Full text of Women in Industry: A Series of Papers to Aid Study Groups (Revision of Bulletin 91) : Women's Bureau Bulletin, No. 164

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UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
FRANCES PERKINS, Secretary

WOMEN’S BUREAU
MARY ANDERSON, Director

■4

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY
A SERIES OF PAPERS TO AID
STUDY GROUPS
Revision of Bulletin 91
By
MARY ELIZABETH PIDGEON

Bulletin of the Women’s Bureau, No. 164

UNITED STATES
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 1938

For sale by the. Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D. C.




Price IS cents




I

CONTENTS
Letter of transmittal_____________________________ _
Foreword______________________________
List of references__________________________ ~____
Part I. The work of the wage-earning woman
(a) How she went to work and what she doesI__
(b) The number of women employed
(c) What work in the factory means
(d) Early industrial work of women in this country
Part II.—The industrial world in which women work
(a) Changing civilizations_____________________________
(b) Effects of the introduction of machinery________ ____________
(c) Relation of women workers to the machine age
(d) Lives of the workers in the machine age
Part III.—Married women workers_______________________~_
(a) The number of married women gainfully employed
(b) The responsibility of married women for family support
(c) The double duties of married women workers
(d) Some effects of the employment of married women
Part IV.—Women and unemployment_________________________
(a) How unemployment affects women__________ _______________
(b) The extent of unemployment
(e) Some causes of unemployment
(d) Methods of minimizing unemploymentI~~
Part V.—Health standards for women’s work—working conditions__ I__
(a) Service facilities and sanitary conditions in the workplace__ I
(b) Special health needs in the workplace________________ __
(c) Industrial hazards: Injuries__________________ ____ '
(d) Industrial hazards: Disease_____ _________ I_________
Part VI.—Health standards for women’s work—working timeI
(a) Daily hours of work_____________________________
(b) Hours of work in the week_________________
(e) The night shift_______________________________________
(d) Vacations and sick leave with payI111™
Part VII.—Labor legislation for women__________________ _______
(a) Reasons for legislation and forces furthering it____________
(b) Hour legislation in various States““!!_'
(c) Various types of labor legislation for women___________
(d) Certain effects of labor legislationI"
Part VIIi:—What the wage-earning woman earns~”
(a) Outworn ideas as to women’s wages______________________
(b) Some factors affecting women’s wages_________ __ ____
(c) Women’s wages and what they must buy___ I__ I I____
(d) The minimum wage and its effectsI
Part IX.—Various connections of women with the industrial and labor
world
(a) Women in unusual occupations________________
(b) Women as “officials and managers”____________________
(c) Women’s labor organizations and some of their leaders-..! !__!_
(d) Women in official administrative labor positions and women who
have furthered movements for workers___________
Part X.—Work of the Women’s Bureau___________ _________ ~
(a) Antecedents of the Women’s Bureau, and formation and person­
nel of the Bureau__________________________
(b), (c), and (d)------------------------------ ™__”
~__
Appendix.—Publications of the women’s BureauFollowing




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LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL
United States Department

of

Labor,

Women’s Bureau,

’Washington, May 27, 1938.
I have the honor to transmit for publication an outline
tor group study of the subject of women in industry.
Phe Women’s Bureau receives many requests for material on gain­
fully-employed women, arranged in such form as to be used easily for
group study or for meetings. Since a wider knowledge among or­
ganizations of American women of the conditions and problems of
women m industry is of great importance, this outline, originally
published in 1931, revised in 1935, has again been brought up to date
onr account ol the changes in matters affecting women.
The outline is the work of Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, chief of the
research division. This revision has been prepared by Rachel Fesler
Nyswander, of the research division.
Respectfully submitted.
tt
t-,
T.
Mary Anderson, Director.
Hon. Frances Perkins,
Secretary of Labor.
Madam:




v




1

FOREWORD
This bulletin has been prepared in response to a request for matonal m such form as to be used easily by study groups of certain
organizations that desire to obtain information on the employment of
women and the general conditions under which they work.
Ten aspects of the subject have been considered separately. Each
of these is divided into four brief statements, to be read and discussed
by four persons taking part in a meeting devoted to one phase of
the subject.
While this material will be all that is desired in some groups, the
ingenuity of others will suggest further study. For this reason a
few additional sources of information are suggested, with the idea
that the leader or presiding officer for the day or period may select
further readings or may read more widely and prepare some ab­
stract of the material it is desired to present.
With practically every number here included, certain of the
Womens Bureau bulletins will be found especially helpful for use
in the selection of additional reading references or in the prepara­
tion of further material by the leader and those appropriate to each
number will be suggested. .
The Women’s Bureau is not in a position to distribute its bulletins
m unlimited quantities, but it will furnish without charge a copy or
two for executive officers of club groups. Additional copies of
Women s Bureau bulletins can be purchased at a nominal price from
the Superintendent of Documents, Government Printing Office Washbidletin ' G*’ priceS may be ascertained from the appendix’of this
The suggested bibliography that follows makes no effort to be
complete or even very long but attempts merely to include a few of
the more popular works that may be especially interesting or help­
ful. Ihe Women’s Bureau does not furnish the books listed and
tliese must be secured from their publishers, or from libraries. State
organizations taking up the study would do well to purchase a few
copies for lending to readers at points where these cannot be obtained
from local libraries.




VII

LIST OF REFERENCES’

I. Bulletins of the United States Women’s Bureau. (Those appropriate for
each subject are listed thereunder.) See also the periodical published by
the Women’s Bureau: The Woman Worker.
II. Books.
Abbott, Edith. Women in Industry. D. Appleton & Co., New York. 1924.
American Woman’s Association.
The Trained Woman and the Economic Crisis (1929 earnings). Idol;
Women Workers Through the Depression, 1934.
Beard, Charles A. Editor. Whither Mankind. Longmans, Green & Co.,
New York. 1928.
„
..
Beard, Mary It. Editor. America Through Women s Eyes. The Macmil­
lan Co., New York. 1933.
Bent, Silas. Machine Made Man. Farrar & Rinehart, New York. 1930.
Branch, Mary Sydney. Women and Wealth. The University of Chicago
Press, Chicago. 1934.
Breckinridge, S. P. Women in the Twentieth Century. McGraw-Hill
^
Book Co., New York. 1933.
Chase, Stuart. Men and Machines. The Macmillan Co., New York.
1929T
Commons, John R., and John B. Andrews. Principles of Labor Legis­
lation. Harper and Brothers, New York. 193(5 ed.
Groves, Ernest R. The American Woman. Greenberg, New York. 1937.
Henry, Alice. The Trade Union Woman. D. Appleton & Co., New York.
1915; Women and the Labor Movement. George H. Doran Co., New
York. 1923.
^
„
LaFollette, Cecile Tipton. A Study of the Problems of 652 GainfullyEmployed Married Woman Homemakers. Teachers College, Columbia
University, New York. 1934.
Stouffer, Samuel A., and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Research Memorandum
on the Family in the Depression. Social Science Research Council.
Bui. 29, 1937. ‘
Wiese, Mildred J„ and Ruth Reticker. The Modern Worker. The Mac­
millan Co., New York. 1930.
.
Wolfson, Theresa. The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions. Inter­
national Publishers, New York. 1926.1
1 It is suggested that the State organization buy a few copies to lend to local groups
where public library facilities are not available.
VIII




WOMEN IN INDUSTRY
A SERIES OF PAPERS TO AID STUDY GROUPS
I. THE WORK OF THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN1
(a) How she went to work and what she does.
Woman’s work is one of the oldest things in the world as we
know it. From long before the dawn of written history the evi­
dence of cave and burial place gives mute testimony to the patient
labor of feminine hands. In the earliest days of human association
of any permanent sort it was the woman around whom the little
family group revolved.
When, machines and factories came into being, the second follow­
ing closely upon the heels of the first, a great part of the former oc­
cupations of the home went out of it. It was no longer good econ­
omy to hand-weave the family clothing when power looms could
make the cloth so much faster and, in most instances, so much more
cheaply. Woman changed in a few short years from producer to
consumer, and her husband’s income dwindled accordingly. In the
old days she, as well as he, had been in truth a wealth creator. Now
she must pay out the money he earned for the purchase of things
that formerly she made. And his earning capacity did not increase
at a sumcient rate to bridge the gap thus formed, nor could it keep
pace with the rising cost of living.
In most countries, in consequence, as in the United States, the
women, whether producers or consumers, were forced to follow their
old jobs out of the home and into the factory. They became again
producers beside their husbands, but now in the additional capacity
of wage earner and, in most instances, carrying a double burden
because they could no longer combine their two jobs into the one
continuous performance of running their households.
In the United States, according to the census of 1930, there were
over 10,700,000 women workers gainfully employed. There are few
occupations in which no woman ever has worked. In 12 manufac­
turing industries women operatives and laborers outnumbered men
m both 1920 and 1930. These include the clothing industries as a
whole, silk mills, knitting mills, cigar and tobacco factories, and
candy making.
Having blazed the trail of remunerative employment outside the
home, women have stopped short at practically no type of work
although many of the jobs they perform are similar to tasks that’
U/UAwUT’S o'11!?!*118, °h
Women’s Bureau will be of Interest in connection with
1/nf Tu?le<rw.Yv3’ S.ta2dards f°r tjje Employment of Women in Industry. 1928; No.
,
P™Fe8s Of Women, 1910 to 1930. 1933; No. 115, Women at
ptlch11* 1937 N
155, Women ln the Economy-of the United States of America.




1

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

women had for ages been responsible for in the home. Now that we
have outlived the era when the slogan “Woman’s place is the home”
was at the height of its popularity, women are found in occupations
that not so long ago were unheard of or undreamed of as possible
and practical ways for women to earn a livelihood.
Four or five decades ago the girl in business was a curiosity, a
woman doctor or lawyer was an object of prejudice, and the woman
professor was scoffed at as a bluestocking. In this country today
are thousands of women in such vocations. There are even women
who are managers and superintendents of factories, bankers and
bank officials, chemists, inventors, engineers, architects, and judges.
There are women chauffeurs, draymen, teamsters and expressmen,
garage laborers, switchmen and flagmen on steam railroads, ticket
and station agents, telegraph messengers, steam and street railway
laborers, and large numbers of women working as telephone and
telegraph operators; and there are enormous numbers of women in
other ranks, working in factories that make cloth, garments, shoes,
cigarettes, and countless other articles.
In almost every factory where men work there are some women
employed, and in some kinds of establishments there are many more
women than men. In the clothing industry as a whole and in corsets,
shirts, collars and cuffs, gloves, and certain other branches, in 1930
there were more than twice as many women employed as men, and m
knitting mills, and cigar and tobacco factories, there were nearly
twice as many women as men.




I. THE WORK OF THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN—Contd.
(b) The number of women employed.
The census of 1930 showed more than 10.700,000 women gainfully
occupied on April 1 of that year. This is an enormous increase over
the number so engaged on January 1, 1920—26 percent, which wTas
much greater than had been expected. Nevertheless, of all the
women m the country who were 10 years old or over, only a little
more than one-fifth were gainfully occupied, and of every nine em­
ployed persons seven were men.
It is of interest to see what types of work have been engaging
women to the greatest extent. Of every 10 women employed in 1930
3 were m domestic and personal service, very nearly 2 were in
clerical pursuits, something less than 2 in manufacturing, more than
1 in professional work. This accounts for 8 women or somethin^
over, and the occupations of the remaining 2 were scattered, with
the largest numbers in trade and in agriculture and the group next
m size, that called by the census “transportation and communica­
tion, the greatest woman occupation there being that of telephone
operator.
^
When the last census was taken (1930), only a small proportion
ol all the women m paid jobs were in pursuits not followed by women
for many years. The largest woman-employing occupation was that
classified by the census as “servant,” the next was the teaching
profession, and stenographers and typists came third.
Among the various States, the proportional increase in the em­
ployment of women was greatest in California, where there were 94
percent more women so occupied in 1930 than in 1920. Florida
came next with 76 percent, then Arizona with 63 percent, and there
were increases of between 40 and 50 percent in Oregon, New Mexico
Michigan, West Virginia, and New Jersey. The smallest gains—
less than 2 percent—were in South Carolina and New Hanipshire
and fewer than 10 percent were added to woman employment in
Arkansas, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Georgia, and Rhode
If we go back to 1910 to get a 20-year view, we find that in agri­
cultural pursuits, which have employed very many women, their
number has declined greatly. The same is true of mining, in which
tew women are at work. In every other group, however, women have
made great strides. In fact, their numbers have trebled in clerical
occupations and in public service (a relatively small group) and
more than doubled in trade, the professions, and transportation and
communication.
Among the occupations in which men have increased in number
more rapidly than women in the 20 years prior to 1930 are those of
farm laborers, factory foremen, janitors and cleaners, semiskilled
work in chemical, electrical, paper, and certain textile factories and



3

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

the skilled or professional pursuits of tailoring, certain occupations in
the printing trades, musicians and music teachers, and artists,_ sculp­
tors, and art teachers. Women have gained over men in certain jobs
such as they have long held in some of the semiskilled manufacturing
processes. They have gained also as stenographers and typists, book­
keepers and cashiers, office clerks, telephone operators, waitresses,
and operatives in clothing, tobacco, clay, glass and stone, shoe, candy,
and automobile plants. They also show greater increases than men
as actors, as college professors, as keepers of hotels, restaurants,
boarding and lodging houses, as real-estate agents, and as barbers and
hairdressers. The period showed fewer women but more men becom­
ing physicians and osteopaths.
It is significant, however, that census figures for the period 1900 to
1930 indicate that it was not after the world depression began that
women formed the largest proportions of the total employed in certain
of the most outstanding woman-employing industries and occupations.
For example, in all manufacturing and mechanical industries as a
whole, women formed the largest proportion of employees in 1900; this
same year shows this true for servants and waitresses, for cotton
manufacture and knitting mills. In textiles as a whole, in paper
and printing, and in electrical machinery and supplies, it was in 1910
that women formed the largest proportion of those employed.




I. THE WORK OF THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN—Contd.
(c) What work in the factory means.
Mary van Kleeck, the first director of the Woman in Industry
Service of the United States Department of Labor, in describing,
what industry means to women workers, lias said:
14 seems to me that it means three things that we should emphasize here.
First, it represents a chance to earn a living; how good a one it offers can
he discussed later. Second, industry has constituted for women what one might
call an endurance test. Third, it is an opportunity for women to join in the
constructive upbuilding of a better order.

In the industrial world where women are engaged in an almost
bewildering variety of occupations, there is a great deal of specializa­
tion. In fact, industrial processes have become so specialized that
one person is seldom able to complete an entire article. It takes about
150 different operations to make a shoe, which used to be made entirely
by one person’s hands. Many other products of industry are sub­
divided almost as much in the process of manufacture. Consequently,
today great groups of women make but one part of one thing or per­
form one little operation, doing the same thing over and over and over
again. For example, a woman will do nothing but stitch cuffs on
sleeves, piling them up rapidly—850 pairs a day. Or she may work
intensively feeding and keeping up with a machine that cuts thou­
sands of tin disks during her 9-hour schedule. Monotony of work
has increased with subdivision in industry and the loss of craftsman­
ship. This development has been almost inevitable. Women are
not given the same trade training and opportunities as are men, and
so they are the ones who perform the most repetitious jobs and upon
whom the burden of monotony falls most heavily.
Scientific study has indicated that what would be classed as light
work may become, where continuously repeated, more damaging physi­
cally and psychically than heavier work which affords some oppor­
tunity for variety. Speed, complexity of machinery, monotony of
job, and noise seem necessarily to be associated with our modern
industrial life. Since these causes of strain are with us to stay, the
problem becomes one of planning hour schedules and other conditions
of work so as to reduce the amount of fatigue.
Additional reading: From Women’s Bureau Bulletin 115.




Women at Work.
5




/

I. THE WORK OF THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN—Contd.
(d) Early industrial work of women in this country.
I lie member assigned to this section of the program should secure,
if possible, Women in Industry, by Edith Abbott. The suggested
readings from which she can select are as follows:
Ch. I. The Colonial Period.
Ch. V. The Early Field of Employment [1808-1840],
Ch. VII. Early Hill-Operatives; Conditions of Life and Work.




7




■

II. THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD IN WHICH WOMEN WORK
(a) Changing civilizations.
Many aspects of the age we live in are difficult to understand.
Rapid changes are taking place in some communities, and these stand
side by side with others where changes are less rapid and culture ap­
parently is more stable. But the developments of today proceed on a
large scale, and improved means of transportation and communica­
tion have carried us along so fast that the quick succession of changes
in important centers often produces profound effects upon localities
that are smaller and quite distant from the real causes of change.
In his introduction to a collection of articles by a number of
thinkers who are trying to understand modern life, Charles A. Beard,
formerly a professor at Columbia University, New York, classifies
civilizations into three types: The agricultural, which may be slave,
feudal, peasant, or freehold; the premachine urban, which includes
handicraft and mercantile pursuits and political capitals; and the
mechanical and scientific, such as is found in our great industrial
cities. The last-mentioned type of civilization he further explains as
follows:
* * * machine civilization * * * differs from all others in that it
is highly dynamic, containing within itself the seeds of constant reconstruction.
Everywhere agricultural civilizations of the premachine age have changed
only slowly with the fluctuations of markets, the fortunes of governments, and
the vicissitudes of knowledge, keeping their basic institutions intact from
century to century. Premachine urban civilizations have likewise retained
their essential characteristics through long lapses of time. But machine
civilization based on technology, science, invention, and expanding markets
must of necessity change—and rapidly. The order of steam is hardly estab­
lished before electricity invades it; electricity hardly gains a fair start before
the internal combustion engine overtakes it. There has never been anywhere
in the world any order comparable with it, and all analogies drawn from the
middle ages, classical antiquity, and the Orient are utterly inapplicable to its
potentialities, offering no revelations as to its future.2

An interesting contrast between an agricultural and handicraft
civilization and a civilization of the machine age is given in a com­
parison made by Stuart Chase of life among the Mexican Indians
with that which is developed when machines are introduced. He
says in part:
* * * Houses are built of local materials, clothing is largely home grown
and spun, food comes from the neighboring fields and groves, recreation is a
local product in which all participate, while over the whole economic process
broods a spirt of authentic craftsmanship giving rise to some of the loveliest
pottery, glasswork, masonry, and weaving which the world knows. Nobody has
much; a bad harvest may cause real suffering; you and I would be pro-* 1
1 the following bulletins of the Women’s Bureau will be of interest In connection with
tins subject: No. 104, The Occupational Progress of Women, 1910 to 1930 19:13 • aim
No. 115, Women at Work. 1934.
1 Whither Mankind : A Panorama of Modern Civilization. Edited hy Charles A. Beard
and containing articles by 16 other modern thinkers. Longmans, Green & Co New York
1928, p. 15.
’
83139°—38----- 2




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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

foundly uncomfortable adjusting our bathroom, steam-heat, butter-plate com­
plexes to actual living in one of these villages; but there is enough to go
around, in the basic biological sense of the term, leisure to enjoy life, economic
independence within the exigencies of climate and food supply * * *.
Now let us perform a drastic and—mindful of these kindly Indians—a some­
what ghastly surgical operation. Let us graft upon this community the technic
which James Watt set in motion when he solved the problem of the steam
engine a century and a half ago. Invested capital comes sweeping into the
country and with it interest, profits, and wages. Corporations spring like
mushrooms. A lumber company takes over the forest and fuel supply. Con­
tractors undertake the building of houses. Mining concerns exploit the silver,
copper, and gold of the surrounding mountains. Factories proceed to the
manufacture of textiles, agricultural implements, boots and shoes. * * *
Self-sufficiency lies in ruins; the region is clamped into world machine econ­
omy, drawing its supplies of physical goods from the five continents and
supplies of credit from New York and London.
The Indians will have a higher standard of living, more things, and a
perplexing amount of new kinds of trouble. They cease to direct their own
economic destinies and go to work for a boss. Money wages supplant their
sometime more direct means of subsistence. From diversification they turn
to specialization; from cottage craftsmanship to work on the assembly line
or in the machine shop.3
3 Chase, Stuart.
pp. 130—131.

The Nemesis of American Business.




Harper’s Magazine, July 1030,

II. THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD IN WHICH WOMEN
W ORK—Continued
(b) Effects of the introduction of machinery.
In America the machine age began to have a decided effect in the
sixties. Mass production got firmly under way about the beginning
of the present century. Since 1899 energy has grown twice as fast
as population.
The development of an industrial era has had many and varied
effects, and has changed the whole fabric of human existence in
countless ways, the ramifications of which often are difficult to un­
tangle and to understand; it has intensified its joys and magnified its
evils.
For example, large-scale manufacture has meant excessive con­
centration into urban areas, with consequent congested living condi­
tions. The census of 1930 shows that in many States the proportional
increase in the population of the chief industrial cities has far outrun
the corresponding increase in the population of the State as a whole.
Side by side with this effect have come developments in transpor­
tation and communication that are among the marvels of the times.
Thousands of workers and their families can travel distances more
vast and view scenes more manifold than the people of a century
ago ever could have dreamed of. The perfection of certain types
of machinery has resulted in eliminating whole categories of heavy
labor under which human beings formerly were subjected to incessant
slavery.
The former labor supply was inclined to be immobile and the
earlier processes of living proceeded at a somewhat leisurely tempo;
but a myriad of changes have come with such speed that it fre­
quently has proven difficult—sometimes quite impossible—to adjust
an economic system, a set of business practices; and a method of
living to these new conditions with sufficient rapidity to prevent the
occurrence to large numbers of people of serious and sometimes longcontinued hardships of various types. The many benefits have been
followed too frequently by evils that are taking much time, careful
planning, and continuous effort to reduce them.
Certain favorable attributes of the machine age are given by one of
our keen thinkers as follows: A shortening of hours in the day (per­
haps not in the year, as there formerly were more fetes and holidays) ;
a raising of real wages; a lowering 'of prices; and an improving of
the social and political status of the worker. The unfavorable attri­
butes he lists as—initiation of repetitive labor, which tends to reduce
to a dead level of uniformity; production of cheap, plentiful, and
uniform commodities, frequently with the sacrifice of quality and
variety; creation of a tendency toward some class antagonism; en­
couragement of wastefulness, since products are made for sale rather
than for use and are made for cheapness rather than for lasting



11

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

qualities.4 He adds that the machine age found the masses of men
living upon the land and has herded them into cities; it made peas­
ants, serfs, domestics, and artisans alike into wage earners; it super­
seded the medieval guilds and drove the descendants of the artisans
into factories, stores, and offices; it found the intellectuals living
on the bounty of wealthy and powerful patrons and it evolved a
class of persons who capitalize their wits, commercialize their tal­
ents, or engage in work within the bounds set by modern business;
it found a ruthless hereditary aristocracy ruling and replaced them
by more impersonal capitalists.
Two effects of machine civilization on the lives of the workers
deserve especial emphasis: The loss of economic independence and
the loss of joy in an expert completed task. In regard to the first,
Stuart Chase says:
When the workman left his cottage and his shop for the factory he lost his
economic independence. He gave up his own tools and operated tools owned
by somebody else. He ceased to control his own time and his own job. So
long as the force which owns the factory has no interest in labor save as a
commodity, the workman is distinctly worse off than before.6

As to the second point, loss of the satisfaction that grows from a
completed work well done, two writers may be quoted. Prof. John
R. Commons has said in substance that—
In general it is fair to say that the factory system has depressed the economic
status of artisans and elevated the position of laborers. The experiences of the
shoemakers illustrate this. The extension of markets and the gradual adoption
of machinery both tended to degrade the quality of the work done by journey­
men cobblers. Prices were reduced in a competitive market and artisans
found themselves in an impossible rivalry with factory-made goods and with
the products of semiskilled workers who were able and willing to live at a
lower standard. Machinery hastened the process of substituting laborers for
artisans.

On the same point Stuart Chase says:
* * * the old artisan saw the product of his skill culminating immediately
before his eyes. Satisfaction came as he worked. The modern designer may
not see the tangible product of his labor for months; indeed, may never see it.
Satisfaction is delayed or completely thwarted. Similarly much specialized
work of the highest skill is only one tiny part of a great process, and often
the worker has no picture' of the whole process or where his task tits into it.
The machine has thus operated to split the psychological unity of work and
result and to take away a greater or lesser amount of the craftsman’s completed
satisfaction.* 1
\ConAe,?sed from: Borsodi’ Ralph. This Ugly Civilization. Simon & Schuster, New
York, 1929.
1 Chase, Stuart. Men and Machines. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1929, p. .'129.




II. THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD IN WHICH WOMEN
WORK—Continued
.
(c) Relation of women workers to the machine age.
In the development of the machine age women took their part,
and they followed the industries out of the home and into the factory.
The transition had a profound effect upon the whole position of
women. The real change for them was not the work itself but the
manner in which the work was performed and the change from an
unpaid occupation to a paid one. In other words, with the develop­
ment of the factory system women were transformed from the bread­
winner taken for granted in the home to the paid breadwinner
outside the home.
The skills of the earlier age gave way to new skills. Handwork
included spinning, weaving, woodworking, pottery making, glass
blowing, and the household arts. But the new skills are mainly such
as have not belonged primarily to women—for example, engine driv­
ing, track inspecting, garage work, prospecting and drilling, steel
construction. Other new skills woman has more readily acquired,
although they differed vastly from her former pursuits—for example,
stenography, telephone and telegraph operating, machine-printing
work, medical science, laboratory research.
In relation to her household tasks, an industrial age produces many
devices for lightening labor and simplifying life. These include
such things as vacuum cleaners, refrigerators (electric or other type),
sewing machines, canned food, and many other appliances and com­
modities that lighten household labor. It must be remembered,
however, that many women must go outside the home to earn money,
and if the labor of the wage-earning days is too exhausting, the added
work that must be done at home may be, despite the new labor savers,
a greater burden than it was in the years when the entire life of
women was lived at home under the old conditions. Furthermore,
there are many wage-earning women who can afford to buy but few
of the labor-saving devices.
Stuart Chase outlines three stages through which factory machines
have progressed:
First, they supplied more power to the skilled worker. They increased his
output but left his job substantially unchanged.
Second, they subdivided the manufacturing process, allowing unskilled or
semiskilled workers to feed them, remove the output, and carry on the few
repetitive motions which their tending required. * * *
Third, they replaced the unskilled worker with their own steel fingers, doing
the feeding, processing, packaging, themselves. The skilled man comes back
into the picture as inspector, repairer, adjuster of delicate controls. His job
is interesting, nonrepetitive, requires intelligence.

It is the second and least satisfying of these stages that makes
up the bulk of the work of women in factories today. When women
go from the home to the factory they become peculiarly liable to



13

14

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

industrial exploitation. The industries in which they first tend to
be employed are likely to pay very little. Unaccustomed to price
scales outside the home, unfamiliar with the new life, unconnected
with organizations that could educate and benefit, the woman worker
has neither the knowledge nor the facilities to secure adequate pay
and safe work conditions. Low wages and poor conditions go hand
in hand. It is for this reason that, although much is being done in
some places to improve the work surroundings for women and to pro­
vide for them conditions making for health, they still too often are
subject to the earlier conditions described by Mr. Chase as follows:
* * * The initial effect of the machine age was to hurt the worker
physically and mentally. It killed him, maimed him, infected, poisoned, and
above all bored him as perhaps no other culture has ever done. This effect
still obtains in altogether too many areas, particularly in countries which are
just developing the factory system and in backward regions of highly mecha­
nized nations.8

In summing up the rapid movement in this new age, Professor
Beard has this to say:
* * * Science and the machine have changed the face of the earth, the
ways of men and women on it, and our knowledge of nature and mankind.
They break down barriers before us and thrust us out into infinity. Not even
the Living Buddha escapes their impact, for ships, railways, motors, and air­
planes carry visitors to disturb the calm of his contemplation. * * * Old
rules of politics and law, religion and sex, art and letters—the whole domain
of culture—must yield or break before the inexorable pressure of science and
the machine. Women, perhaps even more than men, find it difficult to steer by
ancient headlands. Accustomed by long necessity to functions that conserve
life, they suddenly discover that the modes of conservation are multiplied by
science and the machine into endless complexity. * * *
* * * [But] by understanding more clearly the processes of science and
the machine mankind may subject the scattered and perplexing things of this
world into a more ordered dominion of the spirit.’
* Chase, Stuart. Men and Machines. The Macmillan Co., New York, 1929, p. 166.
"• Whither Mankind : A Panorama of Modern Civilization.
Edited by Charles A. Beard
and containing articles by 16 other modern thinkers. Longmans, Green & Co., New York,
1928, pp. 403-404.




II. THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD IN WHICH WOMEN
W ORK—Continued
(d) Lives of the workers in the machine age.
With the growth of the present era of machinery and large-scale
production there came for many workers extreme specialization in
their tasks, the strain of speed in carrying out their operations, and
the monotony of continuous rapid performance of one process. As
one writer puts it:
* * * the impersonal beat of machinery has made demands, never before
approximated, upon the men and women who serve it. In the textile industry,
for example, the rate of production is determined by the speed of ma­
chines. * * * Human beings are subordinated * * * to the motion of
machinery.8

A brief paragraph from Stuart Chase in regard to some of the
activities in Henry Ford’s factory illustrates the extreme speciali­
zation that takes place in most modern industries:
The chassis-assembly line of Mr. Ford goes (or did for model T) at the rate
of (5 feet a minute. It contains 45 stations or operations. At station No. 1
mudguard brackets are fastened to the frame; at station 10 the motor is
installed. The man who puts on a bolt does not put on its nut; the man who
puts on the nut does not screw it home. At station 34 the motor receives its
gasoline. At 44 the radiator is filled with water; at 45 the finished car arrives
in John Street.

The effect of such work tends to take away the worker’s pride in
his individual job. As Mr. Borsodi has said in substance:
The factory makes it almost impossible for individual workmen to develop
their own personalities; condemns those capable of creative effort to repetitive
work.
The modern worker is a creature of routine, which changes hardly at all
from day to day and from year to year, a cog in huge factory systems of pro­
duction and distribution.

Or to quote from another writer along similar lines:
* * * the machine is opposed to individuality. It is ruthless, routine,
patterned, and precise. It has no use for many of the qualities and attributes
of man, who created it. It has no way to employ that enthusiasm and effer­
vescent imagination which were the wellsprings of its invention.

Along the same lines Arthur Dakin, principal of the Baptist col­
lege in Bristol, England, said in a recent address:
* * * Years ago a man’s work was probably next to the home the greatest
single factor in the development of personality. Today it is not so. For one
thing, the nature of work has changed. It no longer brings the same satis­
factions. It leaves parts of personality entirely without exercise, and, more­
over, often the higher parts of personality. In many situations, for example,
only a minimum call is made upon a man’s judgment. The reasoning processes
are scarcely required at all. Thousands are never called upon to make any
decision or to display any sort of initiative, with the result that work has
8 Chenery. William L.
1922, p. 153.




Industry and Human Welfare.

The Macmillan Co., New York,

15

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

16

become less vitally connected witli character, and consequently it is in the
leisure hours especially that the development of personality must be cared for.

Long hours of the sort of monotonous work required in many
women’s jobs in factories today leave the worker weary and lacking
in initiative.
* * * A recent study of the Psychological Institute of Paris concludes that
adding machines and other calculating devices constitute a distinct danger to
the nervous system if operated for more than two hours a day. A picked
number of intelligent girls were given monotonous cross-stitching work. They
learned quickly and their initial output was very large. After a while, how­
ever, it fell below the output of the girl of average Intelligence. They had
been slowly bored to inactivity.
R. L. Cruden, analyzing labor conditions in Detroit, concludes that “monotony
* * * stifles initiative and may operate as an industrial boomerang. Men
with alert minds report that after eight hours of it they can not settle down
to read or to think.” They must find some emotionally violent form of escape
in jazz, gin, the movies, tabloid murders, cross-country motoring.

Perhaps it was instinctive for the members of the premachine age
to resent the rapidly changing times, but their opposition could not,
delay the march of the machine age. A celebrated American poet,
Stephen Vincent Benet, has thus described the light against the
advent of the newer times put up by one group:
They shot the railway train when it first came,
And when the Fords first came, they shot the Fords.
It could not save them. They are dying now
Of being educated, which is the same.
One need not weep romantic tears for them,
But when the last moonshiner buys his radio,
And the last, lost, wild-rabbit of a girl
Is civilized with a mail-order dress,
Something will pass that was American
And all the movies will not bring it back.

To the frequently sordid pictures of what too often has happened
to the worker with the introduction of machinery, there is hope of
the relief that can be supplied by improving the conditions of work
and life, by understanding the needs of new situations, by the action
of informed public opinion, wise legislation, and more effective
management to prevent abuses. Mr. Chase sounds an optimistic
note as to the present age:
* * « The life of any modern individual is theoretically open to more
variety, but practically may be less varied, than that of an Individual in other
cultures. The machine is probably the greatest destroyer of standards which
the world has ever seen. The temporary standards which have sprung up to
All the gap are all too often ugly and unpleasant. But there is no certainty
that they will last. Indeed, the only certainty is constant change, so long as
technology maintains its present pace.

*

*

*

*

*

*

* * * [But] Ask the traveler if he would prefer to live out his years in
the Wales of the eighteenth century, or as a citizen of the modern British
Empire. Unless he is an incurable sentimentalist he will prefer the varied
life of the modern man to the limitations of the premachine man.




III. MARRIED WOMEN WORKERS 1
(a) The number of married women gainfully employed.
According to the 1930 census, there were in that year over 3,000,000
married women workers. This means that only slightly over 1 mar­
ried woman in 10 is gainfully occupied, though well over 3 in 10
widowed and divorced women and 5 in every 10 single women are
so employed.
It must be pointed out that the 1920 census publications classed
widowed and divorced women and those with status unknown in
the group with single women, so that it was not possible to ascer­
tain the total number of women workers who had been married.
For tbe 1930 census, two groups of matrons were reported: One
includes married women living with their husbands, the other com­
prises those widowed and divorced. Single women formed another
group, but in this were thrown all those whose marital status was not
reported.
It is significant to consider what occupations married women have
entered in the greatest numbers. More than one-third of them are
in domestic and personal service, practically one-fifth in manufac­
turing, over one-tenth each in clerical work and in trade, and nearly
one-tenth in the professions and in agriculture, the remainder being
scattered.
Since almost two-thirds of the gainfully-occupied married women
were found in manufacturing and mechanical industries, domestic
and personal service, and agriculture—types of work in which
women have almost no opportunity for a career—it would appear
that the chief reason they have sought such employment lies in the
demands of economic necessity. Indeed, this point cannot be too
frequently emphasized, since many studies show how customary it
has become for married women to be responsible for the total or
partial support of others. This is even more true in a time of wide­
spread unemployment, and in very many cases the married woman
has had to go to work because the man wage earner in the family
has lost his job and is not able to obtain employment.
Of all women gainfully occupied in the United States, the census
of 1930 shows us that only about 29 percent were married, about 17
percent widowed or divorced. A decided majority of all such em­
ployed women were single.
Many surveys testify further to the fact that the married woman
often bears a heavy share in the support of the family. For ex­
ample, an unemployment census made in Philadelphia in 1931
showed that over 9,500 families had no earned income whatever
except that obtained by the employment of the married woman,
whose husband might be an invalid or among the jobless.1
1 The following publications of the Women's Bureau will be of interest in connection
with this subject: Bui. 75, What the Wage-Earning Woman Contributes to Family Sup­
port, 1929 ; No. 155, WTomen in the Economy of the United States of America. ’ pt. I,
ch. 4. 1937 ; and Effects of Dismissing Married Persons from the Civil Service. March
1936 (Mimeog.). See also LaFollette, Cecile T. A Study of the Problems of 652
Employed Married Women Homemakers. Teachers College, Columbia University, 1934.




17




III. MARRIED WOMEN WORKERS—Continued
(b) The responsibility of married women for family support.
Readings from-Women’s Bureau Bulletin 75, What the Wage-Earning Woman
Contributes to Family Support.
Read on pages 6-7—Inadequacy of Men’s Wages.
Read on pages 10-11—Contributions by Women.
See also Women’s Bureau Bulletin No. 155, Women in the Economy of the
United States of America, pt. I, ch. 4.

The gainful employment of the married woman is a part of the
whole problem of economic change. Dr. Gwendolyn Hughes Berry,
author of Mothers in Industry, explains this, and gives instances
showing the necessity for women to help to support the family, as
follows:
With the growth of towns and the development of the factory system, how­
ever, production by women and children in the home has been greatly reduced.
The husband’s contribution to family support, meantime, has changed from
commodities ready for immediate consumption to money wages. Whether the
money income earned by the father is less or greater than his former contribu­
tion in kind is not known. The fact remains that while he did not support the
family alone during the period of household production, it is tacitly assumed
by those who question the employment of mothers that his money wage should
today support both him and his family.
* * * As her duties in the home are cut down, the mother’s economic
function is becoming specialized outside the home. * * *
The struggle to live on the husband’s wage alone, in most industrial families,
is a failure. A canvass of nearly 12,000 families in six industrial sections of
Philadelphia in 1918 showed that the majority, 55 percent, relied on income
from other wage earners or from lodgers. Only 6 percent of this entire group
was of the conventional statistical type, husband, wife, and three children
under 16 years of age, supported by the husband alone.
Families not supported by the father alone, as a rule, turn first to the wages
of children (18.6 percent), next to the wages of the wife (17.7 percent), and
third to income from lodgers (15.9 percent). This canvass of almost 12,000
homes showed that in only 7.5 percent of the total number was more than one
of these sources of supplementary income utilized.
He

*****

*

“Why did you go back to work after you were married?” was one of the
questions put to a group of 728 working mothers in Philadelphia. “My hus­
band wasn’t making enough,” answered the largest group (29 percent) ; “My
husband was dead,” came next (22 percent) ; followed by “My husband was
sick” (14 percent) ; “He left me” (13 percent) ; “He couldn’t support me” (11
percent) ; and “I’d rather work” (11 percent).
These answers show clearly the measure of success which has met the hus­
band’s attempts at supporting his family. The great majority of these wives,
under varying degrees of economic pressure, undertook the partial or entire
support of their families while the husband was living.2

Further testimony to the economic need of the married woman is
shown in a small study published by the Women’s Bureau of two
groups of married women who applied for jobs in Denver.
In the first group were reported 345 women who had applied to
the Young Women’s Christian Association. Of those giving reasons,
2 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.




May 1929, pp. 316,

20

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

90 percent were forced to work by economic necessity. Among the
causes given were these: The fact that the husband was dead, that he
was unemployed or in irregular work, that he was in prison, that he
was divorced, separated, or deserting, that his earnings were inade­
quate, that some financial emergency had occurred in the family.
The other group comprised 103 women who had applied for jobs in
a large department store in the city. Of these, 86 reported economic:
necessity as the reason for needing work.
An earlier study of 843 Chicago mothers published by the United
States Children’s Bureau showed that for nearly 70 percent of them
the father’s support was withdrawn from the family, through death,
desertion, illness, or some other reason, and for another 12 percent
his earnings were irregular through seasonal employment or some
other cause. Over one-fifth of these families had four or more chil­
dren.
In 132 families whose total year’s income was reported, the budget
for the year outran the entire family income in nearly half the cases.
In families not sending children to day nurseries, 45 percent of the
children were cared for by neighbors or by some relative other than
the parents while the mother was at work, but for more than onefourth of them no provision for care was made, and almost one-fourth
of those looked after by other relatives were in the care of older
sisters, most of whom were under 18. The family situation was un­
fortunate no less for mothers than for children. One-tliird of the
women reporting had all their own housework to do in addition to
their gainful employment, while a similar number did it with the
help of the children, and mother after mother spoke of being worn
out or “tired all the time.” Over one-third of the children attending
school had been absent 30 or more half days, and cases were reported
of delinquency arising from the necessary neglect.3
More recent surveys show the family situation still operating as
the incentive for married women to work. For example, in a study
of gainfully-employed married women homemakers it was found that
19 percent of the husbands were unemployed, 6 percent of them
earned less than $1,000, and 25 percent earned between $1,000 and
$2 000 • furthermore, 62 percent of the women here reported had de­
pendents. A survey made in 1935 in New York City of employed
women on relief showed that 86 percent of the domestic workers
with dependents were married, widowed, or divorced women. Simi­
larly, among beauty-shop employees reported in New York State m
1936, 33 percent of the women with dependents were married. Mar­
ried women at work in professional fields frequently are sharing m
the support of dependents, as is shown in studies made by the Na­
tional Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs and
the American Woman’s Association of New York.
a IT S Department of Labor. Children's Bureau. Publication No. 102, Children of
Wage-Earning Mothers, by Helen Russell Wright. 1922. See also LnFollette, Ceeile T.
A Study of the Problems of 652 Employed Married Women Homemakers. Teachers
College, Columbia University, 1934.




III. MARRIED WOMEN WORKERS—Continued
(c) The double duties of married women workers.
There are some people who believe that women go into stores, fac­
tories, and mills because they prefer that kind of labor to housework.
If those theorists could take a peep into the homes of most wage­
earning women, they would discover these same women after long
hours of industrial work toiling in the home, at the stove, or over
the dishpan, washtub, or sewing machine. Housework must be done
before and after factory work each day, even though women must
get up at a very early morning hour and go to bed at midnight.
In a radio address, Mary Anderson, director of the Women’s
Bureau, has said:
Because in the neighborhood there may be a family in which both a man and
his wife work, perhaps drawing very good salaries, this does not mean that all
the married women who are working have husbands drawing good salaries or
that they are only working to earn better clothes, a new car, or a radio.
That this is not true, the findings of the Women’s Bureau have clearly shown.
The majority of the married women who are working are so employed because
their wages are actually necessary for the support of the home and family.
The figures collected by the Bureau in scientifically conducted investigations
show that to support a family even at a level of mere decency requires more
than the income obtained by hundreds of thousands of wage-earning fathers and
husbands today.

The records of all the employed women in one industrial city as
taken in the census of 1920 were studied by the Women’s Bureau, and
it was found that about half of the women who were breadwinners
were married women. There were more than 4,000 married women
earning money in this one community. When examined closely,
the records of these 4,000 married women disclosed something that
seems very important. Nearly two-thirds of them were mothers who
had children less than 5 years old. It was found that about half
these mothers of young children earned money at home by taking in
boarders or doing laundry or some other form of work that did not
oblige them to leave home, so that they could care for the children
and work at the same time. But the other half went out to work and
spent their days in mills making woolen and worsted cloth and in
factories making handkerchiefs and other articles.
Agents visited as many of these families as they could and found
among every five women one who was working at night and looking
out for her children during the daytime and one who just left the
children alone at home to look out for each other. Sometimes the
father worked at night and cared for the children in the daytime
while their mother was away, and sometimes the neighbors or the
landlady or relatives kept an eye on the children. Only 1 woman
in 20 had someone who was paid especially to care for her young
children while she was away at work.
The census of 1930 shows that in one typical industrial city (Fort
Wayne, Ind.) nearly a third of the women at work carried the home


21

22

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

making responsibility for their families, some of these being mar­
ried women, others single, widowed, or divorced. One in five of
these employed women who were homemakers also had children
under 10; many of them had at least three small children, and a few
had as many as five. Of those homemakers each of whom was the
sole support of a small child besides herself, all but one left home
each day to earn a living. Information for more recent years shows
that this picture remains true for many industrial communities, and
during the depression years probably became of great intensity.4
Can you see all these mothers leaving home at 6:30 or 7 in the
morning after they have washed and dressed the children and pre­
pared their breakfasts and lunches? Can you see these mothers
working all day, and can you imagine their thoughts as they wonder
whether the children are all right and whether someone has seen
to all the many things little children need? And at the end of the
day’s work in factory or mill, can you picture the homecoming of
these mothers and the tasks awaiting them?
Some States for many years have provided “mothers’ aid” from
public funds, and at the present time practically all States have
made provision for funds to aid persons with needy children de­
pendent on them so that families will not be broken up by poverty.
Under the Social Security Act, 38 States, the District of Columbia,
and Hawaii receive money also from the Federal Government for
this purpose. However, the amount furnished is limited, applying
only to needy family units where, because of death, continued ab­
sence from home, or incapacity (physical or mental) of the parent
responsible for the support, poverty might place the children in in­
stitutions. Children must be under 16 years of age and living in
their own home or that of a near relative. At the beginning of 1938
it was estimated that more than half a million children were receiving
aid from Social Security. The large numbers of married women
at work belong in the population level above this poverty line, where
the economic need in the family for additional cash income is so
great that the mother is found assuming the triple role of wage
earner, mother, and housewife.
4 See also Stouffer, Samuel A., and Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Research Memorandum on the
Family in the Depression. Social Science Research Council. Bui. 29, 1937. pp. 24-58.




III. MARRIED WOMEN WORKERS—Continued
(d) Some effects of the employment of married women.5
There has been considerable speculation as to the effect of the
gainful employment of married women upon the women, upon in­
dustry, and upon society in general. To such questions, as to others
that arise from social conditions that are in constant flux, there is
no complete or final answer.
The effect upon industry of the work of married women has not
been measured, and scarcely can be separated from that of single
women. Employers or foremen have been known to state a pref­
erence for married women as the most regular workers. Some studies
show considerable irregularity of women as compared to men
workers in industry, their home cares often being assigned as a
reason; but such a cause cannot be confined to married women—
single women also have many home responsibilities, frequently in­
cluding the support and care of dependents.
As to the effects upon society, the experience of most persons today
testifies to acquaintance with women who are giving fine types of
service to professions for which they are admirably suited and by
the pursuit of which they are able to add to the family income
amounts that spell for their children more expert care than they
themselves, perhaps poorly equipped for household tasks, could
possibly provide, and far better opportunities of education and train­
ing than the salary of one member of the family alone could give.
One writer (Dr. Lorine Pruette) speaks of the need for married
women to maintain earning capacity, since there always is the like­
lihood of being thrown upon their own resources. She says:
Not only does part-time employment of the married woman offer the oppor­
tunity for the development of a new home life; it lessens or destroys the
appalling economic risk taken by every woman who today marries and devotes
herself to the traditional role of wife. There is no security in domesticity. It
is heartbreaking to see the middle-aged woman, trained for nothing except the
duties of the home, venture out into the industrial world. Divorce, death, or
loss of money may put her in this position, where she has so little to offer
organized industry and so much to suffer. The married woman who lets
herself go upon the easy tide of domesticity is offering herself as a victim
in a future tragedy.

The effect of the employment of married women upon the women
themselves is considered by a keen student of the situation, Ernest
R. Groves. Certain paragraphs of his that bear upon various aspects
of this many-sided problem may be quoted as follows:
* * * Not from body structure or biological function, but from a divi­
sion of labor in which masculine desire had the determining influence, woman
was delegated the home responsibilities and the details of parenthood. Aside
' Quotations in this section taken from articles
Academy of Political and Social Science, May 1929.




in The Annals of the American
23

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

24

from the nursing of her child, there is no part of the task of housekeeping
or child nurture which man could not have carried on as efficiently as woman
if the path of tradition had led him to the domestic vocation.

*

*****

*

* * * women * * * are handicapped because of artificial regulations
based upon the idea still persistent in much of the thinking of men that
the only proper place for the woman is in the home. Excellent teachers of
experience lose their positions if they marry, because of the regulations of
many school systems. In one institution of higher learning the woman teacher
who marries a member of the faculty automatically is removed from the
staff and no questions are asked as to whether by entering matrimony she
has taken over additional responsibilities of domestic character or has lost
through her marriage her desire or ability to teach.

*******

In spite of the prejudice that still persists regarding the married woman’s
employment, built upon the tradition of masculine dominance, fortunately
rapidly passing, there are to be found an increasing number of the younger
group of husbands and wives who find a richer domestic experience possible
because both of them work outside the home. This thoroughly modern type
of man refuses to believe that there is any psychic distinction which marriage
originates that can make his wife happy in a household routine that he would
find for himself unendurable.

*******

The complications that grow out of the employment of women in business,
industry, and the professions are, aside from possible effects upon the choice
of motherhood, socially constructed and will be eliminated by merely increas­
ing the number of women who work after marriage. Artificial handicaps and
obstructing traditions must give way as woman’s economic independence per­
sists and increases. Meanwhile, for the individual wife, the conditions of
our transitional period make her choice of wage employment a cause of diffi­
culties that register their effects upon her personality, her philosophy of life,
and her social attitudes and relationships.




IV. WOMEN AND UNEMPLOYMENT1
(a) How unemployment affects women.
The hardships of unemployment fall heavily upon women in many
ways. No generalizations on the subject can be made that will cover
the cases of all women, since different groups are affected variously.
There are women who must share the effect on the family of their
husbands’ loss of jobs, women who must assume the burden of sup­
port when the male worker is laid off or permanently displaced, and
women who are themselves out of. work and seeking a job for the
support of themselves and sometimes of others also.
In a study of families known to settlement workers in 32 cities
in all parts of the country, case after case is given of women who had
gone to work because the husband had lost his job. None of these
were in families in which unemployment was caused by illness or
incompetence, but in all cases the man had been an effective—often
a skilled worker, and he was willing and anxious to take any kind
of job he could get. The following were a few of the instances
included:
A Boston shoe worker whose wife went into a laundry. (Three children )
A laborer m a New York wrecking company that failed. Wife went into a
restaurant. (Four children.)
A man employed by a Boston ice company. Lost his job with the increase
in electric refrigerators. Wife cleaned offices. (Seven children.)
A worker in a broom factory in Louisville was displaced when the company
failed because unable to buy improved machinery. Wife became a scrub
woman. (Three children.)
A^ Philadelphia loom fixer’s wife went into a shirt factory.
Wife of a Pittsburgh pipe cutter’s assistant was a high-school graduate
and took up canvassing when he lost his job because of the installation of
new machinery. (Three children.)
A Philadelphia truck driver’s wife took up office cleaning. (Seven children.)
A Boston printer whose wife is employed in a restaurant. (One child an­
other baby coming.)

While a larger proportion of men than of women are likely to be
placed by employment agencies, there are times when relatively more
women than men can get jobs. But where women can get jobs and
men cannot? the most frequent reason for this is that women usu­
ally are paid less, and if they must assume the family support it
means a definitely lowered living standard for the family, already
likely to be existing on too low a wage to permit saving for the
emergencies of illness or unemployment. Practically one-tenth of
the jobless women in the country in 1930 were heads of families, and
according to the definition used by the Bureau of the Census in re­
porting this group, this means these women had dependents. A
n,iI.T!wSW1S a1ll6™ns ofthP.Women’s Bureau will be of interest in connection with
this subject. No. 92, Wage-Earning Women and the Industrial Depression of 1930—A
Survey of South Bend, 1932 ; and No. 113, Employment Fluctuations and Unemployment
of Women. 1928-31, 1933 ; No. 107, Technological Changes in Relation to Women’s Em­
ployment 1935 ■ and No. 155, Women in the Economy of the United States of America.
83139°—38------3




25

26

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

survey in October 1933 by the Federal Emergency Relief Associa­
tion reported that 13 percent of the relief households in rural dis­
tricts were headed by women.
Large numbers of women are among the unemployed because of
the introduction of machines that take the place of hand labor. In
a study the Women’s Bureau made of the tobacco industry, many
women were found permanently out of work because machines that
required fewer operators than before had been installed and fac­
tories had, in consequence, been closed in the smaller places. De­
pressed periods mean the curtailing of public as well as private
funds, and school teachers form a large group thrown out of work.
When a self-supporting woman is out of a job, her situation is
miserable enough. But when a mother—either the wife of a dis­
placed man or herself the breadwinner—is out of work, her distress
over the condition of her children is even more acute than that of
the unemployed woman with no dependents. For, as Miss Grace
Abbott, formerly Chief of the Children’s Bureau, points out, what
children lack this year may permanently undermine their health and
the loss cannot be repaired next year.




IV. WOMEN AND UNEMPLOYMENT—Continued
(b) The extent of unemployment.
As to the full extent of unemployment, only estimates can be made,
based upon such information as lias been collected in various places.
Of course, the number of unemployed changes from week to week
and month to month and is never wholly stationary. It is estimated
that even in the most prosperous times there were 2,000,000 persons
unemployed, and the recent tendency to displace workers by install­
ing improved machinery may greatly increase the number that al­
ways will be found out of work. New industrial workers on the labor
market (boys and girls coming to working age and persons moving
from farms to cities form the largest groups) also add to the num­
bers unemployed, the Secretary of Labor estimating that this group
amounts to about 2,500,000 each year.
During the worst of the depression there were at least 2,000,000
women out of work (as many as all persons unemployed during 1929
and the years immediately preceding) according to conservative es­
timates from Government figures and those of various special studies
m many localities. Data for later years show women still forminolarge proportions of the unemployed. The Federal Emergency Ke?
lief Administration reported that in 1934 women who normally were
employed formed about 30 percent of all persons on relief in towns
and cities of over 2,500. Another Government report for the 2 years
ending June 1936 (U. S. Employment Service) shows that in that
period women who were applying for jobs for the first time formed
more than a fourth of all applicants (both men and women). The
proportion of “new” women in the labor market was greater than
the proportion all women workers formed of the gainfully-employed
persons, since according to the United States census of 1930 women
formed 22 percent of all persons gainfully occupied.
Of the many unemployment counts or estimates that have been
made, that of the United States census in 1930 was one of the most
comprehensive. Of course, the figures found at that time soon became
out of date. Phis included women who ordinarily were wage earn­
ers,2 separately from those ill or unable to work who comprise an
additional large group of unemployed, many of whom are especiallv
destitute. Furthermore, in 29 of the 38 States that had cities of
50,000 or more, the proportions unemployed in these urban groups
were higher than in the State as a whole. A later count of 19 cities
of 100,000 population or over, by the census, reported 18.9 percent of
all women wage earners in these cities out of work or on lay-off.
. Unemployment studies made in recent years in certain important
industrial States present other phases of the unemployment picture
of women. In the three large States of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
“Including the two census classifications A and B : Persons out of a job, able to work
113 just1cned°lnEIV0U)PerS0nS "" lay0ff without Par- See also Women’s Bureau Bull




27

28

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

and Michigan, substantial proportions of all employable women were
found to be unemployed. (Employable women include the younger
persons on the labor market for the first time as well as perhaps older
women who found it necessary to seek work due to changed economic
conditions.) Such proportions were 21, 31, and 15 percent, respec­
tively, for the States named.
If we consider next those women who usually are gainfully occu­
pied, we find many of them without work. In Massachusetts in 1934,
18 percent of the women formerly with jobs were unemployed; in
the same year in Pennsylvania this group formed 22 percent; in
1935 in Michigan almost 10 percent; and in Rhode Island in 1936,
15 percent. As ordinarily proves to be the case, where data are
available for comparison, the large industrial cities in a State show
higher unemployment of women than does the State as a whole.
Though the difficulties of estimating unemployment are great, this
type of information is so important that there is much demand for
fuller data. Consequently, Congress authorized a survey of the num­
ber of persons unemployed in the entire country, to be undertaken
in the late fall of 1937. This census suffered from a shortage of both
time and money. It had to be taken on a basis of voluntary registra­
tion, and thus completeness was not entirely assured, even though a
further test of figures for the entire country was made from a smaller
intensive sample. Since there may have been some under-reporting
of men and perhaps an over-reporting of women, it is possible that
the percent women constituted of the unemployed reported is some­
what high, and that counts made in State censuses more nearly show
the true situation.




IV. WOMEN AND UNEMPLOYMENT—Continued
(c) Some causes of unemployment.
Why do workers suffer from unemployment ? What factors make
for these conditions? One cause lies in the seasonal character of
certain industries. Examples of this are in candy, where peak pro­
duction is required to produce Christmas candy and another smaller
peak comes just before Easter, with depressions and loss of jobs for
many workers at other periods of the year. The clothing industries,
likewise, are subject to seasonal variations, and it is obvious that
fruit and vegetable canneries have to operate with full force at cer­
tain seasons and offer no work at others.
In a number of industries that suffer from seasonal fluctuations,
large groups of women are employed. In consequence, while we
have seen that women can sometimes get jobs at low pay when men
cannot, this condition for women as an industrial class may be
offset by the concentration of much of their labor in seasonal indus­
tries that mean frequent unemployment, or slack work with conse­
quent low pay. It is reported by the International Ladies’ Garment
Workers’ Union that many of their members can find work for only
about 6 months in the year, and William H. Green, president of
the American Federation of Labor, has estimated that in the cloth­
ing industry as a whole workers are employed not over 40 weeks
in the 52.
Besides the seasonal trades, other industries suffer from recurrent
cycles of depression and unemployment. When times are good,
buying power is widespread, a hopeful attitude is abroad, manufac­
turers expand sometimes too much, money values are inflated. Then,
often for a variety of reasons, the market for goods begins to fall
off; factories find themselves overstocked and begin to cut produc­
tion and to lay off workers; workers then have less money to buy
and those still having jobs spend less freely; some save their money
for fear they may be the next laid off, others that were in seasonal
industries before find their slack season lengthened; the market
contracts still more; heavy depression and unemployment are upon us.
A third general reason for unemployment is'called by certain
lengthy names, such as “technological unemployment,” or that due
to “rationalization.” This occurs when improved machinery is
developed to take the place of workers more rapidly than these can
be adjusted to other types of jobs, or when large concerns merge
and the resultant curtailed forces can produce under new organiza­
tion as much or more than the larger groups of workers that were
formerly employed.
A few concrete instances of the way in which the too rapid intro­
duction of machines throws people out of work are of interest: In
the manufacture of sewing-machine needles, 1 girl can now inspect as
many as 9 could before; as bean snippers in canning factories ma


30

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

chines have made it possible for 12 women to do the work formerly
done by 200; in textile mills, a machine put in use in 1919 made it
possible for 1 woman to do the work formerly done by 17 drawers-in
of the warp; a machine for wrapping bread can now do the work
of a number of women; the electric typewriter is replacing typists;
and the introduction of the dial-telephone system is likely to
close many jobs for girls. Such changes are bound to produce
serious effects upon great numbers of workers, unless constructive
planning prevents these inevitable hardships. President Green, of
the American Federation of Labor, has stated that a new machine
installed in the glass industry threw out of work 20 to 40 glass
blowers for every machine installed, and thirty-one times as many
electric-light bulbs can be made by automatic machinery as by the
former hand processes. Nor is the problem confined to industrial
workers. The merging of business firms or the taking over of small
by large concerns—a process that is now going on at a rapid rate—
sometimes throws out business executives.
Sometimes the malady of unemployment affects highly trained
artists, and the loss of jobs by many skilled musicians in some of our
cities because of the introduction of instruments producing music
artificially has been a tragedy that has made a profound impression
on the public mind.




IV. WOMEN AND UNEMPLOYMENT—Continued
(d) Methods of minimizing unemployment.
There is a theory sometimes current that a sporadic increase in buy­
ing may assist in inspiring the public confidence to a belief that
recovery is beginning. However, no permanent effect is produced in
this manner, and it may even stimulate a seasonal growth that may
prove disastrous when succeeded by a slump. Furthermore, the
women who are out of jobs, or whose husbands have had lay-offs last­
ing for many months, have no money for such buying. Very large
groups of people can buy only when they have jobs—-can contribute to
the steadiness of the market only when a condition of stability has
been restored.
For this reason it is obvious that some more permanent methods
of general economic planning had to be undertaken. Four very im­
portant points in a constructive program for minimizing unemploy­
ment may Ire mentioned here: Further attempts at regularization
within the industries, the establishment of sound public employment
agencies, some type of insurance against such unemployment as can­
not be prevented or the establishment of a reserve fund to maintain
wages in times of depression, and a permanent shortening of hours
of work—with sustained wages—as improvements in machinery make
less labor necessary to produce commodities and services.
Many individual firms have undertaken methods of regularization,
such as manufacturing for stock or making repairs when orders are
slack; combining services that would reach peak demand in different
seasons, as, for example, the well-known combination of supplying
coal and ice; guaranteeing a certain number of weeks’ pay in' the
year; shortening hours of work in slack seasons while maintaining
regular pay—in this connection a system of payment by the year in­
stead of by the hour or week would be a distinct improvement. Manu­
facturers are finding that it pays them to undertake methods of secur­
ing stable conditions, since a large proportion of those who should
be able to buy are wage earners and it is only when people have work
that they can afford to buy, and it is of vital importance to the devel­
opment of industry that the buying power of the people be main­
tained. The particular methods of attaining this end vary with in­
dustry, locality, and other conditions.
There is great need for help to the worker in finding a job and a
growdng sentiment for the carrying on of this work by well-regulated
public agencies. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, when industrial
commissioner of New York State, found abuses arising from private
employment agencies that sought to make capital out of a period of
widespread unemployment. In some cases agents collected fees and
sent men out to jobs that did not exist; in others, jobs were given and
then the worker caused to lose the job in order that the agency might
collect another fee. Of course, there are private agencies that pursue



31

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

honest policies, but a system maintained at public expense is necessary
for the relief of the unemployed of the burden of paying a fee in'
order to secure employment. In certain large industrial States, such
as Ohio, California, Massachusetts, New York, or Michigan., public
agencies have operated over a period of years with considerable
success and with benefit to many workers. In June 1933 the United
States Employment Service, completely reorganized as a result of
the Wagner-Peyser Act, set up an organization, coordinating existing
State employment services, to serve all parts of the country with fa­
cilities to register applicants for work and enable them to find jobs
in private industry.*3
Finally, relief must be provided for periods of unemployment that
cannot be prevented, and a broad program along this line has been
initiated in the Social Security Act, passed in August 1935, which rep­
resents a major advance in the attainment of economic security for the
individual and for his family. One provision of the act deals with
unemployment compensation, and before the end of 1937 all the States
and Territories of the United States had passed unemployment
insurance laws.4
It is of interest here to note also the successful work of the Federal
Emergency Eelief Administration (and its successor the Works Prog­
ress Administration) in finding jobs for unemployed women during
the depression. A special staff, headed by a woman, was organized
for this purpose, with regional branch offices throughout the country,
and its record shows a wide range of projects on which some hundreds
of thousands of destitute women have been engaged.5
s See II. S. Employment Service. Twelve and One-Halt Million Registered for Work.
1934; Filling Nine Million Jobs. 1937; Who Are the Job Seekers. 1937.
4 Consult Social Security Board for material for discussion.
3 Upon request, Division of Women's and Professional Projects, Works Progress Admin­
istration, Washington, D. C., will provide further information for use of discussion
groups. See also The Woman Worker, Women’s Bureau periodical, for September 1938.




V. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK­
WORKING CONDITIONS1
(a) Service facilities and sanitary conditions in the workplace.
The physical condition of the shop or factory in which the woman
worker spends a third or more of the 24 hours of each working day
has definite effects that make for good or for ill health for the worker
and often contribute to the state of health of her family as well.
The health and energies of an individual are bound up with the
welfare and prosperity of the community. The crippling and in­
capacitating of human beings by industry means the undermining of
the national life.^ This is particularly true where women workers
are concerned. Sanitary and comfortable work conditions go far
toward maintaining the good health and unimpaired morale of the
workers, which are national assets that should be fostered.
Standards that are recommended for women’s workplaces by the
Women’s Bureau include provision for pure drinking water, with
individual cups or sanitary fountains; accessible washing facilities,
with hot and cold water, soap, and individual towels; standard and
convenient toilet facilities, with at least one installation for everv
15 women; cloakrooms, rest rooms, and lunch rooms.
To the minds of persons accustomed to consider certain conveni­
ences necessary to health and well-being, many of these points need
little elaboration. The subject of pure drinking water has been so
well studied in connection with the needs of school children that
there is a common sentiment—all but one State had crystallized this
into law to some extent by 1936—against the use of the common cup
and m favor of the sanitary drinking fountain or the individual cup.
That care must be taken to have fountains sanitary was shown in
a well-known university several years ago when an epidemic of
streptococcus was traced directly to faulty drinking fountains, which
had the vertical flow on which germs are not washed awav but have
been found to remain as long as 25 to 48 hours. To avoid contami­
nation, in the fountain provided, the flow of water should be at
an angle, so that it cannot fall back onto the orifice, and it should be
equipped with an adequate guard to prevent face or hands coming in
contact with the orifice. Certain other specifications that have been
found most satisfactory for the construction of fountains are set
forth more fully in a special bulletin of the Women’s Bureau.
Where individual cups are used, care should be taken that the supply
is not allowed to become exhausted and that it is kept clean.
»The following bulletins of the Women's Bureau, which will be of interest in eonnection with this subject, will be furnished on request: No. 57, Women Workers and Indus­
trial Poisons. 1026; No. 87, Sanitary Drinking Facilities. 1931; No. 129, Industrial
Injuries to Women in 1930 and 1031 Compared with Injuries to Men. 1935 : No 136
The Health and Safety of Women in Industry. 1935: No. 147, Summary of ’state
Reports of Occupational Diseases with a Survey of Preventive Legislation. 1932 to 1934
addition, the Women’s Bureau will send free of charge pictorial posters, en­
titled The Woman Mho Earns: Keeping Her Workplace Safe; Keeping Her Workplace
Comtortable and “Minimum Standards for the Employment of Women in Industry.”




33

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

34

As regards washing facilities, where these are added not only is
the employee protected but the consumer of the goods as well.
Clean hands make clean work
(That's a truth we cannot shirk).
Soap and hot water and each her own towel
And neither the foreman nor customers growl.

In all industries workers should have facilities for washing be­
fore eating lunch and before leaving the plant, and in some occupa­
tions, especially, frequent washing of the hands is a necessity; in the
handling of food, or when work involves contacting poisonous sub­
stances, it should be compulsory.
Toilet requirements should be fully defined by law, and should
cover separation of facilities for men and women, privacy, the pro­
vision of at least 1 seat to every 15 workers, cleanliness, good light­
ing, and suitable fixtures.
Among its reports, the Women’s Bureau has issued 37 that deal
with some phase of working conditions. These cover approximately
5,800 plants and more than 340,000 women; 18 of them are State­
wide industrial surveys, made in each case at the request of the State
concerned. Conditions of workplaces as revealed by these reports
present contrasts; in every State there were plants in which work
conditions were excellent, and in many instances employers had
gone farther than the requirements of the State law or the standards
recommended by the Women’s Bureau, but in many of the establish­
ments the surroundings were such that they constituted a menace
to the workers.




V. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK—WORK­
ING CONDITIONS—Continued
(b) Special health needs in the workplace.
Tlie improvement of the health of the workers is a national prob­
lem, and also a very personal one, and therefore a matter of interest
to every worker and employer. Aside from humanitarian reasons,
the employer is vitally interested from the standpoint of the ef­
ficiency of his employees. Engineers and other scientific experts are
continually at work devising better methods of regulating the light­
ing, heating, and ventilation of workrooms, minimizing noise and
vibrations, and controlling similar matters affecting health.
One of the health problems to which attention was given early
was that of comfortable and hygienic seating and correct posture
at work. In regard to this point the Women’s Bureau has recom­
mended the following:
Continuous standing and continuous sitting are both injurious, A chair
should be provided for every woman and its use encouraged. It is possible
and desirable to adjust the height of the chairs in relation to the height of
machines or worktables, so that the workers may with equal convenience and
efficiency stand or sit at their work. The seats should have backs. If the
chairs are high, foot rests should be provided.

The necessity for providing workers with chairs that will support
the body so that the best working position can be maintained with
the expenditure of a minimum of energy is becoming more generally
recognized, with the increasing realization of the harmful effects of
fatigue.
All States but Mississippi make some legal provision for seats in
workplaces, and many provide in addition that workers shall be
allowed to use them. However, these laws ordinarily make no
specification as to type of seat, and in many cases they do not apply
to all kinds of establishments.
It is generally understood that a good work chair must provide
support for the back, a seat shaped to the body, and foot support
(either the floor or a foot rest), and that the height and back must
be adjustable. The measurements vary according to the individual
and (lie type of operation to be performed.
On three other points affecting the worker’s health, the Women’s
Bureau makes the following recommendations:
Lighting should be without glare and so arranged that direct rays do not
shine into workers’ eyes. Ventilation should be adequate and heat sufficient
but not. excessive.

It is common knowledge in this day that bad air, rooms that are
too cold, too hot, too humid, not well ventilated, are injurious to
health. They reduce not alone the worker’s vitality but her effi­
ciency as well. It is obvious that sufficient circulation of air and the
elimination, as far as possible, of injurious fumes, lint, dust, or



35

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

excessive humidity are important to health. Certain occupations
involve special problems not easy of solution. For example, careful
attention has to be paid to eliminating dust in tobacco factories and
lint in certain departments of textile mills, to minimizing the exces­
sive heat and humidity in laundries, and to carrying off poisonous
fumes from certain substances and to protect workers from flying
particles in buffing and polishing. In many cases methods of dis­
posing of these problems have been worked out effectively, and many
firms have recognized the need of employing technical engineers for
installing devices for this purpose; however, in some establishments
the plant is not equipped with modern devices for handling matters
of such importance to the worker’s health.
In certain occupations where close work is required, defective
lighting is likely to damage eyesight and impair health, to cause ac­
cidents, and to limit and spoil production. Studies have shown cor­
rect lighting to lessen nervous irritability and increase output and
quality of product. From careful experiments in one factory it
was found that in several operations production showed a rise of
from 8 to 27 percent with improved lighting. Illumination, whether
natural or artificial, should be of the proper intensity for the job to
be done; facilities should be well arranged and well guarded to pro­
tect from glare.
Tt has long been known that excessive noise produces unfavorable
effects on the nervous system. One writer states that noise is often
a sign of “wasted energy, of poor design, or of hurried ignorance.”
Although noise may be responsible for an accident or illness, it is
often hard to prove the direct effects. However, recent studies have
shown that definite increases in the output of typists resulted when
noise was reduced. Where heavy machinery is used, some of the
various methods of absorbing sound and vibration should be em­
ployed. Unfortunately, the science of preventing noise has not pro­
gressed so rapidly as have the improvements in ventilation and
. lighting.




V. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK­
WORKING CONDITIONS—Continued
(c) Industrial hazards: Injuries.
As new industrial processes develop and new machinery is placed
in operation, it becomes necessary to be ever on the alert to make
sure that proper safeguards are taken against the risk of injury that
could be prevented.
1 lie American Engineering Council has found that the number of
machine injuries per worker has increased since 1920, but believes
this to be a temporary feature due to lack of sufficiently rapid ad­
justment to the changes that are coming so fast in the industrial
world. Although accidents are relatively fewer to women than to
men, the number of women injured is very large. In New York, for
example, in each year from 1927 to 1931, inclusive, from 7,000 to 9,600
women were compensated for accidents.
Frequently it is very difficult to get complete reports of the num­
ber of accidents that have occurred to women, and it is almost im­
possible to make adequate comparisons of the various States in this
respect. Studies by the Women’s Bureau of State reports from 1920
to 1934 found 7 States1 reporting data separately for men and women
m every year of the period.2 No more than 18 States made public
such data m any one of those years. In the latest year studied only
9 States reported age of injured women and men', only 8 reported
cause of injury, and 7 the industry in which they were injured.
1 The suffering and loss from injury were so evident that early in
this century a movement for some form of compensation to the
worker began to be crystallized into law. Such action was fur­
thered by farseeing employers as well as by the American Association
for Labor Legislation. At present 46 States have some form of work­
men’s compensation legislation, and the Federal Government has
given similar protection to its life-saving and postal services, long­
shoremen and harbor workers, and civil employees.
Money compensation is an excellent thing, but this alone is not
enough. Many of the injuries that occur could be prevented. One
large corporation is said to have reduced accidents 86 percent in
13 years; one large railroad company is reported to have a record
five times as favorable in this respect as the average for other laro-e
railroads.
For women in 4 of 7 States that gave reports by industry, over
half the injuries were in manufacturing, and chief among these to
cause injuries were the food, clothing, textile, and machinery and ve­
hicle industries.
In two important industrial States—Indiana and Pennsylvania—
the Women’s Bureau made a detailed study of the reports of nearly
2 See Women’s Bureau Bulletins 81, 102, 129, and a later bulletin (160) in press.




37

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

6,000 accidents that had occurred to women in one year. Of these,
nearly two-thirds in Indiana and a little more than one-half in Penn­
sylvania had affected the upper extremities. Machinery is a major
cause of accidents to women. In Georgia, where the textile industry
ranks high in number of women’s accidents, it was found that in
each year from 1932 to 1934 more of these were due to machinery
than to any other cause.
A study by the Women’s Bureau of injuries occurring to per­
sonal service employees in Ohio showed machinery to be the causal
agent in over four-fifths of the injuries to women laundry workers.3
Among the machines that frequently injure women’s fingers, hands,
and arms are punch presses in metal factories and machine shops,
power sewing and knitting machines, and cutting machines of any
type. For example, girls and women were found to have been in­
jured taking off lumber from a saw, cutting leather in a heel factory,
shaving soap in a soap and perfume factory, operating a flat-work
ironer or an automatic cigar machine, packing food in bottles, carry­
ing or lifting heavy weights, and in many other ways. It is possible
to guard most of these machines so that fingers or other members
cannot be so maimed, and proprietors frequently realize that it is
greatly to the interest of industry and society that such accidents
shall not occur.
Nor is the guarding of machinery all that is necessary.
Well guarded now our big machines
But other dangers lurk;
Cluttered, oily floors and aisles
Add peril to our work.

Many injuries occur from falls on slippery floors, in cluttered
aisles, on ill-lighted stairways, or in passageways. In eight States in
each of which accidents to women for a year’s period were studied,
from well over one-fifth to one-third of all injuries to women were
due to falls. And falls, it is found, result in longer periods of dis­
ability than do other types of accident.
First-aid facilities, in charge of a competent person, should be pro­
vided in every place of employment.
* Sec Women's Bureau Bulletin 151, p. 17.




V. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK­
WORKING CONDITIONS—Continued
(d) Industrial hazards: Disease.
Certain occupations present greater hazards of disease than do
others, and, in addition, the excessive speed that attends some in­
dustrial processes is likely to produce permanent nerve strain, often
accompanied by abnormal muscular reactions.
Dust is an ominous destroyer, and persons employed in the dusty
occupations^ are likely to be affected with pulmonary or bronchial
troubles. Flour, starch, soapstone, talc, wood dust, bran, clay, ore,
and stone dust are very prevalent in industry. Tuberculosis figures
collected by the Metropolitan Life Insurance'Co. in 1928 show death
rates far above the average for pottery workers, stonecutters, and
grinders.
In general it may be said that t.lireh chief methods ought to be
developed to combat the dfehjteriotis physical effects of dust and
poisonous substances used in industry: (T) Every effort should be
made to reduce the amount of dust; to carry it off, or otherwise to
protect the worker; (2) where less dangerous substances can be used,
processes should be changed to enable their use: (3) occupational
disease should be made reportable and included in workmen’s com­
pensation laws; compensation is allowed for such diseases gen­
erally or for designated diseases of this class in 20 States and the
District of Columbia.4
It will be noted that the foregoing methods of minimizing occu­
pational disease apply to men as well as to women, and such should
be the case. The prohibition of women’s work in occupations expos­
ing them to these dangers will not solve the whole industrial prob­
lem if men still are affected. The finding of substitutes for poison­
ous substances and the inclusion of diseases arising from occupation
in the compensable lists constitute more fundamental remedies.
As. regards the possibility that women may be more susceptible to
certain poisons than are men, in most cases sufficient data have not
been gathered in this country to give proof of this fact. However,
there are two substances that apparently affect women more seriously
than they do men—lead and benzol. The pottery trade carries with
it the greatest danger of lead poisoning for women, and American
potteries have made less headway in protecting workers from mala­
dies due to this cause than have those in certain European countries.
While men also are susceptible to lead poisoning, the effects are
especially injurious to women, rendering them more likely to have
abortions or stillborn children and reducing the vitality of children
born alive. Despite this fact, only two States have laws prohibiting
‘ California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts
Michi­
gan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.




39

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

or regulating women’s employment in industries where they are in
danger of such poisoning.5 Benzol poisoning causes anemia and ren­
ders a healthy pregnancy almost impossible.
The poisonous trades in the United States employ a very much
larger proportion of men than women, and the occupations of the
latter usually expose them in a less degree than men; but it is also
true that the number of women subject to the danger of industrial
poisoning is much greater than it was before the war. In many
cases the serious effects of the use of a new substance do not appear
for a period of years, and the tracing of illness to the true cause
sometimes is difficult. Every effort should be made to protect work­
ers from poisonous substances; so far as possible, the use of other
substances should be substituted for those found dangerous; in all
cases occupational disease should be made reportable and compensa­
ble ; and much further study should be made of the effects of various
suspected poisons and of the extent to which these effects apply
especially to women.
5 New Jersey nnd Pennsylvania.




VI. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK­
WORKING TIME 1
(a) Daily hours of work.
A few years ago a new musical production entitled “Tire Dance of
the Age of Steel” was heard in Philadelphia. Sixty dancers took
part in the presentation, and the press made this statement:
* * * This ingenious ballet presents a cynical survey of the grinding
wheels of the machine age, ironing out individuality of effort, crowding and
pounding human beings down with steam-roller impersonality, and pointing
the hopeless and irreconcilable contrast between warring elements in modern
life. All types—the bourgeoisie, flappers, Boy Scouts, soldiers—even such im­
personal elements as coal, steel, and electricity, playing their parts in the
ceaseless treadmill of modern existence.12

This opera illustrated vividly how different are the conditions of
modern industry from those obtaining at the time when most articles
were made in the home. The invention and development of powerdriven machinery, the subdivision of processes, mass production,
rapid transportation contributing to mass distribution—these and
other factors have helped to mold our present complex economic life.
Such conditions tend to have a very marked effect on the human
beings involved in making the goods now in demand. The factory
method of manufacture described in earlier papers of this series
produces types of strain unknown or infrequent in the time of home
production. Some of these are due to speed, complexity of ma­
chinery, noise, subdivision of processes, and monotony of job. These
things mean that the individual is overtaken by fatigue very rapidly.
They make it imperative that every effort should be made to main­
tain reasonably short hours in factory and other occupations.
In the needle trades, for example, in some cases a girl tends a
sewing machine carrying 12 needles making 4,000 stitches a minute,
or 2,400,000 in 10 hours—since some work that long—often working
in a bright light and with unshaded eyes, and in the midst of noise that
can only be described as a deafening roar.
The telephone service also may he cited as an example of "work re­
quiring great speed. It is said that hours for the most part are 8,
but with overtime, Sunday work, “working through,” loss of relief,
or “excess loading,” as practiced in some exchanges, these are often
exceeded. When you consider problems of monotony, speed, and
noise in industry, it is well to picture yourself at such work. For in­
stance, you would probably find it most fatiguing to answer 500 tele­
phone calls day in and day out. Yet thousands of telephone opera­
tors have answered many times that many calls a day—depending
1 The following bulletins of the Women’s Bureau, which will be of interest iu con­
nection with this subject, will be furnished on request: No. 64, The Employment of
Women at Night. 1928; No 136, The Health and Safety of Women in Industry. 1935;
and No. 156,.State Labor Laws for Women, Part I and Part II. 1938.
2 Le Pas d’Acier, by Serge I’rokoflefl. Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski, and
dance led by Edwin Strawbridge. Washington Star, Apr. 12, 1931.
83139®—3841
4




42

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

upon the location and type of equipment. While many of you would
find the mere plugging-in a trying operation, telephone" operators
have had to receive each of your calls and plug in your connection,
follow its completion and sometimes check up to disconnect you; far
too frequently they have been held responsible in addition for poor
connections over which they have had no control—long hours of
work have therefore been particularly arduous. In many cases the
automatic equipment has relieved telephone operators from much
that was provoking and places much of the responsibility for satis­
factory telephone calls upon the person calling.
Scientific study has indicated that what would be classed as light
work may become, where continuously repeated, more damaging
physiologically than heavier work that affords more opportunity for
variety.
Extreme subdivision of industrial processes, with the resulting
monotony for the worker, is one of the greatest factors calling, for
the reduction of the long day. This is a matter to be considered par­
ticularly in connection with women, because women are employed
very largely in the industries where the subdivision is the greatest,
such as the garment, the boot and shoe, the electrical-supply, and the
textile industries. For example, many women are engaged in the
stitching of long straight seams all day, the tacking of pockets, the
pasting of lining stays in shoes, or the running of 30 or more looms
in a textile mill. These operations mean the same kind of work from
morning to night, from one week to the next. Spinning, weaving, or
knitting means continuous walking between machines, watching,
watching for stoppage of machines and tying up broken threads.
Because of the great monotony attending the work through subdi­
vision, the continuous work must not be too long if health is to be
maintained.
There is considerable scientific evidence to show that excessive
fatigue, besides having deleterious physical effects, slows up the
worker. Dr. H. M. Vernon, of the Industrial Fatigue Research Board
in Great Britain, concludes from his studies that when hours of work
are very long a reduction of hours may lead to a distinct increase of
total output. Others have reached the same conclusion. Moreover,
fatigue increases the danger of accident, lowers the resistance of the
worker to infections and other diseases, and tends to induce various
forms of nervous disorder.
The Women’s Bureau recommends that no woman be employed
more than 8 hours a day, and that at least 30 minutes should be
allowed for lunch. How conservative a minimum this is, is shown
by the fact that the late Charles P. Steinmetz, the “electrical wizard,”
stated that with the possible increase in the use of electricity the time
will come when no one need work more than two hundred 4-hour
days in the year. In the garment trades, for example, as much clothing
as can be sold to advantage, even in good times, can be made in about
40 weeks in the year, and special arrangements have been made between
employers and employees in certain of these trades to give workers rel­
atively steady employment for a certain number of weeks at a wage
reasonably suited to maintain them for the full year. In most in­
dustries, even with expanding markets, much better planning for the
use of workers’ time on the job could be instituted, better work se­



WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

43

cured, and much more leisure and a higher living standard assured
than now obtain. Thus far, only 19 States, the District of Columbia,
and Puerto Rico legally restrict any type of employment to 8 hours,1'
and in 6 States there is no restriction whatever in regard to the length
of the workday in any industry.34 And experience has shown that
while many firms voluntarily make their own limitations of hours
there are always some firms that will require work for too long a
period unless this is prohibited by law for the sake of the workers’
health.
The Women’s Bureau also recommends that a rest period of 10
minutes be allowed in the middle of each work period without increase
in the daily hours. Common sense would indicate the need for such
rests, but in addition a considerable body of evidence exists from
various scientific tests that have been made.
For example, an experiment conducted in the lifting of weights
shows that a worker on “light-heavy muscular work” in an 8-hour day
cannot give maximum output unless he rests at least one-sixth of the
time. A group of girls folding handerchiefs produced their best out­
put when resting 21 percent of the total working time. These findings
are confirmed by other studies.
Further, it has been found that when one’s middle finger lifts a
weight over and over until completely exhausted a rest of 2 hours
is necessary for complete recovery; while if the finger is worked only
half as long as this, recuperation requires only a quarter as much time
as in the first case. All such investigations indicate the wisdom of
providing reasonably short hours of work and suitable rest periods.
3 Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana,
Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina,
Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.
* Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, and West Virginia.







VI. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK­
WORKING TIME—Continued
(b) Hours of work in the week.
An important pioneer work, Fatigue and Efficiency, by Josephine
Goldmark, indicated quite clearly, as many succeeding studies have
done, that the individual handicapped by the physical poisons pro­
duced by fatigue cannot work so rapidly or so effectively as can the
person who has sufficient time for rest and recreation.
Reasonably short hours of work in the week are even more im­
portant than short daily hours, for while a worker might withstand
occasional long days, the long week produces cumulative fatigue that
cannot be overcome.
That a shorter workweek does not diminish production but rather
increases it, because the worker who is not overfatigued is able to do
a_ more effective job, has been indicated in a number of investiga­
tions. One of these was made by the Illinois Industrial Survey
Commission in 1918 and had to do with a group of girls wrapping
and packing soap. It was found that production in a 48-hour week
was considerably above that in a 55-hour week.
The minimum weekly standard recommended by the Women’s
Bureau is that there should be one day of rest in seven and that,
m addition, the Saturday half-holiday should be the custom. With
an 8-hour day this recommended standard would make a 44-hour
week. This minimum standard is a very conservative one in these
days when in large numbers of industrial firms as well as in other
occupations the 5-day week has been instituted, and especially since
the passage of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 places
maximum hours of workers in industries engaged in interstate com­
merce first at 44, to be reduced later to 42, and then to 40. (Write
the Women’s Bureau for further information on this Act.) Of
course, the salutary effect of a reduction in hours would be entirely
nullified if it should mean in any case a reduction of the week’s
wages.
Since there has been a striking trend toward the shortening of
working hours within the past few years, the standards earlier
striven for now seem most conservative. In' the textile industry,
for example, in cotton mills in 1928 weekly hours averaged about
53.4, but in 1935 they averaged only about 34,6. This has not been
wholly the result of depression, since even at the low point many
plants Avere found doing overtime Avork while others were shut down
or on part time. Influences responsible in part for more reasonably
shortened hours of work have been the introduction of labor-saving
machinery, the experience of the National Recovery Administration,
and more widespread popular understanding of the economy of
shortened hours. Despite all this, however, there is danger of re­
lapse toward earlier sweatshop conditions in some quarters unless
the maximum hours are fixed by law.



45

46

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

At the 1930 convention of the American Federation of Labor it
was conservatively estimated that over 500,000 union members had a
regular weekly schedule of 5 days, and in 1938 this number had
increased to well over 1,000,000. It is well known that the 5-day
week has been the accepted practice for a large proportion of those
in the occupation of teaching, frequently for office employees, and
sometimes in stores, especially in the summer months.
With an 8-hour standard and a Saturday half holiday, 44 hours a
week would be worked. A 5-day week and an 8-hour day would pro­
duce 40 hours; while much shorter hours still undoubtedly could
make for happier and more efficient living if industrial managers
planned effectively and if leisure were wisely used.
Yet in only 21 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico
are women’s weekly hours restricted by law for gainful employment
in any manufacturing occupations to 48 or less, in 4 of these a 40-,
44-, or 45-hour maximum being fixed; in 22 States the laws affect­
ing women in manufacturing provide for a week of over 48 hours,
8 of these permitting over 54 hours, 4 as much as 60 hours. Five
States make no legal restriction of daily or weekly hours and 2
States have a daily but not a weekly provision.
The findings as to increase in production with the shorter day
might be taken to indicate that better planning could inject greater
efficiency—as well as happiness—into the life of the home manager.
A few years ago the United States Bureau of Home Economics in­
duced more than 2,000 housewives to keep careful daily records of a
typical week of 7 days. The average hours worked were 51 in the
week, while for 950 farm women they were 62. Although city fam­
ilies usually were smaller and had more help, women in towns of
50,000 and larger worked a little over 48 hours in a week, those in
the smaller towns 51. Many more household appliances are avail­
able today, but many families cannot afford them and in others the
labor savers have tended to reduce the work of the household more
definitely to a one-worker job. There is an important difference in
the work of the homemaker and the woman in industry: Housewives
usually can distribute their own time; not so with the woman who
works in a factory all day and has to do her housework after factory
hours.




VI. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK­
WORKING TIME—Continued
(c) The night shift.
The fault confessed in Edna St. Vincent Millay’s pretty little verse
that has been very popular since its appearance and runs as follows—
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light—

may be all very well for a few individuals, but it would be a bad
practice for most people, and certainly for women who tend rapid
and noisy machines.
Most employed women have responsibilities outside their hours at
the place of business; almost always they must complete more time­
consuming odd jobs than men must—they must launder some or all of
tlieir clothing, darn their stockings, and keep themselves presentable.
But more than that, often they must cook and clean for a smaller or
larger family and very often—whether married or single—they must
bear some share, not infrequently the whole responsibility, in the care
of children.
The health of the worker is all the more seriously impaired if the
employment happens to be on a night shift. Then, indeed, must the
candle be burned at both ends, whether the individual would wish it
or not.
There is a considerable body of medical testimony to the deleterious
physical effects of night work. “Outside of great emergency or ab­
solute industrial necessity, all night work should be abolished, and
more so for women than for men,” says one eminent medical authority;
and another states: “It is unnatural for most forms of life to work at
night and attempt to sleep in the day.” These opinions are echoed
and reechoed by physicians, by life-insurance actuaries, and by many
other scientific investigators. Night work sins against nature in the
loss of sleep it involves, and this loss of sleep, with its accumulating
fatigue poisons, is far more deadly to the body than is starvation.
For the night worker, the end is frequently ruined health, and in
most cases this comes far more quickly with the woman than with
the man, not only because of her different physical make-up but be­
cause her work does not end when she leaves the factory, including,
as it nearly always does, the manifold household cares that await her
return home. Additional physical evils are to be found in depriva­
tion of sunlight, most valuable of natural tonics; in frequent injury to
sight; in a higher number of accidents, due to the necessity of work­
ing under artificial light.
Investigations made by the Women’s Bureau have shown that the
strain and hardship of night work was intensified by the fact that
hours often were very long and that in many cases provisions were



47

48

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

lacking for certain of the facilities important for the health and com­
fort of the workers, such as proper rest pauses, lunch periods, and
seats. In addition, while wage rates generally were slightly higher
than those for day workers, the amounts actually earned often were
below the corresponding earnings on the day shift.
Experience in one large industry has shown that the majority of
employers, though striving honestly to effect reforms along this line,
may find themselves unable to accomplish desired results due to a
small group of firms not subscribing to such policies. The Cotton
Textile Institute in 1931, recognizing that night work was a basic
cause for the instability of employment in the textile industry, an­
nounced that 83 percent of the manufacturers in the industry had sub­
scribed to a plan to eliminate night work, over tliree-fourths of the
mills running night shifts being represented by this group. How­
ever, when a code for the cotton textile industry was being considered
by the National Recovery Administration in 1933, testimony of em­
ployers urged the establishment of provisions that would accomplish
by the help of the law what their previous efforts had failed to bring
about. The National Recovery Administration code for cotton textile
manufacturing set a 40-hour week for employees, with an 80-hour
week for machinery operation, establishing thereby a two-shift sys­
tem for the industry. Since the end of the National Recovery Ad­
ministration, the great majority of the mills are still operating on a
one-or-two-shift basis.
At present, there are only 12 States that prohibit night work for
women in various manufacturing industries,6 although 6 others either
prohibit in some occupation or place some restriction on night work.
The hours of 10 to 6 are the most commonly affected by such prohibi­
tion or restriction. This is an advance over the minimum recommen­
dation of the Women’s Bureau, which is that no woman should be em­
ployed between the hours of midnight and 6 a. m.
5 California, Connecticut. Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New
Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.




VI. HEALTH STANDARDS FOR WOMEN’S WORK­
WORKING TIME—Continued
(d) Vacations and sick leave with pay.
Executives and business men, like school children and teachers,
look forward to the vacation period, and often the homemaker does
also, even though for her it entails much of the labor or preparation
for the family outing. The head of a large company has given a
concise expression of the basis on which the vacation with pay is
likely to be granted—that it is “a good business proposition on the
theory that a worker will more than pay for his vacation in better
work.” It has been estimated that the typical cost of vacation wages
in general is less than 2 percent of the total annual pay roll of a firm.
Sometimes this is charged to the overhead of the various depart­
ments, or it may be deducted from net profits of the business.
It is quite certain that every individual must have some leisure for
health and happiness. “ Leisure to be worth the name must be pleas­
urable, vivid, and tranquil,” says a recent writer. “ Leisure is en­
joyed when we do something by individual choice and not by co­
ercion, and when the doing brings a sense of timelessness and en­
richment * * * ; unoccupied time is not leisure, nor is organized
play, nor speeding from point to point.”
Despite the view widely held that vacations with pay are good
business, and the medical testimony to the health requirement for
such an occasional rest, practices as to the arrangement for vacations
vary widely. Since women are more likely than men to have jobs
entailing repetition, routine, and monotony, and since their labor
rarely ends with the day’s work in factory, store, or office, it would
seem that women in particular had need for an annual vacation.
Studies made by the American Management Association, the Fed­
eral Personnel Classification Board, the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Co., the Industrial Relations Counselors, the National Industrial
Conference Board, and other agencies confirm the statement that it
is a very general custom to grant vacations with pay to clerical
workers and to the office force in manufacturing plants.6 The time
allowed varies, but most commonly it is one or two weeks. Under
the laws of the United States and various States and cities, as long
ago as 1929, about 2,000,000 public employees were given vacations.
»American Management Association. Office Executive Series No. 30. Office Wording
Conditions and Extra Compensation Plans, by H. J. Taylor. New York, 1928. Reviewed
in Monthly Labor Review, August 1928, pp. 34-36. Industrial Relations Counselors
(Inc.). Research Series. Vacations for Industrial Workers, by Charles M. Mills. The
Ronald Press Co., New York, 1927. United States Personnel Classification Board. Re­
port on Wages and Other Conditions in Government and in Private Employment, pub­
lished as House Document No. 602. Reviewed in Monthly Labor Review, August 1929,
pp. 133—140. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Vacations with Pay. New York. U. S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly Labor Review, August 1938, p. 269. Vacations
with Pay. Princeton University Industrial Relations Section. Recent Trends in Vaca­
tion Policies for Wage Earners, by Eleanor Davis. Princeton. 1935. National Industrial
Conference Board. Vacations with Pay for Wage Earners. 1935.




49

50

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

Though vacations arc extended to only a small proportion of the
industrial workers, in spite of the fact that the nature of their work,
with its speed, noise, and monotony, would seem to require especial
attention to this matter, the practice is growing, especially recently.
It is estimated that in 1937 about two-fifths of all wage earners in
manufacturing industries were in plants that had wage-earner paidvacation plans. Further, trade agreements had already begun to
show evidence of success in collective bargaining for this right, and
since the depression it is noted that one of the requests always made
of employers by the unions is that of vacations with pay.
A study of the New York Bureau of Women in Industry made in
1925 and again in 1930 showed that over this period there was a 7percent increase in the proportion of plants granting vacations with
pay to production workers.
Economic conditions subsequent to 1929 induced modifications of
this policy, but that the practice was by no means abandoned is indi­
cated by studies made during recent years.
Among these may be mentioned two studies by the National In­
dustrial Conference Board, one made in 1931, one in 1935, which show
that since the depression the policy of granting vacations with pay
is again being established. The proportion of plants making such
practice was greater at the later than at the earlier date, and in 1935
the number of workers affected was nearly 1,000,000.
Information secured in 1934 and 1935 by the industrial relations
section of Princeton University indicated definite increase in the
number and coverage of such plans. Of the 100 companies scheduled,
38 gave vacations with pay to workers on hourly and piece-work
rates, while some of those remaining stated that they expected to
resume the practice if business continued to improve. The Bureau of
Labor Statistics, from a recent investigation, estimated that in 1937
nearly 40 percent of the employees in manufacturing plants had
vacations with pay.
Several of the reports draw attention to the fact that the chief
problem in connection with paid vacations for wage earners, aside
from the expense, is the maintenance of plant efficiency and service
to customers. Obviously there are many types of industries where
a general plant shutdown is impossible, while other industries find
a definite advantage in suspending plant operations and arranging
for all employees to take vacations at the same time. The great
majority of manufacturing companies reported give staggered vaca­
tions, preference as to time of year being based on seniority.
A further matter of primary importance is the arrangement for
sick leave with pay. Sick leave very frequently is granted to office
workers, although this is not always the case. However, the produc­
tion worker usually does not receive payment during sickness. Some
firms have a system of allowances for sickness independent of the
group-insurance or sick-benefit plans that employees usually have
access to.
For teachers the practice is fairly common of granting sick leave,
though there is variance in the amount granted and the pay al­
lowed during such periods. A survey made in 1930-31 showed that
90 percent of the cities of over 2,500 in population granted leave



WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

51

for personal illness, and about 75 percent of them allowed full pay
for sick leave; 5 days on full pay was the usual practice for small
towns and 10 days the most common allowance among cities over
30,000 inhabitants. Some school systems provided for a combina­
tion of a certain number of days on full pay and additional days on
less than full pay. A more recent report, made in 1934, for 39 cities
of over 200,000 population, showed that all but 1 of such cities made
some provision for sick leave with full or part pay.*7
7 National Education Association. Research Bulletin. Administrative Practices Affect­
ing Classroom Teachers, Part II, pp. 56, 57; Educational Research Service, Circular No.
7, September 1934.







-

J

4

*
*

A

VII. LABOR LEGISLATION FOR WOMEN1
(a) Reasons for legislation and forces furthering it.
Labor legislation for women in the United States has become a
matter of increasing importance in the past few decades as women
have entered more types of gainful employment and as the develop­
ment of machinery has been accelerated. The subject is one having
many ramifications, due to the various types of labor laws and to the
many problems involved, the vast number of women who are em­
ployed, the great variety of their occupations, and the conditions
under which they work, varying with locality, industry, and in­
dividual establishment.
Men and women in industry do not have equal economic power in
bargaining for better standards of hours, conditions, and remunera­
tion. Forced into industrial life by increasing economic pressure,
women are the late comers in industry and as such are in the position
of being the cheapest labor in the market, thus tending to undercut
the wages and conditions that have been gained by men in their
longer industrial life. The fact is commonly recognized that men
have gained their advantage in the industrial world largely by
means of organization but have welcomed recent strengthening of
this method through the machinery of the State. This method is
desirable for women also, but more difficult, since women who are
wage earners, with one job in the factory and another in the home,
have little time and energy left to carry on a fight to better their
economic status.
Entering industry by the easiest and most widely open door—
that of the job requiring little or no skill—naturally women workers
too often land at the bottom of the economic scale. They cannot im­
prove their condition, because in so many instances they are not
organized; and often they cannot organize because their need of em­
ployment is so great that they dare not risk the loss of their jobs,
no matter how poor, a loss that too often follows the unskilled
workers’ first attempts at organization. In view of these facts, a
definite demand has developed for a method to produce scientifically
and as soon as possible conditions and opportunities that more
nearly equal those of men. This short cut is legislation, and such
laws, even if written for women only, tend surely though indirectly
to benefit men as well, as every gain made by labor in any direction
whatever is a gain for all labor. These laws, applying as they do to
women in industry and ordinarily not to those in the professions,1
1 The following bulletins of the Women’s Bureau will be of interest in connection with
this subject: No. 66-1, History of Labor Legislation for Women in Three States. 1932 ;
No. 66-11, Chronological Development of Labor Legislation for Women in the United
States. Revised 1932 ; No. 68, Summary : The Effects of Labor Legislation on the Em­
ployment Opportunities of Women. 1928; No. 79, Industrial Home Work. 1930; No. 115,
Women at Work. pp. 27—32. 1934. No. 135. The Commercialization of the Home
Through Industrial Home Work. 1935; No. 156, State Labor Laws for Women. 1938 ;
No. 155, Women in the Economy of the United States of America. 1937 See also His­
tory of Labor in the United States, Vol. IV, Labor Legislation, by Elizabeth Brandeis.




53

54

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

cannot be said to hamper women in opportunities for a career. The
Women’s Trade Union League urges the enactment of such legisla­
tion because experience has demonstrated its need and value to the
rank and file of women wage earners. _
The earliest type of labor legislation in our States usually has been
the attempt to secure reasonably short hours of work. The two great
reasons for this demand have been the need for protection to health
and the need for leisure. This was emphasized as early as 1842 in a
petition for hour legislation presented to the Massachusetts Legisla­
ture, which gave the following reasons for the demand:
It would, in the first place, serve to lengthen the lives of those employed,
by giving them a greater opportunity to breathe the pure air of heaven, rather
than the heated air of the mills. In the second place, they would have more
time for mental and moral cultivation * * *. In the third place, they will
have more time to attend to their own personal affairs, thereby saving con­
siderable in their expenditures.

The first hour law passed was one in New Hampshire limiting the
day to 10 hours with certain exceptions and applying to both men
and women. This was passed in 1847.
Taken as a whole, probably the largest single factor making for
the passage of labor legislation for women has been organized labor.
Directly or indirectly it was the influence that made most of the
legislation possible; it initiated most of the laws limiting the hours
of women in factories and mechanical establishments, as well as other
statutes; it represented the bulk of the political strength that made
legislators fear to run counter to measures designed to benefit the
laboring classes; it paved the way for legislation by establishing
through trade-union activity conditions of work that later were made
standard by law.
_
Other factors that ordinarily have been the moving force in
securing labor legislation have been factory inspectors and other
officials charged with the enforcement of labor laws; bureaus of labor
statistics; special legislative committees or commissions for the study
of labor conditions; governors; pioneering employers; social, civic,
philanthropic, and church groups; factual studies of conditions to be
remedied by law; and, finally, the spirit of the time.




VII. LABOR LEGISLATION FOR WOMEN—Continued
(b)Hour legislation in various States.
The early months of an odd year are likely to he an “open season”
lor all sorts of legislation, including that relating to labor problems,
because in so many of the States that have biennial sessions the
legislatures meet in the odd year.
Since the history of labor legislation for women and children
shows that in many States the first subject considered is the fixing
ot i easonably short hours, it is of interest to see how far the various
States have progressed in this direction. It is difficult to summar­
ize hour legislation, since the provisions in the various States differ
so widely. In some States maximum hours are fixed at one length
for some industries and at a different length for others; in some
cases many industries are covered, in others only one or two rela­
tively unimportant ones; sometimes the regulation is written into
.the statute law, sometimes it is in the form of a rule or order of
an industrial commission or other body to which has been delegated
the power to issue such regulations.
All but six States have some regulation of women’s daily hours,2
but two States regulate daily hours in some industries for which
t}ley have set no weekly limitations.3 In all, 19 States, the District
ol Columbia, and Puerto Rico have established an 8-hour day in
certain industries or occupations. In 14 of these, the District of
Columbia, and Puerto Rico, this applies to manufacturing, stores,
laundries, hotels, and restaurants.4 Ten States and the District of
Columbia apply it also to telephone and telegraph operators. One
of them (New Mexico) restricts the day to 8 hours in most establish­
ments except express, transportation, or common carriers, which
have 9 hours. Connecticut provides an 8-hour day only for stores.
Kansas has an 8-hour day only for telephone operators and women
m public housekeeping (a 9-hour day in manufacturing, stores, and
laundries). North Dakota has an 8(4-hour day in manufacturing,
stores, laundries, hotels, restaurants, telephone and telegraph offices
and express or transportation companies.
Twenty States make some provision for a 9-liour day; in 17 of
these this applies to manufacturing industries, in 14 to hotels, restau­
rants, or both, m 15 to stores, and in 13 to laundries. Four of these
States have, m addition, 10-hour laws in some industries, and seven
of them have 8- or 8(4-hour laws for some industries.
The laws m 9 States make no provision in any type of occupation
for a day shorter than 10 hours. Two of these (Mississippi and
l0Wa- ana West Virginla wit"

Hour laws and Minnesota

8 Colorado and Montana.




Wyoming

■

55

56

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

South Dakota) are included with the States having the most inclu­
sive statement found anywhere, the last applying to “any employer
or other person having control.” In two States in which there is
some legal restriction of hours in manufacturing, periods of work
longer than 10 hours are allowed in some other industry.
Sixteen States 5 specifically exempt canneries from their hour reg­
ulations, and many others have other exceptions regarding seasonal
industries.
.
...
Although this summary appears complicated, still it omits many
of the variations that exist in the laws and other regulations, and it
will serve to indicate how very difficult it is to give any adequate
discussion of legal matters in a short period.
5 Arizona, California, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minne­
sota, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Washington.




VII. LABOR LEGISLATION FOR WOMEN—Continued
(c) Various types of labor legislation for women.
In general, special labor laws for women deal chiefly with the fol­
lowing subjects: Hours of work, a minimum wage, home work, night
work, seats for women workers, the prohibition and regulation of
women’s work in certain occupations or industries. The laws on each
of the several topics differ widely in extent, in requirements, and in
ilication.
our and night-work legislation already have been discussed and
minimum-wage laws will be considered later.6 Twenty-nine States
and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have provided for such
breaks in the hours of a woman’s employment as a day of rest or one
shorter workday in the week or time for meals or rest periods during
the workday. Twenty-five States, the District of Columbia, and
Puerto Rico have minimum-wage regulations.
The Women’s Bureau strongly advocates laws requiring the furnish­
ing of seats. To New York goes the credit for the first law, passed
in 1881 and requiring seats for women “in any mercantile or manu­
facturing business or occupation.’’ Following the passage of this, 14
States enacted similar legislation before 1890. Today 47 States and
the District of Columbia—all but Mississippi—have laws requiring
the provision of chairs or stools for women employees in stores or
factories or both.
In regard to prohibitory legislation the Women’s Bureau recom­
mends the following:
Women should not be prohibited from employment in any occupations except
those which have been proved to be more injurious to women than to men, such
as certain processes in the lead industries.

The first prohibitory legislation for women dates from 1872, when
Illinois forbade women to work in any mine. Today 26 States have
regulated or prohibited women’s employment in some industry or
occupation, showing in all a total of 38 such restrictions; the remain­
ing 22 States have no prohibitory or regulatory laws regarding any
specific occupation. The most commonly prohibited occupation is
mining, from which women are excluded in the 17 most important
mining States.
In regard to the lifting or carrying of heavy weights, a provision
considered important by the Women’s Bureau, little progress has been
made in most States, but in five States women are not allowed to
carry or lift heavy weights, the standards varying from 15 to 75
pounds where an exact amount is fixed. For example, in Massachu­
setts in manufacturing or mechanical establishments, boxes, baskets, or
other receptacles weighing 75 pounds or more must be equipped with
pulleys, casters, or other contrivances so that they may be moved
easily. In California a similar statute (as passed in 1921 and amended
a Night-work legislation in No. VI; minimum-wage legislation in No. VIII.
83139”—38----- 5
57




58

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

in 1929) requiring provision for pulleys or casters for weights of 50
pounds or more applies to mills, workshops, restaurants, and packing,
canning, mercantile, or other establishments employing women.7 In
Washington women in manufacturing and mercantile establishments
are not allowed to lift or carry “an excessive burden.” The Indus­
trial Board of Pennsylvania has ruled that women shall not be re­
quired or allowed to lift heavy weights in explosive plants and women
in welding and cutting operations shall not be required or allowed to
lift any material weighing more than 15 pounds, and Ohio prohibits
employment requiring the frequent or repeated lifting of weights
in excess of 25 pounds. Such laws are wholly reasonable in these
days when machinery can relieve human beings of heavy lifting.
Five States—Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, and Penn­
sylvania—regulate the work of women in core rooms, where the molds
are made for the inside of hollow castings in the metal industries.
In three States—Louisiana, Minnesota, and Missouri—women are for­
bidden by law to clean moving machinery.
There are several States—Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, Oregon,
Washington, and Wisconsin—whose laws in general terms prohibit
the employment of women under detrimental conditions. Kansas
says that women shall not work in any industry or occupation “under
conditions of labor detrimental to their health or welfare;” the North
Dakota, Oregon, and Washington laws are the same with the sub­
stitution of “morals” for “welfare”; Michigan provides that no woman
“shall be given any task disproportionate to her strength, nor shall
she be employed in any place detrimental to her morals, her health,
or her potential capacity for motherhood;” and Wisconsin says that
no woman shall be employed in any place or at any employment
dangerous or prejudicial to her life, health, safety, or welfare.
Home-work legislation, first passed in 1885 in New York but later
declared unconstitutional, is today found in 17 States. The laws
either prohibit the making of certain articles or regulate home work,
generally requiring cleanliness, adequate lighting and ventilation, and
freedom from infectious or contagious disease. Under an interpre­
tation of the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, employees
working in their homes on articles moving in interstate commerce
are to receive the benefits of the act.
Six States—Connecticut, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Ver­
mont, and Washington—prohibit the work of women immediately
before or after childbirth. Unfortunately, these laws in the United
States lack a very advantageous feature that exists in many such laws
in other countries—they do not protect the expectant mother against
loss of job during her absence. Furthermore, a number of laws in
European countries include arrangements for compensation of the
mother during this period, though this has not been in line with policy
and social attitude in the United States.
7 Aii order of the industrial welfare commission issued in 1928, applying to fruit and
vegetable canneries, fixed the maximum weight women are permitted to lift or carry at
25 pounds. An order issued in 1919 made less definite provision, not specifying the
maximum weight but merely prohibiting the lifting or carrying of “any excessive bur­
den,’’ and anplying only to mercantile establishments and factories (which by definition
include laundries and dry-cleaning plants),




VII. LABOR LEGISLATION FOR WOMEN—Continued
(d) Certain effects of labor legislation.8
Every year of State legislative sessions sees a.n increase in the
number of women in the United States whose working hours are
regulated by law, recent years being notable in extending the cover­
age of already existing labor legislation to new classes of women
workers. It probably is safe to say that such hour legislation now
affects well over a third of the women in gainful occupations. In a
few cases men also are included, though by and large men’s superior
bargaining power has enabled them to obtain a similar result through
union action and without recourse to legislation. Business and pro­
fessional women, those in supervisory positions, and, in general,
those in the higher ranks of opportunity usually are not covered
by labor laws. These laws have been directed toward the control
of conditions in industrial, mercantile, and factory occupations.
When applied to certain occupations which differ from those for
which they were drawn, such as the work of conductors on street
cars, pharmacists in drug stores, women in newspaper work, labor
laws have proved to be a handicap in a few instances.
With the growth and development of special labor laws resulting
from the efforts of various groups convinced of their value in pro­
moting the interests of women workers, opposition also has grad­
ually _ arisen among other groups, who came to view these laws as a
handicap to women’s occupational progress. This opposition arises
not from the ranks of women in industry, to whom the laws apply,
but from certain women in more professional occupations and mem­
bers of a few highly skilled and well-organized trades.
The Women’s Bureau made a special investigation of the ef­
fects of labor legislation on the employment opportunities of women.
This covered more than 1,600 establishments, employing more than
660,000 workers, 165,244 of them women, and personal interviews
were held with more than 1,200 working women who had experienced
a change in the law or who were employed under conditions or in
occupations prohibited for women in some other State.
Among the industries included were those that were major enployers of women: Boots and shoes, clothing, electrical apparatus,
knit goods, and paper boxes. In addition, women workers in stores,
restaurants, newspaper offices, street-railway transportation, elevator
operating, pharmacies, the metal trades, and certain other types of
employment were studied. Particular attention was given to the
effects of laws prohibiting night work and those barring women from
certain specific occupations, such as grinding, polishing, buffing,
acetylene and electric welding, taxicab driving, and gas and electric
meter reading.
•For minimum wage, see Vlll-d.




59

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

The general conclusion of the survey, based on the facts as they
were found, is that women are necessary to industry and, provided
the laws are properly written, they are not barred from industrial
work nor do they lose their jobs because of the laws; on the contrary,
in practically every case they are benefited by them. Moreover,
reasonable legal standards for the employment of women tend to­
ward a marked raising of standards in industry for all workers; a
shorter workday for women results in shorter hours for men in the
industries affected. The great majority of up-to-date employers re­
alize the value of such standards of work and often exceed them
in their own plants. Many of them approve such legislation because
it largely does away with the cheap, unfair competition of unscrupu­
lous employers.
The findings seem to show that the instances of handicap, which
were diligently sought by the investigators, are only instances and
should be dealt with as such, without allowing them to interfere with
the development of the main body of legislation. The material
demonstrates again and again the impossibility of generalization,
the necessity for recognizing differences in different occupations,
industries, and localities. The report concludes that regulatory hour
laws as applied to women engaged in manufacturing processes do
not handicap them but “serve to regulate employment and to estab­
lish the accepted standards of modern efficient industrial manage­
ment.”
That certain forces other than legislation do handicap women is
recognized in this report as follows:
In almost every kind of employment the real forces that influence women’s
opportunity are far removed from legislative restriction of their hours or
conditions of work. In manufacturing, the type of product, the division and
simplification of manufacturing processes, the development of machinery and
mechanical aids to production, the labor supply and its costs, and the general
psychology of the times, all have played important parts in determining the
position of women. * * *
In other occupations other influences have been dominant in determining the
extent of women’s employment. In stores a more liberal attitude and suc­
cessful experimentation with women on new jobs; in restaurants the develop­
ment of public opinion as to the type of service most suitable for women; in
pharmacy a gradually increasing confidence in women’s ability on the part of
the public; in the metal trades a breaking down of the prejudices against
women’s employment on the part of employers and of male employees, and
demonstration of women’s ability along certain lines—these are the significant
forces that have influenced and will continue to determine women’s place
among the wage earners. Such forces have not l(een deflected by the enforce­
ment of legislative standards and they will play the dominant part in assur­
ing to women an equal chance in those occupations for which their abilities
and aptitudes fit them.




VIII. WHAT THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN EARNS
(a) Outworn ideas as to women’s wages.
Investigations have established the fact that the vast numbers
of women who work in schools, offices, stores, factories, mills,
laundries, and restaurants, must earn money for the essentials of
life. They must work to buy food, to pay rent, to meet doctors’
bills, to obtain the other necessities of life, and, in addition, large
numbers must support dependents. The old idea known as the
“pin-money theory” has been disproven repeatedly under the con­
ditions of life in the world today. It is not an adequate basis for
the payment of women’s wages.
Another fallacious idea is that for the most part women who need
to work live at home and can get along on small earnings. In the
first place, to fix wages on this basis leaves out of account the im­
portant minority who must be responsible for their own entire sup­
port; these constitute more than one-tentli of the women employed
in 17 States surveyed by the Women’s Bureau. But more important
than this is the fact that if an employed woman living at home does
not earn enough for her own support, she is a financial burden on
her family, and to that extent the family—whether able to do so
or not—must subsidize both the girl and the industry in which she
works. Take, for example, a place in which it costs a girl $15 a
week to live; her employer requires all her time but pays her only
$12; the other $3, saved by the employer, must be made up by the
girl’s family. When expressed in simple terms how clear this is.
And if the girl’s earnings are too low to permit of saving and she
becomes ill or loses her job, this fact may be the final cause of sub­
merging an already overburdened family.12
A third idea that has persisted in the past but is being disproven
under modern conditions is that women are transients in their jobs—
that they go to work with the intention of remaining there only a
few years. Women’s Bureau studies show that considerable propor­
tions of women have been in various industrial pursuits for long pe­
riods of years. Moreover, women frequently cannot leave their jobs
after marriage, as has been supposed. In 18 States studied by the
Women’s Bureau, from 15 to 38 percent of the employed women were
classified as married and from 8 to 25 percent were widowed, sepa­
rated, or divorced. In one State the proportion of single women
was only 37.3 percent.
A survey of 22 studies made by various agencies in various States,
cities, and in industrial groups covered more than 60,000 women,
1 The following bulletins of the Women's Bureau will be of interest in connection with
this subject. No. 85, Wages of Women in 13 States. 1931; No. 137, Summary of State
Hour Laws for Women and Minimum Wage Kates. 1938; No. 155 Women in the
Economy of the United States of America, pt. I, ch. 3, 4. 1937.
2 See Women’s Bureau Bulletin 85, pp. 1 and 2.




61

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

and of these well over half contributed their entire earnings to the
family budget.3
The files of the bureau contain countless stories of women, both
married and single, whose earnings are the sole income of the family.
Among these cases are those of a cigar maker who had supported her
husband and two children for six months because of the man’s in­
ability to get steady work; a family with three children in which the
husband was laid up with an injury for five months; a woman em­
ployed in the meat-packing industry who said, “It always takes two
to earn enough to keep our family.”
Naturally, fewer women than men have total dependents, the more
common condition being one of joint responsibility; nevertheless,
large numbers of women have such dependents. Of 1,800 women
interviewed by the Women’s Bureau in 1919, 1 in 3 of the single
women had a dependent mother and 1 in 7 of the married women
had a dependent husband. In eight studies by various agencies that
covered about 17,000 women, almost 1 in 7 said they had total de­
pendents. In a study of women who were or had been married, made
in one city by the Bureau of the Census from 1920 figures the wife
or widow was the only breadwinner in about 4,300 families. In a
study of 843 working mothers with dependent children made by the
Children’s Bureau at about the same time, more than two-thirds of
the families had no support from the father.1 Analysis of 1930
census data covering all the employed women in the country who were
homemakers as well as wage earners showed that nearly half a
million such women were the sole support of families. Similar data
from the 1930 census for 2 representative cities in the United States,
Bridgeport, Conn., and Fort Wayne, Ind., indicated further that
over 17 percent of the women who were the sole wage earners in
their families were supporting three or more persons (in each case
in addition to the woman herself).
To sum up: Women who are at work are not merely seeking to
make a little extra money; most of them must bear their whole
expenses and many must support others besides; on the whole they
are steady workers, often highly skillful, and very necessary to in­
dustry. Any wage that does not take these factors into account
constitutes inadequate payment for the services given and inadequate
income for the needs to be met.* Ill
a See p. 12 of Women’s Bureau Bulletin 75, which was recommended for use with No.
Ill of the present series. Also see Bulletin 155, Women in the Economy of the United
States of America, p. 84.
4 See Women's Bureau Bulletin 75, pn. 18-10.




VIII. WHAT THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN-EARNS—
Continued
(b) Some factors affecting women’s wages.
Women’s earnings tend to be very low. In most cases this has re­
sulted from the tradition that certain jobs constitute “women’s work,”
and that the work of women is of little economic value and will be
given almost as freely as it was in the home. Nevertheless, many of
the industrial occupations of women require great dexterity and skill,
and practically all lines of women’s work should be better paid.
The method of payment has considerable influence on the amounts
earned. If workers are paid by the piece, those who work rapidly
often are more highly paid, but the excessive speed sometimes de­
veloped is likely to undermine health. Furthermore, piece-work earn­
ings tend to be very irregular. An hourly or a weekly rate would
seem to guarantee greater certainty of earnings. But it must be
remembered that the amounts actually received often are consider­
ably below the rates fixed.
New methods have brought about practices that often work to the
disadvantage of employees. One of these is that used in paying in­
dividuals who work in a group formed to complete particular parts
of a certain process—familiarly called by the workers a “gang,” anti
a system in vogue in many large plants. If any member of the gang
is slow or is a beginner, the work of the whole group is slowed up
thereby, and all suffer loss of earnings. Whatever the method of
payment, time lost because of industrial reasons—such as a break­
down in machinery or a poor run of material—or because of sickness
or other personal reason, reduces the worker’s earnings. In a study
of women’s wages in 13 States, the Women’s Bureau found a very
large degree of lost time. In every State from about 30 percent to
over 70 percent of the women had earned less than their rates of pay,
and sometimes earnings were more than 10 percent below rates.5
Naturally earnings vary widely in different times, localities, and
industries, and information as to wages paid is likely to be scattering.
Three States—Illinois, New York, and Ohio—have reported monthly
on wages of women for more than 10 years. The Women’s Bureau
makes various special surveys that report the exact earnings of
women, taken from the pay rolls of the firms where they are em­
ployed; sometimes these are supplemented by interviews with the
same women in their homes. Twice a year, wage data by sex are
compiled by the Women’s Bureau from pay-roll reports mailed in to
the Bureau of Labor Statistics by employees.
That women’s earnings are low as compared with men’s—often
very much below men’s—is indicated in all the wage data compiled
by the Women’s Bureau, either from its own investigations or from6
6 See Women’s Bureau Bulletin 85, p. 67.




63

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

agencies such as the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics or
State agencies reporting earnings by sex, or from studies made by
organizations such as the National Industrial Conference Board the
research agency of the large manufacturing interests.6
In comparing the levels of men’s and women’s wages, attention
must be paid to the fact that the occupations or general types of work
m which women are engaged usually differ from those of men. In
the manufacturing industries women and men ordinarily are em­
ployed on different processes.
The largest numbers of employed women are in domestic and per­
sonal service and clerical occupations. In the manufacturing indus­
tries women are found in greatest numbers in cotton and knit goods
and other textiles, shoes, clothing, the tobacco industries, food, and
electi ical machinery and supply factories. While large numbers of
men also are engaged in these factories, in some industries greatly
outnumbering the women, their chief employment is in the heavy
metal industries, in automobile manufacture, in lumber and furniture,
the chemical industries including petroleum relining, the building
trades, and so on.
Comparing wage data for November 1936 in these woman-employ­
ing and man-employing industries, the average weekly wage for all
employees is in most cases below $20 for the former, while in the
man-employing industries it is in all cases above $20 and runs
above $30.
Analyzing wages for total manufacturing, where such data are
available by sex, the level of men’s wages always is found to be above
the level of women’s. For example, in Illinois in 1936 average weekly
earnings of men in manufacturing were $26.61, for women $15.12; in
New York in the same year men’s earnings in manufacturing aver­
aged $28.37 and women’s $15.83; in Ohio in 1935 average weekly
earnings for men in manufacturing were $24.77, for women $15.33.
Where men and women are employed in the same industries, the
levels ol women’s wages are much below those of men; studies of
particular industries made in 1934 or 1935 by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics show average weekly earnings of women less than threefourths of men’s. Looking further into special manufacturing occu­
pations engaging both men and women, earnings of the latter are
consistently lower than men’s.
Despite the fact that women form 37 percent of the semiskilled
and only 4 percent of the unskilled employees in manufacturing in­
dustries, a comparison of their wages with the wages of unskilled
men show them receiving considerably lower wages than the men
laborers. Over a period of years the National Industrial Confer­
ence Board has reported average weekly earnings of skilled and
semiskilled men, unskilled men, and women; for the most part in
the period 1920 to 1935 the average received by women has been
only about three-fourths as much as that of unskilled men. It is in­
teresting also to note that women’s earnings in factories in States
surveyed by the Women’s Bureau in 1935 or 1936 were lower than
the entrance rates for common labor on new construction in these
areas.
Women in the Economy of the United States of America, pt. I, ch. 3
Also see Women s Bureau Bulletin 85, pp. 154-157.




WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

65

This unfavorable picture of women’s wages in comparison with
men’s arises partly from the fact that women so often are used as a
fill-in labor supply for highly seasonal industries; partly from the
fact that women’s work, formerly concerned so largely with unpaid
household tasks, traditionally has been considered of low money
value; partly from the fact that women form large proportions of
the workers in the great piece-work industries and piece rates for
such jobs often are fixed on the old customary basis of considering
women’s work as of slight money value. It is significant that these
discrepancies are found of universal extent, in whatever period of
time under consideration, regardless of the type of occupation. It is
because women thus have constituted an especially exploited group
that efforts have been made to establish minimum wages for women
with the sanction of the Government, in order to fix a bottom figure
below which women may not be paid.







VIII. WHAT THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN EARNS—
Continued
(c) Women’s wages and what they must buy.
The general standard the Women’s Bureau recommends for the
payment of women’s wages is as follows:
Wages should be established on the basis of occupation and not on
the basis of sex or race.
We all know’ from personal experience how the purchasing power
of the dollar varies with costs of living—how in 1917, for example,
a dollar would go less than three-quarters as far as we had been
accustomed to; and then prices advanced still further, and in 1920
the same dollar bought only one-half as much; in June 1937 the
dollar bought only 85 percent as much as in the period 1923-25.
That is what is meant by the term “real wages”—not the wage itself
but the wage taking into consideration the value of the dollar.
In this way wages over a period of years may be compared, and the
Women’s Bureau has done this according to 1930 values for the
earnings of 79,000 women in factories in 13 States. The median of
these women’s earnings—and the median is the middle point when
all earnings are arranged in order of amount—was below $13 in
10 of the 13 States. Very recent data (Illinois, New York, Ohio, and
National Industrial Conference Board) on women’s earnings indicate
a slight rise, though in practically all cases the earnings seem quite
inadequate to meet the many requirements of present-day living.
For manufacturing industries, data on women’s earnings from these
four sources show a range per week of $15.12 to $15.83 in 1935 and
1936; but for the same years surveys of manufacturing industries in
certain States made by the Women’s Bureau show average weekly
earnings of women to be lower—$9.50 to $12.70.
Special surveys of service industries (1933-35) made by the
Women’s Bureau have found women in beauty shops in four large
cities having average weekly earnings of $14.25; in laundries in
several States with average earnings of $10.61 to $13.42; and in hotels
and restaurants having a cash wage averaging as low as $6.55 in
some cases. In connection with the last-named, a study by the New
York Division of Women in Industry and Minimum Wage shows
the fallacy of the popular idea that tips can be relied on, since these
form a very uncertain source of income.
Estimates of cost of living can be examined with a view to the
general consideration of the adequacy of women’s wages. Careful
surveys were made in several States in 1937 for the purpose of
setting a minimum wage for various woman-employing industries.
In New York State a cost-of-living survey, State-wide in scope,
conducted by the Division of Women in Industry of the New York
State Department of Labor, shows that at least $22.93 a week is
necessary for “adequate maintenance and protection of health” of



67

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WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

the woman worker who lives alone, and $20.35 if she lives as a mem­
ber of a family; this is computed on the basis of 52 weeks a year
($1,192.46 and $1,058.31, respectively). In Colorado the industrial
commission made an investigation which revealed that $18.77 a week,
or $975 a year, is necessary to maintain a self-supporting woman at
an acceptable standard of living in that State. The Works Progress
Administration determined that in 1935 the cost of living for a manual
worker’s family of four persons was $1,261 a year, or $24.25 a week;
the same agency estimated an emergency level for the bare existence
of such a family at $903 a year or $17.37 a week.
Further, not only is the low wage frequently paid to women a
serious matter for those who must live on the amounts received; it is
an unfortunate factor in the economic life of the country, and
especially is it significant when it is remembered that two in every
nine wage earners are women.
Any industrial group working for less than the standard that pre­
vails will be likely to have the effect of lowering wages for all.
Industries in which low wages are paid to women are likely to pay
low wages to men as well.
At its convention in Atlantic City in 1925 the American Federa­
tion of Labor made the following declaration :
We hold that the best interests of wage earners as well as the whole social
group are served by increasing production in quality as well as quantity and
by high wage standards which assure sustained purchasing .power to the work­
ers, and therefore higher national standards for the environment in which
they live and the means to enjoy cultured opportunities.

Figures of the Federal Trade Commission indicate that in 1923
about 60 percent of our national wealth was owned by about 1 per­
cent of the population. A recent estimate of the national income
(made by the National Resources Committee) shows that of the total
income flowing into the hands of all families, including 1-person
families, in the year 1935-36, the poorest third of the families re­
ceived but 10 percent of the total income, about the same amount
as was received by the richest one-half of 1 percent of the families.
Business men, employers, economists, and workers have now realized
that since from two-thirds to three-fourths of the buying public is
made up of wage earners, if a market is to be found for the increased
goods that can be produced the millions of workers must have more
money to enable them to buy their share of these products and more
leisure to give opportunity for their use. For example, Dr. William
M. Leiserson, now a member of the National Mediation Board, has
said:
Is it not time for economists to point the way to sound methods of con­
trolling income distribution to stabilize wage payments in spite of fluctuating
employment, as accounting scientists and management scientists pointed the
way to stabilization of the incomes of the investment and management classes?1

The argument for a wage for women that enables them to live de­
cently is reenforced by the economic thought of the day that recog­
nizes the advantages to industrial society as a whole of a high wage
for all workers.*
7 Address published in full in American Labor Legislation, March 1931, pp. 65 ff.




VIII. WHAT THE WAGE-EARNING WOMAN EARNS—
Continued
(d) The minimum wage and its effects.
In 15 States prior to 1933 an attempt was made to establish by law
a figure below which wage payments to women should not fall. This
was done usually by a commission authorized to study the living
costs of women and to determine the least amount that women might
be paid that would enable them to live decently. Sometimes the
amounts fixed varied for different industries; sometimes they had
to be changed to meet the changing value of money in different years.
In 1923 the United States Supreme Court declared this type of law
unconstitutional in a case involving the District of Columbia law’
(the Adkins case). This decision threw out similar laws in certain
States, and there were only seven States8 9with minimum-wage laws
in force at the beginning of 1933.
New impetus to minimum-wage laws was given in 1933 when,
spurred by the acute conditions of a period of business depression,
with the hardships it imposed upon both industry and workers,
seven States 8 passed legislation, six of them establishing a new basis
for the fixing of minimum wTages under a type of law framed to
conform to the constitutional interpretations that had been given by
the Court in 1923.
In 1936 the progress of minimum-wage legislation received a set­
back when the United States Supreme Court affirmed the decision
of New York’s highest court in ruling its minimum-wage law’ of
1933 unconstitutional. This wTas only temporary in effect, however, as
in 1937 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wash­
ington State minimum-wage law of 1913, at the same time specifically
overruling its opinion of 1923 in the District of Columbia case.
Since that time, old legislation invalidated by the courts because of
the precedent set by the 1923 decision has been revived and new laws
have been passed, so that in the summer of 1938 the number of
minimum-wage laws totaled 27—25 States,10 the District of Columbia,
and Puerto Rico.
A summary of the various types of laws in effect in 1938 follows,
classified according to the three categories in which they fall:
1. Value of service rendered.

The fair value of the/service rendered is the principle on which are
based the minimum-wage law’s of Connecticut, Illinois, New Hamp­
shire, New’ Jersey, Ohio, and Rhode Island. The laws of the follow^
ing States provide that the cost of living as well as the fair value of
8 California, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and
Wisconsin ; in Minnesota, by a ruling of the attorney general, the law was applied only
to minors ; in Colorado, the law had not functioned because of lack of appropriation.
9 Connecticut, Illinois, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Utah.
10 Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky,
Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York,
North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah,
Washington, and Wisconsin.




69

70

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

the service rendered be taken into account: Arizona, Kentucky, Massa­
chusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania. A further provision—that
in determining minimum rate wage boards take into account the
wages paid for work of like or comparable character by employers
voluntarily maintaining minimum fair wage standards—is contained
in all these laws.
2. Cost of living.

The cost of living is the sole basis of the laws in the 11 States of
California, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, North Dakota,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin, and the
District of Columbia. Though a wage is written into the Arkansas
law, it may be adjusted by the commission to equal the cost of living.
3. Flat-rate laws.

The minimum that may be paid is written into the law in Arkansas,
Nevada, South Dakota, and Puerto Rico.
Considerable testimony is available as to the definite effects of
minimum-wage legislation, both from the States where such laws
have been in existence over a period of years and from the States
having more recent legislation.
Women’s wages in California, where the law has been in effect
more than 20 years, have risen each time the minimum has been in­
creased. Laundries in Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New
York, and Ohio show very considerable wage increases after the
orders for that industry, compared to earnings before. In New York,
increases were far greater in laundries than m industry as a whole.
Where data can be compared on earnings in States having and
States not having minimum-wage laws, the benefit of such legisla­
tion is clear. The Women’s Bureau made a comparison of earnings
in laundries in 1933 and 1935 in New York, where an order was issued
in 1933, and in Pennsylvania, at that time not a minimum-wage State.
The figures show that the increase from 1933 to 1935 in the proportion
of women with hourly earnings of 31 cents or more (31 cents being
the minimum set by New York for the metropolitan area) was 520
percent in the New York City area but only 160 percent in Phila­
delphia. In the State outside of the chief city, for which the New
York order set a minimum of 27y2 cents, the increase in the propor­
tion of women earning 27y2 cents or more was 345 percent in New
York State in contrast to 87 percent in Pennsylvania.
Women in canneries in California and Wisconsin in 1932 received
almost twice as much per hour as women in New York canneries,
at that time not covered by a wage law.
Available data show almost universally that women whose earnings
are above the minimum rate do not suffer as a result of wage legisla­
tion, that is, the minimum does not become the maximum. In Cali­
fornia the proportion of women receiving more than the minimum in­
creased steadily from 1920 to 1930. In Massachusetts, after a 5-year
period in which the laundry order had been in effect, almost twice
as many women as before received above the minimum; and in three
other industries significant increases were found. In New York
laundries 81 percent of the women surveyed had higher earnings
after the order. In laundries in three other minimum-wage States



WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

71

larger proportions than before had earnings above the minimum set,
as follows:
Percent of women receiving
above minimum—
Before order
After order

Illinois (includes minors)-----------------------—
New Hampshire 37.0
Ohio 23.3

18.2

20.9
42.0
40.7

That the minimum wage is recognized as a benefit to industry is
shown by the attitude of employers. California for some years has
had the support of the Canners’ League of the State, and endorse­
ment by other industries. The New York laundry owners assisted in
the sponsorship of the minimum-wage law in that State. The Na­
tional Association of Hosiery Manufacturers and retail trade groups
also have placed themselves on record as favoring such legislation.
There is no evidence that minimum-wage laws have any gen­
eral effect on employment of women, since the usual experience is
that women’s employment continues its normal increase where these
laws are in effect. The continual shift occurring at all times and in
all places is caused by many factors other than the establishment of
a minimum wage. Further, the claim that such legislation has any
general or controlling effect toward inducing the replacement of
women by men is disproven when it is noted that even after allowing
for the increases in wages brought about by minimum-wage laws
women’s wages tend to be considerably lower than men’s. It should
be remembered also that women and men seldom compete for the
same jobs, and that because of their particular fitness for certain
types of work women’s employment is likely to increase regardless
of whether or not a minimum wage is fixed.
A Nation-wide minimum wage became effective on October 24,
1938, with the coming into force of the Federal Fair Labor Standards
Act of 1938. Workers employed in interstate commerce or in the
production of goods shipped in such commerce are covered, with
certain classes exempted from both wage and hour provisions and
other classes exempted totally or partially from the hour provisions.
For the first year the minimum wage is fixed at 25 cents an hour,
and the maximum hours are to be 44 a week. As rapidly as is
economically feasible without substantially curtailing employment,
the minimum wage will be raised to 40 cents an hour and weekly
hours will be reduced to 40, the latter goal to be reached within 3
years. The Administrator appoints an industry committee, for each
industry, consisting of an equal number of representatives of employ­
ers, workers, and the public, which recommends the highest minimum
wage possible with due regard to employment conditions in the in­
dustry. Within 7 years, 40 cents an hour is to be the minimum rate for
all industrial employees covered under the act.
Note.—Write the Women’s Bureau for other current material on
the minimum wage and for further information on the Federal Fair
Labor Standards Act of 1938.







IX. VARIOUS CONNECTIONS OF WOMEN WITH THE
INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR WORLD
(a) Women in unusual occupations.
It is illuminating merely to run through the census list of the oc­
cupations in which women were engaged in 1930. In addition to
all those in which women ordinarily are expected to be found, and
the long lists of factory employments in which people now have be­
come accustomed to finding women, there are many that may seem
more unusual. In connection with women who are factory workers
and laborers at various occupations, there should be mentioned per­
haps women in the related field of invention. At the National In­
ventors’ Congress in New York in June 1937, more than 10 percent
of the articles were listed as having been invented by women, many of
them designed to lighten and make efficient old-time housekeeping
tasks.
Perhaps it is not surprising to know that according to the census
of 1930 thousands of women were painters, glaziers, and varnishers;
“postmasters;” or “floorwalkers, and foremen in stores.” But it may
seem somewhat more strange that over 1,000 were “mail carriers” and
“undertakers,” “paper hangers,” “chauffeurs.”
In addition, hundreds were classified as “engravers,” as “detectives,”
and “policemen.” More than 100 were “lithographers,” “sheriffs,”
“shoemakers and cobblers (not in factory)”; “builders and building
contractors.”
One of the oldest employments open to women, outside those in
the home, was the keeping of taverns and “ordinaries,” and women
did this in America in the seventeenth century. Occasionally a
woman of that day ran a mill or even worked in a sawmill. In the
early eighteenth century there were many women printers, both as
compositors and at the press, and some worked in the early paper
mills. Most of those in industry were in some form of textile
manufacture.
In 1840 there were reported to be only 7 manufacturing occupations
open to women; but in 1930 there were women engaged in all but
30 of the entire 534 occupations listed in the census. There were
even a few women reported as “blacksmiths,” “loom fixers,” “plas­
terers,” “brick and stone masons,” “machinists,” “millwrights and
toolmakers,” and “iron mo biers, founders, and casters.”
An illustrated newspaper article of recent date (1937) describes a
woman at work in one of these unusual occupations:
“Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands,” wrote Longfellow.
In New York’s Greenwich Village the smith labors at the traditional task of
shoeing horses, the Ninth Avenue “L” playing the role of the chestnut tree.
“The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands.” He, did Long­
fellow say? What a shock he would get if introduced to Mrs. Martha Drew
Smith, 33, daughter of a Dexter, Michigan, blacksmith. She is New York’s only
woman smith.
6
83139°—38
73



74

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

“And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.” Change the
pronoun to her, and Longfellow’s is an apt description of the sturdy arms of
Mrs. Smith, who is her husband's full-fledged partner in the smithy. In Long­
fellow’s time vacuum-cleaning a horse was unheard of, so there are no lines of
his poem to fit this picture (illustrated in the paper). Mrs. Smith, however,
proves herself as adept at the more feminine task of grooming Dobbin as at the
muscular one of shoeing him.

Other occupations in which women are not frequently thought of,
but in which some were reported in 1930, were “tinsmith and copper­
smith,” “piano and organ tuner,” “mechanic,” “cemetery keeper,”
“bootblack,” “porter, steam railroads,” and there even were reported
four auctioneers, four railway mail clerks, and one plumber.
Probably the most unique occupation for a woman is circus clown.
The magazine article noting this information stated that a woman,
whose husband was a member of a clown group, “pinch-hitted” for a
clown who became ill, and she had been filling the big tent with laughs
ever since. The comment was further made that she probably was the
only woman clown in the business.




IX. VAKIOUS CONNECTIONS OF WOMEN WITH THE
INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR WORLD—Continued
(b) Women as “officials and managers.”
The census figures for 1930 indicated that large numbers of women
were in the field of management, or officials, or in independent busi­
ness. For example, from over 5,000 to more than 10,000 were reported
under each of the headings of “manufacturers,” “managers and offi­
cials” in manufacturing, and “bankers and bank officials.” Over 1,000
were “owners, managers, and officials” of theaters; “wholesale dealers,
importers, and exporters;” “stock brokers;” “proprietors, officials, and
managers” of telephone and telegraph companies; and “managers and
officials of insurance companies;” smaller numbers were “loan brokers
and pawnbrokers;” “commercial brokers and commission men;” “offi­
cials and superintendents” of steam railroads; and “operators, officials,
and managers” in the extraction of minerals.
With regard to the railroads, among the newer occupations in which
women are showing themselves valuable employees in train systems
are, in addition to the well-known hostesses and stewardesses, jobs as
passenger agents and as inspectors of dining cars and restaurants;
other positions noted are a woman immigration agent, assistant gen­
eral freight agent, supervisor of passenger service, traveling passenger
agent, passenger car distributor. The railroad’s oldest profession for
women, station agent, is found mentioned in the office records of prac­
tically all the large railroad systems of the country, life stories of those
women who have been railroad station agents and telegraphers, some
of their service years beginning as far back as the eighties.
Attention should be called, of course, to that newer field of trans­
portation which numbers women among its employees—aviation, in
which, for example, there are the familiar airplane hostesses and
women pilots, one woman being a licensed United States mail pilot.
Then there are other occupations that obviously require specialized
skill or very good judgment if they are to be effectively carried on,
as, for example, hunter, trapper, and guide; or marshal and con­
stable.
And when all this is said, the great body of professional women
remains still to be considered—over a million of them—authors, edi­
tors, clergymen, teachers, trained nurses, dentists, draftsmen, lawyers,
physicians, civil and electrical engineers, architects, and others.
No general resume has been made of the women in executive and
managerial positions, and to do so obviously would be a gigantic task.
However, the numbers reported in the census give a background for
discovering in some measure which are the more usual, which the
more unusual, of managerial, official, professional, and semiprofes­
sional positions, and frequent stories of the activities of individual
women are to be found in various periodicals.
It may be of interest to mention two women widely variant in
talents and interests who are among those who have pioneered in



75

76

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

quite different lines of management; one of these is of special interest
to labor and to management for her unusual handling of a difficult
business, while the other is of importance because of her original work
in the field of efficiency engineering.
At the death of her father, Miss Josephine Roche became the pro­
prietor of the Rocky Mountain Fuel Co. in Colorado, and she deter­
mined to control its management herself and direct it along lines of
cooperation with the mine operatives.
The company issued in 1928 an agreement reading in part:
* * * Our purposes are: To promote and establish Industrial justice, to
substitute reason for violence, confidence for misunderstanding, integrity and
good faith for dishonest practices, and a union of effort for the chaos of the
present economic warfare; to avoid needless and wasteful strikes and lockouts
through the investigation and correction of their underlying causes; to establish
genuine collective bargaining between mine workers and operators through
free and independent organization; to stabilize employment, production, and
markets through cooperative endeavor and the aid of science; to assure mine
workers and operators continuing mutual benefit and consumers a dependable
supply of coal at reasonable and uniform prices; to defend our joint under­
taking against every conspiracy or vicious practice which seeks to destroy it;
and in all other respects to enlist public confidence and support by safeguarding
the public interest.

At the close of 1929, when other companies were suffering, this one
reported an increase in production of 29 percent, with a decrease of 19
cents per ton in mine costs; an increase of seven-tenths of a ton in
daily production per man; and an increase of over one-fourth in
average of annual earnings per worker. In addition, the company
had the advantage of staunch union support and no strikes.
Miss Roche was appointed assistant secretary of the Treasury
in 1934,1 Her activities included supervision of the United States
Public Health Service, chairmanship of the Interdepartmental Com­
mittee on Health and Welfare, and chairmanship of the National
Youth Administration.
The other woman, Dr. Lillian M. Gilbreth, is a consulting engineer,
and her prominence in the field of scientific management has been
unique. Having taken a doctor’s degree at Brown University, she
has been active in the Taylor Society, and is an honorary member of
the Society of Industrial Engineers. She collaborated in certain
of her husband’s publications and has herself done some writing in
this field; for example, the article on scientific management in the
New International Encyclopedia is from her pen.
1 In 1037 she resigned to return to directing the affairs ot her coal company. More
recently she has had a large share in directing health activities on a national scale.




IX. VARIOUS CONNECTIONS OF WOMEN WITH THE
INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR WORLD—Continued
(c) Women’s labor organizations and some of their leaders.2
It is a natural human trait for persons having like interests to
form associations. Those who pursued various occupations in medie­
val times had their craft guilds, and today it is considered a helpful
thing for those practicing any type of profession to come in contact
through organization with others similarly engaged—be it doctors,
lawyers, financiers, undertakers, press representatives, road builders,
dentists, or any of those in a host of other types of work.
When women began to enter factory occupations they did likewise.
The earliest information we have of the organization of employed
women for better work conditions goes back to about 1825, although
the names of a few women workers stand out before that period.
For example, Hannah Borden, whose expert weaving even when she
was quite a little girl led her father to find a place for her in a mill
in Fall River, Mass., of which he was a stockholder.
The girls of that day were quite spirited in demanding improve­
ment in their work conditions. When a cotton mill in Paterson,
N. J., changed the dinner hour from 12 to 1 o’clock, the women and
child workers left at noon; this was in 1828, and was the first re­
corded strike among women in this industry for better conditions.
About 6 years later a female protective association was formed in
Lowell, Mass., and 2,500 girls marched through the streets singing:
Oh, isn’t it a pity such a pretty girl as I
Should be sent into the factory to pine away and die.

These girls refused overtures from their employers in any way except
through their union officers, and declared, “As our' fathers re­
sisted * * * the lordly avarice of the British ministry, so we,
their daughters, never will bear the yoke which has been prepared
for us.” At this time some of the mill owners had constructed
boarding houses, which often were very crowded and badly aired.
Tuberculosis was prevalent. The boarding-house keepers had an
arrangement with certain mill owners that half the girls’ board
would be paid them directly by the factory out of the girls’ wages.
Although working women formed organizations in other localities
there was no concerted movement at that time. In 1833 seamstresses
and tailoresses in Baltimore organized; in 1835 the Female Improve­
ment Society was formed in Philadelphia by members of the sewing
2 The following books would be of interest in connection with this subject: U. S.
Bureau of Labor. Report on Condition of Woman and Child Wage Eearners iri the United
States, Vol. X History of Women in Trade Unions, by John B. Andrews and W D P
Bliss, 1911. Henry, Alice. Women and the Labor Movement. George II Doran Co
New York, 1923. Wolfson, Theresa. The Woman Worker and the Trade Unions Inter­
national Publishers, New York. 192(5. Wolman, Leo. The Growth of American Trade
Unions, 18S0-1923, ch. V. National Bureau of Economic Research. New York
1924
Lorwin, Lewis L., and Jean A. Flexner. The American Federation of Labor The
Brookings Institution. 1933




77

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

78

trades; the shoe binders formed The Female Society of Lynn and
Vicinity for the Protection and Promotion of Female Industry;
in 1851 a shirt-sewers’ cooperative union was formed in New York,
and the women who were members of it quoted a poem, Hood’s Song
of the Shirt, as applying to themselves:
Sewing at once with a double thread,
A shroud as well as a shirt.

The labor-reform associations sometimes worked for legislation es­
tablishing better conditions for women workers. In 1845 Miss Sarah
G. Bagley, then president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform As­
sociation, testified before the Massachusetts legislative committee as
to conditions in the textile mills. This is said to have been the first
official investigation of the condition of adult laborers, and was a
move largely inspired by the activities of women.
In 1869 the first convention was held by the Daughters of St.
Crispin, a shoe-workers’ organization, which appears to be the earliest
recorded national trade-union of women. In this year, also, women
first became members of one of the 8-hour leagues that had grown up—
that of Boston.
In 1881 women were allowed to become regular members in the
early men’s union organized on a national scale and known as the
Knights of Labor; 4 years later a department of women’s work was
created which employed an investigator, Mrs. Leonora M. Barry.
In the first year she visited 30 cities and spoke over 100 times; in 3
years the women members numbered 12,000, with a great variety of
trades represented. Records of the Knights of Labor were printed
and afford the basis of a consistent organization history. It has
been estimated that by 1923 about 250,000 women were organized;
another estimate is that in 1920 there were 396,000 women members
of various trade-unions (women’s, and men’s and women’s.)3
In 1903 the National Women’s Trade Union League was formed,
its first convention attended by seven persons, and its first president
being Mrs. Mary Morton Kehew, of Boston. Perhaps the woman
most responsible for its formation and growth was Mrs. Raymond
Robins, who for many years gave untiring service and financial aid
to the development of the organization. She was its president until
1922, when she became honorary president, the active office then being
held in succession by Maud Swartz, of the International Typograph­
ical Union, and Rose Schneiderman, of the United Hatters, Cap, and
Millinery Workers, reelected in 1936. The National Women’s Trade
Union League of America has 2 State leagues and is organized in
19 cities. The proceedings of its 1936 convention, held in Wash­
ington, D. C., at which 21 trades were represented, list as affili­
ated with the league 35 national and international unions, 11 State
labor bodies, and The Trades and Labor Congress of Canada. The
league now has more than a million members with direct or affiliated
membership in 35 trades.
Nearly all trade unions having any women members are affiliated
Avith the National Women’s Trade Union League of America—both
locally and nationally. The Glove Workers’ International Union has
had as its president Agnes Nestor; she had formerly served as its
s Wolfson, Theresa, and Wolman, Leo.




See footnote on preceding page.

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

79

secretary-treasurer, an office later held for many years by Elisabeth
Christman (now secretary-treasurer of the National Women’s Trade
Union League). Another woman—Sarah Conboy—was for several
years following 1915 secretary-treasurer of the United Textile
Workers of America; and since 1923 Julia O’Connor has been presi­
dent of the Telephone Operators’ Department of the International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. At all times since its formation
a woman has been on the board of the Boot and Shoe Workers’ Inter­
national Union; the International Ladies’ Garment Workers, the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the American Federation of Teach­
ers, and unions of Federal employees are other organizations of
national scope that have had women in national offices. The Ameri­
can Federation of Labor and the newly formed Committee for
Industrial Organization have women organizers. Many more
organizations and very many interesting women who have been
active in labor organizations could be listed, but the space of a large
volume would be required to make such information complete.







>

IX. VARIOUS CONNECTIONS OF WOMEN WITH THE
INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR WORLD—Continued
(d) Women in official administrative labor positions and women
who have furthered movements for workers.
That women are taking their part as officials and inspectors is evi­
dent from the figures of the 1930 census, which report 980 women as
State, 5,855 as county, and 3,109 as city officials and inspectors. Natu­
rally their duties and the fields they cover are varied.
Some of these women inspect factories under the State labor laws
or regulations to insure safe and healthful conditions of work for
women and children. The whole budget of a State for factory in­
spection—for both men and women—ordinarily constitutes a small
proportion of all that is spent by the State under the head of safety;
of the expenditures for protection of persons and property reported
by the United States Department of Commerce in 1931, only 2.6 per­
cent was for factory inspection, a very small amount when the large
groups of men and women workers are considered.4
Today there is an increasing number of women executives in State
labor departments. I he first woman to hold such an executive posi­
tion was Mrs. Florence Kelley, appointed by the Governor of Illinois
m 1893 as chief of factory inspectors in the State. A graduate of
Cornell University and a member of the Illinois bar at a time when
women university graduates were few and women lawyers very un­
usual, she did a thorough job for 4 years. After that time her orig­
inality, keen mind, and forceful personality were active for more than
30 years in the local, State, and Federal campaigns for labor laws and
various other types of social legislation.
Present or past directors of the Women’s Bureau and the earlier
organizations that preceded it in the United States Department of
Labor will be given somewhat more detailed consideration in chapter
X;5 they include Marie L. Obenauer, Mary van Kleeck, and Mary
Anderson; those of the Children’s Bureau include Julia Lathrop,
Grace Abbott, and Katharine Lenroot.
One great industrial State had a woman as commissioner of labor,
Frances Perkins, of New York. In the same State, Nelle Swartz has
been a member of the industrial commission and Frieda Miller direc­
tor of the division of women in industry and minimum wage.6
Obviously, it is not possible even to list here the women who are in
labor departments and factory inspection in all the States. The
Bureau of Labor Statistics lists such women in at least 33 States and
the District of Columbia, though of course their duties vary widely
and their official status is scarcely ever the same in any two cases.7
‘ U.^ Bureau of the Census. Financial Statistics of States, 1931. Table 11, pp. 72, 74.
* Miss Oilier was appointed industrial commissioner of the State of New York while
this bulletin was in press.
. 1V S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bui. No. 621, Labor Offices in the United States and
m uanaaa. lyoo.




81

82

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

In addition to these officials, and to those active in the organizations
of their own trades, there have been other socially-minded persons
who have worked or have formed organizations for the improvement
of women’s working conditions. As early as 1828 Matthew Carey,
“an independent and public-spirited citizen,” called attention to the
low wages paid women in Philadelphia, and was a moving spirit in
the organization of the women there. At about the same time or a
little later Frances Wright was writing in 'the interest of such move­
ments, and after the Civil War Grace Dodge was instrumental in
organizing working women’s clubs. In 1866 the Working Women’s
Protective Union was formed to aid working women in the collection
of their wages. In the present time Margaret Dreier Robins and her
sister, Mary E. Dreier, have given long and devoted personal energy
as well as wealth in furthering the purposes of the Women’s Trade
Union League.
In 1886 the Working Women’s Society of New York was formed
with the help of Josephine Sha w Lowell and others; it aimed to fur­
ther working women’s organization, and to educate the public to the
need of better conditions. From this grew the National Consumers’
League, first arising in local branches in New York, Boston, Phila­
delphia, and elsewhere, and formed on the principle of interesting
consumers to use only goods made under satisfactory conditions; this
standard was determined after careful investigation, and approved
firms were placed on a “white list” and allowed to put the distin­
guishing label of the society on their goods so that buyers would be
sure of it. Among the persons active in forming the New York
branch, in addition to Mrs. Lowell, were Maud Nathan, later its presi­
dent, and Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, daughter of the publisher,
George P. Putnam, and the first woman to become a member of the
New York Academy of Medicine.
The group in New York was first formed after an investigation
reported by Alice Woodbridge in the winter of 1889-90. Ten years
later the league became national in scope, with Mrs. Florence Kelley
as its executive secretary. Among the outstanding white lists there
were prepared those for candy and hosiery manufacturers. The
league was aided by two prominent lawyers, Felix Frankfurter and
Louis D. Brandeis; Josephine Goldmark prepared briefs for its cases
and published the results of her brilliant researches on the effects of
fatigue; Carol a Woerishoffer gave up a summer trip abroad to work
in laundries to ascertain for the league the conditions prevailing there,
and Louise Lockwood did similar work in the silk industry.
Many others could be mentioned, but one woman who is a pioneer
in a scientific field must be included at all events—Dr. Alice Hamil­
ton, who as a professor in the Harvard Medical School has devoted
years of investigation and research to the problem of occupational
diseases, publishing from time to time the results of her findings.




X. WORK OF THE WOMEN’S BUREAU
(a) Antecedents of the Women’s Bureau, and formation and
personnel of the bureau.
In the decade from 1900 to 1910 there was a growing recognition
that women were increasing rapidly in industrial pursuits and that
many problems confronting working women should be the concern
of the Federal Government itself.
Almost the first official utterance of the National Women’s Trade
Union League, which had been created at the Boston convention of
the American Federation of Labor in 1903, was the passing of a
resolution requesting the Federal Government to make an investiga­
tion of women in industry. In 1906 three Chicago women—Mrs.
Raymond Robins, Miss Jane Addams, and Miss Mary McDowell—went to Washington and appeared before a congressional committee
to ask for an appropriation to make a special investigation of women
in industry. The appropriation finally was granted by Congress,
and the investigation was conducted by Charles P. Neill, then Com­
missioner of Labor in the Department of Commerce and Labor. The
investigation extended over a period of 3 years, from 1907 through
1909, and covered many of the industries in which women were em­
ployed. The report was published in 19 volumes and laid the basis
for an insistent demand for a bureau in the Government whose
concern should be the working woman. In 1913 the Department of
Labor was separated from the Department of Commerce.
A women’s division was established as a subdivision of the Bu­
reau of Labor Statistics. It was first headed by Marie L. Obenauer,1
and the reports issued by her division in this early period give evi­
dence of a thorough and scientific approach to the work. However,
her efforts for women were placed under a heavy handicap by the
form of organization, for she was but one of five executives in the
bureau, the other four being men. Under these circumstances it
was natural that the groups interested in employment conditions
affecting women should continue their work for the establishment of
a separate women’s bureau.
The American Federation of Labor at its conventions passed reso­
lutions asking for the creation of a women’s bureau, and the presi­
dent, Samuel Gompers, and the legislative committee were active in
the agitation for such a bureau. In 1916 Representative Casey, of
Pennsylvania, introduced in Congress a bill to create a women’s
division in the Department of Labor, but this bill did not pass.
In 1918 the increased employment of women and the Nation’s great
need of their work led to the institution of a Woman in Industry
Service, headed by Mary van Kleeck. Having been director of the
committee on women’s work and of industrial studies under the
Russell Sage Foundation, Miss van Kleeck brought experience in
1 Mary Conyngton succeeded Miss Obenauer in this office.




83

WOMEN IN INDUSTRY

84

investigation as well as a brilliant mind to her task, and when the
war was over she urged upon the attention of the country’s leaders
the permanency of women’s entrance into various occupations and
the consequent need for a Federal body that should make continual
study of the situation of employed women.
In this she was supported by organizations of those who saw the
importance of such a move. The joint committee of the Senate and
House heard representatives of the following organizations in the
interest of forming the Women’s Bureau:
American Federation of Labor.
National Women’s Trade Union LeagueNational Federation of Federal Employees.
National Consumers’ League.
National League of Women Voters.
National Young Women's Christian Association.
United States Department of Labor.
Children’s Bureau, United States Department of Labor.
Division of Industrial Studies of the Russell Sage Foundation.
University of Chicago Settlement.
Women’s Executive Committees of the National Republican Committee and
National Democratic Committee.
National Republican Congressional Committee.

Accordingly, in 1920, the Women’s Bureau was established in its
present form, created to—
* * * formulate standards and policies which shall promote the welfare of
wage-earning women, improve their working conditions, increase their effi­
ciency, and advance their opportunities for profitable employment.

In harmony with the policy of the Government, the Women’s
Bureau has no mandatory powers nor any laws to administer. How­
ever, it is the duty of the Federal Government to make sure that in
our eagerness for expansion of industries and the ever-growing de­
mand for more production we do not neglect the important human
resources of our country, and do not exploit women. The declara­
tion of standards and policies by the Women’s Bureau has the force
inherent in facts scientifically secured and presented and tends to
influence the industrial standards of the several States.
Since its formation, the bureau has been headed by Mary Ander­
son, who had been assistant director when Miss van Kleeck was
director of the then Woman in Industry Service, and had had years
of experience with the Boot and Shoe Workers’ Union and the
Women’s Trade Union League. The assistant director appointed
was Agnes L. Peterson, who had served as industrial supervisor with
Miss van Kleeck, and formerly had been a superintendent of the
first bureau of women and children organized in any State.2
The Children’s Bureau was organized in the United States Depart­
ment of Labor much earlier than the Women’s Bureau, and during
its history has been headed by three outstanding women—first, Julia
Lathrop, later Grace Abbott, and at present Katharine Lenroot. The
work of these three directors is known wherever the expert care of
the child is sought, be it the dependent or delinquent ward of the
State, the child m industry, or the child in the home.
2 The State of Minnesota. Bertha M. Nienburg succeeded Miss Peterson in the Women’s
Bureau of the United States Department of Labor in 1934.




X. WORK OF THE WOMEN’S BUREAU—Continued
(b), (c), and (d).
For use in this connection, make your own selections from Women’s
Bureau Bulletin 84, Fact Finding; with the Women’s Bureau. If
you have not a copy of this bulletin, it can be obtained by request.
Sections especially suggested are those beginning on pages 1, 9, 28,
and 32. See also the Women’s Bureau periodical, The Woman Worker,
published every two months.
85




APPENDIX
PUBLICATIONS OF THE WOMEN’S BUREAU
Bulletins may be ordered from the Superintendent of Public Documents, Washington,
D. C., at prices listed. A discount of 25 percent on orders of 100 or more copies is
allowed. Single copies of the bulletins or several copies for special educational purposes
may be secured through the Women’s Bureau without charge as long as the free supply
lasts. Mimeographed reports are obtainable only from the Women’s Bureau.

Bui. No.

RECOMMENDED STANDARDS

87. Sanitary Drinking Facilities. 1931. 10c.
94. State Requirements for Industrial Lighting. 1932. 10c.
99. The Installation and Maintenance of Toilet Facilities in Places of Em­
ployment. 1933. 25c.
112. Standards of Placement Agencies for Household Employees. 1934. 20c.
See also Health and Safety, bul. 136; Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions,
bul. 142.
HOURS, WAGES, AND WORKING CONDITIONS
43. Standard and Scheduled Plours of Work for Women In Industry. 1925. 15c.
47. Women in the Fruit-Growing and Canning Industries in the State of Wash­
ington. 1926. 40c.
67. Women Workers in Flint, Mich. 1929. 15c.
70. Negro Women in Industry in 15 States. 1929. 15c.
72. Conditions of Work in Spin Rooms. 1929. 10c.
76. Women in 5-and-10-Cent Stores and Limited-Price Chain Department Stores.
1930. 10c.
78. A Survey of Laundries and Their Women Workers in 23 Cities. 1930. 30c.
80. Women in Florida Industries. 1930. 20c.
82. The Employment of Women In the Pineapple Canneries of Hawaii. 1930.
15c.
85. Wages of Women in 13 States (1920-1925). 1931. 35c.
88. The Employment of Women in Slaughtering and Meat Packing. 1932. 40c.
93. Hqusehold Employment in Philadelphia. 1932. 10c.
96. Women Office Workers in Philadelphia. 1932. 10c.
106. Household Employment in Chicago. 1933. 10c.
109. The Employment of Women in the Sewing Trades of Connecticut. (Final
report.) 1935. 5c.
111. Hours, Earnings, and Employment in Cotton Mills. 1933. 10c.
118. The Employment of Women In Puerto Rico. 1934. 5c.
119. Hours and Earnings in the Leather-Glove Industry. 1984. 5c.
120. The Employment of Women in Offices. 1934. 15c.
121. A Survey of the Shoe Industry in New Hampshire. 1935. 10c.
122. Variations in Wage Rates Under Corresponding Conditions. 1935. 10c.
123. Employment in Hotels and Restaurants. 1936. 15c.
124. Women in Arkansas Industries. 1935. 5c.
125. The Employment of Women in Department Stores. 1936. 10c.
126. Women in Texas Industries. 1936. 15c.
127. Hours and Earnings in Tobacco Stemmeries. 1934. 5c.
130. Employed Women Under N. R. A. Codes. 1935. 20c.
132. Women Who Work in Offices. 1935. 5c.
133. Employment Conditions in Beauty Shops. 1935. 10c.
142. The Economic Problems of the Women of the Virgin Islands of the United
States. 1936. 10c.
143. Factors Affecting Wages in Power Laundries. 1936. 10c.
349. Employment of Women in Tennessee Industries. 1937. 10c.
150. Women’s Employment in West Virginia. 1937. 10c.
152. Differences in Earnings of Women and Men. 1938. 10c.



<U

153. Women's Hours and Wages in the District of Columbia in 1937.

1937.

10c.

162. Women in Kentucky Industries, 1937. 1938. 10c.
163. Hours and Earnings in Certain Men’s-Wear Industries. 1. Work Clothing;
Work Shirts; Dress Shirts, 10c. 2. Knit Underwear; Woven Under­
wear. 5c. 3. Seamless Hosiery. 5c. 4. Welt Shoes, oc. 5. Rain­
coats; Sports Jackets. (In press.) 6. Caps and Cloth Hats; Neckwear;
Work and Knit Gloves; Handkerchiefs. (In press.) 1938,
Short Hours Pay. 1937. (Leaflet.)
Women’s Wages in Michigan Industries. 1935. (Mimeog.)
Employment of Women in Delaware. 1936. (Mimeog.)
See also Occupations and Opportunities, bul. 117; Lost Time and Labor Turn­
over, bul. 52; Legislation, buls. 130, 145; Employment Fluctuation, bills. 92, 95.
103, 108; Variations in Hours and Methods of Production, buls. 100, 105, 107
110, 141; Industrial Home Work, bills. 128, 131; Miscellaneous, buls. 115, 155,
165.
LOST TIME AND LABOR TURNOVER
52. Lost Time and Labor Turnover in Cotton Mills. 1926. 35c.
69. Causes of Absence for Men and for Women in Four Cotton Mills.
5c.
See also Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions, bill. 72.

1929.

OCCUPATIONS AND OPPORTUNITIES
50. Effects of Applied Research Upon the Employment Opportunities of Ameri­
can Women. 1926. 10c.
53. The Status of Women in Government Service in 1925. 1926. 15c.
68. Summary: The Effects of Labor Legislation on the Employment Oppor­
tunities of Women. 1928. 10c.
74. The Immigrant Woman and Her Job. 1930. 30c.
104. The Occupational Progress of Women, 1910 to 1930. 1933. 10c.
117. The Age Factor as it Relates to Women in Business and the Professions.
1934. 10c.
140. Reemployment of New England Women in Private Industry. 1936. 15c.
Labor Supply and Demand in the Service Industries. (Leaflet.)
See also Recommended Standards, bul. 112: Hours, Wages, and Working
Conditions, buls, 47, 70, 76, 78, 82, 88, 93, 96, 106, 109, 111, 118, 119. 120, 121,
125, 127, 132, 133, 142, 143; Family Status and Home Responsibilities, bul.
77; Health and Safety, bul. 101; Employment Fluctuation, buls. 95, 103;
Changes in Hours and Methods of Production, buls. 100, 107, 110; Industrial
Home Work, buls. 128, 131, 135; Miscellaneous, buls. 115, 146, 155; Biblio­
graphies, buls. 134, 154.
.
FAMILY STATUS AND HOME RESPONSIBILITIES
75. What the Wage-Earning Woman Contributes to Family Support. 1929.
5c.
77. A Study of Two Groups of Denver Married Women Applying for Jobs.
1929. 5c.
148. The Employed Woman Homemaker in the United States. 1936. 10c.
Gainful Employment of Married Women. 1936. Revised August 1936.
(Mimeog.)
Effects of Dismissing Married Persons from the Civil Service, March 1936.
(Mimeog.)
See also Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions, buls. 47, 88, 124; Occupa­
tions and Opportunities, bul. 74; Employment Fluctuation, buls. 92, 108; Mis­
cellaneous, bul. 155.
HEALTH AND SAFETY
60. Industrial Accidents to Women in New Jersey, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
1927. 45c.
81. Industrial Accidents to Men and Women. 1930. 15c.
101. The Employment of Women in Vitreous Enameling. 1932. 10c.
102. Industrial Injuries to Women in 1928 and 1929 Compared with Injuries
to Men. 1933. 10c.




(ii)

114. State Reporting of Occupational Disease, Including a Survey of Legislation
Applying to Women. 1934. 10c.
129. Industrial Injuries to Women in 1930 and 1931 Compared with Injuries to
Men. 1935. 10c.
136. The Health and Safety of Women in Industry. 1935. 5c.
147. Summary of State Reports of Occupational Diseases with a Survey of
Preventive Legislation, 1932 to 1934. 1936. 10c.
151. Injuries to Women in Personal Service Occupations in Ohio. 1937. 10c.
160. Industrial Injuries to Women and Men in 1932, 1933, and 1934. 10c.
See also Recommended Standards, buls. 87, 94, 99: Hours, Wages, and Work­
ing Conditions, bul. 121; Miscellaneous, bul. 79; Bibliographies, bnl. 71; Em­
ployment Fluctuation and Unemployment, bul. 158.
LEGISLATION
61. The Development of Minimum-Wage Laws in the United States. 1912 to
1927. 1928. 90c.
60-1.‘History of Labor Legislation for Women in Three States. 1929. 15c.
66-11. Chronological Development of Labor Legislation for Women in the
United States. 1929. 15c.
137. Summary of State Hour Laws for Women and Minimum-Wage Rates.
1936. 10c.
145. Women’s Wages Prior and Subsequent to the Ohio Minimum-Wage Law.
1936. 10c.
156. State Labor Laws for Women, December 31, 1937. I. Summary. 5c. II.
Hours. 10c.
157. Legal Status of Women in the United States of America. Issued State by
State, in no special order, to be assembled later. Separates, 5c.
Why Legislate Living Wages for Women Workers? March 1935. (Leaflet.)
The High Cost of Low Wages. 1938. (Leaflet.)
Mimeographed Material on History of Court Cases of the Minimum-Wage Laws
of New York, Ohio, and Washington. Bulletin pending.
The Benefits of Minimum-Wage Legislation for Women.
March 1937.
(Mimeog.)
Factors to be Considered in Preparing Minimum-Wage Budgets for Women.
1937. (Mimeog.)
•
See also Recommended Standards, buls. 87, 94, 99, 112; Hours, Wages, and
Working Conditions, bul. 130; Occupations and Opportunities, bul. 68; Health
and Safety, buls. 64, 114, 147; Miscellaneous, bul. 155.
EMPLOYMENT FLUCTUATION AND UNEMPLOYMENT
73. Variations in Employment Trends of Women and Men. 1930. 50c
83. Fluctuation of Employment in the Radio Industry. 1931. 15c.
92. Wage-Earning Women and the Industrial Conditions of 1930. A Survey
of South Bend. 1932. 15c.
95. Bookkeepers, Stenographers, and Office Clerks in Ohio, 1914 to 1929 1932
10c.
103. Women Workers in the Third Year of the Depression. 1933. 5c.
108. The Effects of the Depression on Wage Earners’ Families. 1936. 5c.
113. Employment Fluctuations and Unemployment of Women. 1928 to 1931
1933. 30e.
139. Women Unemployed Seeking Relief in 1933. 1936. 5c.
158. Unattached Women on Relief in Chicago, 1937. 1938. 15c.
159. Trends in the Employment of Women, 1918-1936. 1938. 10c.
See also Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions, buls. 88, 121; Occupations
and Opportunities, bul. 140; Changes in Hours and Methods of Production,
buls. 100,141: Miscellaneous, bul. 155.
CHANGES IN HOURS AND METHODS OF PRODUCTION
100. The Effects on Women of Changing Conditions in the Cigar and Cigarette
Industries. 1932. 15c.
105. A Study of a Change from 8 to 6 Hours of Work. 1933. 5c.
(III)

83139°—3J




107. Technological Changes in Relation to Women’s Employment. 1935. 10c.
110. The Change from Manual to Dial Operation in the Telephone Industry.
1933. 5c.
116. A Study of a Change from One Shift of 9 hours to Two Shifts of 6 Hours
Each. 1934. 5c.
141. Piece Work in the Silk Dress Industry. 1936. 10c.
Memorandum on the Practicability of Setting Maximum Standards of Work
in Cotton Mills Operating Under the Stretch-Out System. 1933. (Leaflet.)
See also Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions, buls. 06, 120, 125; Miscel­
laneous, bul. 155.
INDUSTRIAL HOME WORK
128. Potential Earning Power of Southern Mountaineer Handicraft. 1935. 10c.
131. Industrial Home Work in Rhode Island. 1935. 5c.
135. The Commercialization of the Home Through Industrial Home Work.
1935. 5c.
The Price of Industrial Home Work. 1936. (Leaflet.)
»
See also Hours, Wages, and Working Conditions, buls. 109, 118, 119, 126;
Occupations and Opportunities, bul. 74.
MISCELLANEOUS
84. Fact Finding with the Women’s Bureau. 1931. 10c.
86. Activities of the Women’s Bureau of the United States. 1931. 5c.
89. The Industrial Experience of Women Workers at the Summer Schools, 1928
to 1930. 1931. 20c.
115. Women at Work. 1933. 10c.
146. A Policy Insuring Value to the Woman Buyer and a Livelihood to Ap­
parel Makers. 1936. 10c.
155. Women in the Economy of the United States. 1937. 15c.
164. Women in Industry. A Series of Papers to Aid Study Groups. 1938. (Re­
vision of Bulletin 91.) 1938.
165. The Negro Woman Worker. (In press.)
The Woman Worker, published every 2 months. 25c a year.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
71. Selected References on the Health of Women in Industry. 1929. 5c.
134. Summaries of Studies on the Economic Status of Women. 1935. 5c.
154. Reading List of References on Household Employment. 1937. 10c.
EXHIBITS
Material starred (*) is sent free for permanent use. Charts for sale may be secured from
the Superintendent of Documents, Washington, D. C. Other exhibits, including motion
pictures, are lent free, but borrowers must pay any transportation charges.

Motion Pictures.

(Silent, both 16-mrn and 35-mm width of film.)
1. What’s in a Dress. Deals with old problems in the dress industry and uew
ways of solving them. One and one-half reels.
2. Behind the Scenes in the Machine Age. Stresses certain technological changes
affecting women workers and some conditions preventive of human waste
in industry. Three reels.
8. Within the Gates. Illustrates through the story of "Dad’s Shirt” women’s
part in niass production and business and shows the need to improve
standards for their employment. Two reels.
Model.

Steps to Safety and Efficiency for Wage-Earuing Women. Consists of 3
panels with 7 scenes. Shows that good standards for employed women are
beneficial and widespread in effect, contributing to the well-being of industry,
the workers, the home, the family, the race, and the Nation. Particularly
suitable for large conventions. Size, 6 (4 feet high, 10 feet wide, 4 feet deep.
Weight, 486 lbs.




(IV)

*Maps.
Four eolored maps show hour and minimum-wage laws for women workers
in the various States. In two sizes. For Avail use, 39 by 24 inches; for desk
use, 8 by 10M> inches.
Charts.

(Bach 24 by 32 in.)
1. Women With Gainful Occupations. Bar chart showing the occupational dis­
tribution and progress of women, 1910 to 1930, with definite numbers and
percentages. 30c.
2. Proportion of Men and Women With Gainful Occupations, 1870-1930. Pic­
torial chart. 10c.
3. Number of Men and Women With Gainful Occupations, 1870-1930. Pictorial
chart. 10c.
4. Occupations of Women, 1930. Pictorial chart. 10c.
5. Pictorial charts on oflice workers—six on women in several cities and one on
men and women in Chicago. Full set, seven charts, $1.05 or individual
charts as follows:
Women Office Workers:
Monthly Salary Rate, by Occupation. 15c.
Monthly Salary Rate, by Type of Office. 15c.
Median of Monthly Salary Rates, by Occupation. 15c.
Median of Monthly Salary Rates, by City. 15c.
Median of Monthly Salary Rates, by Age and Experience. 15c.
Most Common Hour Schedule. 15c.
Office Workers in Chicago—Median of Monthly Salary Rates. 15c.
Posters.

*1. America Will Be as Strong as Her Women. 17 by 24 inches.
2. Minimum Standards for Employment of Women in Industry, 28 by 38
inches. 10c.
*3. The Woman Who Earns—Keeping Her Work Place Safe and Comfortable.
Two posters, each 30 by 44 inches.
*Display of Bulletins.

On reauest sample bulletins will be arranged for use on special occasions,
according to appropriate subjects.




(V)

o