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Women in the Workforce |
Scroll down for information about each item in the exhibit.
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Exhibit curated by Suzanna Denison, '09
Published Fall 2008
Women have always contributed to the workforce in formal and informal
ways, but their labor has not always been recognized. Karl Marx stated
that "[women's] labor appears to be a personal service outside of
capital." From the social issues concerning sexual harassment to the
policy reforms surrounding the wage gap, this exhibit showcases a
variety of materials from the BCRW collection that relate to women's
participation in the workforce. These documents chronologically span
three decades, starting in the early 1970s with documents from MIT's
significant conference "Women in Science and Technology," which sparked
a discussion of women in higher education and skilled professions,
to materials that showcase 1990s women-run, women-owned businesses.
This exhibit also contains a slideshow of photographs documenting women's
labor and activism.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Women in Science and Technology: A Report on an MIT Workshop
Published by the MIT Press, 1973
In the spring of 1973, the Massachusetts Institute for Technology
held their first "Women in Science and Technology" conference. The
conference focused on the growing numbers of women in the workforce and
their absence from highly skilled job sectors, especially science and
technology. In 1973, just three percent of people in skilled trades were women,
despite the fact that women made up over forty percent of the
workforce. Only one percent of engineers were women, and women were rarely in
positions of management. This report examined the challenges for women
in both higher education and the job market. The report points to the
inaccessibility of higher education for women as the main reason that women
are not able to occupy these skilled positions. This conference
sparked a conversation about women and skilled
professions that still continues today. This conference
report brought together four experts from employment, the labor force,
education and psychology and counseling to create solutions and further
this conversation.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Wages for Housework Flyers
1975
The mission of the Brooklyn-based New York Wages for Housework Committee was
embedded in an economic critique of how American capitalism affected women.
The Committee demanded that women have autonomy over their sexual capacities and power over their
experience as houseworkers or workers of a "second shift" in the home. While housework was physical
work, since it was not wage-labor, it was unrecognized as employment in
a capitalistic system. Housework was not only unrecognized, it also
fundamentally supported how workers would earn their wages. One campaign
poster read, "We have all sweated while you have grown rich. Now we want
back the wealth we have produced." This campaign importantly connected
economic independence with social power and freedoms and
demanded that houseworkers be granted social, sexual and economic
autonomy regardless of their position within or without the formal
workforce.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Counter-Planning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework—A Perspective on Capital and the Left
By Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici
Published jointly by New York Wages for Housework Committee and Falling Wall Press, 1975
The pamphlet "Counter-Planning from the Kitchen: Wages for
Housework—A Perspective on Capital and the Left," continued the economic
critique of women within a capitalistic society by arguing that both
capitalism and the Left could not resolve women's inferior economic
status since both privileged the male experience.
Women's exploitation had been over-shadowed within Marxism as well, due
to its focus on recognized wageworker exploitation. The pamphlet's
solutions concentrated on policy change that would support women's
current functions and activities within society as houseworkers. Both
this pamphlet and the Wages for Housework campaign recognized that
housework was truly work, and that it was excluded from the official workforce. These
campaigns simultaneously critiqued the economic system while attempting
to integrate housework into the workforce.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Women Office Workers Newspaper Articles
1976
The following New York newspaper articles, collected in 1976 by Women
Office Workers, reveal many of the issues women specifically confronted
as they entered the workforce. In the Daily News article "Girls Friday
Want a New Day," it was observed that women office workers were treated
like second wives or daughters to their bosses. They were never peers,
hence the issues surrounding naming in an office setting. According to
the New York Post article, "Stenos Give Some Dictation," women office
workers addressed their bosses formally with "Mr.", while the women themselves
were called by their first name. Women office workers were often refered to
as "girls," further infantilizing them. These sexist dynamics
within the office resulted in women office workers being seen not as workers,
but as inferior women.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Sexual Harassment at the Workplace: Historical Notes
By Mary Bularzik
Published by the New England Free Press, 1978
Mary Bularzik's article "Sexual Harassment at the Workplace:
Historical Notes," exposed gender-specific harassment
in the workplace. Bularzik states that
sexual harassment "stems from notions that there is a 'woman's place'
which women in the labor force have left, thus leaving behind their
personal integrity." With women's transition into the workforce, social
norms were, therefore, not left at home. A woman was still to encounter
the treatment of her traditional gender role in the workplace. Using a
historical analysis, particularly of white urban working women in the
Northern United States before 1940, Bularzik combined a person's
sexuality and his or her position as a worker to confront and expose the sexual
harassment of women in the workplace.
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Click image above to download PDF |
The Women in the Office: The Economic Status of Clerical Workers
Published by Women Employed Institute, 1979
"The other day, a client came onto the floor where I'm a
receptionist, look around, then looked directly at me and asked, 'Isn't
anyone here?'"
— Receptionist, sales office
The Women Employed Institute was founded to improve the status and
rights of women in the workforce. In their report "The Women in the
Office: The Economic Status of Clerical Workers," the economic reality
of clerical work was compared with the general workplace reality. Given
that clerical work was a female-dominated career, this study contrasted
women's work realities with the general workforce to symbolize women's
work realities at large. Using comparative studies of the wage gaps and
increases, differences between men and women clerical workers, and
salary earnings, the report uncovered large deficiencies for women both
in pay and rights within clerical work. This report stated that the
reaction to the introduction of women in the workforce and their
consequent denial of rights was the result of the lack of their
recognition as a legitimate workers. The report
demanded seven basic policies, which included fair salary schedule and
training programs in order for women to be recognized and economically
successful within the workforce as clerical workers.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Worldwatch Paper 37: Women, Men, and the Division of Labor
By Kathleen Newland
No. 37, May 1980
Worldwatch Paper's edition "Women, Men, and the Division of Labor,"
provides an excellent analysis of the social issues addressed in the
other materials within this exhibit, including the lack of women in
skilled professions, worker's rights for typically "women's" jobs and
sexual harassment. Worldwatch's explanation relies upon the concept of a
sexual division of labor. The five chapters of this edition investigate
how paid labor was no longer a solely masculine pursuit, how women still
hold the majority of the world's unpaid labor and how sex roles have
influenced the job force. The authors note that since
women have entered the workforce, the traditional sexual divisions of
labor, in which men work in the public and women in the private sphere has been
broken. Thus the issues of equal pay, rights and opportunities for women
in the workforce and sexual harassment are the results of this
disruption within the sexual division of labor. Importantly, since
Worldwatch Paper is a periodical with a global focus, this edition shows how
the issue of women in the workforce has become an international one, as economic markets
expand beyond nation borders and migration and travel have become a greater
part of people's daily lives.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Warning: Health Hazards for Office Workers:
An Overview of Problems and Solutions in Occupational Health in the Office
Published by the Working Women Educational Fund, 1981
Working Women is a foundation dedicated to research on and funding
for women office workers. This report aided in dispelling myths that
feminized office work, unlike masculinized hard labor, does not have its
own health risks. This report reveals how
little emphasis and importance was given to "womanly" jobs by a
masculinized workforce. To reveal the dangers and physical effects of
clerical work meant to legitimize and actualize it as "real work." The
report's analysis of office stress, office-specific health ailments, air
quality and ventilation, and safety hazards uses statistics to convey
how the facts were present but ignored by society at large. This report
articulates how assumptions of what work is, especially what entails
"dangerous work," is produced and reproduced by societal norms and those
in power within the workforce.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Office Work in America
Published by Working Women, 1982
Working Women's sweeping report of the status of women workers in the
1980s ultimately provided a lens to view the progression women have
achieved within their time as a major part of the 20th
century U.S. workforce. This report uses statistical analysis to come to
the understanding of women as underpaid, undervalued and underemployed
in the workforce. With this as a foundation, the report
assesses gendered work issues including the working family, age
discrimination, sexual harassment and health and safety hazards. The end
of the report focuses on where working women are headed in the 1980s as
more women gain powerful positions in their workplace. While the major
issues hindering women in the workforce were addressed, the report also
showed how as more women entered the workforce, and were gaining
positions of power, their specific needs were slowly being
addressed through women worker's demands and their increasing presence
in the workforce.
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Click image above to download PDF |
Women's Market pamphlets
Published by Women's Marketplace, circa 1995
These pamphlets are evidence of the progression women have
made in the U.S. workforce from the 1970s to the 1990s. Organizations
such as Women's Marketplace formed to tackle the concerns of working women
in positions of power. The 1990s saw more
women than ever enter the workforce in managerial and other high level
work positions. Women's Marketplace was created to bring awareness to
the growing trend of women-owned, women-run businesses. Their mission
states that, "We are looking for ways that women can empower each other
and themselves, economically. Imagine a world where women can all work
and all their work is economically productive." This organization
responded to the Wages for Housework campaign's critique of capitalism as
oppressive to women by creating a space for women to become
economically successful under capitalism. The successful and powerful
working women of the 1990s did not need to overturn capitalism, but
rather engage with it with their newfound economic strength. The
organization's emphasis on women supporting women creates a space where
if women join together, even the woman-oppressive capitalistic state can
be utilized for their economic gain. Women's Marketplace lies at the
heart of capitalism, but this time the producers and products are
women-run and women-owned. Thus women are not only entering but also
altering the workforce.
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Click image above to start the slideshow |
Slideshow
These photographs, selected from materials found in the Center's Collection, document women's
labor and activism.
Click here
to start the slideshow.
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