administrators and executives do not like to face prob­
lems head-on. It is true that the woman administrator has to be
more flexible, more sensitive, to the opinions of others, more flexible
in approaching these problems. I am of the opinion that the woman
executive generally has to have more preparation, has to bear more
things willingly, and has to bow to the opinions of others more
graciously in order to secure the cooperation that she needs for
effective performance.
I think it is very difficult sometimes for women executives and
administrators to pay the price. Now, look at the position of a man
college president, for instance. He works in his office, while his gra­
cious and effective and intelligent wife is busy at home entertaining
his guests and supplementing his activities. The woman college presi­
dent has to depend on her faculty and staff to be her “corporate wife”
and to perform these functions in her absence.
I represent not only the “school marm” and the woman administra­
tor who has a budget of a million dollars for the welfare and payroll
for a community of 700 people, with a great many business functions
to perform. I also represent another type of workingwoman, who
1 think is often forgotten in community planning; that is, the widow
with dependent children.
I would like to emphasize the necessity for more concerted public
attention to the problem of providing day care for the children of
working women with dependent children. Community facilities,
nursery schools, kindergartens, are needed to be sure that the children
are well cared for while the woman worker is attending to the absolute
necessity of earning the daily bread and paying the doctor’s bills and
buying the new shoes and schoolbooks.
These are very important facets to me of the special problems of
the workingwoman. She is dependent, as I think she always has
been, upon the cooperation, the understanding, and the loyal interest
of men as well as other women.
Mrs. Michelson : Miss Watson, would you like to comment on this
question? I know, having talked to you, that you have a special
interest in some of its aspects.
Miss Watson : I do agree fully with Dr. Pannell in her analysis of
the situation. But I feel that times are changing and that women




34

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

should have what is almost a religious fervor in seeing that women
of ability have equal opportunity.
.
.
All the women that I know in my field tremendously enjoy working
with men. Maybe that is the chief reason why the field is so
interesting.
_
_
I think a woman should go into any business or profession exactly as
a man does, feeling confident that, as a woman, she is able to contribute
a point of view different from a man’s but equally valuable. She
must have the ability to be herself and to stand on her own two feet
mentally and spiritually as well as physically. If she wishes to be
promoted she must acquire a more thorough knowledge of the subject
than the man at the next desk and work much harder than he. She
is interested in getting the job done. She learns how to be impersonal.
Because of all the groundwork that has been done all these years, and
because of the fact that the times are changing for women, I believe
women are going further in the future.
Dr. Panne el: Miss Watson, may I point out another possible
dilemma and frustration of our times. An article in the New York
Times very recently suggested that women today are marrying earlier
and having more children earlier and closer together than a generation
ago. (I have had prepared at the college a study of the comparative
marriage age and child-bearing ages of our classes at Sweet Briar in
1930 and 1945, which I will discuss later.) If the New York Times
is right, it means that often our young women today are seeking
stopgap employment to furnish their homes, to help their husbands get
an education, and to supplement their limited beginning income. Then
later, after their children are grown, they are going to come back into
the labor market younger than previously, with less professional ex­
perience and training.
Therefore they are going to seek easy jobs with easy working con­
ditions. This may mean that a group of women, a large group of
women, are less concerned with status and with the possibility of pro­
fessional advancement into decision-making positions. There may be
a growing movement toward women seeking blind-alley jobs, which
makes for less seeking of training and proficiency.
I want to cite an example in this connection of a rather typical recent
Sweet Briar graduate. She received her bachelor of arts degree,
Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude. And she was given a rather good
beginning administrative post at the college. She gave it up at the
end of a year to marry a young man who was overseas with our Armed
Forces in Germany. She joined him and began to work in a Govern­
ment school in Germany. She had majored in sociology, but she took




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

35

a teaching j ob to be with her husband. She spent a winter in Germany.
Then he came back and got the job that he always wanted, running a
Virginia plantation. What did she do? She went into the State
employment office and secured a caseworker job in the same town where
her husband was located within 1 day after he got his job. Then
within 6 more hours she found an apartment one block from their
respective jobs.
She illustrates what I regard as both the virtues and the weaknesses
of many of our contemporary young women; the need for flexibility
in education. She is giving her primary devotion to her husband and
his career. But she lacks permanency in her occupational choice. She
has many distractions. She lacks opportunity for continued promo­
tion, which must in the end decrease her job motivation and her interest
in her work. Yet she is doing well in a socially useful occupation, and
she is demonstrating a good work performance, good human relations,
good social attitudes.
She illustrates what I regard as the most desirable education for
women in the second half of the 20th century, the liberal-arts training,
which makes women able to accept the distractions of our times and
adapt their general training to the specific job situation that they find.
I do not think, for instance, that we need specific vocational training
in dietetics or what-have-you to have better homemakers. I still think
that the best training for a good wife and mother, for the creation of
good homes, is for children to be brought up in good homes by good
mothers; to help their mothers at the stove, in cleaning the house, in
minding the babies.
The function of education is to develop critical thinking ability, to
provide flexibility, to instill ethical and moral and intellectual values—
those things which are absolutely essential for the preservation of our
culture and civilization.
The Sweet Briar chart I mentioned earlier shows that the girls
graduated in 1945 married sooner after college than those graduated
in 1930. Among the more recent graduates, the largest number of
marriages occurred during the first and second years after graduation;
among the 1930 graduates, on the other hand, it occurred 3 years after
graduation. Five years out of college, 80 percent of the class of 1945
were married, but only 55 percent of the class of 1930. This is very
remarkable. At the present time 93 percent of the 1945 graduates are
married, and 89 percent of the 1930 graduates are married.
Undoubtedly the war and the depression influenced both classes,
causing the class of 1945 to marry earlier and the class of 1930 to marry
late. Security is a big factor in the troubled world of today.




36

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Another point is that the graduates of 1945 have already equaled
the graduates of 1930 in the number of children per married graduate.
The class of 1945 has had more children sooner after marriage. The
older class had a much more gradual childbearing period.
Now, these are major factors for you to consider in the future role
of the workingwoman. I think great changes are taking place.
Mrs. Michelson : Thank you, Dr. Pannell. Mr. O’Connell wanted
to make a comment.
Mr. O’Connell: I just wanted to enter into this discussion about
the question of married women who have homes and who have children.
We do not like to be characterized, either as employers or as males, as
prejudiced when we have to set up certain rules for continuity in jobs
which might seem to discriminate against a child-bearing female.
It is more a matter of practicality than of prejudice. In American
industry we are in business to make money. That fact establishes a
need for continuity of jobs at the place where this money is to be made.
As I said, we do employ a great number of women. And we have a
whole series of rules and regulations regarding them. We have rules
about when pregnant women shall leave work, how soon they can be
reemployed, what their rights to their jobs are, and what guarantees
we can offer and cannot offer.
I know that the industry as a whole would not like to be character­
ized as disapproving of the idea of early marriage and frequent
motherhood. All I ask is that the women try to understand the prob­
lems of the employer.
I would guess that well over 50 percent of our women employees are
married—most of them have families and most of them take maternity
leave. But we are not really prejudiced—at least we do not think we
are—when we cannot afford to hire them or when they do not feel they
get an equal opportunity to advance. Sometimes they have no chance
for consecutive training which will enable them to acquire the ability
of the male who started with them but whose employment was not
interrupted.
Mrs. Michelson : Mr. O’Connell, I do not think any of the women
members of the panel would disagree that in a business such as yours
continuity of employment is important. And if it is broken, the
woman cannot have the same aspirations for advancement as a man
who stays with the job.
I have a question for Mrs. Berthelot, who through the unions she
represents, has to do with a great many women who, from my limited
knowledge, leave their careers in the telephone companies and later
often come back to work. Assuming the premise that women work for




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

37

economic reasons, how can they be stimulated to more job satisfaction
by feeling that they make a definite contribution ?
Mrs. Berthelot : Well, I am particularly interested in this question,
because, as a widow left with two small children, I found it essential
to work. Had there been a nursery school, my problems certainly
would have been lessened.
I come from the telephone industry. I grew up with the telephone
union movement. When the Wagner Act was passed, I happened to
be working for the telephone company, and I became interested in the
union movement and have been with it ever since.
My union is composed for the most part of women, approximately
65 percent. That means that the industry also is composed of that
percentage of women. However, it is very interesting to note that
there are no women in executive positions in the telephone industry
higher than an assistant to a district manager. Believe me, there are
many other jobs having higher titles and corresponding pay! The
union has done considerably better than that, but not nearly enough,
considering the number of women we have in our organization; I am
not sure whether it is the men’s or the women’s fault. We do have a
woman on the executive board, and we have some women in the inter­
national office, of which I am a member.
One of the first things that a woman has to do is to learn to view
her work as a commodity. If her work is a good product, then she
can demand a high price for it. If her work is shabby and inefficient,
certainly she cannot expect top pay.
Another thing she has to recognize is that competition is a work
factor and not a personal matter. This is one of the great weaknesses
that women have, particularly when they are trying to break into a
new field. If there is a job opportunity open and they compete for
it unsuccessfully, they view their failure as a personal matter, and
they become discouraged more easily than they should.
One of the prime considerations, of course, is an improvement of
the monetary compensation for a woman’s work as it relates to the
labor force in general. And one of the things that the woman should
do is to refuse to accept a lower rate of pay than a man would be offered
for the same job.
It seems to me that a woman should be encouraged to improve her
own work and inspired to improve her own opportunities through
self-education and through analytical thinking.
One of the prime work hazards in my estimation is poor work
orientation on the job, which creates a feeling of insecurity. This
is true of both men and women and is particularly true at the man­
agerial or supervisory levels.




38

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Many times there is no clear-cut employment policy regarding
women, and I am sure that women still suffer from the myth that a
man can do a job better than a woman.
I do not know the answer to my fellow panel member’s problem in
getting women to work the late shifts. We have that same problem in
the telephone industry. And in many instances the late shift in our
particular industry is the desirable shift, particularly for the married
woman. They are shorter shifts with higher pay. I think the older
women are more interested in that type of shift. The schoolgirl
wants to work in the afternoon, possibly, after she gets out of school.
Mrs. Mictielson : You wanted to make some contribution to that,
Dr. Pannell ?
Dr. Pannell : I wanted to ask the opinion of the gentlemen mem­
bers of this panel how they think we really can get at the problem of
educating women for the second half of the 20th century. How can
women be motivated to increase their efficiency and train themselves to
the fuller use of their powers ? The content of the women’s education
is still largely masculine dominated. Most of the textbooks, most of
the curricula, are set up by gentlemen. Most of the heads of educa­
tional institutions, even women’s colleges, are still men. I would
like to have the comments of the men on the panel on how we should go
about educating women to achieve these kinds of motivation.
Mr. O’Connell: I do not know whether Dr. Pannell means the
extent of the education or the type of education.
I would say, that, first, all women should be educated, as should
all men, up to the limit of their capacity to really benefit from
education. That does not always mean the same level for everybody.
Second, I think that women, since their outlook is more varied, can­
not plan quite as accurately as men. Their education should be in
broad and general terms so that if they are “channeled” into particular
careers, they can then complete the technical and vocational education
necessary after that time.
Going back to that question of part-time work, and also to some­
thing which Mrs. Berthelot said: I am going to take the risk of a
generalization on feminine psychology here. I think there is a very
definite trait in a woman of subjectiveness and possessiveness in her
employment.
We have a very peculiar block on shift work or part-time work.
Every girl regards her machine as her personal property. She has
a right to move it. She is careful which mechanic she lets work on it.
And she resents very strongly having it turned over to any other girl
for another shift. We tried all the means of education, and we get a
certain amount of acceptance. But we get the same degree of ac­




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

39

ceptance as we used to get from our children, or that my mother got
from her children, when she olfered them castor oil. They take it,
but I am sure they have never gotten to like it. It seems to me that
possessiveness is a part of the subjectiveness of women; they are un­
able to separate themselves personally from their employment. The
male does not have this possessiveness to the same extent.
Actually that, to me, is one of the problems which we face in training
a girl for supervisory jobs. We do not find the same thing in highlevel administrative professions or technical jobs. Where a woman
deals with things, or where she even deals with people in a way that
does not affect her personally, she tends to be not only as good but in
many cases better than a man under the same circumstances.
However, where she herself enters as a person in the discussion
with an employee, often as a supervisor, she does not assume that same
degree of objectivity. I do not say she cannot be trained to have that
approach. 1 merely say it is harder to train her.
Mr. Martin : I think you girls who work have to worry more about
what other women see in women working than what men see in women
working.
A number of centuries ago—more centuries than I like to think of—
I was dean of men on a college campus, Dr. Pannell. I worked under
a very great president who said that he believed that the purpose of
education was to create adulthood in the lives of the youngsters who
came to the campus. Ilis definition of an adult was a person who was
more interested in solving problems than in creating them.
I have listened to this side of the panel, and it seems to me as an
amateur psychologist that there have been several Freudian slips.
Miss Watson said in a part of her statement that as a woman she can
bring a woman’s viewpoint into a business. I would like to say that
I think she should go into business as an individual with the added
advantage of bringing the woman’s viewpoint.
Now, I feel the same thing about the college tests which are written
by men, the colleges which are dominated by men, all of those areas
of higher education and secondary education which seemingly are
dominated by men. That is not good altogether. But if you were to
ask me what kind of training a young woman should have for the
second half of the 20th century, I would say that liberal-arts training
is pretty fundamental, whether it is on the college or the high-school
level. But of prime importance is the injection into the individual’s
thinking the idea that what is being achieved on the campus is simply
a way of approaching a problem—that liberal arts training deals with
a general body of knowledge about our society, about our culture, and
about our economy that is going to be helpful to the individual.




40

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

I am not particularly concerned as an employer of women that a
woman comes to us as a specialist. Certainly, she must come to us
as a well-rounded, matured individual; we can make the specialist
out of her, fortunately. But if she comes to us as a well-rounded,
matured individual interested in the solving of problems and not in
the creating of problems, then we receive her just as we would that
same kind of man. We have men who create problems, just as often as
we have women who create problems.
In fact, again, one of the rare virtues—and here I am swinging
over to your viewpoint—one of the rare virtues, I think, of the average
woman executive is the trait criticized earlier. That is the way in
which she will not meet the situation head-on but will in ways devious
and wondrous to behold, solve a problem which a man just is not able
to solve because he does want to batter his balding head against that
brick wall.
Mrs. Berthelot : That brings up another point: It was mentioned
a little while ago that women resent other women getting ahead. I
think that they do not resent another woman getting ahead if they
are absolutely sure that the woman has been chosen for her actual
ability and for her production rather than, perhaps, her attractiveness
only.
Mrs. Michelson : Miss Watson, I think, wants to make a comment.
Miss Watson : I would like to say a word on the subject of liberalarts education from my experience in business.
A businesswoman is much more apt to be a well-integrated human
being if she has a liberal-arts education before any degree of special­
ization is attempted. It used to be said that women could be wedded
to jobs, that they had no special interests outside; that they were nar­
row in their outlook, and consequently were fairly uninteresting as
people. With this kind of background, of the liberal-arts education
before specialization, the woman can have not only a better perspective
from which to view her problem, but her leisure life is bound to be
much happier and richer. And her opportunities of success in her
work and as a human being are definitely furthered by such a
background.
Mrs. Micjielson : I want at this time, while we are waiting for
your questions, to thank the members of the panel. I do not know
whether they feel that they have learned something today or not; but
I, as the moderator, certainly feel that I have learned something from
the divergent points of view which proved to be not quite so divergent
as they seemed at first.
I think they can be very easily reconciled: The women members of
the panel are convinced that the opportunities and the prospects of




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

41

the future are bright; the men on the panel are both tolerant of and
interested in ■welcoming women into the business world. And I think
with those happy attitudes it is a fairly compatible situation.

Question Period
Question for Mr. Martin: Can you think of any good reason why a
company anxious to hire more women should not set up its own day
nursery ?
Mr. Martin : I think that is a fair question. I can think of several
good reasons why it should not. And I can think of probably twice
as many good reasons why it should.
Let’s put it very bluntly. Number one: The liability on such an
operation is terrific. We have ceased to run our public nursery for
children of the shopping public because of the tremendous liability
and our inability to get nurses and skilled people with teacher back­
grounds to run the nursery.
I think the second, and probably the most important, reason is that
our competition does not do it. If you are not forced to do some­
thing, you do not do it—probably it is just sheer inertia. But I think
it might well be done.
•
Question for Mr. O’Connell: Would a different attitude toward
employment of older women help meet the problem of part-time
employment ?
Mr. O’Connell : We do not have any problem with regard to the
employment of older women. We have very productive employees in
our industry who are past the retirement age of 65. Our only stipu­
lation on age, as far as women are concerned, is that we do not like to
start training them after they have turned 35. We do it: but they are
not quite as adaptable as the younger women. Actually, I do not
know to what extent there is prejudice against women workers over a
certain age. We do not have it, so I can not talk from experience.
Mrs. Miciielson : I do not know whether anybody is interested in
a moderator’s point of view on that question, but I do have a point of
view. I think, particularly in retailing, that middle-aged and older
women are a useful source of womanpower. And they very well meet
the needs of our business.
But one of the problems, whether through collective bargaining, or
management institution, is the greater emphasis which is placed on
long-range security, on pension plans, and long-range thinking. These
considerations make it harder if you are going to be very practical
about integrating an older person into your business organization
from the starting point. And I think that as more emphasis is placed




42

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

on fringe benefits and social gains, these difficulties will increase. We
have to find a way of reconciling those two objectives if we are going
to be practical.
Mr. O’Connell : That is true for older men too.
Mrs. Miciielson : That is right.
Question for Mrs. Berthelot: Why don’t you pick up Mr. Henle
on his statement that the A. F. of L. licked the problem of equal pay
through collective bargaining ?
Mrs. Berthelot : I am sure Mr. Henle will agree with me that not
only the A. F. of L. but the CIO—and the labor movement in gen­
eral—is untiring in its efforts to see that the women get equal pay
wherever possible. Sometimes the grievance machinery is even more
effective than the collective bargaining. Through usage, provisions
are written into a contract that you might never be able to get across
the bargaining table.
We are not resting on our laurels in this matter. We also are at­
tempting through Federal legislation to bring an equal-pay bill into
being. You might be interested to know that a group of women here
in Washington representing many divergent groups have agreed on
the text of a bill. We have worked with the Women’s Bureau here,
and they have been of great assistance to us. I think that this bill will
be introduced very shortly.
Mr. Henle : It is not any one group in the labor movement, but the
whole labor movement, that has been working for a long time not only
on the question of equal pay but on the question of protective legisla­
tion for women, and going back even further, the suffrage amendment.
The whole achievement over the years can be viewed as a result of
efforts made by many, many groups and by all the labor movement.
Now, there is, I must indicate, one slight difference of views on the
question of equal pay between some of the people within the labor
organization. We in the A. F. of L. feel that the problem of equal
pay can be licked, and is being licked, through collective bargaining.
We see the value of legislation to set a floor, a minimum, for wages for
women, but we do not feel it necessary to have legislation establishing
an equal-pay principle for wages above the minimum.
Our experience m negotiating agreements has been that the problem
involved in collective bargaining, the problem involved in industry,
more often is a question of comparable pay rather than equal pay. By
relying on the standard of comparable pay, we are able to eliminate
wage differentials because of sex and remove the opportunity that
many employers would have to quibble under a complex and difficult
administration of a specific law.
So, we say we are getting the job done. The women are helping us.




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

43

The women, both in the labor movement and out, are helping us. And
we think that the job can be done, and most effectively done, through
collective bargaining.
Mrs. Berthelot: I think possibly this might be a subject for a de­
bate between the A. F. of L. and the CIO panels. We will not go into
that here, however.
Question for Miss Watson: Since World War II, when women
came into banking, the number of officers has risen to 6,000, out of a
total of 80,000. There are 225,000 to 250,000 women employed in
banks—more than 50 percent of the entire staffs. In the brokerage
houses, how many women are working as brokers, and has the number
multipled as it has with women in banking?
.Miss Watson: The women who are presidents of banks and chair­
men of the boards are outside of Hew York City. There are a great
many women on the clerical staffs in Hew York banks, but few who
are vice presidents.
In the brokerage houses of Hew York City there are very few
women partners. There are a few, but it is outside of Hew York where
you find them in large numbers. There are only 4 or 5 women invest­
ment counselors in New York firms. The number is still very small.
Question for Dr. Pannell: Should not the education of women for
the second work period—and that is defined as 32 years and over­
become the responsibility of adult education, leaving to the junior
and liberal-arts colleges the function of guidance, planning, and moti­
vation to engage in a lifetime career of living and working ?
Dr. Pannell : I agree with parts of those implications. It is the
duty of the undergraduate college to instill a lifelong interest in the
things of the mind and in real achievement—in other words, to instill
motivation if possible.
I would likewise agree that the adult-education movement is tre­
mendously important. I think that organizations like the American
Association of University Women are extremely important in provid­
ing pathways in community activity of a most worthwhile kind for
women and providing a union of career women and homemakers. But
I think, to answer the basic point there: I have often been asked by
widows who have come back into the labor market after a considerable
period of absence how to go about reorienting themselves. I think
neither the undergraduate college nor the adult-education movement
is entirely the answer.
It is my belief that when a woman returns to the labor market after
a long period of absence, it is basically important for her to get a maxi­
mum amount of training of the most highly specialized kind, of the
most recent vintage that she can, so that she has something extra to
345983—55------ 4




44

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

offer in the labor market. She must not take the little job created
for her by some friend or the lowest thing that she can get at the poor­
est salary. I would advise her to seek the graduate school or the
technical school or the vocational school that offers something extra.
Question for Miss Watson: You had talked about the advantages
of a liberal-arts education. How will a liberal-arts education help
dressmakers, gloveworkers, and so forth, in the labor supply? Or
make them available?
Miss Watson : I do not know that it will make them available in the
labor supply. It will just make their lives far richer and give them
more imagination in their work. One of the best-read men I know is
the hired man on an Arizona ranch. He also plays the piano with
professional skill. Why should not the gloveworker have the tools
with which to enjoy art and read? At 60 she is apt to be much hap­
pier and much more successful.
Mr. Henlf, : The question of a liberal-arts education for the dress­
maker and the other occupation that was mentioned, it seems to me,
raises this problem: It is all very well to say that these occupations
and the individuals who want to go into them would be helped by a
liberal-arts education. I think we are all agreed that any person
would be so helped. But there is a question of what education we
provide for those among us, men and women, who cannot afford to go
to college, who have to hit the employment trail directly after high
school.
And for this group which, if I might point out, still constitutes the
majority of people in the United States, we have to look pretty sharply
at our educational and our training curricula. The labor movement,
of course, does its part in taking an interest in the vocational schools
and in apprenticeship programs and things of that sort. But we want
to do more than we have done to make sure that our young people are
channeled toward pursuits in which they can find a happy life and a
fairly remunerative one.
Mr. O’Connell: The question, it seems to me, also has a social
connotation. It goes back to part of the original philosophy that edu­
cation is solely an end to material advancement, the earning of a living,
in dollars and cents, forgetting what we call the dignity of labor. It
seems to me that every individual, whether through circumstance or
not, has to earn a living no matter at what level, and he is still an
individual with human dignity and, therefore, an individual to whom
education is most important.
The liberal-arts idea was not necessarily at a college level as I
understood it, but it was a general training of the individual for living.
All education is a course of training for living, not just a course of




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

45

training for making a living. To consider only the college level would
distort the issue. I know many people who are, let us call them, shirtmakers, whose job used to be considered low-paid employment, but
many of those people are thoroughly educated individuals, not form­
ally, but they are thoroughly educated. They are good people, and
they are good citizens. That was what I meant when I was discussing
liberal education. And I think it is all that the rest of the panel
meant: not something formal, but something complete in the develop­
ment of the individual.
Mrs. Michelson : I think from the comments that I hear that that is
the case.
Questions for Mr. Henle: (1) Why are there so few women in toplevel trade-union executive posts? (2) As long as there is unemploy­
ment and fear of its increase, do you really think that industry will
adjust to noncontinuous employment of women?
Mr. Henle: Actually, there are quite a few top trade-union people
in the labor movement who are women. There are a number of in­
stances where women in the labor movement have been given recogni­
tion according to their ability.
The other question on the subject of unemployment is, of course, a
very vital one. It certainly is true that when unemployment is at a
relatively high level, as it is today, there is less incentive for the em­
ployer to arrange special work schedules, stagger hours, fix up the job
requirements, and so forth, to attract women. This is a hazard that
the economy puts in front of us. Right now we are a little concerned
about the direction in which the economy is going. We still have a
fairly high level of unemployment. But we are certainly hopeful,
because we do have employers, like the two on either side of me here,
tackling the problem.
Question for Mr. Martin: Regarding the trouble in getting workers
for short shifts, have you opened those jobs, such as clerks, inspectors,
and so forth, to Negro workers? Many times employee shortages re­
veal that this portion of the population either is not considered or is
restricted to service, semiservice, and semiskilled jobs in very limited
numbers. Can Negro workers be hired for any position you have?
Mr. Martin : We have no FEPC law in Illinois. About 6 years
ago we, as a store, individually, because others did not wish to join us,
adopted a completely nondiscriminatory hiring practice. This was
not to fill so-called traditional jobs for Negroes. At first we employed
only skilled Negroes, as secretaries, machine operators, and so forth.
We have utilized every available labor resource in the community. We
have a number of Nisei. We hire on the basis of what an individual
can do, not on the basis of color or religion. We have found it an




46

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

eminently satisfying practice. This has been a real source of good
employees for us. It has worked out very, very nicely, and we are
very happy that the other stores, within the last year or 18 months,
have joined us.
•
Question for Dr. Pannell: Does the earlier marriage and earlier
and more frequent childbearing of young women today imply less
interest on the part of women to work outside the home ? If so, does
this suggest a beginning of modification of our value system as it was
described this morning?
Dr. Pannell : This is a question that I simply am not wise enough
to answer. I would suggest that perhaps it means considerably more
flexibility in the pattern that women are going to follow. I do think
that there is definitely developing a pattern of early marriage and more
frequent childbearing at an earlier age. And I do think that possibly
there is less specific seeking of the job and of advanced training which
will train women best for the executive, administrative, or other top
posts in the field.
I think women are far more likely to seek the job where the pay and
the hours suit them, even though I think that many very able young
women are seeking and accepting jobs beneath their ability.
Question for Dr. Pannell: In what ways can American workingwomen aid those women in other countries who are newly entering
into the professional and business worlds ? And how are they doing
so at present ?
Dr. Pannell : Well, I think that depends very largely at present on
the organization in which they are effective and what programs they
support. There certainly are any number of organizations. Again I
cite the one that I know best, the American Association of University
Women, which has an affiliation with the International Association of
University Women.
I presume that a great many organizations in this country, like the
General Federation of Women’s Clubs, belong to a larger international
association. Most of the organizations of this kind have educational
committees both on the national and the international level. I, my­
self, believe that probably women can best meet these needs by provid­
ing more scholarships, fellowships, graduate-training opportunities.
I know that to meet the needs of the postwar world the American
Association of University Women initiated a very interesting and
worthwhile program-—the international study program—to which
the women of the American Association of University Women contrib­
uted voluntarily. This program originally was launched to provide
retraining opportunities for professional women in the formerly oc­
cupied countries. For instance, a woman physician who had been in




MARCH 10, AFTERNOON SESSION

47

a concentration camp, or a dentist or a social worker who had not had
an opportunity to read the latest scientific or professional journals,
who had not had an opportunity to work in a good hospital or labora­
tory or technical program, needed to be retrained. They were brought
to this country and given the money and the free time to retrain them­
selves in the use of those services.
I am sure that there are numerous programs of this kind.
Question for Mrs. Berthelot: If one woman refuses to work at a
salary lower than a man would receive for the same job, isn’t there
another woman who steps in and accepts the job? How can this be
controlled ? Is it possible ?
Mrs. Berthelot : There is no control over anything like that. But
I do think that if women in general would demand equal pay, we
would no longer have the problem of a woman being offered a job at
a lower rate than that which a man would be offered. There is no
real solution except through education and evolution.
Mr. Henle : And unions!
Question for Miss Watson: What steps can this conference, the
organizations represented, and/or the individuals that are here take
to prevent the present groundswell of discrimination against employ­
ment of women in government and industry from becoming a flood
such as engulfed women of the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s ?
Miss Watson : Wliat happened to women in the late 1920’s and the
early 1930’s was due to the great depression. Now, I have said that
in the financial field I think doors are being opened to women in
increasing numbers and that they have great opportunities in the next
few years, assuming that we do not have any depression.
I was not aware that there was a tremendous groundswell of dis­
crimination against employment of women in industry. I think I
should turn that part of the question over to the gentlemen of our
panel.
Mr. Henle : I think that the individual who wrote the question—
and those who feel that there is a terrific resentment against women in
industry—should get rid of their inferiority complex, because I think
that it is not so. Although there are special problems, particularly at
the higher career levels, nevertheless there is a place in our economy
for women who want work and who are qualified to work. And if
there is no place for them, it is not the result of prejudice, but of
serious economic difficulties.




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

Address
The Honorable Arthur Larson, Under Secretary of Labor
In the conduct of human affairs, there is no more sinister disease
than the urge to herd people into categories instead of treating them
as human beings. Of all the contrasts between our traditions and
the traditions of the Communists and the Socialist countries, there
is no more conspicuous contrast than this. To us, a person is a person.
To them, he is a unit. He is a component part of a mass or a class or a
category with certain average or minimum characteristics or require­
ments for subsistence or survival.
Although we pride ourselves on judging everybody on his own
personal qualifications and on giving every person the just rewards
and privileges and prestige that he deserves, we too must constantly
be on guard against this proclivity to categorize and dehumanize.
This tendency is apt to be most pronounced in government. We
would not dream of saying that all the members of the proletariat are
honest and sturdy and long suffering, while on the other hand all of
the members of the bourgeoisie are effete and mean and decadent and
ripe for extermination. But if we do not watch ourselves we are apt
to do things like this.
We say, “Well, labor thinks this” or “Management says that.”
Or we might say, “The consumer believes this.” “On the other hand,
agriculture is of this opinion.” Or we might say that teenagers are
all juvenile delinquents or Texans are all rich, Norwegians are all
coldblooded or bullheaded, or older workers are unreliable and slow,
or professors are impractical, or advertising men all have ulcers.
I have one very simple message tonight, one very simple theme to
my remarks. And that is this: The way to achieve the effective
use of womanpower is to train and employ and pay women on the
basis of their individual merits, and eschew as far as possible all
differentiation and exclusion on a categorical basis.
It seems to me that the time has come when, with a third of the
work force made up of women, it no longer makes sense to think of
48




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

49

women as a kind of separate segment of the work force or for that
matter a separate legal or political category.
If you are going to put people, human beings, into categories for
distinctive legal or political or economic treatment, you first have to
be able to describe with some precision the characteristics and quali­
ties of that category. Otherwise, you cannot justify setting up the
category in the first place. Or even if you do, you don’t know what
to do with it when you have it. You don’t know what privileges or
disabilities or special rules that category warrants.
Now, you can make a separate category, say for the blind. We
know what their special problem is. And you can make special rules
for them. You can deny them automobile driving permits and so
forth, because you have this very clean-cut category which you can
define and for which you need a very special rule. But when it comes
to women, can we describe the occupants of this category with such
precision and with such asssurance that we can defend this separate
set of rules for them?
I sometimes wonder if our surest source of wisdom on the subject
of human traits isn’t the sociologist. But perhaps the novelists and
playwrights and poets who all down through the ages have been analyz­
ing for us the subtle characteristics of human nature have left us a
very considerable body of data on the characteristics of this category
which we may take as a guide.
I know that not only all day today but perhaps all of your lives
you have been hearing sage quotations about women. I am going to
give you a few, but not for the usual reason. In fact, I can tell you in
advance that the net effect of this is going to be to cancel them all out.
First, are women essentially good or bad?
Blackmore, in Lorna Doone, said:
Women ... are, beyond all doubt, the mothers of all mischief.

In the education of Henry Adams, Henry Brooks Adams says:
Women have, commonly, a very positive moral sense; that which they will,
is right; that which they reject, is wrong; and their will, in most cases,
ends by settling the moral.

We are off to a bad start with our category obviously. You cannot
have in the same category the mother of all mischief and the fountain­
head of all morality. Let’s try again.
Are women wise or foolish ?
Says James Stephens, in The Crock of Gold:
Women are wiser than men because they know less and understand more.




50

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

But Thomas Moore, in his poem, How To Make a Good Politician,
suggests:
Ask a woman’s advice, and, whate’er she advise,
Do the very reverse and you’re sure to be wise.

Here are two Irish poets disagreeing on a matter of the utmost
importance, so far as employment or political or property rights are
concerned: wisdom and judgment.
Perhaps we should resort to the French, who always understand this
subject so much better—and there I am categorizing myself. Andre
Maurois says:
Learning is nothing without cultivated manners, but when the two are com­
bined in a woman you have one of the most exquisite products of civilization.

You cannot ask for anything more exalted than that, but, on the
other hand, George Meredith wrote
Woman is the last thing which will be civilized by man.

Are women courageous or timid ?
We have all sung “Ben Bolt,” with those touching words by Thomas
Dunn English, about Sweet Alice,
.
Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile
And trembled with fear at your frown.

But this same writer penned these lines:
Though little dangers they may fear,
When greater dangers men environ
Then women show a front of iron . . .

William Bolitho carried it even a bit further, when he says:
Contrary to male sentimentality and psychology, the confrontation of a
hostile crowd, to a woman, is like a tonic.

Do women get along well with other women ?
Euripides remarked, in the fifth century B. C.:
Woman is woman’s natural ally.

But more recently, James Stephens observed:
Women and birds are able to see without turning their heads, and that is
indeed a necessary provision, for they are both surrounded by enemies.

Is woman dependable, or inconstant?
The poet, John Clare, says:
The winds, the clouds, now here, now there,
Hold no such strange dominion,
As woman’s cold, perverted will,
And soon estranged opinion.




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

51

In rebuttal may I offer William Shakespeare:
For, boy, however we do praise ourselves,
Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm,
More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,
Than women’s are.

I hope you realize that we are covering, one by one, most of the
qualities that determine whether a person makes a good employee or
voter or professional worker: intelligence, morality, courage, depend­
ability, ability to get along with others, and so on. But we do not
seem to be getting anywhere in delineating a clear-cut category, by
quoting different authorities. Actually, you get no more agreement
even if you quote merely the different utterances of a single writer.
For example, in Venice Preserved, Thomas Otway exclaimed:
O woman! lovely woman ! Nature made thee
To temper man: we had been brutes without you.

But in the poem “The Orphan,” we find this outburst:
What mighty ills have not been done by woman!
Who lost Mark Antony the world?—A woman!
And laid at last old Troy in ashes?—Woman!
Destructive, damnable, deceitful woman!

I have always been curious to learn what happened to Otway be­
tween these two poems.
Finally, what about the fundamental question of the proper sphere
of women’s activities ?
On this, I shall quote, for the first time, a woman—Kate Field:
They talk about a woman’s sphere as though it had a limit:
There’s not a place in earth or heaven,
There’s not a task to mankind given,
There’s not a blessing or a woe,
There’s not a whispered “yes” or “no”,
There’s not a life, or death, or birth,
That has a feather’s weight of worth
Without a woman in it.

Of all the quotations I have given you, this one, I think, comes the
closest to being completely true.
My purpose, in this literary roundup, has not been to present a
description of the salient characteristics of women. On the contrary,
it has been to show that you cannot set aside women as a class, define
their strengths and weaknesses, and then proceed to construct a system
of special legal and business and employment rules and practices to
meet these peculiar qualities. You cannot do it for the simple reason
that no one can agree on what those qualities are. And the reason they




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMAIsPOWEB

cannot agree is that they are talking about individual persons, not
composite abstractions. (After all, you could take practically any
of these quotations, turn them around and apply them to men and
have them come out just about as true.)
When you begin to make practical application of these pronounce­
ments, you soon discover how silly most of our ancient legal and eco­
nomic differentiations were.
Should women sit on juries, or become judges or lawyers? Well,
if they have a “very positive moral sense,” what could be more appro­
priate? And so we have not only almost universal jury service for
women, but also any number of outstanding lawyers and judges who
are women.
Should women be allowed to handle their own property and make
their own contracts and handle business matters of great importance ?
You have heard the testimony that women “are wiser than men” be­
cause they “understand more.” This view seems at last to have gained
considerable currency, since during the last one hundred years most
of the old property acts have given way to freedom of property hold­
ing and contract.
So we could go down our list of individual characteristics and find
an application for each. If it is true that confrontation of a hostile
crowd is like a tonic to a woman, and that she can detect her enemies
on all sides without turning her head, there are obviously great oppor­
tunities for women in such activities as politics, teaching—and work­
ing for the Labor Department.
And if it is true that a woman of learning and cultivated manners
is the most exquisite product of civilization, and that it is she who
keeps men from being brutes, then it follows that women can range
up and down the whole scene of our arts and letters and theater and
entertainment and music and journalism and pedagogy, with an un­
limited charter to raise it from its present state to what it ought to be.
So far as the Department of Labor is concerned, the tangible con­
sequence of this way of looking at things is a new emphasis of the
idea that women are no longer to be thought of as primarily a sort
of special problem group. They are an integral and indispensable part
of the work force. Everything we do, every program we have, every
statistical series we run, every statute we enforce, every income insur­
ance system we deal with, is concerned with all working people,
whether men or women. Whenever one of these programs or statutes
is weak, women workers are hurt as much as men; whenever one of
them is perfected, women workers are the gainers along with men.
Let me review with you the objectives, activities, and plans of the




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

53

Department of Labor, so as to provide some feeling of the sweep and
range of what we are trying to do for all workers, whether men or
women.
It is a good idea, whenever one embarks on an assignment, to start
by asking the simple question: what is my objective? One of the
best ways to put the question is this: if I could have my way in every
respect before I have finished with this job, what would the state of
affairs be when I left it? Of course, we know that no one ever per­
fectly achieves such a goal; but unless the goal is known and con­
stantly kept in view, one’s activities will be aimless, routine, and
uninspired.
Our beginning point is the recognition of the aspiration of all Amer­
ican men and women “to give, through their work, the highest and
finest expression to their God-given abilities and talents.”
This sentence could stand as the text about which the whole story
of the struggle of workingwomen has been written. To be admitted
to professions on the strength of ability, to be admitted to crafts on
the strength of skill, simply to be allowed the ultimate human satis­
faction of feeling that you are exercising your capacities and poten­
tialities to the full—this has been the goal of workingwomen through­
out the years, and it is our first great objective. We put it ahead of
material reward, and in this we are not being sentimental or rhetorical.
A factual survey of workers not long ago turned up a significant fact:
when asked what they considered the most important thing about their
jobs, they listed size of wages not first but third. Heading the list was
the satisfaction of doing good work that gave a feeling of self­
expression.
Our second general objective, “To maintain the dignity, the pride,
and the freedom that rightly belong to all free men and women,” is
similarly of particular interest to women. For once more, in the
struggle for equitable treatment in those areas where this is still de­
nied, is not the consideration just as much recognition of rightful
place as it is dollars and cents ? Is not the right to be accorded un­
grudged and unquestioning freedom of access to all varieties of activ­
ity, reward, and prestige solely on the basis of individual merit per­
haps a greater stake even than the financial ?
Of course, we also recognize, without apology, that the aspiration
to a decent standard of living is an important one, because it provides
the setting for “a good and useful life”; and here again our objective
tallies with that of the countless women whose efforts and talents have
brought good and useful lives both to themselves and to families and
others who otherwise would have been denied them.




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Now, let us look at some of the specific objectives.
The provision of an effective Employment Service is one of the most
fundamental. In aiming toward this objective, we have lately been
pressing for several kinds of improvement. We hope to put the entire
calculation of allowances for administration on a different footing
so that hereafter the employment offices will be allotted a larger sum
for making more difficult and specialized kinds of placement.
This may sound like a technical change, but its effect will be that
people with special individual talents and skills will receive greater
attention than in the past, since it obviously takes more time and
effort to find the right place for this kind of person than for one with
some routine occupation. We also hope to step up our counseling
and aptitude activities, and give more particularized attention, with
the aid of special personnel, to such people as older 'workers or the
physically handicapped. In our Farm Placement Service, and with
the aid of the new Cabinet Committee on Migratory Labor, of which
Secretary Mitchell is chairman, we intend to perfect and extend our
annual worker program, under which migratory farm laborers are
provided with a consecutive schedule of engagements as they move
from crop to crop, and are relieved to a considerable degree of the
greatest nightmares of the migrant—uncertainty and unemployment.
Through the Cabinet committee and the member agencies, and in
company with States, communities, religious groups, and others, we
intend to press an active campaign for improving the housing, trans­
portation, health, safety, education, and security of migrant workers,
as well as systematic programs within the communities where they
temporarily live to make them feel welcome and at home.
As we know, unfortunately there are times when employment is not
to be had, and at this point there must be an adequate unemployment
insurance system ready to go into action. We stress “adequate” first,
because our greatest single problem right now is the extent to which,
largely because of fixed dollar limits on weekly benefits, unemploy­
ment compensation has not kept pace with increased wages and living
standards. The simple underlying theory of unemployment insur­
ance was that, since unemployment is a mutual misfortune, its cost
might be shared roughly equally by employer and employee. This
meant that the unemployed worker ought to get about half of his
average weekly wages. But our latest figures show that what he is
getting is more like one-third.
President Eisenhower, both last year and this year, urged the States
to bring their standards up to this half-of-wages level; and, although
it is too early to tell how widespread the response will be, it is gratify­




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

55

ing to note that the number of bills introduced and the number of
governors’ messages directed toward this kind of improvement are far
beyond those in any similar legislative season for many years.
The other respect in which adequacy must be watched is the dura­
tion of benefits. The President has called upon the States to pay
benefits for a period of up to 26 weeks to anyone who qualifies.
Of all the people who come within this system, none have a greater
claim upon our concern than those who exhaust their benefits because
the period allowed is too short to cover their span of unemployment.
May I say, in passing, that we do not content ourselves with exhort­
ing the States; we also try to work toward our own standards in the
District of Columbia, where the Federal Government has direct re­
sponsibility ; we got the maximum benefits raised by 50 percent and
the potential duration extended to 26 weeks in the last session of
Congress, and in this session we hope to remove an alternative limita­
tion on duration which deprives some claimants of the full 26 weeks
when needed. We also, last year, extended unemployment insurance
coverage by Federal action for the first time in history to 4 million
more workers, including Federal civilian employees.
Our second specific objective relates to work injuries. Clearly the
best thing is to prevent accidents. Of all the things we do, surely
nothing is so thoroughly rewarding as the promotion of safety cam­
paigns and the training of safety experts, as a result of which we are
constantly seeing dramatic reductions in accident rates where these
methods are applied.
We have seen the laundry industry of South Carolina reduce its
accident rate by 79 percent. Oregon witnessed a reduction in the in­
jury-frequency rate of its food-processing plants by 31 percent.
Not the least of our concerns is safety for Federal employees. One
Federal establishment cut its accidents to one-sixth of what they had
been, with the help of five courses in safety fundamentals given to their
supervisory personnel. The number of disabling injuries per million
man-hours worked in manufacturing industries fell from 13.4 in 1953
to 11.5 in 1954. The 1954 rate was the lowest on record, but with over
1,800,000 such injuries recorded for the year, there is still a lot of room
for progress. We have some plans for an even more determined on­
slaught on this problem in the future. For example, we have a bill
in Congress which, by the use of grants-in-aid, will build up systematic
modern State safety programs in States that now lack them.
Just as you must have unemployment insurance where your em­
ployment efforts fail, so you must have workmen’s compensation where
your safety efforts fail. This is largely a matter for State legislation
and administration, but the Department has traditionally served as a




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

clearinghouse for the dissemination of ideas on how the State acts can
be bettered. We are in the midst now of preparing a model workmen’s
compensation law, into which we are trying to merge the very best
features of all the very best State laws, on the theory that, if we do a
good job of it, the model act will be studied and accepted on its own
merits. Here, too, our first effort is to persuade the States to improve
their standards, some of which are pathetically low.
I know of one case, which is not particularly atypical, of a young
woman, a graduate chemist, who has been bedridden for several years,
has already run up $11,000 in hospital bills, is apt to be bedridden for
life and continue to run up more bills—and even if she wins her case,
she will get only a total of $7,500 for both lost wages and medical
expense.
The inadequacy of workmen’s compensation in such jurisdictions
is no joke; it is capable of producing tragedies and injustices of
appalling proportions. Here also we try to live up to our exhorta­
tions; our Federal Longshoremen’s and Harbor Workers’ Act, will,
we hope, have its maximum benefits raised from $35 to $50 under a
bill recently proposed by the administration.
At the same time, we are trying to stress rehabilitation of the
worker, rather than merely paying him off for his injury. We have
legislation pending that will help us finance more rehabilitation, and,
of course, we were all extremely gratified by the success of the admin­
istration’s bill, passed last session, which will multiply the number
of people, including those on compensation rolls, who can be rehabili­
tated.
The third specific objective is to provide a framework within which
employers and employees can conduct their affairs and fairly work
out their differences with a minimum of government intervention;
but where practices exist that offend American standards of decent
wages or hours or working conditions, to blot out these substandard
conditions by vigorous enforcement of labor standards legislation.
This involves a dichotomy; we recognize the basic American tradition
of freedom of the parties to make their own wage bargains and work
out their own agreements and disagreements without Government in­
terference as far as possible; and both labor and management have
responded to this policy of nonintervention by displaying great under­
standing and maturity in the conduct of their relations, with the result
that we have lately had less time lost by strikes than in any comparable
period in history.
Yet, we also recognize that this freedom, while it has extremely
wide range, cannot be absolutely unlimited. Our American traditions
of decency draw a line as to wages and working conditions and say to




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

57

the employer and employee: Beneath this you may not go, even by
agreement. The line has been drawn lately at 75 cents an hour in
covered occupations. We have proposed an increase to 90 cents, which
we believe to be the figure at which the purposes of the legislation can
be served without undue disruption and dislocation in areas where
wages are relatively low.
Fourth, in the extremely important realm of training, we are giving
a “new look” to our program, by broadening our conception of the
job beyond the conventional apprenticeship training into all kinds
of training on the job at all ages. At the same time, we continue to
press the promotion of apprenticeship through State apprenticeship
councils, industry committees, employers, unions, and communities.
The demands of our expanding economy and our swift-moving tech­
nology, not to mention national defense, place on us a grave responsi­
bility to accelerate the building up of essential and flexible skills, and
it is obvious that much of this skill will have to come from women
workers.
Our fifth specific objective, to provide needed factual informa­
tion, is one on which no informed person has to be “sold.” Any
person who might harbor the notion that statistics are, after all, only
a plaything of economists would be quickly disabused if he could
spend a few weeks trying to find hard, practical solutions to even
our most elementary everyday problems. How can we effectively
attack unemployment if we do not have adequate facts about the
composition of the sum total figure of the unemployed? We watch
the total national figure rise and fall, but how much better it would
be to know the character of the people who make up that figure.
What happens to people who exhaust unemployment insurance?
Can people really live on their benefits ? What are the causes of work
injuries, and the trends in these causes? What exactly is going on
in residential construction, housing vacancies, family formation?
We know some of the answers, of course, but it frequently happens
that the quality of your policies and the success of your solutions
will be in proportion to the adequacy and accuracy of your facts.
I am glad to say that the prospects seem to be quite good this year
for a strengthening of the statistical activities in these and other
crucial fields, both within the Department of Labor and in other
departments.
Our sixth category is a series of special concerns for such groups
as older workers, young workers, the physically handicapped, minor­
ity groups, and veterans. For the first, we have our special com­
mittee on the older worker, which has drawn up a program of action
with which we hope to make a really tangible advance in this area.




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Our special province is not retirement and the general problems
of aging—within the Federal Government that is the concern of the
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Our task is to com­
bat unjustified age barriers to the hiring of qualified workers at any
age where the barrier might be raised. Our job orders show that it is
quite common to specify “under 45” for men, and sometimes even
“under 35” for women. One of the specific plans we would like to
carry through is a study of the performance, attendance, dependabil­
ity, judgment, speed, and efficiency of older workers, for if such a
study shows the older worker to equal or excel the younger and if it is
sufficiently convincing and authoritative to persuade the business man
to “put his money” on the result, then we are well on our way to a
solution, since in the last analysis the only real solution is to convince
the employer that hiring older workers is good business.
Another part of our attack is to try to disentangle the awkward
problem of the relatively high cost of private pension plans for older
workers; it is no small paradox that these plans, which were meant
to help older people, sometimes have just the opposite effect, by adding
a pension-cost obstacle to the other obstacles the older worker already
faces.
For younger workers we have (in addition to training, safety work,
and the like) the enforcement of child-labor laws—and there is more
child labor in this country than most people realize; it is not some­
thing that went out with the age of Dickens. Notable improvements
have been made recently, particularly as to children working on
farms during school hours, and the corresponding increases in school
enrollments have been most gratifying.
For the handicapped, we have the constantly accelerating activities
of the President’s Committee on Employment of the Physically
Handicapped, the stepped-up rehabilitation program, and the new
techniques being used by the Employment Service to maximize the
utilization of their abilities.
For minority groups, we have the President’s Committee on Gov­
ernment Contracts, in which the Department plays a leading part,
and which in a quiet way is making real progress in eliminating em­
ployment discrimination based on race, with the aid of research
activity carried on by the Department.
Finally, for veterans, we have the job of helping them get employ­
ment or assert their reemployment rights and we also are responsible
for the special unemployment insurance system for veterans.
Our last specific objective calls for promoting international under­
standing among working people of all countries. One forum for this
is the International Labor Organization. Eussia last year decided




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

59

to exercise its right to join this organization, which is unique among
international bodies in having, in addition to government delegates,
representatives of private employers and labor. The opportunities
for furthering good will and common understanding among repre­
sentative and influential people of all countries are thus more direct
m this body than in any other on earth. So are the dangers of Soviet
propaganda and machinations directed to the invariable target of
Soviet activity: the working people. Among our many other inter­
national interests, I shall mention only one more which to me, com­
ing from a background of education, is one of the most exciting and
promising.
This is the exchange program, under which students, workers, em
ployers, Government officials, and technicians from all over the world
spend extended periods in this country, studying our methods and
laws and plants and administration, traveling all over the country, and
generally finding out more about ourselves than sometimes we our­
selves know.
In connection with this program, the Women’s Bureau last year
planned and directed individual programs for 94 women leaders from
nine countries, and programs for three teams—a labor-management
and government team of 10 women from France, a trade-union and
government team of 12 from Italy, and a team of 4 trade-union women
from Germany. They visited small towns and communities, many of
which had never had a foreign visitor under government sponsorship,
and they were greeted with the kind of hospitality that will give them
a true and enduring picture of what American life is really like.
I have given you this overall survey of what the Department does
m order to bespeak your aid in support in all of these highly essent ial
activities, and also to underline my thesis that the major task in im­
proving the lot of women workers and the effective use of womanpower
will involve the utilization of not just one bureau but of all the re­
sources of the Department. Of course, we recognize that there are
still discriminations to be combated, anachronistic laws and practices
remaining to be put right, and other inequities that call for actions
pertaining to women as a group. But I think this roundup of our
programs will indicate that we have passed from a phase in which the
greatest gains for women were achieved by ad hoc legislation for
women as such, into a phase where the greater part of their gains will
be achieved in common with men, through overall strengthening of
our safety activities, our training work, our income insurance, our em­
ployment service, our special programs like that of promoting employ­
ment of older workers, or laws or wages and working conditions, our
efforts on vocational rehabilitation, our international labor activities.
345983—55------ 3




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

our general statistical and research work, and our continuing exer­
tions to contribute to the achievement of maximum employment and
business growth.
Secretary Mitchell’s organizational expression of this concept is
seen in the creation of the position of Assistant to the Secretary for
Women’s Affairs, whose able and vivacious occupant, Mrs. Leopold,
is now so situated that she can participate in high-level policy discus­
sion on the Department’s work as a whole, and also multiply the effec­
tiveness of all our activities by funneling into one stream the related
exertions of the Women’s Bureau and the other bureaus of the
Department.
We are confident that, with this marshaling of forces, we shall not
only be more effective in doing such special jobs as still remain to be
done of exclusive or particular interest to women, but shall also
continue to raise to the greatest heights in history our standards of
working conditions and earnings, and our opportunities for a reward­
ing and meaningful life, to the common benefit of all.

Question Period
Question : I would like to address a question to the Director of
the Women’s Bureau in Japan: Do you have special labor legislation
for women similar to what we have in the United States; for example,
minimum-wage laws, equal-pay laws, and limitation on hours ? And
if so, which law do you think is most important or of greatest benefit
to the women workers ?
Miss Taki Fujita: We do have special legislation for women.
Women are not allowed to work at night, xlnd also we have various
protective measures for mothers; for instance, maternity leave 6 weeks
before and 6 weeks after childbirth.
As to the equal pay for equal work, we do have it written into our
labor standards law, and this is really beyond what some of the other
countries have. But the wage system in Japan is somewhat different
from yours. As duration of service increases, workers get higher
wages. And also if they have dependents, they have higher wages.
And if they are older they get higher wages. Therefore, almost
always, men receive higher wages than women, because they stay in
jobs longer, and because they have dependents, and also, most im­
portant, because they have more training than women. On the aver­
age, women receive only 45 percent of men’s wages in Japan. So I do
not think you would say in Japan we have equal pay for equal work
when you look at it that way.
But if it is proved that a man and a woman are doing equal work,




MARCH 10, EVENING SESSION

61

and the duration of service is the same, and if they have the same
number of dependents, they do receive equal pay.
I know very little about your country’s laws. But in Japan we are
m the stage where we do need various protective measures. And I
think that since the end of the war, because of the labor standards law
m Japan, women workers have advanced in their way of living. What
we in the Women’s Bureau in Japan have to do, is to malm all these
regulations reality in actual practice; and we are working very hard
on that.
Question : I would like to ask a question about the equal-pay law
Many of our States have equal-pay laws at present. Some that are
working for equal-pay laws. Is the Women’s Bureau still interested,
and should we still work for a Federal equal-pay law ?
Mrs. Leopold: To whom are you addressing the question?
Questioner : To Mrs. Leopold.
Mrs Leopold; It is a pleasure to be able to tell you that we are
still interested.
We have been meeting with various groups in Washington. We
have been working; other organizations have been working. We have
Members of our Congress—our women Members of the Congress—who
are interested m equal-pay legislation.
We feel there is a very definite place for a Federal equal-pay law,
and you can be assured that this will be one of the things the Women’s
Bureau will continue to work for. I would like to say that I believe
some of our delegates to the United Nations also have this on their
agenda.
Any other questions?
Question : Since we are on the subject of equal pay, may I ask Miss
Royce what they are doing in Canada in this field ?
Miss Roxcn: Madam Chairman, in Canada, in three Provinces, we
have equal-pay laws; in the Provinces of Ontario, Saskatchewan, and
British Columbia. According to the terms of the Federation in Can­
ada, working conditions and laws governing conditions of work are
under provincial jurisdiction, and therefore, one would hope that in
the future there will be more progress in the provincial field.
A number of women’s organizations in the trade-union movement
are working m that direction.
Federally, we have the question of equal pay before the Canadian
House of Commons. A bill was introduced by the opposition party
which was voted down a few weeks ago, but I think we have come
to a time in history when no political party wants to be counted
against the issue of equal pay. The Women’s Bureau has been asked
to take on a very special assignment in this connection, to find out




62

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

just what is the differential between men’s and women’s wages in
industries under Federal jurisdiction. Perhaps I ought to say that
the industries under Federal jurisdiction in Canada are somewhat like
your industries in interstate commerce. About 75 percent of the
women who are employed in these industries are under collective
agreement.
t
Most of the agreements recognize the rate for the job, which is tanta­
mount to equal pay for equal work. In our civil service, we have a
small residual group of unorganized women workers under Federal
jurisdiction, among whom there is a considerable differential varying
from one industry to another, and it is our job in the Women’s Bureau
to find out just what that amounts to in order that we may know
what we are legislating for.




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

Panel—Shortage Occupations: New Opportu­
nities for Women
I
Eli Ginzberg, Ph. D., Director of Research, National Manpower

Council, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University,
New York, N. Y.—Moderator
I am going to take a very few minutes of this panel’s time, because
of my pedagogical background, to try to set the framework for
the panel’s discussions.
I want to raise with you just two points contained in the title
concerning the words “shortage” and “opportunity.” First, I want
to comment briefly on types of shortages. And then I want to tell
you a fewT things that are being uncovered by the National Manpower
Council at Columbia University as it progresses in its studies of
women in the labor force.
One point about a shortage is whether it is recognized or not. The
real heart of the question is whether industry knows it has a short­
age and does something about it, and whether the individuals who
are preparing themselves for life recognize it and do something about
it. During the past years of the discussion of the engineering short­
age, I have been impressed by the fact that the very people who were
talking about shortages failed to do anything to facilitate the train­
ing and employment of women in engineering or in associated work.
Either the shortage was not so great as the proponents thought it
was, or else their behavior was mighty erratic.
Next, we heard much yesterday about the contributions of the major
wars to opening up new employment opportunities to women. This
raises the question of whether a particular shortage is of short dura­
tion, such as occurs in a war, or whether it has more persistent
qualities. The opportunities opened to women in a major short­
term emergency are not necessarily always carried over into peace­
time. This is true not only for the United States, but for Great
Britain where, after having made tremendous use of womanpower




63

64

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

during World War II, there was a loss, especially of top positions,
when peace returned.
The third comment I want to make about a shortage is: Does it
relate to general manpower or are we talking about demands for
specific types of trained manpower ? I think the great opportunities
that women have had to increase their participation in the labor force
since 1920 occurred as a result of changes in the demand for man­
power as a whole. That is, women really gained, I believe, in this
country because, among other reasons, large-scale immigration was
terminated.
I do not mean that the number of women in employment would not
have increased had immigration continued. But women do represent
a great reserve supply of labor. Just as I believe that people on farms
have had new opportunities in industry because of a cessation of
immigration, so, too, in the case of women did it provide a boon.
This appraisal does not make me, of course, a proponent of our
rigid immigration laws.
So much for three aspects of the shortage question. What about
opportunities ? Let us approach that in terms of asking which women
work—and for what part of their lives.
At the present time I think it is probably correct to say that some
8 out of every 10 young women, at the completion of their schooling—•
at the end of their sophomore year in high school, at the end of high
school, in the middle of college or at the end of college, or after
graduate school—enter the labor market.
But most of them enter, I think, with the idea of leaving. This
is the crucial point. They plan to leave upon marriage or more par­
ticularly with childbearing. Only a few who enter the labor force
have planned to remain.
But plans are not immutable. What happens is something quite
different. First, there is a group, about 10 percent, who do not marry,
and in our society today the unmarried woman is expected to, and
does, remain at work. Secondly, there is the woman who marries
but who has no children. This is a much larger group than most
people realize. It is one-sixth, roughly, of all married women. By
and large the childless tend to remain in employment. If you add
the single, plus the married women who have no children, we already
have about one-fourth of the total womanpower of the country
permanently attached to jobs.
Next, are women who start to work with no intention of remaining
in the labor force, but who find employment desirable and become
attached to working, although they may marry and take time off to




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

65

have a baby or two. We see that in the civil service. We see it in
teaching, and in other occupations where having children no longer
fundamentally interferes with a woman’s career. I am not interested
in why these women stay at work. There are a thousand reasons.
The fact is that many of them do stay at work.
The next group is one about which there was much discussion yes­
terday: Women who encounter calamitous situations in their lives
and who have few options but to seek employment. It is the young
widow, the young divorcee, women whose husbands have been stricken
with illness. At the present time, most of the women with children
under 6—representing about one-sixth of all the women at work who
are or have been married—belong to this group.
So, now we have four groups of women more or less fully attached
to jobs: The single person, the married woman without children, the
married woman who takes leave to have children but who really does
not leave the labor force, and the married woman who is in the labor
market because of calamitous conditions.
There are two additional new groups emerging: Married women
who come back as soon as their last child is at school, and the group
that comes back when their children are somewhat older.
This leaves two remaining groups: Those who are in and out of
work all of the time; and, finally, a diminishing group of those who
never enter the labor market or who leave it early, never to return.
In statistical terms this is what it adds up to: I believe that about
one-third of all women in the United States today can be called regu­
larly attached workers. I think that about one-half of all women are
either full-time workers or at least attached for part-time work.
I would say that, so far as the future is concerned, women will
probably only be out of the labor market during the periods when
their children are young; that “young” may extend all the way from
2f to 6 or 14 years of age. But even those who will stay out, let us say,
for 10 to 20 years will spend most of their lives in paid employment.
This, I think, is my suggestion of the framework in which our dis­
cussion ought to proceed.
We have probably moved a much greater distance than we realize
from a situation in which women were by and large not in paid em­
ployment, to a situation that is emerging where women will be in
paid employment all of their lives except for those years when they
have young children at home.




66

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

II
Brigadier General David Sarnoff, Chairman of the Board,

Radio Corporation of America, New York, N. Y.
I am told that this panel proceeds on the assumption that women
are persons, that they are members of the human race, and that if
given an opportunity to do work, they can do a useful job.
I am not here to challenge these bold assumptions. I am here to
give you testimony of the validity of these assumptions. So far as
the industry and the company with which I happen to be associated
are concerned, the facts substantiate all the claims that have been
made for the competence of women in industry. I am speaking of
the electronics industry as a whole, and under the term “electronics
industry” I include communications, broadcasting, television, and
all the fancy things that you hear about and read about these days.
And I shall have a word or two to say to you about this thing called
the electron.
That industry is less than 10 years old, because, while there was
broadcasting and radio communications and so on before the war,
it did not represent any sizable industry. But following the war, the
advance was very great. You may be surprised to know that in 1954
the volume of business of the electronics industry in the United States
alone equalled a little over 10 billion dollars. That is a lot of money
even in these days.
In that industry, there are now employed approximately 1 million
people, in manufacturing, broadcasting, service, and all the occupa­
tions that go with the industry. Of that total, approximately onehalf, or 500,000, are women.
In my own company, the Radio Corporation of America, we have
a total of 70,500 employees. Of that number, more than one-third are
women. In the manufacturing end alone, between 37 and 40 percent
of all those employed in making radios, television sets, phonograph
records, and so on, are women. But that is not all. We have women
engaged in key positions, managerial activities, supervisory activities,
and as executive secretaries.
We also employ women in research and engineering. We believe
that women are capable, if trained, to do engineering work and re­
search work, and even to make inventions. For example, we have
women on the research statf in the RCA Laboratories at Princeton,
N. J., where we employ many scientists, physicists, and engineers,
whose sole business is to deal with the unknown and the new things to
come.




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

67

For instance, we are working on a new system of electronic cooling,
as we call it; the idea being to see if we can produce a refrigerator
or an air conditioner that will work noiselessly and electronically
without any motors or blowers or moving parts. One of the research
workers in our Princeton Laboratories, in that very fascinating new
field, is a woman and she is doing an excellent job. *
In the broadcasting business, women are all around us. In the field
of production, direction, script writing, continuity, and, of course, in
acting, women have not only an important but in many instances a
predominant role to fill. We even have a woman on our board of
directors, a lady whose name you have undoubtedly heard before.
She is Mrs. Mildred Horton (formerly Miss Mildred McAfee), Direc­
tor of the Waves in World War II and a former president of Wellesley
College. She takes her place with the 12 other directors on the ECA
board, holds her own very well indeed, and gives us the benefit of the
woman’s point of view.
As to the future, I would like to touch briefly on some of the points
that our chairman has indicated for our discussion.
First, shortages. I do not know of any reason why more women
cannot be trained in the skills necessary in so-called shortage occupa­
tions such as engineering, research, and development. The growth of
technology has been great and it will be greater with each passing day.
This is a field I would strongly recommend for women’s attention. I
do not think there is any resistance that would prevent their employ­
ment. That not many women are employed in this field is of course
traditional. Women have not taken up engineering in the past to
any great extent.
The second point that Dr. Ginzberg made was with reference to the
continuation of employment in war industries. It would be a sad
commentary on humanity if we had to have a war in order to stimulate
an industry.
But be that as it may, wars have given rise to new industries. These
new industries sometimes have expanded since the war, and they have
provided opportunities for employment. As I have indicated, the
electronics industry is one illustration.
The war itself stimulated the electronics industry immeasurably,
because communications, aviation, transportation, and many other
activities are dependent upon electronics. After the war was over,
those developments were applied to industry. It is perhaps interest­
ing to observe that following the First World War, broadcasting was
born. There was no radiobroadcasting before the First World War.
Following the Second World War television was born. There was no
television, except in an experimental way, prior to the Second World




08

THE

effective use of womanpower

War. Both of these industries, of course, are today very large and
very important.
So far as the future is concerned there is one thing on the horizon
which, it seems to me, is likely to have an influence upon the matter of
employment, and particularly the employment of women. That is
automation. No doubt you have heard or read a good deal about
“automation.” I have no doubt that automation is on the way. Inci­
dentally, it is largely electronic. I believe that the automobile, the
business machine, the radio and television manufacturing industry,
and related industries, all will be affected in one way or another by the
development of automation. Naturally the question is asked: “What
is going to happen to employment?” “Will the substitution of ma­
chines for human hands cause great unemployment?” And so on.
That is a pretty sizable subject. I will give you my own opinion,
which is that while there will be uncomfortable periods of transition
when adjustment and readjustment will be necessary, in the end auto­
mation will increase rather than decrease employment. It will enable
production to be developed at a lower cost, and, therefore, more things
will be produced. That means more consumption. That in turn
means more jobs.
There may be a shift in some employment from the production area
into the service area. A great many people are employed in the serv­
ice areas. For example, in television and in radio at least as many
people are employed in advertising, selling, broadcasting, and servic­
ing as are employed in manufacturing; perhaps more. There are
some 50,000 dealers handling equipment, and there are many thousands
of service men who enter some 40 or 50 million homes equipped with
a radio or television set, at some time or another during the year.
Automation will increase the area of employment in the service field
and will, I believe, take up whatever slack may be temporarily created
in the manufacturing field. Making allowance for the new types of
skills that automation will require, I think that automation will prove
to be the same kind of boon to humanity that other technical and tech­
nological developments have proven to be.
Women are also becoming interested not only in being employees,
but stockholders. My company, for example, has roughly 175,000
stockholders and some 50 million shares of stock outstanding. More
than half of them are owned by women. Women will have a larger
voice in industry as time goes on and will be able to influence the
course of events.
I have been asked whether we have women officers in our establish­
ments. It is all very well to talk about large numbers of women
employed at the bench and in the offices. But how about a couple




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

69

of vice presidents? I am going to make an honest confession. We
have no women at the vice-president level. If you were to ask me to
give you one good reason why we haven’t, I couldn’t.
It is just habit and tradition, as well as the fact that women are
not looked upon as permanent in their positions, for some of the reasons
Dr. Ginzberg has given here. We seem somehow to feel when an
officer is appointed to the position of vice president, he is a permanent
fixture around whom an organization is built. And we do not want
to be faced with the possibility the next day or the next month that
the lady has found more glamorous employment. But that is rational­
izing. The answer is that there are no women in vice-presidential
positions because there are no women in those positions! I think
that there will be, and I think that there should be. As we go along,
I think we are going to learn to forget some past habits. When 2 or
3 or 4 women arrive as vice presidents, others will follow.
In the technological developments of the present age, there are
two little things called an atom and an electron, which undoubtedly
came to us at the time the world was created. The building blocks
of the universe are composed of these little things. Nevertheless, man
knew nothing about the atom until about 150 years ago, nor about
the electron until about 60 years ago!
I have never understood why these secrets of nature have been
kept from man all of these years. But we now know about the energy
that is locked up within the nucleus of an atom, and about how the
electron can be used to control the energy released from the atom.
These two little celestial relatives, the atom and the electron, are
going to revolutionalize everything in this world—our way of life,
our political outlook, our military activities—and our industries.
The electron is the tiniest particle of Nature known to man. There
is nothing smaller in the universe. Even an atom, which you cannot
see, or taste, or feel, or smell, is larger; for when we split the atom,
we find many electrons and other particles inside the atom. Now,
these very tiny particles of nature have the power to change the whole
aspect of our life on this earth! And a woman certainly ought to be
able to do to an “Adam” what an electron is able to do to an atom!

HI
Irving H. Siegel, Ph. D., Economist, Senior Staff of Council of

Economic Advisers, Washington, D. C.
I have been asked to talk about the opportunities for women in the
“humanitarian” and in the “shortage” occupations. Although I can-




70

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

not explore all this territory in the time available, I should like to
define it and to operate within it selectively.
I consider humanitarian occupations to include all those which
minister directly to the arts of consumption or which directly affect
the quality of living. They relate to personal services,- education,
health, welfare, housing, and general government. They include the
shortage occupations of teaching and nursing.
Opportunities for women in the humanitarian occupations would
seem to be especially plentiful in the years immediately ahead. I
include, not only the traditional occupations (office, sales, teaching,
etc.), but also occupations typically staffed with men and occupations
newly defined.
Among the favorable factors are:
1. The general maintenance of high-level employment.
2. Vigorous population growth.
3. The continuing trends toward home ownership, suburbanization,
and new community formation.
4. An increasing public concern over health and education needs.
5. The preponderance of women in the working-age groups, 14 years
and over.
6. The general availability of women at lower pay and for part­
time work.
7. The improvement of the educational qualifications of women.
8. The eligibility of males for military service.
9. The limitation of new entrants into the labor force by the low
birthrates of the 1930’s.
Some factors will tend, of course, to work in the opposite direction.
The adoption, for example, of electronic accounting systems, robot
typewriters, and other high-speed and high-volume office techniques
will probably have a much greater impact on jobs typically per­
formed by women.
The same is true of self-service retailing and of automatic vending.
But the introduction and spread of laborsaving methods will most
probably release women to other jobs, frequently of higher grade,
rather than from employment.
Perhaps only twice in our national history—in the 1880’s and in
the 1930’s—did the notion of widespread and persistent “technological
unemployment” take hold. Our experience has shown, instead, that
extensive technological change increases the variety and educational
qualifications of employment and provides work for an expanding
labor force.




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

71

The fields in which opportunities for women are expanding include:
1. Teaching in primary and secondary schools—especially mathe­
matics and science in the latter.
2. Nursing, physical therapy, and other “paramedical” occupations.
3. Atomic medicine—including the administration of radioisotopes
and the protection and treatment of industrial, laboratory, and other
exposed workers.
4. Pediatric and geriatric medicine, as the age distribution of the
population changes.
5. Psychiatric medicine, as the mental health problem becomes
recognized as urgent.
6. Public health, including control of air and water pollution.
7. Research in medicine and the life sciences.
8. Manual and mechanical office work incident to the growth of
voluntary prepayment health plans, and industrial pension plans.
9. Social work, including a new emphasis on juvenile-delinquency
programs.
10. Television and other entertainment.
11. Sale of children’s and infants’ wear, housefumishings, and “do
it yourself” materials.
12. Sale and management of real estate.
13. Tourism and staffing of resorts.
14. State and local government, including progress from PTA and
community political experience to candidacy for elective office.
Shortages of personnel are already being experienced or are antic­
ipated in many of the areas listed above. The shortages of nurses
and technical assistants to doctors, surgeons, and dentists were noted
and authoritatively discussed in the report of the President’s Com­
mission on Health Needs of the Nation.
President Eisenhower’s health message of January 31, 1955, recog­
nized that the supplies of trained personnel for individual and com­
munity health services are “critically short.” Accordingly, he
proposed (1) a 5-year program of grants to State vocational educa­
tion agencies for training practical nurses; (2) public health service
traineeships for graduate nurses in administration, teaching, and re­
search, and (3) traineeships in all public health specialties, including
mental health.
The President also recommended grants to States for strengthening
juvenile-delinquency programs and for further encouragement of the
construction of hospitals, nursing homes, and rehabilitation centers.
Women, as leaders as well as subordinate members of health teams,
will evidently be needed in increasing numbers.
Another prominent shortage area is education. The President’s




72

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

message of February 8,1955, on the building of schools, concludes with
a reference to the shortage of teachers as “less obvious, but ultimately
more dangerous than the classroom shortage.” Presumably the State
conferences on education which are now in progress will provide new
incentives to enter the teaching profession.
The National Science Foundation has pointed to the need for better
high-school science and mathematics courses to assure maintenance of
a desirable rate of technological advance.
The third well-publicized shortage concerns professional scientific
and engineering personnel. Unlike the health and education fields,
the scientific and engineering professions traditionally have not
included large numbers of women.
But the barriers to the employment of women here, as in other pro­
fessions, have been crumbling. In conformity with their historical
“humanitarian” role in society, women who go to the universities still
concentrate on degrees in education, the humanities, and the social
sciences. But the statistics begin to show a rising interest in the
natural and biological sciences.

IV
Roland R. Renne, Ph. D., President, Montana State College,

Bozeman, Mont.
I have been impressed with the very realistic accounting which is
being done here in terms of the characteristics of women, the situa­
tions, the forces which play upon their employment, and the bright
prospects for the future.
I have been asked to discuss ways in which women can increase their
contribution to our economy through the application of new tech­
niques and new knowledge in such traditional professions as teaching
and nursing. I feel somewhat at home in this field, having spent most
of my life in preparing to teach, teaching, or educational administra­
tion, and in our own institution we have a school of nursing. The
problems which we face in administering that school have brought me
in close touch with some factors that may be of interest to you.
It is important, I think, to get an overall picture of the national
prospect. I am sure most of us in the last few years have gotten the
impression that the population is growing. Yet I think very few of
us realize how tremendous is its growth. This past year there were
slightly more than 4 million births. Our population may be not 163
million, as at the present, but roughly 220 million in 1975, just 20 years
from now. In other words, there may be an increase of some 60 mil-




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

73

lion people, an increase of 40 percent. If present trends continue, this
means that in our population there will be a much larger proportion
in the age group over 65 and the young group under 20, and a smaller
proportion in the working age group of 20 to 65.
So we can say without any fear of contradiction, barring an atomic
catastrophe in terms of destructive warfare, that there will be a very
high demand for those who are in the working-age group and par­
ticularly a very high demand in those professions which serve youth
and the aged.
Now, in teaching and nursing women have, I think, reigned supreme.
Our present shortages in these two fields are somewhat cumulative:
the low birthrates of the 1930’s, the current earlier marriages, higher
birthrates, larger families—all are contributing to make our present
situation one of very acute shortages. Even more acute shortages are
in prospect.
The increase in the amount of service demanded, particularly in
terms of medical care for the aged; the improvement in the quality of
service which is now regarded as standard, particularly in education
and training for the professions, but especially for nursing and teach­
ing ; and the larger numbers that must be served in the next 15 to 20
years all point to a tremendous demand for workers in these fields.
I think the increased efficiency of womanpower in our country is
vital to anything like a satisfactory solution to these very high de­
mands. In my own State, Montana, we have only a little over half
a million people, but this past year we found ourselves in the fall more
than a thousand teachers short for the grade and high schools. We
have had to issue this year more than 800 emergency certificates.
Almost half of all the teachers in our State at the present time are
not college graduates. I am not saying that they all should be college
graduates. But in many States, minimum requirements now emphasize
at least 4 years of college work.
The shortage of qualified teachers and nurses is serious. The one
real area where we can make a sizable improvement in the supply is in
the field of “limited occupational employment” (or part-time employ­
ment). For the next two decades, I would place first and foremost
this matter of limited occupational roles. I think the development of
laborsaving devices in the modern home makes much more time avail­
able. Also, most women with a college education or with professional
preparation need an intellectual and an economic outlet. The acute
shortages which we now face and which we will face indicate that it is
not possible for us to fill the demands with full-time qualified people.
If we cannot get a whole person, so to speak, perhaps two halves will
in some ways do the job as well or better.




74

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

There are some fields that lend themselves especially well to limited
employment. We find in our State, for example, that many of our
married graduates in some fields like health and physical education
do have time to teach a part of the time. And many schools that were
not in a position to finance a full-time health and physical-education
teaching staff member have been very pleased to employ one teacher
on a part-time or, we will say, half to two-thirds time basis.
There are many opportunities for limited occupational roles in the
field of physical therapy and occupational therapy. Individuals who
need and desire treatment, particularly in physical therapy, often are
not able to take time off during the working day but would be free in
the early evening hours. The same applies in the fields of recreation,
photography, sports, music, drama, camping, folk and square dancing.
There are some concurrent adj ustments that we must make. A great
deal of attention has been focused upon the adaptations that industry
and business would have to make in management and in operations to
fit in with the limited-role employment or the part-time employment
of more and more women. But most of us, I fear, have not empha­
sized adequately the adaptations which must be made in terms of
better time management.
I was somewhat alarmed to read in Washington papers about efforts
to reduce appropriations for research in the fields of home economics
and home management in our Department of Agriculture. Now, it
seems to me that if we are going to make more effective use of womanpower, certainly our home-management specialists, our home-eco­
nomics research workers, will need to speed up and do more work in
this field rather than less. There must be effective time management
by the woman who does two jobs, one as a homemaker and one as an
employee in a profession or occupation, perhaps halftime. Job anal­
ysis studies would seem to be very much in order.
Educational institutions, particularly those which train women in
traditional professions, should develop institutes on brushup courses
as well as regular academic offerings to help women prepare for em­
ployment. In this way the older woman who has been away from
professional employment, as well as the younger mother who has had
inadequate preparation, will gain confidence and competence to under­
take employment in the professions.
The Extension Service in each of the States, I think, could very
well organize workshops. They could emphasize factors and con­
ditions of better time management, using local people who have dem­
onstrated unusual ability as managers and efficient operators.
I have only one comment on some of the aspects of danger in this
situation. I agree fully with the statement yesterday that a happy




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

75

mother available for a part of the day in the home is better than a
dissatisfied, unhappy one at home all day, and that the old connotation
that child-delinquency and unsatisfactory child welfare is associated
with working mothers is not valid. I do think that mothers with
young children, except in very unusual circumstances, should probably
not consider full-time employment too soon. But that is quite dif­
ferent from limited-role employment and the early preparation for
more effective service when the children are in school.
Another adaptation is the cultural environment. We need to do
much more to change the cultural pattern in terms of attitudes toward
workingwomen. I hope we can develop soon a much more general
and prevalent notion that it is as proper for wives of business and
professional leaders and prominent men to work as it is for other
women.
The Women’s Bureau, the United States Department of Agriculture,
our home-economics divisions of colleges and universities, our exten­
sion workers, our service clubs, our PTA’s, our AAUW’s, many other
organizations that I could mention can do a great deal in the next 2 or
3 years to help develop a proper cultural environment.
Now I will mention briefly other techniques and new types ot
knowledge: Nurse aides and teacher aides to increase the proficiency of
the professional nurse and teacher. Nursing has led the way in this,
but I think teaching is catching on very fast. The use of mothers to
supervise homerooms, playgrounds, and study halls, and the use of
local persons to take some of the community-service responsibilities
of teachers, will perhaps enable teachers of special subjects such as
home economics to serve 2 or 3 schools in larger communities or in rural
areas where distances are not too great, though the out-of-class re­
sponsibilities of these teachers would be increased.
We must find ways to make a limited number of qualified teachers
serve a much larger number of students. But certainly keeping a
ratio of 20 or 25 students per teacher and expecting to get the number
of teachers we will need in the next 15 years is not a very realistic
approach. However, I do not think we have even begun to scratch
the surface in this field. We are going to have to make adaptations,
develop new techniques in teaching. I suppose in many cases it will
be necessary to develop larger classes, as well as more classroom aides,
assistant teachers, better clerical assistance, and all the techniques
that will make a superior teacher.
In fact, the use of specialists in some fields like the fine arts, music,
and drama might be much more effective than some of the certified
teachers who are not particularly adept in these fields.
345083-55-




6

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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWEK

Television, I think, offers many possibilities. I wish I had time to
go into those.
In the nursing especially we find a very great need for mature,
balanced women who are interested in acquiring administrative ex­
perience and who are willing to take administrative responsibility.
For example, in one of our hospitals in Montana which is affiliated
with our school of nursing at Montana State College, we have had
nine different directors of nursing in the last 10 years. That kind
of turnover, excessive though it may seem, is indicative of the problem
in finding qualified women who are willing to remain on the job and
make effective hospital administrators.
_
I think that we should keep in mind laborsaving devices in homes,
new fabrication that will reduce the time of ironing and related work,
prepared foods and frozen foods which are timesaving, and all types
of work-simplification adaptations in the home to reduce the time
necessary for housework and release more time for remunerative em­
ployment outside the home.
I think the matter of incentives is one which we should not overlook.
In the traditional professions especially, I am quite concerned over
the fact that the floor and the ceiling in terms of wages and salaries
are so close together. And I have been alarmed in recent years with
the tendency of some of our bargaining associations, teachers’ groups,
to set up salary schedules in which the mediocre teacher, the one who
just gets by, gets practically as much, and sometimes more than the
really superior teacher. TVhile I realize that in the professions re­
muneration is not the major incentive, nevertheless, I think we are
tending to emphasize mediocrity when we work out such salary and
wage schedules.
I hope that we will have the courage and the finances to make a
more realistic schedule which puts a premium on the superior teacher
and recognizes merit when it develops. I think we must appeal to the
service motive. One of my good women teachers in Montana said,
“You find out at this conference the ways in which we can increase
the professional incentives, especially those in teaching and nursing,
and come back and tell us.”

Summary
Mirra Komarovsky, Ph. D., Chairman,
Department of Sociology, Barnard College, New York, N. Y.
Dr. Siegel has forced my hand with regard to a pun. I was not
going to pass it on to you. I did not make it, and I disclaim any re­




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

77

sponsibility for it. A gentleman in the audience who is related to
me passed it on to me after General Sarnoff’s speech. He said that
General Sarnoff, pioneer that he is in the electronic industry, should
develop a department of The Guided Misses!
Our speakers have given us an incisive and realistic analysis of
opportunities for the economic services of women. The import of their
presentation is clear. There is no dearth of opportunities. Indeed,
in many occupations the phrase “critical shortage” seems more
appropriate.
Opportunities exist and so does the potential supply of labor, and
yet, our speakers have made one further thing abundantly clear: it
will take vigorous leadership, imagination, and a good deal of skillful
social engineering to bring the supply and the demand together.
I thought it might be fruitful in our general discussion to focus
precisely upon this problem—how to bring the potential supply and
the demand together, and to analyze the resistances, the obstacles in
the way.
First, I should like to sketch for you certain facts concerning the
occupational pattern of married women, and I should like to concen­
trate my remarks upon the problems of married women.
Bear in mind the following life cycle of a married woman with
regard to occupation. The facts for the current situation are given
to us by the Women’s Bureau and the Bureau of the Census.
At the present time, about 40 percent of married women are gain­
fully employed the first year after marriage. The proportion declines
to 30 percent the second and the third year. Apparently marriage no
longer stops the gainful employment of the woman.
Childbearing does. Only 15 percent of women with children under
6 are gainfully employed. About one-third of all married women 35
to 54 years old are employed, but after 55 years the proportion declines
rapidly.
The demographic changes of the last 50 years have produced a revo­
lutionary change in the family cycle. They have given us a new stage
in life—the “empty nest” stage.
The woman of 1950 can expect to be about 48 years old when her
last child leaves home to get married, and on the average she can look
forward to some additional 14 years together with her husband, at
which point death, usually the death of the husband, breaks up the
marriage, lliere is the further melancholy fact that a woman today
must look forward to about 13 or 14 years of widowhood.
. -^ow> the import of this is as1 follows: As far as the married woman
is concerned, the main reservoir of labor is women 35 and over. And
now for the more recent changes: the early marriage, the larger




78

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

family, the decline in the proportion of childless couples. These
changes have occurred largely in the educated classes. Will these
changes among the educated, who are the potential source of profes­
sional personnel, as Dr. Pannell yesterday suggested, cut down the
proportion of college graduates going in for advanced training? So
far no change has been observed. From one-fourth to one-third of
college graduates go on to professional and graduate training. My
impression is that marriage, as such, early marriage, has not made
much of a difference, but early child rearing has already, I think,
made some difference.
Before I left for Washington, a brilliant student of mine, a college
senior, came in to inform me of her change of plans. She had gotten
married a year before, at the end of her junior year, and she came to
inform me that she became pregnant and that her plans for graduate
study have been postponed indefinitely.
All this brings me to my first point. In the light of these facts, and
in the light of everything that has been said today and yesterday, it
seems to me that there are two major social policies which will deter­
mine the effective use of womanpower, two foundationstones of a
sound policy. I think it is safe to say that only in so far as we are
successful in solving those antecedent problems will we attain our
goal.
I am afraid that you will experience a certain disappointment when
I tell you what these two areas are. We have heard them before,
and yet, what is there to do but to repeat and repeat until words begin
to lead to action?
The Women’s Bureau has already pointed the direction in which
we are to go. I refer for one think to the need for increased and
better use of women over 35. What we need is something beyond mere
education, beyond mere propaganda, important as it is.
We need a systematic study of the structural and attitudinal resis­
tances to change. Then we will know how to locate and deal with each
specifically. For example, apparently one resistance to the use of
the older worker, and that applies to men as well as women, is the
matter of pensions. Instead of just carrying on the propaganda about
greater job opportunities for the older workers, could we not meet that
problem head-on and discover what compromises and what adjust­
ments could be made in this area ?
Again, we know that to a certain extent the discrimination against
middle-aged workers1 is based on nonrational grounds, but social
science is beginning to tell us something about how to change stereo­
types and we can look to some help in that area.
The second main cornerstone of effective policy I need only mention,




MARCH 11, MORNING SESSION

79

because it lias already been discussed, and this is part-time employ­
ment.
The third point that I would like to make deals less with the need
for new community resources such as new training institutes, new
refresher courses, or more jobs than with desirable changes in public
attitudes. It is an eloquent commentary on the strides women have
made that we have heard so little this morning about discrimination
against women; properly so. Nevertheless, some unfinished business
remains on what I might call the ideological front.
The course of social change, as the course of true love, never runs
smoothly. There are currents and countercurrents, and it is ironical
in the light of the progressive attitudes expressed by our male speakers
today that some of the countercurrents come from women. I refer to
certain new trends in women’s education, certain changes in climate of
opinion, so far represented, I think, by a minority.
There has been, I believe, a trend for which I have coined a very
clumsy term, “neo-antifeminism.” Because of the strains and the
tensions brought about by social changes in the status of women, which
have disturbed the old equilibrium without as yet creating a new one,
many find themselves nostalgic about the past and think the solution
will be to return to our rigid former definition of what the woman’s
and the man’s role in society is.
One prominent writer, in fact two, have written recently urging
that public opinion proclaim some fields to be peculiarly suitable for
women and others not desirable for them. Biology, psychology, soci­
ology, the nursing fields, ought to be the feminine fields, and engineer­
ing, electronics, law, industry, mathematics, technology, all these fields
in which recent opportunities have increased, these authors proclaim
to be the masculine fields. They feel that nothing but disaster will
come of blurring these differences and stressing that women can do
everything.
Now, a comment on that. Of course, a delicate balance must be
maintained between short- and long-range policies. In the immediate
future, it is obvious that out of 100 coeds, the overwhelming majority
would better enter the feminine fields, i. e., social work rather than
physics. There are many reasons why this is the case. May I sug­
gest one very subtle one. It may be as subtle and minor as the reasons
reported to me last week by a former student of mine who is specializ­
ing in physics. She reports that the reactions of her male friends
upon being told that she plans to become a physicist vary from a sud­
den aloofness to a frank, “Why should a nice girl like you enter
physics?” She finally decided that a certain reserve with reference




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

to her occupational plans was called for on the first date with a new
male acquaintance.
I could, of course, mention other reasons why physics is not today
as “natural” an occupation for women as some other fields, but what
long-term objectives or policies can we infer from this? In the long
run, it would be desirable, I think, to urge a lesser segregation of men
and women in special occupations.
As it is, the segregation is very great. May I remind you that
women constitute 90 percent of all librarians, 60 percent of all wel­
fare workers, and 80 percent of teachers ? I believe that many a firstrate male teacher is lost to teaching because it is a feminine and under­
paid occupation, and many a woman scientist would be more com­
petent than the man who takes her place in the laboratory because
science is not a feminine field.
In the long run, I think we can urge with full confidence that a
greater spread in women’s occupations is a good thing for society
as a whole; we can urge women to enter all fields and proclaim no
talent to be unfeminine.
This is especially important in the next decade or two, because with
shortages in educational institutions, shortages of facilities in pro­
fessional schools, it is not impossible that in the light of limited re­
sources, we will have a renewed discrimination against women.
May I conclude by saying again that it is quite clear that bringing
the opportunities and supply together will be a complex problem, but
of one thing we can be sure: Its solution holds great potentialities
for individual and family happiness and for social welfare.
Dr. Ginzberg : I really believe that Dr. Komarovsky helped to pull
together and make explicit much of what was below the surface, giving
it point and direction, and that I think has given increasing meaning
to the presentation. I would like to say to my panel associates that
I hope that we gave Mrs. Leopold some help this morning.
Mrs. Leopold : Thank you, Dr. Ginzberg, and thank you very, very
much, members of the panel. I feel that we have received very in­
teresting and very wonderful direction.
We seem to have agreed that these are changing times. We have
tried to give you a collection of wisdom from the members of our
panel both this morning and yesterday, and I want to assure you that
the Women’s Bureau, and I am sure many of you here, will continue
to work for better understanding and better techniques in this interest­
ing problem of the essential use of womanpower.




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

Women in Today’s World
Mrs. Frances M. Lee, United States Delegate, Inter-American

Commission of Women
As the delegate of the United States to the Inter-American Com­
mission of Women, whose home is in this beautiful Pan American
Union building, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Mrs. Maria
Concepcion de Chaves, who is the Chairman of the Inter-American
Commission of Women.
Twenty-one members compose this Commission. One delegate is
appointed from each of the South American Republics, and since its
creation at the Sixth International Conference of American States,
held in Havana, Cuba, in 1928, the Commission has worked steadily to
improve the status of women in this hemisphere.
The Commission is an official body in the Organization of American
States and works for the extension of civil, political, economic, and
social rights of women in the American Republics.
Mrs. Chaves is an educator and is outstanding in the literary field
in her country, the Republic of Paraguay. She has written many
textbooks that are used in the schools today.
Mrs. Maria Concepcion de Chaves, Chairman, Inter-American

Commission of Women
As Chairman of the Inter-American Commission of Women, I have
been given the honor of welcoming you to this building, which is a
symbol of American justice and solidarity. Rarely have I had a more
pleasant mission; rarely have I been happier or more eager to carry
out a mission than I am at present, as I appear before this group of
eminent women who have taken over the duties required of them by
these new times.
Your presence here is evidence of the heights that have been reached
in the new fields of work and culture by women in this country, with its
complex and productive way of life. Even before coming here, after
listening to the experiences of travelers and reading descriptions and
thousands of facts concerning your country, I was imbued with great
admiration for the women of the United States who “are in the posi-




81

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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

tion of a privileged class,” to quote Keyserling, one of the keenest
observers of our Americas.
It was here, in this marvelous city, that I realized the direct role
women play in determining the destiny of the community and the
nation. What is their essential power? It is a tremendously im­
portant unknown quantity, of which they themselves have not yet
become aware.
Some time ago, I met a United States friend of mine who had lived
for a while in Paraguay.
“And how is your daughter? I inquired of him.
“She is working. She is 17 years old and enthusiastic about life.”
That reply was a revelation. One could summarize the true values
of United States women in these inseparable concepts—work and
enthusiasm about life.
Enthusiasm about life, which is not always radiant in Latin Amer­
ica, is a state of spiritual grace. It does not permit one to turn
toward the past; instead, it makes one look toward the future, it
inspires faith in change and in the ability, through work, to make the
change effecti ve.
The enthusiastic person is not an inactive onlooker. He is a person
gifted with a passionate curiosity, conscious of the role he is called
upon to play and the duties he must perform. He does not know what
tomorrow will bring, but he does know that the world will be more
beautiful and happier if he gives to it an example of work, of justice,
of altruism, and of goodness. Without hesitation, he brings his think­
ing and his work to the thinking and work of others, so as to achieve
fellowship between men and women, and between peoples throughout
the world, just as the government officials and the leaders of this
immense country are doing, and just as you, the workingwomen, are
doing. It is a trait common to young and old—the 17-year-old
daughter of my friend and the incomparable 76-year-old Helen Keller.
Miss Keller has just started on a trip to India, where, as she has said,
she wants to communicate her “joy of living to the unhappy ones who'
have not seen the panorama of the world outspread before them.”
This spiritual grace, which is a basic trait of the women of the
United States, is what has helped them above all else to bring about
the true era of cooperation between women and men.
In the civilization of the United States the idea- of complete spiritual
equality of men and women manifested itself for the first time in the
concept of the universality of values, an unprecedented victory for all
the people of our time. The conference you are now holding is a step
in the direction of that progressive development.
The agenda show the validity of the specific hope of this moment;




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

83

namely, “to raise the standard of living of workingwomen.” This is
likewise the goal of the Inter-American Commission of Women, which
will carry out a campaign this year on behalf of the principle of equal
pay for work of equal value, giving special attention, as you do, to the
basic aspect of education.
Friends, in the name of the Inter-American Commission of Women,
I take pleasure in paying you a tribute of admiration, and through you,
to the workingwomen of the United States—who enjoy spiritual free­
dom, who are working side by side with men, who are laboring as men
do, and who are enriching the lives of the people with their experiences.
Women are laying the foundation of sound relations based on con­
viction and practice rather than by the imposition of contractual or
legal rights. They are helping to create an admirable material cul­
ture, without the militant and argumentative approach, and they are
participating with men in preparing and adapting the economic sys­
tem of this country for the immeasurable possibilities that lie ahead.
May you be successful in all your endeavors!

Panel Discussion
Mrs. Elizabeth S. Carpenter, President, Women’s National

Press Club, Moderator
Mrs. Carpenter : I am Elizabeth Carpenter, your mistress of cere­
monies for this afternoon. Our subject is “Women in Today’s World.”
That must be the reason I was chosen to preside—I am unquestionably
a woman in today’s world!
One of my favorite feminists used to say she hoped when she died her
epitaph would read, “Born a woman, died a person.” Women have
made great advances since the turn of the century. I think that holds
true throughout the world. It is time to take stock to see where women
are now, so we can better see where we should go, how we can best use
our skills and our families and homes and ourselves to make the future
that civilization deserves. How can women best be used in an age of
energy unlimited to assure this future ? What can we do to make our
brains keep up with our brawn ?
This afternoon we are going to have viewpoints from four fabulous
women from both sides of the Atlantic. Two of them are here today
as the first of 80 women from Italy and France who will be coming on
visits to our country this spring. We are delighted to welcome you
both.
From Italy, comes Dr. Olga Monsani. She is an outstanding lawyer
of Florence and a leader of professional women throughout Europe.




g4

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

She was president of the European Federation of Soroptimist Clubs
and is an expert on international law.
From France, we welcome Mine. Georgette Barbizet, who is an out­
standing leader in women’s organizations in her own country. She has
been chairman of the Children’s Section of the National Council of
Women of France and she has an imposing record of work with
children and with juvenile problems in France.
Our two American counterparts are known to many of you in this
room. The Honorable Frances P. Bolton is a Member of Congress
from Ohio. You ladies from abroad will be interested to know that
her State, Ohio, has furnished so many presidents of the United States
that it is known as the mother of presidents. Mrs. Bolton, like her
native Ohio, has a special distinction as a mother, too. She is mother
of a Congressman, and she and her son, Oliver, are the only motherand-son team ever to serve in Congress at the same time. She is a
member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and has been a United
States Delegate to the United Nations.
Dr. Susan B. Riley is the national president of the American Associ­
ation of University Women, which has been and is making a wonder­
ful contribution to international understanding in grants and hospi­
tality. She is an expert on southern folklore and is professor of Eng­
lish at a college for teachers in Nashville, Tenn.
To open our question period, I shall start with a few questions of
my own. First, I think it will be well if we find out what the typical
working woman in each of your countries is like and how she has
changed in the last 25 years.
Dr. Monsani, will you speak for Italy ?
Dr. Monsani : I do not believe there is in Italy a typical workingwoman. According to the law, all careers are open to women in Italy
except three: Army, judicial careers, and diplomacy. These three
fields are regulated by special laws. We have had a new constitution
since just after the war, in which women and men have the same
rights in everything. But the special laws for these three careers
have not yet been changed, and men do not want to change them and
allow women to enter these fields.
Some women’s associations have had public meetings about this
subject. Men at first had many objections, but now even the men’s
opinion has begun to change. They are accustomed now to seeing
women going into all the careers, not in big numbers, but if the woman
has the qualities to do her job, she can advance in a career to a very
high level.
I can give you some examples. We have many women in the uni­
versities who have responsible jobs. I know a woman who was a




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

85

manager in an insurance company. We have in an ] talian Soroptimist Club a wonderful woman who has a very important business as a
builder.
In Italy there are many unemployed persons. In a country where
we must find work for hundreds of thousands of men, you can under­
stand that women who are looking for a job are regarded as intruders.
It is more difficult for women when there is general unemployment,
but they can get along when they are well prepared and are efficient.
Another thing I must tell you: The larger number of workingwomen in Italy is composed of housewives, in rural places and even in
towns. They have been housewives all their lives, but I say they are
workers, because many of them are at the same time agricultural
workers. Our Business and Professional Women’s Association for 2
years has studied the problem of these women to try to get some assur­
ance for their old age. In Italy, the father has generally all the money
in the family and, if he dies, the widow remains at the mercy of sons
and daughters. Sometimes they are good—sometimes they are no
good; so it may happen that these old women, who have worked all
their lives for the benefit of their family and of all the nation, may not
be provided for. In the little town of Bolzano, when housewives go
shopping, they receive a premium—stamps—and put the stamps in
booklets, as a form of old-age insurance, to be collected after a certain
number of years. Our government is interested in the problem and it
is now under study in Rome.
Mrs. Carpenter: Now, we will hear about the working woman of
France from Mme. Barbizet.
Mme. Barbizet: You asked me to speak on career girls. My own
mother was a medical student. Her family was quite against it, but
at last her father consented; for many months, however, he accom­
panied her to the Fcole de Medecine. It just shows the progress made
in 60 years. Many people do not realize how things have changed and
by this personal anecdote I am trying to illustrate it.
Now, we have thousands of girls who have been going to schools and
universities, and for whom all doors are open. In France, women can
be judges; one of our very well-known women in France is on the
Supreme Court. We have teachers, doctors, servants, and so on.
It is difficult to realize that the percentage of workingwomen has
remained the same for half a century in our country. In 1900, accord­
ing to the official statistics, the number of workingwomen was 4y2
million, as it is now. The only difference is that now women get better
jobs. They have shifted from the category of domestic servants to
better posts.
Our nation was one of the first to provide for equal pay and, until




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

this is adopted by other countries, it may be a dangerous gift for
women to receive equal pay. People say that, in our economy today,
prices are very high because women have such high wages. Wages
are 35 percent higher for French women than for English or Dutch
women. It makes a very dangerous position for our exports. At a
conference of women on employment about 6 weeks ago, in Paris, the
experts who came were pessimistic because they thought that there
were so many people at work that women would soon not be able to
find all the employment they needed. After 35 years of age, it is
difficult for a woman to get any work unless she is very well trained.
Mrs. Carpenter : Now, we will hear about ourselves from Congress­
woman Bolton.
Mrs. Bolton : It is a very great pleasure to be here and a delight to
have the opportunity of hearing firsthand what two other countries
are doing about the problems that are our problems, too. Granted, we
probably have more opportunity. Still, we have not yet caught up
with the menfolk.
Two days ago, one of our labor people, a man, needless to say, told
me that women should not work at big machines. They were not built
the right way. They should not do the heavy jobs. They should not
do various things. He said he had even found a woman up a telegraph
pole as a lineman.
We still have that very interesting group of men who say gruffly,
“If those millions of women that are taking up the jobs would only
get out of them, we would not have any unemployment.” I say to
them, “What about the 4 million women who have to be responsible
for their families ? Who is going to do it for them ? Are you willing
to carry two families—yours and a woman’s ?”
This group would not think of doing that, but they do not think
women should be holding jobs. I would say, “You know, some States
have laws that say women in a factory must not lift more than so
many pounds. Have you ever thought about what a nurse in a hospital
has to lift ? It is often a great deal more than men in a factory are
usually expected to lift. In extreme instances, this has resulted in
cracked vertebrae and invalidism for the nurse, who has utterly for­
gotten herself to help her patient.” Yet no one suggests that women
should not become nurses.
In the early years of the century, nursing was one of the few occu­
pations open to women. Now, women can go into almost any occupa­
tion, and women nurses in the Armed Forces are commissioned officers.
But men with nurse training are not ranked as commissioned officers.
I have a bill in Congress to get a few equal rights for men.
Equal pay is very close to my heart and always has been. There are




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

87

13 States and Alaska, that have equal-pay laws. [As of May 15, three
more States had enacted equal-pay laws.—Ed.']
Some of the union officials have written me that they believe that
equal pay should not be taken up by the Federal Government at all,
but through union organization contracts. I got one of those letters
from a very eminent man. But I had just had a letter telling me of
a contract in which there was a differential of from $2 to $4 a week
between men’s and women’s pay rates.
It seems to me we need to give the country a deeper sense of what
equal pay means. We need to understand what it is. The people need
to know and they should want it for us.
For instance, what is the result of discrimination? Does it affect
the morale of the workers? If we can pull together in solving this,
then perhaps next January we will be ready to introduce something
vital, alive, dynamic, that Congress will understand and will want to
put through.
You know that it is no trouble at all to get a bill through Congress
if people want it. There was no hesitation on the part of Congress
about the act that created the Cadet Nurse Corps and paid tuitions for
the administrative and postgraduate group.
I would like to see us as women use our opportunities so that men
would realize we are not working at cross purposes with them; that
we want to go along with them, side by side, each of us doing our share
of the work of building a new world. For that world is not going to
be built if the men do it alone, or if we try to do it alone. We must
work together to bring about a world that is strong, that is true, that
is honorable, that is peace loving.
Mrs. Carpenter : Before I ask Dr. Biley to summarize the signifi­
cant points of what women are doing in today’s world, I would like
to ask if her experience with the American Association of University
Women has given her a picture of how the workingwoman in the
United States has changed in 25 years.
Dr. Biley: I do not know whether it is my association with the
American Association of University Women which gives me a few
ideas on this or the fact that I am a woman in the United States.
I think if I were an artist I could best depict this by a series of four
pictures: The first would be a picture in black and white, of a woman
sitting on the front seat of a covered wagon, with a rifle across her
knees. I would call her “Woman, the Partner.”
The second would be an oil painting of the woman in a Victorian
parlor, to which she has been relegated because her husband is eco­
nomically more prosperous and the industrial revolution has lightened




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

the necessity for her to be an economic asset to her husband. That
woman would be called “Woman, the Possession.”
The third would be a series of snapshots of women in violent com­
motion, parading, waving banners, knocking on doors, with a few
mournful Melisandes over in the corner giving the impression that
they know they are cornered and that they are definitely meant for
better things. I would call that “Woman in Revolt.”
The fourth would be the woman of today. Using motion-picture
techniques, we could show her in action doing a lot of different things—
but with one emergent figure: A woman in the home surrounded by
her children, but with her hat on, because she is likely to go out some­
where any time. I would call her simply “Woman.”
I think that the word “career” is not in our vocabulary today. I
work with young women, as do many of you. They no longer desire
careers. Marriage is the goal of life for them; a suburban ranch house
is their idea of heaven; four children are needed to complete the family
circle. They envision that home as a part of their community, of the
Nation and the world. They are, therefore, interested in everything
which affects the life of women.
This is the woman on whom we must focus our attention when we
speak of efficient use of womanpower.
Mrs. Carpenter: Now that we know something about ourselves as
workingwomen, I think we might inquire into women’s influence on
both sides of the Atlantic. I would like Dr. Monsani to tell us how
women in Italy try to influence national affairs. Are many women in
higher offices in your country ?
Dr. Monsani : Women influence national affairs only by their votes.
I have an idea that the most important thing to be done now in Italy
is to teach women to vote. We have had the right to vote only since the
last war, so you can imagine that in many cases, women vote like their
husbands. It is not a real vote. Some women vote as a political party
tells them to vote.
Every woman should contribute to society with her own thought.
She must know what she wants. She must not have another group
of persons tell her how she must vote. Until women have learned
this, I do not believe they can really enter national affairs. Perhaps
it will come soon, because the Italian people are rather quick to learn.
Mrs. Carpenter : Are there many women who hold public office ?
Dr. Monsani : Oh, yes; we have many women deputies and senators.
And we have many women in public office and public administration.
Mrs. Carpenter : Does a woman who is running for office in Italy
come under criticism because she is a woman ?




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

89

Dr. Monsani: Generally not. Sometimes they say she has suc­
ceeded because she is good looking, but very seldom.
Mrs. Carpenter: Mrs. Bolton is the most experienced among our
panel in politics, so I would like to hear her say something about
women in politics in the United States and what some of the outmoded
charges are that she knows about from her own experience.
Mre. Bolton : Running for public office is a very interesting experi­
ence. I hope a great many of you women are going into the political
field, both in the United States and in the other countries.
We have 17 women in Congress, one of whom is in the Senate—
Margaret Chase Smith of Maine. We do not work as a women’s bloc.
That would be rather foolish, but we like to feel that we perhaps have
more influence than any 17 men. I have never found that the men
will not listen to me because I am a woman.
In State offices, women now have a lieutenant governor, many secre­
taries of state, and many women in municipal offices. We do not have
enough women on school boards and on library boards. Those are
places where any mother could serve. She should know what her
children are being taught, she should be an influence on these boards;
she should also have a great deal to do with the recreation in her par­
ticular area. It may be a tiny village, or it may be a great city like
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or my own Cleveland, but her
influence is important.
Had it not been for the influence of women, we would not have had
our child-labor laws, nor such growth in housing legislation. Women
have a real influence because they believe that babies must be strong
and well, with their minds clear; they must come into homes that are
not just little holes in the wall; they must come into places where there
is wholesome recreation available, and into areas where the schools are
adequate.
Over 300,000 additional teachers and 600,000 new school units are
needed. If we built 107 a day, or something of that kind, we would
not catch up with school needs for some time, because the birthrate has
not fallen, but increased.
In the health field, I know from my own experience that we would
not begin to have what we have today in protection of health if it had
not been for women, so that I am a rank enthusiast for women who
make the men understand that what we want is a shoulder-to-shoulder
process; that we are willing to carry our share.
The increase in number of women in the political field, and in all
phases of government, is helping the men to realize that we are their
partners. We earn that responsibility and that opportunity by our
day-to-day methods and our day-to-day actions, and by our vision.




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Mrs. Carpenter. I wonder if Madame Barbizet would like to ex­
plain the situation in France on the birthrate. I understand it was
declining a few years back, but that the government has made having
babies profitable.
Mme. Barbizet. It is not profitable for the government; it is prof­
itable for families! We had a very low birthrate in France, as you
perhaps know. Our population has been on the decline. After the
war, the government gave families a new allowance.
The new allowance means that an unskilled worker earning 30,000
francs a month will have his salary doubled if he has three children.
If his wife stays at home in order to look after the children, her family
allowance is increased. As soon as she gets work outside the home she
loses that extra family allowance. But it is a very heavy burden for
the government and for the employers, because the employers pay a
share of this family allowance. There are two sides to this question.
Mrs. Carpenter. Dr. Riley, would you like to say anything about
the influence which women’s organizations have on politics?
Dr. Riley. Do you mind if I give it a little twist, and say what
women’s organizations are doing about developing potentialities for
womanpower in the labor force? In the first place, let me say this:
Women in the United States have a great urge to join. It does not
make much difference what we join or what we do after we join, but
we have to join and we have an unbroken record of joining since about
the 1780’s.
We are inclined to make fun of women’s organizations. Many of
us are still haunted with the satirical picture which Sinclair Lewis
drew of the Thanatopsis Club. We are still trying to live it down.
On the other hand, there are many constructive outlets for women’s
organizations. Instead of deriding them, we should be proud of them,
particularly since all of us here belong to a great many and we are not
trying to indict ourselves.
One thing which women’s organizations do for their members is the
very thing that you are talking about; they make women politically
effective. Another goal which we hold up for women through our
various organizations is that a woman should be economically produc­
tive, that she should have a sense of social awareness, a sense of obli­
gation to her community, and that she should have a continuously
growing type of education. Many of our women’s organizations are,
after all, organizations in adult education. Another value of women’s
organizations is the experience they give women of working together.
One reason why women have not gone farther is because we have not
always supported each other. Working together in organizations




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

91

does, I think, bring us more psychological willingness, and also a
technique, for working with other women.
Mrs. Carpenter: There are some questions from the floor at this
point. How do the working mothers in France and Italy cope with
the problem of taking care of children ?
Dr. Monsani: We have no schools for children under 4 years, but
there are nurseries near some modern factories. We have what are
called the garden schools, for children 4 to 6 years; and then the other
schools from 6 years on.
Mrs. Carpenter : Mme. Barbizet ?
Mme. Barbizet : Young mothers can leave their children in day-care
nurseries provided by the management of factories or by municipali­
ties; but they are often obliged to send their babies to foster homes,
and we all know that it is not a good thing for a small child to be
deprived of his mother. Women who get high wages, such as women
doctors and lawyers, can still find more help than you do in America.
Mrs. Carpenter : The question now is whether social legislation
stands a better chance if a male legislator sponsors the bill.
Mrs. Bolton : What I have found very effective is to have a man
sponsor a bill identical with mine, over in the Senate.
Mrs. Carpenter : To wind up this discussion I am going to give
each of the four panelists exactly 60 seconds to discuss their favorite
cause. What ax do you have to grind or what do you like to promote?
Let’s begin with Dr. Eiley.
Dr. Eiley: My favorite talking point would be based on three
premises: The first, that women’s potentialities are greater than their
achievements. Second, the opportunities for service are going to be
greater in the future than they have ever been; in other words, we
are going to have to live up to our potentialities. The third premise
would be we must be ready for this. How do we get ready 1
We can do this through preparation in general education and in
specific skills. We must be ready also in experience. It is necessary
for us to have the opportunity to better ourselves. Too often doors
are closed to women on the lower levels, and therefore they never
have the chance to build up experience so they can get to the top-level
jobs. Finally, we must prepare ourselves psychologically, by moving
away from the idea of a privileged class which has immunity from
certain general responsibilities, and by determining very definitely
that we are willing to pay the price which men pay for comparable
success. Until we are willing to go in for job concentration, and long
expensive training, we must be satisfied with lesser achievements.
The fight to open top-level positions to women after all these years
gives every evidence of being successful. It would be highly ironic
345983—55------ 7




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

if we find now that we do not have a sufficient number of qualified
women to hold the positions which we have fought so long to open.
My challenge is to women themselves, because so many of the
discriminations practiced against women originate with women.
Mrs. Carpenter: Mrs. Bolton? What CO-second cause do you
have ?
Mrs. Bolton : I think mine dovetails with Dr. Riley’s. I think that
women are very reluctant to take the big gamble of entering politics.
They do not seem to realize that the minute they step out of their
front door to go and tell the schoolteacher something about their
child, or to go to the town council and say “We must have more lights
on my street,” they are in politics.
It is the machinery of our free way of life. Women seem to balk
when they come to the point of actually accepting a job with responsi­
bility, even in the libraries or on the school boards.
I would like to challenge all the parent-teacher associations. I
want to know what they are doing. I would like to see education,
not instruction, in our schools. To me this is an essential that we do
not have. We are instructing our children. We are teaching them
a lot of things out of books. Out in Painesville, Ohio, there is a
college for about 500 or 600 girls. They have recently reorganized
their whole plan and method. A girl must know three things when
she leaves there: She must know about herself as a physical, mental,
and spiritual being, and about the universe she lives in. She must
learn something with which she can support herself; a woman must
be able to take economic responsibility for herself and others. And
she must know that there is a responsibility of citizenship, and how
to meet that responsibility.
I learned many years ago that in some of the Indian teachings there
are three areas of living: preparation, citizenship, and consultation
in the wisdom years. My goal is to see this country’s children well
taught in the living of life—not just knowing the English Kings
and the Presidents of the United States. I am trying to point every­
thing I do toward the end that women shall be leaders in all those
areas which mean the teaching of the living of life.
Mrs. Carpenter : Mme. Barbizet.
Mme. Barbizet : The main problem, it seems to me, is the problem
of young women who have received a good training and have left a
job because they got married and had babies. How can a woman
reconcile her obligation to her home and children and her desire to
work? It seems a great waste to train women and then not utilize
their training. Many girls after the first years of motherhood feel
frustrated and dissatisfied, and we are trying to find methods to allow




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

93

them to come back to their work when the children reach school age
by doing part-time work. I had hoped very much to see how you dealt
here with this situation, as we know we must find an answer. Mrs.
Myrdal, who is writing a book on this particular subject, thinks that
young women should give up their work for a few years, remain in­
terested in their training, and come back to it later. We have to see
how this can be worked out.
Dr. Monsani : Once after the war when I was traveling by train I
met a man from one of the Asian countries. We spoke about America
and he explained to me that in the United States the woman was up
here, and the man down there. In his own country, he said the man
was up here, and the woman was down there. He then asked me where
the woman stood in Italy, and I answered, up and down, up and down!
After the war and the adoption of our new constitution, we passed
many laws giving women equal rights but in practice they are not all
being applied. We know that you American women have more pro­
tection than we have in marriage—in your lives as wives and mothers.
I want to know all about these things so that I can go back to my
country and tell people there about them. I cannot say that we will
follow your example but even if some of the things that I see here
cannot be applied in my own country I think it will be useful to know
about them.

The Status of Women Around the World
Mrs. Lorena Hahn, United States Representative, U. N. Com­

mission on the Status of Women
The greatest experience in my recent 4 months’ visit to Africa and
Asia, was the vivid contrasts between old and new civilizations.
Through them one glimpsed the progress of man and within them one
discerned a growing respect for the individual.
It is a serious undertaking to attempt to portray the feelings and
lives of people in foreign countries. There are so many contrasts, so
many contradictions. All are products of their past, as are we.
The oldest civilizations known are in this part of the world. Their
ancient, medieval, and modern customs are struggling together to give
birth to a new society. It is not my intention to build a case for or
against any country, but rather to mirror to you as best I can the pres­
ent conditions and the hopes of the people in action.
My first stop was in Liberia in West Africa. It is a fascinating
country, comprised of modern, educated people and gentle and fierce




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

tribes. The majority of people in Monrovia, the capital, are educated
in excellent missionary schools and in their university. There is an
agricultural experimental farm, sponsored by the United States under
Point 4. They have the same problem there that all countries have,
including our own. It is to induce the tillers of the soil to exchange
old methods for new.
The project director understood people. He did not try to tell
them what to do. Instead he went out amid them and built his hut.
He planted corn and beans and raised chickens as they did, only his
corn grew tall and the ears were well filled out. There were many
beans on his vines. His hens laid huge eggs; compared to them the
eggs of the tribesmen looked very much like birds’ eggs. Occasionally
the natives came over to inquire; then they began to sprinkle on the
magic dust that we call fertilizer and to plant the new seeds.
Today this is a greatly expanded and flourishing experimental farm,
and the tribesmen move in and out freely. This has been a great fac­
tor in breaking down the caste system between the tribesmen. The
last day that I was there, the seven women’s organizations banded
together for the first time and gave a farewell public tea. This was
their thanks to the United States for having sent the first official
woman visitor.
As I stood in the pavilion I could see the only railroad in Liberia,
just a spur, that led to their only iron ore mine. I could see in the
distance the fishing crews of the tribe, and I rejoiced to see on the
shores the framework of a refrigerating plant, the only one in Liberia.
This is to preserve the fish of the tribesmen against the day that fish
do not run. The threat of starvation for the shore tribe will be
whipped.
There is a deep feeling of kinship between the people in Liberia and
the United States. It was with a touch of sadness that I flew away.
In Asia, I visited India, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and
Turkey. I spent 5 weeks in India, and I shall touch on about three
cities: New Delhi, Calcutta, and Bombay.
India, as you know, has been conquered again and again. She has
been a subject nation through the ages, with the conquerors squeezing
out of the land all that was there, and leaving in the people a feeling
of resignation, hopelessness, and an acceptance of their fate. With
the passing of the mogul emperors and the coming of the English, a
new system was instituted. Many Indians were educated and given
positions of responsibility. This grew until there was one stratum
of society with know-how.
When India received her independence from England, she had
this know-how to depend upon. They framed the constitution and




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION :

95

they began to attack their problems. The new and the old city of
Delhi are exactly what their names imply. New Delhi is a modern
city. To my delight there was an air-conditioning unit in my bed­
room and to my surprise there was a pigeon in the unscreened bath­
room!
_ ^ was quite a sight to see the laundry of a city of a million popula­
tion being done alongside the riverbank. These conditions can not
be materially changed until power has been created. They are build­
ing dams for power, but this must be used for the new factories. India
must be industrialized if she is to improve living conditions for this
vast population.
In Calcutta, I visited a rural area, a community development proj­
ect, which is just adjacent to the city. It contains 270 villages. Here
they attack the whole problem simultaneously—farming, health, edu­
cation. They have a farm a good bit like the one I spoke of in Liberia,
only larger. They train midwives, who in turn go into the villages
and train midwives there. There are a number of trained social work­
ers who go into the villages to teach reading, writing, sewing, and a bit
of cooking.
The major problem of these women is to gain acceptance for them­
selves and their program, because the caste system is strong here.
One of the workers told me that she had seven identical classes in the
same village because only certain people will attend together and they
certainly would not be willing to go into a hut of another caste.
The sanitation advance was intriguing. Many had copied a sam­
ple stove that was rectangular, made of clay, with a bamboo stovepipe
which took the smoke out of the hut. Anyone could make one. Can
you imagine what it means no longer to live in a smoke-filled room?
Their eyes are no longer bloodshot. In one village I all but wept for
joy. Each hut had the stove and the bamboo pipe. They had covered
a large pit on each side of the hut, and the water from the streets could
run in it. By their own initiative they put in a trash can. As a final
touch, they showed me flowers all in blossom. They were learning!
Bombay is a delightful international city on the ocean. The people
look well dressed. The streets are clean and no livestock is permitted
on them, no beggars, no horns. But there are the same congested
areas, and the same basic shortages. The women’s organizations there
are few. They are organized on a city level—not as we have them
here, on a national, State, and local level. This will come, I am sure,
but it will take time. They do civic and social work, but most of their
efforts are trained toward welfare. They take over whole orphanages,
hospitals, health clinics, and manage them all with volunteer help.
T visited the industrial school for boys and one for girls. I was de-




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

lighted. Instead of being locked up in cells, as they are in some places:
I visited, the boys and girls here received academic training, as well as
training in the skills and handwork. The problem of the rehabilita­
tion of the child is approached as a whole. The superintendent was a
young man and as I visited with him he said, “You know, I went to the
United States on one of your grants to learn penal methods, and now
my institution is the one where all of the other superintendents come
to visit and learn the new methods.” I was grateful to the United
States.
Education in India is progressing. They have a missionary school;
many of the governmental schools have expanded and the government
is starting new tax-supported schools throughout the country. You
will find education, insofar as literacy is concerned, is provided for the
women as well as for the men.
There are great bulwarks of hope in India. They have a demo­
cratic constitution. They put the individual first—not the State.
There is religious freedom, and untouchability is no longer legal. The
spirit of Gandhi is deeply rooted in the whole Indian population and
it is a powerful influence for stability, freedom, nonviolence, and
human understanding.
It is my impression that Mr. Nehru is reflecting the feeling of the
people. They know that if war comes, this program will be wiped out
and they could fall again into slavery. I am convinced that this is
not a reflection of partiality, but a desperate attempt to keep the pro­
gram from being interrupted.
I shall speak of but two cities in Pakistan—Dacca and Lahore.
Dacca is the capital of East Pakistan and it would be a depressing city
if it were not for the enthusiasm of the people. They are tearing
down squalid centers, widening streets, and getting something done.
I visited a jute mill. It is the largest and most modern in the world.
I talked with a labor representative. He told me that many of the
labor people were determined to start their own unions and develop
their leaders from within, but that the mill and factory owners were
determined to begin the unions themselves. Hence, much of the labor
movement in Pakistan is under cover. They are very careful to es­
cape the methods used in some countries, where the various political
parties head unions.
There are missionary schools, private schools, and the beginning of
a fine network of government schools throughout Pakistan. In East
Pakistan there are 13 boys’ schools to 1 for girls. Pakistan, like almost
all Moslem countries, sends boys and girls to school together only
through the primary grades. Then they attend separate schools until
they reach the university level.




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

97

In West Pakistan, Lahore is a cultural center. The legislature was
m session and there was a whirl of social activity. No veils here—
the women in the Parliament were debating on the floor.
We drove to a place called Lullapur, to speak at a college that was
owned by the government. Lullapur is just 25 miles from absolute
desert. En route, its canal system came clearly into view. This is the
best canal system in the world. I noticed several canals that were
bone dry, nothing but shifting sand in them. I came to know that
this was one of the contentions between India and Pakistan—water
rights, the same thing our Western States have struggled with in
connection with the Colorado River.
The obstacles in Pakistan are tremendous, but despite them, there
is an atmosphere of invigoration. They speak freely of the help they
get from the United States and other countries and say how much
they appreciate it.
The countries of Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon are so closely associated
m their past and present that I shall describe them together. They
are, as you know, Arab countries, and are of the Islam or Moslem
faith, excepting Lebanon, which is half-Christian. Iraq was made
an independent kingdom in 1932. Syria and Lebanon became repub­
lics in 1941.
My first stop was in Baghdad, Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia). This
was the only country which I visited officially where women do not
have the vote. One of the leading women told me that when the
United Is ations sent a questionnaire relating to women, the govern­
ment had to consult lawyers to see just what their position was. When
the constitution was framed no one had ever given a thought to the
status of women.
The people there are conservative and nonvocal. I had an oppor­
tunity, through a friendly contact, to meet a noted poetess. She be­
longed to the religious conservatives, and I was told that her husband
had been approached first to see whether or not she might recite some
of her poems over the radio. He gave his permission after he had
gone to the station, surveyed the rooms, inspected the curtains over
the windows, guarded the door so no one could enter, and brought her
down in a guarded car. She did a beautiful job and was whisked
straight home again.
This woman spoke freely to me about the situation that prevailed.
I asked, “Would you like to have a radio program weekly?” “Oh, yes,”
she said. “Would you mind if your daughter went into public life?”
“That is my hope.” “How do your women associates feel about this
seclusion ?” “We are just waiting for the day for this cruel seclusion
to be lifted from us.”




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THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

That night I met the poetess’ opposite. It was at a social function.
The Minister of Education said 15 percent of the men and 7y% percent
of the women in Iraq were literate, but he was against women voting.
Like a flash this woman challenged him. She said, “Mr. Minister,
how can our country afford to lose half of its intellect in running its
government and public affairs?” As the debate continued, I felt
certain that in time—but it will take time—women will be voting
there.
There are a number of women’s organizations there; they do mag­
nificent welfare work.
In Syria the people were warm, enthusiastic, and vocal. Damascus
is a lovely city. Here the women headed many schools and colleges.
Here, too, women take over orphanages and hospitals on a voluntary
basis and needle their government to get money so they may further
them. They work frantically in the Arab refugee camps.
The last day that I was in Syria, I walked the street in Damascus
that is called “Straight.” I wondered what were the thoughts of
St. Paul as he rode over it so long ago ? I went to the little church
where he was let down through the window in a basket to escape
torture and death; and I wondered how much longer man must suffer,
individually and collectively, before he is ready to accept the way to
peace and health.
In the little country of Lebanon, the capital, Beirut, is a humming
international city. This is the first place I visited where the roots of
the women’s organizations go down into the village. They have a
national council of women that meets twice a year. The 105 women’s
organizations are so diversified in character that they touch practi­
cally every field relating to women. I did not see women wearing the
long veil here, but occasionally I would see a woman dressed in a
smart Parisian gown or suit, with a black veil covering her face and
draped over her hat.
My next visit was in Israel, the modern new city of Tel Aviv. You
cannot imagine such fervor in a whole country. The care they give
the children is outstanding. There are several social systems of living
here. One of the most unusual is called the Kibbitz. It is a complete
socialist community. Here everybody works and the money goes
into a common fund. They have a common dining room, where all
eat. The clothing, the doctors bills* are all paid out of this fund.
When a child is born it is immediately placed in a nursery and has
scientific care. None of the children stay at home but they do go
home daily from 4 to 6 to visit their parents. The rest of the time
they live in the children’s centers and go to model schools.
I asked the supervisor, who happened to be a woman from Cali-




MARCH 11, AFTERNOON SESSION

99

forma, if there were any drones in the community. She smiled and
said, “We call them artists.”
The glowing reports that I had heard about Turkey were merited.
^ ou will recall that the Turkish General Attaturk formed a republic
here in 1923. This is the first Moslem country where church and
state have been separated. There is no polygamy here, no system of
arranged marriages, no separation of boys and girls in schools.
Women have absolute equality with the men; they are exceedingly
active, and the men are inordinately proud of them. They boasted
to me that they are the only country in the world that has a woman
on the Supreme Court. There are an unusual number of women in
the court. The dean in the University of Istanbul is a woman, elected
to this office by the faculty, which is largely composed of men. The
women in the Parliament are most effective.
The women of Turkey have military service, just as men do. Attaturk’s daughter heads the women parachute jumpers in the army.
My official tour had ended. As I flew over the majestic city of
Istanbul toward home, the import of what I had seen swept over me.
Throughout Asia, there is a growing demand for progress and im­
provement, a demand far outdistancing the government’s capacity to
fulfill. The breaking down of old established customs is accompanied
by weakening and disruption of the social structure. The old must
be replaced by something new, or these areas may fall to foreign
domination.
It is glorious to know that the United States, Great Britain, the
United Nations, and practically every one of the countries of the free
world have sent help to these overpopulated countries. It is the first
time in the history of mankind where people have moved in, not to
get but to give, not to conquer and destroy, but to build and to help.
The colossal stone ruins of the era of man’s slavery are being re­
placed with new monuments—not in stone, but in the health* the
welfare, and the dignity of man. You are helping to build these
monuments.
Mrs. Leopold : I would like to tell you that the Women’s Bureau
is here to serve you always, individually and thoughtfully. As we
do in some of our legislatures, shall we adjourn this meeting without
date, meaning that we will meet again in the very near future.




Appendix
PROGRAM
Thursday—March 10,1955—9:30 a. to.
Interdepartmental Auditorium
Invocation-The Reverend John F. Cronin,
S. S.
Assistant Director, Department
of Social Action
National Catholic Welfare Con­
ference
WelcomeMrs. Alice K. Leopold
Assistant to the Secretary of
Labor for Women’s Affairs
“Today's Challenge”The Honorable James P. Mitchell
Secretary of Labor
“Hobizons fob Women”A panel.
Florence R. Kluclchohn, Ph. D.
Laboratory of Social Relations
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
Marie Jahoda, Ph. D.
Associate Director
Research Center for Human Relations
New York University
New York, N. Y.
Leo H. Bartemeier, M. D.
Medical Director
Seton Institute
Baltimore, Md.

Discussion
100




APPENDIX

101

March 10,1955—2 p. m.
Interdepartmental Auditorium
Presiding---------------------- --------------- Winifred

G. Helmes, Ph. D.
Assistant Director
Women’s Bureau
“The Woman Who Works”_____ A panel.
,

Mrs. Gertrude G. Michelson
Manager for Labor Relations
R. H. Macy & Co.
New York, N. Y.

Moderator
As Others See Heb

As She Sees Herself

Virgil Martin
Vice President
Carson, Pirie & Scott
Chicago, 111.

Anne Gary Pannell, Ph. D.
President
Sweet Briar College
Sweet Briar, Va.

Peter Henle
Mrs. Helen Berthelot
Assistant Director of Research
Legislative Representative
American Federation of Labor, Communications Workers of
Washington, D. C.
America (CIO)
Washington, D. C.
James T. O’Connell
Vice President
Publix-Shirts Corp.
New York, N. Y.

Miss Louise Watson
Investment Adviser
R. W. Pressprich & Co.
New York, N. Y.
Discussion

March 10,1955—7 p. m.
Dinner
Pall Mall Boom
The Hotel Raleigh
Presiding
Invocation.

“Women and the Law”.




Mrs. Alice K. Leopold
Rabbi Norman Gerstenfeld, L. H. D.
Minister of the Washington
Hebrew Congregation
The Honorable Arthur Larson
Under Secretary of Labor
Discussion

102

the effective use of womanpower

Friday—March 11,1955—9:30 a. m.
Interdepartmental Auditorium
Presiding Mrs. Alice K. Leopold
Invocation Rt. Rev. Angus Dun, D. D.
Bishop of the Episcopal
Diocese of Washington
“Shortage Occupations : New
Opportunities for Women”-----A panel.
Eli Ginzberg, Ph. D.
Director of Research
National Manpower Council
New York, N. Y.

Moderator
Brig. Gen. David Sarnoff
Irving H. Siegel, Ph. D.
Chairman of the Board
Council of Economic
Radio Corporation of America
Advisers
New York, N. Y.
Washington, D. C.
Roland R. Renne, Ph. D.
President
Montana State College
Bozeman, Mont.

Summary Mirra Komarovsky, Ph. D.
Chairman, Department of
Sociology, Barnard College
New York, N. Y.
March 11,1955—2 p. to.
The Hall of the Americas
Pan American Union
Introducing Mrs. Ciiaves______ Mrs. Franees M. Lee
United States Delegate
Inter-American Commission of
Women
Welcome------------------------------- Mrs. Maria Concepcion de Chaves
Chairman
Inter-American Commission of
Women




APPENDIX

103

“Women in Today’s World”___A panel.
Mrs. Elizabeth S. Carpenter
President
Women’s National Press Club.
Washington, D. c.

Moderator

Olga Monsani, LL. B., former Susan B. Riley, Ph. D., President,
President, European Federa­
American Association of Uni­
tion Soroptimist Clubs, Flor­
versity Women, Washington,
ence, Italy
D. C.
Georgette Barbizet, LL. B., Chair­ The Honorable Frances P. Bol­
man, Children’s Section, Na­
ton, U. S. House of Representa­
tional Council of Women of
tives, Committee on Foreign
France, Paris, France
Affairs

“The Status of Women Around
the World.”

Mrs. Lorena Hahn
United States Representative
U. N. Commission on the Status
of Women

BIOGRAPHIES OF SPEAKERS
Mttie. Georgette Barbizet
French participant in community leaders’ program visiting the United States,
March 3-May 3, 1955. She is a volunteer leader of the National Council of
Women of France, and a member of: Committee on the Daily Work of Employed
Women, Committee on Hospitality for Foreign Visitors, Liaison Committee of
Women and Family Associations, Committee to Welcome Young Aliens. She
has been president of the Soroptimist Club in Paris, vice president of the Women
Social Workers Group, member of the International Commission for Assistance
to Defective Children, president of the Women's Resistance Movement, and has
organized a center for the rehabilitation of delinquent youth. From 1917 to 1919
she worked in the office of the French Resident-General of Tunis. She has par­
ticipated in the International Congress of Women meetings in Vienna, Edin­
burgh, Philadelphia, and Lugano, representing the National Council of Women
of France. She is a former staff member of publication, “The Moslem World.”
Mme. Barbizet is a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.

Dr. Leo H. Bartemeier
Medical director, Seton Institute, Baltimore, Md. Holds degrees from Catholic
University of America and Georgetown University Medical School. He has
received postgraduate training at Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, Johns Hopkins
Hospital, and the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. He has been presi­
dent of the American Psychiatric Association, and of the International Psycho­
analytic Association. He is chairman of the Council on Mental Health of the
American Medical Association and a member of the National Manpower Council.
He has been consultant of the World Health Organization to the Government of
Ireland and lecturer in psychoanalysis to psychiatrists in Havana, Cuba. He is




104

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

a charter member of the Cornelian Corner of Detroit—a multiprofessional organi­
zation for the promotion of better relationships between children and their
parents.

Mrs. Helen Berthelot
Legislative representative, Communications Workers of America (CIO) ; mem­
ber of National CIO Legislative Committee. Helped organize union in 1937-38.
In 1942 became secretary of the Traffic Statewide Organization, later secretarytreasurer. She was vice president of the Amalgamated Michigan Division of
Communication Workers for 2 years, later becoming international representative.
Mrs. Berthelot was the first chairman of the Labor Management Committee of
the Telephone Division of the United Foundation Drive in Michigan.

The Honorable Frances P. Bolton
Represents the 22d Ohio District in Congress. She was United States Repre­
sentative to the 8th Regular Session of the U. N. General Assembly and has been,
for 13 years, a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. She has
served as chairman of its subcommittees on national and international movements
and on the Near East and Africa. Her subcommittee on national and inter­
national movements compiled a monograph, “Strategy and Tactics of World
Communism,” which is an acknowledged authoritative treatise on world com­
munism. She was the first woman Member of Congress ever to head an official
congressional mission abroad (1947), when her subcommittee went for inspection
and study to the Near East and Africa. She introduced the congressional resolu­
tion which invited Mile. Genevieve de Galard-Terraube, heroine of Dienbienphu,
to the United States—the first time Congress ever formally invited a foreign
citizen to visit this country. She is now serving her eighth successive term in
Congress.

Mrs. Elizabeth S. Carpenter
President, Women’s National Press Club. Native of Texas. Graduate in
journalism from the University of Texas. For the past 10 years has been a
member of a husband-wife newspaper correspondents’ team furnishing Washing­
ton coverage to newspapers in the Southwest, including the Houston, Tex., Post
the Arkansas Gazette at Little Rock, Ark., and the Tulsa, Okla., Tribune. Mrs.
Carpenter is a member of the White House Correspondents Association and of
the House and Senate Press Galleries.

Dr. Eli Ginzberg
Professor of economics, Graduate School of Business, Columbia University;
director of research of the National Manpower Council; and director of the “con­
servation of human resources” project at Columbia University. He is consultant
to the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of Labor, and the Surgeon General’s
Office of the Department of the Army. He has served as director of research,
United Jewish Appeal; special assistant to chief statistician, War Department;
director, Resources Analysis Division, Surgeon General’s Office, War Depart­
ment ; member, Medical Advisory Board to Secretary of War; chairman, Com­
mittee on the Function of Nursing; representative of the United States to FivePower Conference on Reparations for Nonrepatriable Refugees; director, New
York State Hospital Study; consultant, United States State Department Tech­
nical Cooperation Administration, Israel. Among his published works are:
“Economics of the Bible,” “House of Adam Smith,” “The Labor Leader,” “A




APPENDIX

105

Program for the Nursing Profession,” “Agenda for American Jews,” “A Policy
for Scientific and Professional Manpower,” "Psychiatry and Military Manpower,”
“A Policy for Skilled Manpower.”

Mrs. Lorena B. Hahn

?

r

United States representative on the Status of Women Commission of the
United Nations. She has just completed a 4-month tour sponsored by the Edu­
cational Exchange Division of the State Department, visiting Liberia, Africa,
India, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Turkey. Following World
War II she served for 14 months in Germany under Gen. Lucius D. Clay, to aid
women in reestablishing their position in a free government. She has been a
member and chairman of the Board of Control of the State of Nebraska and
has been national president of the American Legion Auxiliary. Mrs. Hahn has
served as a member of the National Broadcasting Co., Republican Postwar Policy
Committee, National Board of Wild Life, Forum on National Defense, and is
currently serving on the board of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
She was decorated by the French Government with the Medal of Legion of Honor
for unusual service to veterans.

Peter Henle
Assistant director of research, American Federation of Labor. He received
degrees from Swarthmore College and American University, where his principal
field of study was economics and labor relations. During the war he served as
statistical officer for the Air Force. He has been with the Research and Eco­
nomics Departments of the American Federation of Labor since 1946, and
worked with the United States Department of Labor as executive assistant to
the labor members of the Labor-Management Manpower Policy Committee in
1952.

Dr. Marie Jahoda

,

Associate director, Research Center for Human Relations, New York University.
She received her Ph. D. from the University of Vienna in 1932 and served as
director of the Social Research Institute affiliated with that university from
1933 to 1936. In Great Britain from 1937 to 1945, her activities included a study
of unemployed miners in South Wales; work with Cambridge University on
social-psychological problems of factory life; a wartime social survey with the
Ministry of Information; a study of national income consumption with the
National Institute of Social and Economic Research. In the United States she
has served with the Scientific Department, American Jewish Committee, and
with the Bureau of Applied Social Research, Columbia University. Her publications include: “Some Socio-Psychological Problems of Factory Life” and
“Toward a Social Psychology of Mental Health in Problems of Infancy and Child­
hood.” Her most recent publication is a collaboration with R. Christie, “Studies
in the Scope and Methods of the ‘Authoritarian Personality.’ ”

Dr. Florence R. Kluckhohn
Lecturer in the Department of Social Relations and research associate in the
Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University. A graduate of the Uni­
versity of Wisconsin, she received her Ph. D. from Radcliffe College. Has taught
at Wellesley College, with year’s leave of absence to serve as research analyst.
Far Eastern Division, Office of War Information. Has collaborated with Dr.




106

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

John Spiegel, psychiatrist, in the work of the Committee on the Family In the
Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. Presently, Dr. Kluckhohn and Dr.
Spiegel are developing a research project for a comparative study of “well” and
“sick” families. Has made substantial studies in family structure and compara­
tive culture, particularly in Spanish-American and Mexican groups, and in gen­
eralized United States culture. Dr. Kluckhohn is the wife of Clyde Kluckhohn,
who is in the anthropological field at Harvard.

Dr. Mirra Komarovsky
Professor of sociology and executive officer of the Department of Sociology,
Barnard College. She formerly was an assistant professor of sociology at Skid­
more College, university fellow at Columbia University, research assistant at
Yale University, and research associate at Columbia University. Professor
Komarovsky, in private life Mrs. Marcus A. Heyman, is a member of the Ameri­
can Sociological Society and the American Association of University Professors.
She is the coauthor of “Leisure, A Suburban Study,” and author of “The Unem­
ployed Man and His Family” and “Women in the Modern World: Their Educa­
tion and Their Dilemmas.”

The Honorable Arthur Larson
Under Secretary of Labor. Former dean of the University of Pittsburgh Law
School; professor of law, Cornell University Law School; associate professor of
law, University of Tennessee. During World War II he served as division
counsel, Industrial Materials Division, and then acting price executive, Lumber
Branch, OPA. Later, as Chief of the Scandinavian Branch, Foreign Economic
Administration, he planned war and postwar supply and trade programs of
Norway, Denmark, and Finland. He is a native of South Dakota and attended
Augustana College, the University of South Dakota Law School, and was a
Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. His publications include “The Law of
Workmen’s Compensation” and background documents used by the American
Assembly for discussions on economic security for Americans.

Mrs. Alice K. Leopold
Assistant to the Secretary of Labor for Women’s Affairs. Former secretary
of state in Connecticut and member of the Connecticut General Assembly; per­
sonnel director with Hutzler Bros., Baltimore, and B. Altman & Co., of New York.
She represented the Department of Labor as adviser to the United States delega­
tion at the International Labor Organization meeting in Geneva in June 1054.
In October 1954 she headed a mission to France and Italy to survey women’s
economic problems and their effect on family life, for the Foreign Operations
Administration. She is a member of the Inter-Governmental Relations
Commission.

Virgil Martin
Vice president and general manager, Carson, Pirie, Scott & Co., Chicago.
Former dean of men at Illinois Wesleyan University, executive director of the
Indianapolis Community Chest and Council of Social Agencies, director of
finance for Community Chests and Councils of America, Inc., executive director
of the New York City War Fund, general superintendent and personnel director
of the Wm. H. Block Co., of Indianapolis. He is a member of the boards of the
Welfare Council for Metropolitan Chicago, the National Health and Welfare
Retirement Fund, the Chicago Theological Seminary, the Cook County School of
Nursing, and Illinois Wesleyan University.




APPENDIX

107

Mrs. Gertrude G. Michelsoti
Manager, Labor Relations Department, R. H. Macy & Co., New York. Mrs.
Michelson holds degrees from Pennsylvania State University and Columbia
University, where she specialized in industrial psychology. She has taught a
course in employee relations at the New York University School of Retailing.

The Honorable James P. Mitchell
Secretary of Labor. Former Assistant Secretary of the Army in charge of
manpower and reserve forces affairs. During World War II, he was director
of the Industrial Personnel Division of the War Department. He also served
as a member of the National Building Trades Stabilization Board and as an
alternate for the Under Secretary of War on the War Manpower Commission.
In 1048, he was a member of the personnel advisory board of the Hoover Com­
mission, and in that same year, at the request of the United States Army, he
went to Germany to study the military government’s civilian-employment pro­
gram. In 1950, he was called upon again by the United States Army, this time
to study and report on combat-pay problems. He has served as personnel rela­
tions adviser, director of industrial relations, and operating vice president for
several large industrial concerns. He was appointed to his present Cabinet post
as Secretary of Labor on October 9,1953.

Dr. Olga Monsani
Italian participant in community leaders’ program visiting the United States
March 3-May 3, 1955. An international lawyer, she is vice president of the
Italian Federation of Business and Professional Women. She founded the
Business and Professional Women’s Club in Florence, Italy, and from 1950 until
the present time has served as its president She is former president of the
European Federation of Soroptimists Clubs and has traveled extensively in
Europe in that connection. She spent some time in England studying the work
of women’s organizations there. Dr. Monsani has been active in a great many
community organizations, including the Red Cross and relief agencies for war
orphans and invalids.

James T. O’Connell
Vice president, Publix-Shirts Corp., New York, where he is responsible for
union negotiations and relations, industrial engineering, and personnel manage­
ment. Mr. O’Connell holds A. S., B. S., and civil engineer degrees from Columbia
University. From 1930 to 1940 he was a construction engineer and superin­
tendent in New York City. From 1940 to 1945 he served on the staff of Gen.
Brehon B. Somervell in the Army Service Forces, where he held the rank of
colonel. He was assigned as Deputy Director, Industrial Personnel Division,
ASF. In 1945-46, he served as a colonel on the General Staff Corps and was
with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s staff with the United States Forces, European
theater, in Germany. He was responsible for the direction and coordination of
the program for the development of civil and personnel management by the
United States Forces in the European theater. Mr. O’Connell has been awarded
the Legion of Merit.
345983—55----- 8




108

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

Dr. Anne Gary Pannell
President, Sweet Briar College. Dr. Pannell was previously academic dean
and professor of history at Goucher College, and associate professor of history
and chairman of freshman history at the University of Alabama. Since 1934 she
has been an active member of the American Association of University Women,
serving as secretary, vice president, and president of the Alabama State Division.
She is a member of the Council of the International Federation of University
Women and is currently serving on the relief committee of that organization.
In 1953 Mrs. Pannell was one of 14 American educators chosen to make a
month’s study tour of Germany to visit German schools and confer with German
educators. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Chatham Hall, Chatham,
Va., and holds memberships in the American, Southern, and Alabama Historical
Associations.

Dr. Roland R. Renne
President, Montana State College, Bozeman, Mont. Dr. Renne holds degrees
from Rutgers and the University of Wisconsin, specializing in agricultural
economics. He has been visiting professor of economics at the University of
Chicago and of local government at Cornell University, and was Price Ad­
ministrator for Montana for the Office of Price Administration. He is the
author of “Land Economics,” a college textbook, and is senior author of “The
Montana Citizen,” a textbook on government for Montana schools. He has
been a member of the National Forest Advisory Council, the National Advisory
Committee on Indian Affairs, and the President’s Water Resources Policy Com­
mission. In 1951-5.3 he served as Chief of the Technical and Economic Mission
to the Philippines. Since 1951 he has been active on Columbia University’s
National Manpower Council.

Dr. Susan B. Riley
Professor of English, George Peabody College for Teachers, Nashville, Tenn.,
and national president of the American Association of University Women. Dr.
Riley has taught at Blue Mountain College, Hillman Junior College at Clinton,
Miss., Mississippi Women’s College at Hattiesburg, and Western Kentucky State
Teachers College at Bowling Green. Her special field is American literature,
and her chief interest is Southern folk literature. She was president of the
Tennessee Folklore Society from 1942 to 1944. Dr. Riley received the Cross of
the Commander of the Order of Merit for AAUW, awarded by the Federal
Republic of Germany. The presentation was made in recognition of the aid
given through AAUW international study grants to German women, the hospi­
tality shown by AAUW members to German award recipients during their
stay in the United States, and the support by AAUW branches of six demon­
stration kindergartens in Germany and of a dormitory for women of the Free
University in Berlin.

Brig. Gen. David Sarnoff
Director and chairman of the board of Radio Corporation of America, RCA
Communications, Inc., National Broadcasting Company, Inc. General Sarnoff
entered the communications field as a messenger boy at the age of 15 and became
president of the corporation at the age of 39. He has achieved international
prominence in radio communications and broadcasting, and recognition as a




APPENDIX

109

pioneer in the development of virtually every phase of radio, television, and
electronics. General Sarnoff’s interest in military and naval radio dates back
to World War I, when he played a prominent part in helping to equip our
fighting service with wireless. During World War II he served in the office
of the Chief Signal Officer in Washington, D. C., and later as a special con­
sultant on communications at SHAEF. He was awarded the Legion of Merit
for his military services overseas and was promoted to the rank of brigadier
general. He has been decorated by France, Poland, and Luxembourg, and has
been honored by 14 universities and colleges in the United States. In 1945
the American Nobel Center selected General Sarnoff as first recipient of its
“One World Prize” for “contribution to international understanding through
radio.” In 1949 he received a citation from the United Nations for his “notable
cooperation in the development of public understanding.”
Dr. Irving H. Siegel
Economist with the Council of Economic Advisers. Native of New York
City, educated in New York public schools. Holds degrees from City College of
New York, New York University, and Columbia. He is director of American
Technology Study, Twentieth Century Fund. Former lecturer in political econ­
omy and director of Russian productivity study, Johns Hopkins University;
chief economist, Veterans’ Administration; assistant chief, BLS Productivity
and Technological Developments Division; National Bureau of Economic Re­
search; and statistician, WPA National Research Project on Reemployment
Opportunities and Recent Changes in Industrial Techniques. His publications
include: “Production, Employment, and Productivity in 59 Manufacturing In­
dustries, 1919-36,” “Concepts and Measurement of Production and Productivity,"
and “Soviet Labor Productivity.” He is currently working on a report for the
Twentieth Century Fund on “Tomorrow’s Technology: Its Shape and Meaning.”

Miss Louise Watson
Investment adviser R. W. Pressprich & Co., New York City. She is a graduate
of Bryn Mawr College, and was the business manager there for 6 years. She
became affiliated with the Guaranty Trust Co. of New York and later conducted
her own investment counsel firm. She is a vice president of the board of
directors of the Spence-Chapin Adoption Service, New York, and a member of
the Byrn Mawr Club the Cosmopolitan Club of New York and the Women’s
Bond Club. Miss Watson is active in women’s finance forums.
Dr. Winifred G. Helmes
Assistant Director, Women’s Bureau. She received her Ph. D. from the Uni­
versity of Minnesota where she held a teaching assistantship for 3 years. Her
doctoral thesis, a political biography of one of Minnesota’s governors, was pub­
lished by the University of Minnesota Press in 1949. For 8 years, she was a
member of the faculty of Bradford Junior College, Bradford, Mass. From Brad­
ford she joined the executive staff of the American Association of University
Women, and from there, in September 1954, she came to the Women’s Bureau
as Assistant Director.




LIST OF ORGANIZATIONS REPRESENTED
In addition to Members of Congress and representatives of Federal and State
agencies, foreign embassies, individual business firms, the press, and national
magazines, conference members included delegates from the following
organizations:
Altrusa International
Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, CIO
American Academy of Ophthalmology & Otolaryngology
American Association of Industrial Nurses
American Association of Medical Record Librarians
American Association of Medical Social Workers
American Association of School Administrators
American Association of Social Workers
American Association of University Women
American College Public Relations Association
American Council on Education
American Dental Assistants Association
American Dental Hygienists’ Association
American Farm Bureau Federation
American Federation of Government Employees, AFL
American Federation of Soroptimist Clubs
American Home Economics Association
American Korean Foundation
American Labor Education Service
American Library Association
American Nurses’ Association
American Occupational Therapy Association
American Patent Law Association
American Personnel & Guidance Association, Inc.
American Physical Therapy Association
American Red Cross
American Society of Medical Technologists
American Society of Women Accountants
American Vocational Association
American Woman’s Society of Certified Public Accountants
American Women’s Voluntary Services
Association of American Colleges
Association of Land-Grant Colleges & Universities
Association of Stock Exchange Firms
Bard College
B’nai B’rith, Vocational Service Bureau
Bryn Mawr College
Camp Fire Girls
Canadian Women’s Bureau, Ottawa
110




(

'

'

,

APPENDIX
Carrie Chapman Catt Memorial Fund
Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems
Catholic Labor Alliance
Catholic University of America
Chamber of Commerce of the United States
Cincinnati Public Schools, Division of Counseling
College of St. Elizabeth, Convent Station, N. J.
College of William and Mary
Columbia University Teachers College
Committee on Careers in Nursing, National League for Nursing
Communications Workers of America, CIO
Congress of Industrial Organizations
Connecticut College
Cornell University
Council of State Governments
Democratic National Committee
Drexel Institute of Technology
General Federation of Women’s Clubs
George Washington University
Girl Scouts of the U. S. A.
Goucher College
Governmental Affairs Institute
Hampton Institute
Hannah Harrison School, Washington, D. C.
Hood College
Hotel & Restaurant Employees & Bartenders International Union, AFL
Howard University
Indiana University
Industrial Union of Marine & Shipbuilding Workers of America, CIO
Institute of International Education, Inc.
Institute of Life Insurance
Inter-American Commission of Women
International Association of Machinists, AFL
International Association of Personnel Women
International Association of University Women
International Association of Women Lawyers
International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite & Paper Mill Workers, AFL
International Federation of Business & Professional Women
International Labor Office, Geneva
International Labor Organization, Washington, D. C.
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, AFL
Jack & Jill Clubs of America
Labor Education Association
Labor Ministry, Japan
Laundry Workers’ International Union, AFL
League of Women Voters of the United States
Lynchburg College
Minimum Wage & Industrial Safety Board, Washington, D. C.
Montana State College
National Association of Bank Women
National Association of College Women
National Association of Colored Women




111

112

THE EFFECTIVE USE OF WOMANPOWER

National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs
National Association of Deans of Women
National Association of Life Underwriters
National Association of Manufacturers
National Association of Negro Business & Professional Women’s Clubs
National Association for Practical Nurse Education
National Association of Women Lawyers
National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools
National Committee for Careers in Medical Technology
National Congress of Parents & Teachers
National Consumers League
National Council of Administrative Women in Education
National Council of Catholic Women
National Council of Jewish Women
National Council of Negro Women
National Council of Women of United States
National Education Association
National Federation of Business & Professional Women’s Clubs
National Federation of Licensed Practical Nurses
National Federation of Republican Women
National Jewish Welfare Board
National Manpower Council
National Restaurant Association
National Scholarship Service & Fund for Negro Students
National Secretaries Association
National Social Welfare Assembly
National Urban League
National Vocational Guidance Association
National Woman’s Forum
National Woman’s Party
National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
North Carolina State College
Pembroke College
Peninsula General Hospital, Salisbury, Md.
Pennsylvania College for Women
Pennsylvania State University
Pilot Club International
Purdue University
Quota Club International
Radcliffe College
Republican National Committee, Women’s Division
Richmond Professional Institute
Rutgers University
Scientific Manpower Commission, Washington, D. C.
Service Bureau for Women’s Organizations, Hartford, Conn.
Simmons College
Society of Women Engineers
Soroptimist International
State Teachers College, Towson, Md.
Stephens College
Sweet Briar College




APPENDIX

113

United Automobile, Aircraft & Agricultural Implement Workers of America
CIO
United Cerebral Palsy Association
United Church Women
United Nations Commission on Human Rights
United Nations Commission on Status of Women
University of Chicago
University of Connecticut
University of Delaware
University of Maryland
University of Pennsylvania
University of Richmond
University of Wisconsin
University Women’s Club
Virginia State College
Women’s Bar Association
Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania
Young Women’s Christian Association, National Board
Zonta International

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For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U. S. Government Printing Office
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