Americans, not just college students, what comes into our mind is suburban housewives. The person that comes into my mind is june cleaver. I have been studying womens history for decades in the first image that pops into my mind is june cleaver. She wasnt even a real woman. My gosh, she is a sitcom character in leave it to beaver. That is the name of the show. Can you describe june cleaver . What is she wearing . A dress, prim and proper. An apron. Prof. Muncy fancy dress and an apron. Sometimes a high coller, not too low. It was still the 50s. Prof. Muncy pearls. Coiffed hair. Prof. Muncy when i picture june cleaver, i always picture her, got the pearls, got the coiffed hair, in stiletto heels frying bacon and vacuuming. This is very often the image we have of american women in the 1950s. One of the things we want to do is to shove june cleaver to the margins of our images of american women in the 1950s. We dont want to get rid of her entirely because suburbanization was an important trend. When we picture june cleaver, with the vacuum cleaner, that image does obscure one of the most important trends for women in the 1950s, which is that the american womens Labor Force Participation increased. American women workers not only did not go home after world war ii, but they increase the third the labor market. A decade that we associate with womens domesticity. We are going to shove june cleaver to the side and fill our minds eye with a much more diverse set of images of american women in the 1950s. With me . Great. Here are the main points today. The first main point is after world war ii, american women workers did not retire to domesticity. As you know, and you saw this in the video already on thursday, women workers were forced out of high paying good jobs in world war ii. Forced out of those jobs at gm and the shipyard. Forced out of those jobs, but as you learn in the video, the majority of women workers couldnt afford to go home because they were working because they had to work. So instead of being pushed out of the labor market, women workers were forced down in the labor market. They had to leave the high paying jobs but they couldnt leave the labor market. They werent free to do that. They had to go back to the lower paying job with fewer benefits that they had been able to get before the war in the first place. Women are not so much forced out of the labor market as forced down. That is the direction we want to see when we think of the trajectory of women labor Market Participation after world war ii. Down, not out. The reason this is important, i would devote an entire lecture to this, it is important to dispel this notion that women went home, because one of the reasons that it is easy for us to believe and it trips off the tongue, a persistent and pernicious notion of women wage labor since the 19th century. Women workers had to work for a living. They were in the labor market because they had to make a living. There has long been a notion that women workers always had somebody else to fall back on. They would have called it pin money, for the fun things, not the necessities of life, for extras, frivolous reasons. You know that is not true. We can only think women workers went home after world war ii because we are implicitly buying into an understanding of womens wage work that says it is for fun. It is not out of economic necessity they are there. It is for fun. Otherwise they could not leave. That notion that women workers always had somebody else to fall back on in terms of economic necessity, that has been one of the reasons for womens lower wages then men. One of the reasons is that they assume that women have other support. That belief is not just false, it continues to echo in the lower wages of women even now. So if we are going to honor not just the past, but do better in the present, we really have to let go of this notion women workers could go home after world war ii. It is really important. Materially important. That will be our main point. The second main point is that not only did women workers not leave the labor market, participation actually increased across the 1950s, and then for all of the remaining decades of the 20th century. It is going to continue across the postwar decade, even decades we associate with women domesticity. Finally, i am not positive we will get to this, we want to look at the changing demographics of women in the labor force across the late 20th century and the occupations they were in, how they changed to the degree they did across the late 20th century, and look at womens wages as well. Come right on in. There are places up here. You are so welcome. These our main points today. I want to do a bit of narrative. The war ended in 1945. There is a period immediately after the war when the u. S. Economy contracted, a mild and in that period, a lot of industry that had been turning out war material shut down divisions to reconvert to the production of consumer goods. Wartime to peacetime production. During those 18 months or so when the economy contracted, lots of women as well as men were thrown out of work. There is high unemployment and numbers of women in the workforce that did decline. As soon as the factories reopened and the economy was gearing up for one of the longest expansions in the economy in American History, as that happened women flooded back into the labor market, and by 1950, the very beginning of the june cleaver decade, by 1950 there were as many women in the labor force as had been in the labor force at the height of world war ii. By 1950, no time at all, you have as many women workers in the labor force as at the height at world war ii. They did not go home after world war ii. I wanted to go back, i promised we would talk about the arguments of rosie the riveter that are crucial to our understanding of why we believe the women workers left the wage labor after world war ii and helps to explain the real trends we are going to see afterward. Let me quickly sum up the arguments you saw in the video thursday. The overarching argument of that piece was that and see if you think this rings true the publicity about women workers in world war ii constantly contradicted the actual experiences of women in world war ii. You kept seeing those newsreels, radio advertisements, pamphlets handed out to and about women workers in world war ii, and you saw interviews with actual women workers. There is constant clashing between those two sets of evidence. Just to give you a reminder of some of the particulars, according to government sources and the personnel departments of american corporations, according to them, women workers are coming into the War Industries because of patriotism, because they wanted to help their country when the war. And of course american women workers did want to help their country when the war. They wanted to triumph over the axis powers. But the majority of the women during world war ii had already been in the labor market before the war broke out. The majority of women were either in paid labor or looking for a job before the u. S. Was involved in world war ii. So that women of course wanted to help with the war effort. What came second to their having to be in the labor market out of economic necessity. So you see this contradiction between what government officials and corporate officials are saying about women workers and their motive for war work, and what women themselves said about the motive for more work. You also saw contradiction in claims about the availability of childcare. Government officials and Corporate Executives are claiming any mother who wanted to work in the War Industries and willing to work to support the war effort could easily find childcare. Governmentsponsored child care, corporate sponsored childcare. That is true. That is absolutely true. But you also saw the majority of mothers in the labor force either had never heard of that daycare or those versions were too expensive or too far away for them to get there, or it didnt help the majority of women at daycare. You saw the heartrending struggles. You saw husbands and wives working different shifts and never seeing each other. That childcare and the lives of the majority of women, mothers working, that was a constant stress. There was not easily available daycare as the publicity would have led you to believe. Earning a mans pay. The publicity said they take a mans job and earn a mans pay. That is a quote from one of the personnel officials that you saw interviewed in the video. Earn a mans pay. While it was absolutely true womens wages skyrocketed, when you went from being a waitress to being a shipbuilder, your wages increased dramatically. They never equaled the pay of man. Womens wages were below those of men. They were always lower than white womens wages. There continues to be that gender wage gap during world war ii. Finally, you saw this contradiction in the understanding of womens aspirations for after the war. You solve that Corporate Executives and government officials always were claiming that women were coming into the War Industries for the duration of the war and then that they were expected to be delighted to turn their jobs back over to returning servicemen. That is always the assumption of those officials. And the publicity that was so widespread. You saw in the interviews with the women workers themselves that they had been working for wages before the war or looking for work before the war, or widowed by the war. After the war they had to keep working for wages and they would have loved to keep those higherpaying jobs. They would have loved to keep those jobs that gave them benefits. Even vacation pay. Some had maternity benefits during the war. Incredible increase in standards of living for women as result of those jobs. They would have loved to keep those jobs. But they were not allowed to. They had to go back to working as maids and dishwashers. They are pushed down. As i said earlier, womens Labor Force Participation is going to increase across the 20th century. I want to cut the numbers a couple of ways. I am going to try this laser thing. So fancy. I will try not to put your eye out with the laser. One way to look at the percentage of the total labor force that was female. As you can see then those numbers just go steadily up through the 20th century and into the 21st century. So in 1950, women account for 30 of the labor force. I cant help myself. Im going to point to it with my physical hand. I cant believe in the laser. It just goes up until women account for half of the labor force in the early 20th century. If you could just get in your notes may be the number for 19401960, and the 20th century, that would be fantastic. You see the trend. The most remarkable decade is the decade of the 1950s. That women account for an increasing percentage of the labor force of the 1950s is the shocker. Because that is the june cleaver decade for so many of us. Another way to cut the numbers, to look at the percentage of women 16 years old and over who were in the labor market. Again, in 1940 before the u. S. Was officially involved in world war ii, about 25 of american women 16 years of age or older were in the labor force. That number again is going to go up steadily through the 20th century. And into the 21st century as well. That number, that percentage has leveled off at about 60 . That 60 is just about where we are today. The remarkable decade is 19501960 when the percentage of women, and it is a growing body of women, the percentage of women 16 and over who are working for wages is increasing. As you know from your study of the new deal, that percentage cannot be increasing among teenagers. Because kids have to stay in School Longer and child labor has been abolished in most industries by the time we get to the 1950s. That increase is coming overwhelmingly from older women. Those are the bits of evidence for the claim that women did not go home after world war ii. I want to talk about the occupations they could go into as they came out of the war and cross the 1950s. In that original post war period, that immediate postwar period, women were not able to change the gender division of labor. They were not able to change the gender division of labor. What they do is they flood into the occupations that women had begun to move into in the late 19th century. So the same occupations that we saw women dominating in the 20th century, say, they are dominating in the 1950s, the same occupations where this growth is going to occur in womens Labor Force Participation. I want to remind you of what some of them were and talk a little bit about them, why they are changing, why their demand is increasing in the 1950s, why more women could be absorbed into those occupations. And i wanted to get pictures up here because i want these pictures to move into our minds to help us move june cleaver aside. She is occupying a little bit less of our imagination when we think of women in the 1950s. So by the time we get to these images i hope these images will be crowding june cleaver to the margins. So really stare hard at these images. You want to engrave these in our mind. As you well know, american women had taken over the Elementary School teaching by the end of the 19th century. They dominate the School Teaching force by the end of the 19th century. In the 1950s, the famous babyboom that began in the 1940s, i am one of those babies, because of those babies, the increase in fertility among american women, because of the baby boom, new schools were being built all over america and those schools needed schoolteachers. Right . So because of the babyboom, there is this huge expansion in the demand for schoolteachers. Those are jobs that were already labeled, already categorized. The demand for women workers as teachers expand dramatically in the 1950s. So dramatically the demand was so great, in the 1950s the marriage bars to teachers finally dropped. Remember in the 1930s we talked about this. In the 1930s. That most American School districts in the 1930s would not higher woman to teach if she were married. Many of them would fire her if she got married when she was on the job. Those were called marriage bars to teaching. In the 1950s, americans schools desperately needed teachers, they began to drop those marriage bars. Even if you were married you get a job as a teacher in most American School districts and even have to fear being hired if you got married while employed. This is when older women can stay in the Teaching Force instead of having to quit when they get married. There is a similar kind of boom for nurses. For nurses. You will remember in the late 19th century, women professionalize nursing and it became one of the professions women, wide open to women. Virtually no man at that point. That is one of the changes, that there are now male nurses. They were almost exclusively female. In the 1950s, the location of American Health care began to centralize on hospitals. Hospitals, having a hospital in every block was not common before the war. A whole lot of government money put into the buildings of Community Hospitals in the 40s, 50s and 60s. The hill burton act. That provided federal funds to communities to build hospitals. Hospitals, Corporate Funding and because of government funding, are merging in rural areas, as well within major urban areas in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Those are places where health care became centralized. Even if you wanted to be diagnosed, to get an xray, you wouldnt go to the hospital. There are all these radiology clinics all over the place. In the 1940s and 1950s, just to get diagnosed with strep throat you would go to a hospital. As hospitals became so much more common and health care so much more centralized, those hospitals needed nurses. It increased the demand for nurses dramatically, so much so that nurse wages increased in the 1950s, and hospitals have an incredibly interesting this is the june cleaver decade. The one we associate with the assumption that women are at home with their kids. In the 50s american hospitals began to open onsite day care because they were so desperate for nurses that when good nurses had babies, they did not want them to leave the workforce. They wanted them to stay in. So they raised wages and opened onsite day care some others could come back as soon as possible and nurse patients. Nursing was another one of the occupations that offered all kinds of new opportunities for american women workers, and where the employers and government officials are begging women to come back even after they have become mothers. There are very differet from our image of the 1950s. Some of the other workplaces where women had been before the war, opened more opportunities for women in the 1950s. We want to get these images in our minds when we think about the 1950s. So that you know women worked as Migrant Workers in the fields of the southwest, and the numbers of women devoting themselves to field labor increased to hundreds of thousands of women. Often they were Migrant Workers living an awfully, awfully hard and deprived lives, going from county to county to harvest for you know in the late 19th and 20th centuries women were moving into office work. The numbers of secretaries and file clerks and bookkeepers increased. That was because of this expansion of the American Economy in the 1950s. It is a steady expansion into the 1950s and then a recession and then there is expansion again for the rest of the 1950s. That is drawing more and more women into the labor force. The same was happening with the federal government. Especially for the cold war. The federal government was also growing. That increased opportunities. They want these office workers, they want these farmworkers and nurses and teachers to take their place alongside june cleaver. Also, we have talked about women in Department Stores. In the 1950s, the big change is Department Stores are merging not only in central cities are where they have been since wannamakers, they are now emerging on the fringe in suburbs where june cleaver was living. Those suburbs, malls become the thing. One historian refered to the 1950s as the malling of america. They need workers. They need sales clerks. Sure enough those jobs are already labeled womens jobs. That kind of change opens new opportunities for women workers in the 1950s. In addition there are new possibilities