Women’s Paid Labor in the United States, 1870s-1920s

By Robyn Muncy

Professor of History, University of Maryland, College Park

Between the 1870s and 1920s, American women increasingly entered the paid laborforce. They did so overwhelmingly because of economic need, and they were able to do so because the US economy was changing in ways that opened new wage-earning opportunities to women. Indeed, the economy changed in ways that relied on women’s labor power. In the main, the jobs offered to women subordinated them to men at the worksite and maintained their subordination beyond the workplace by paying wages insufficient to full health and economic security. Through determined collective action at their worksites, however, some wage-earning women challenged these inequalities, empowering themselves as both workers and women.

Aspiring professional women, largely excluded from traditional men’s professions, also engaged in collective action, theirs aimed partly at creating new professions for themselves. Altogether, women’s job-related organizing in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for movements and legislation that would reduce class inequalities later in the century and help to generate the women’s movements of the 1960s.

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Several inter-related trends dramatically transformed the US economy in the late-nineteenth century. They included corporate industrialization, massive internal migrations and immigration from abroad, and rapid urbanization. Although industrialization had begun decades earlier, the late nineteenth century saw a more widespread shift from craft to mass production, from smallish economic enterprises serving a local or regional market to large, complex corporations producing for national—and even international—markets. The reorganization of work processes, which made mass production possible, demanded millions of new workers and prompted corporations to recruit workers from abroad and from rural areas within the US. After 1880, recruits from abroad came especially from Southern and Eastern Europe and soon included many from Mexico and the Philippines, new origins for American immigrants. By 1920, nearly 23 million new immigrants had arrived in the United States, dramatically altering the scale and diversity of American life. After 1910, job recruiters also appealed more consistently to African Americans in the US South, many of whom were eager to relocate because of the South’s increasingly rigid racial segregation, disfranchisement of African American men, and constant threat of racial violence. The combination of these factors resulted in the movement of over one million Black Americans from the South to northern and western industrial centers between 1910 and 1930.[1]

Wherever they were from, most of the new arrivals crowded into cities where corporations situated their factories and corporate headquarters. All of this movement transformed the US from a rural to an urban society by 1920. Ill-prepared for the influx of these millions of new residents, burgeoning cities suffered housing shortages and crises in the provision of fundamental services like clean water, transportation, education, and health care.[2]

Explosive urban growth and the shift to mass production created new economic opportunities for millions of American women. Mass production generated new opportunities in part simply by creating a nearly insatiable need for more workers. New opportunities also opened to women, though, because much office and factory work became specialized and routinized, which meant it no longer trained workers for management positions. Once filing and bookkeeping became dead-end jobs that did not mentor a worker for higher positions, women were invited to apply. Similarly, once mass production reduced a craft formerly conducted by a business-owning master craftsman to a series of mechanized steps conducted by “unskilled” machine operators, employers were willing to hire women. In positions that maintained a workers’ subordination to (male) higher-ups, women often found welcome.[3]

At the other end of the class spectrum, educated women sometimes saw emerging urban problems as opportunities for their own employment. Largely barred from traditional professions like law, medicine, and the clergy, some middle-class women created new jobs for themselves by offering innovative services, such as visiting nurses’ care, kindergartens, day nurseries, and factory safety inspections. In the course of responding to new social needs, these women opened possibilities for their own economic and social independence.[4]

These new jobs, both in corporations and social services, explain a dramatic increase in the number of wage-earning women in the United States. Federal census records show that between 1870 and 1910, the number of women working for wages increased by four times, from 1.7 million to 7 million women. These increased numbers did not simply reflect a growing population: In 1870, women constituted 14% of wage earners, and in 1910 they accounted for 20% of a much larger work force. The percentage of women over 16 years of age who were working for wages shifted from 15% in 1870 to 21% in 1900 and to 24% in 1920.5 Women workers helped to make the US the industrial behemoth it had become by 1910, when it out- produced any other industrialized country.

Not all women were equally likely to be among these increasing numbers of working women. Unmarried women, for instance, were more likely to work for wages than married women: In 1910, only 11% of married women officially worked for pay; 51% of unmarried women did; and 34% of widowed and divorced women worked for wages.[6] Census takers demonstrably underestimated married women’s wage earning: Taking in boarders and working at mom-and-pop stores were rarely counted as official employment, for example, even though many households depended on these forms of women’s labor to sustain themselves. Still, growth in married women’s employment really took off only in the 1930s.[7]

Women’s wage earning also varied by race and ethnicity. According to the census, for instance, 25% of married Black women worked for pay in 1900 while only 3% of married White women did. By 1930, the percentage of adult women working for wages was 39% for Black women; 21% for native-born White women; 19% for foreign-born White women and Japanese-heritage women; 16% for Chinese-descended women; and 15% for Mexican-heritage and American Indian women. These differences reflected in part the racial segregation of the labor market, which generally hired men of color for the least remunerative men’s jobs, making it necessary for other family members to work for wages more often in families of color than in White families. The differences also reflected, however, diverse strategies for family sustenance among different racial-ethnic groups. While some groups preferred to send mothers or daughters into waged labor than sons, others had different preferences.[8]

The kinds of jobs open to women workers changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. As late as 1900, over half of all employed women worked in either agriculture or domestic service. By 1930, although domestic service remained the single largest occupation for women, employing nearly 1/3 of all working women, agriculture had plummeted, employing only about 7% of all women workers. Over those decades, increasing numbers of women worked in manufacturing, especially in the garment and textile industries as well as food and tobacco processing; office work, including jobs as file clerks, secretaries, bookkeepers, and telephone operators; and retail sales in such new institutions as department stores.[9]

During the early twentieth century, the number of women professionals also increased. The largest profession for women was school teaching, an occupation that had begun to open to women in the early nineteenth century. Only a few women broke into traditional male professions, medicine proving the most amenable, while many more found opportunities by creating entirely new professions such as social work, public health nursing, and home economics.[10]

Despite the opening of many new kinds of jobs to women, the labor market remained severely gender- and race-segregated. In “heavy” industry—mining and steel, for instance—few women found jobs at all. In other worksites, women and men held different jobs. The jobs assigned to women generally paid less than jobs held by men, which was one way that the labor market produced and maintained the gender wage gap. Overall, in the 1890s, full-time women workers made about 46 cents for every dollar men earned, and by 1930, they earned about 56 cents for every dollar that men earned.[11] This gender wage gap would not decrease significantly until the 1970s and depended on the widespread assumption that women enjoyed economic subsidies from their families; husbands and fathers were supposed to earn a family wage, permitting their wives and children to remain out of the labor market.[12] This assumption remained potent despite research in the early twentieth century that showed a substantial portion of women workers lived apart from their families or were the sole support of their families.[13]

Similarly, employment practices maintained racial hierarchies by hiring people of color for only the lowest paid and most dangerous jobs in a workplace while excluding them from many workplaces altogether. Between the 1870s and 1930, Black women, for example, found few opportunities in industrial employment—tobacco and seafood processing as well as laundries excepted—and both clerical and professional jobs were available to them mostly in Black-owned enterprises.[14] Moreover, not all women of color had the same opportunities. By 1930, 22% of Chinese-American women workers held professional or technical jobs, while only 6% of Filipinas did. Although 53% of Japanese-descended women workers toiled in agricultural or domestic service jobs in 1930, only 15% of Chinese-heritage women did. Specific histories of different racial groups did much to explain the patterns of racial and ethnic discrimination that women faced in hiring.[15]

US industry’s need for workers did not translate into humane working conditions. Instead, employers worked laborers long hours at the lowest possible wages and often in unsafe conditions. The garment industry, for instance, employed thousands of White women and girls, often immigrants, and notoriously crammed them into dank basements or stuffy tenements where they sweltered in the summer and shivered in the winter.[16] In commercial laundries, where Black women ironed as White women starched, workers sometimes fainted from the heat generated by steam pressers and 300-degree drying closets.[17] On industrial farms, Mexican-heritage women faced back-breaking field labor in scorching heat from sunrise until sundown and lived in crowded labor camps with inadequate sanitation and little privacy.[18] Sexual harassment was pervasive in virtually every industry.[19]

Women workers did not blithely accept these conditions. While some escaped through marriage, many sought to improve them by organizing labor unions. Before 1930, fewer than 7% of women workers were ever unionized, but their organizing efforts were deeply significant. Among the most visible unionizing efforts in the early twentieth century was that of women in the garment industry. Famously, in 1909-10, tens of thousands of women garment workers in New York City went on strike to protest their dangerous working conditions, low wages, and long hours. They were led by young, immigrant women from Eastern Europe, especially Clara Lemlich and Rose Schneiderman. The increased wages and reduced hours won in some shops led to union organizing elsewhere with the result that by 1919 around half of workers in the garment industry belonged to unions.[20]

Women in other industries clocked important victories as well. Telephone operators, overwhelmingly White women, achieved the height of their early twentieth-century power in the 1910s, when they agitated for wages high enough to be “self-supporting”; sponsored educational opportunities for union members; and one local even purchased a vacation home.[21] Elementary school teachers in Chicago won pensions, tenure, and higher salaries in the early twentieth century through advocacy by the Chicago Teacher Federation.22 In domestic service, dominated in the early twentieth century by African American and foreign-born women, workers even without a union nevertheless won the freedom to live in their own homes rather than in the homes of their employers, a cherished desire of many in the occupation.[23]

While continuing to agitate at their workplaces, some women workers also pursued public policies to improve their working conditions. They often did so in alliance with middle-class women who were pioneering new urban services. In 1903, the two groups formalized their partnership by founding the National Women’s Trade Union League. At the forefront of this alliance were women labor leaders like garment worker Leonora O’Reilly and bookbinder Mary Kenny O’Sullivan and professionalizing women like social worker Jane Addams and public health nurse Lillian Wald. Both groups were part of grassroots movements across the United States who opposed the overwhelming power that corporations were amassing at the expense of workers, consumers, and local communities.[24]

These grassroots movements coalesced to form the Progressive reform movement that dominated early twentieth-century US politics. Progressivism began as a diffuse set of local reform efforts in the late nineteenth century, many of which responded to the human suffering created by industrial employment and rapid urbanization. Women were prominent among these reformers, who came to see both private-sector organizing and public policy as mechanisms for balancing the power of corporations in the interest of workers and consumers. Protective labor legislation in the form of anti-child labor laws, minimum wage laws, maximum hours laws, and factory safety laws became prime goals of many progressives, who believed that the political community had an obligation to set limits on the exploitation of workers by profit-seeking corporations.[25]

The alliance of progressive working- and middle-class women celebrated some startling successes. By 1920, forty-three of the forty-eight states—as well as Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico—had maximum hours laws for women workers. By 1920, twelve states prohibited night work for women in specified occupations. Some states required rest breaks for women in particular occupations.[26] To gain more leverage with lawmakers, organized women workers pushed for the enfranchisement of women and became important activists in the mass movement that won the vote for most American women by 1920.[27]

These results of women workers’ organizing in the early twentieth century continue to shape lives today. Although the 1920s battered movements of working women in a variety of ways, their cross-class alliances remained strong enough and their organizing and policy precedents powerful enough to undergird massive union organization and national labor legislation in the 1930s. Union women in the post-World War II period, who by then included significant numbers of women of color, ultimately sparked a mass movement for women’s advancement in the 1960s, a legacy that resonates even in the twenty-first century.[28]

1 On the Great Migration, see Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 152-195.

2 Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s-1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 13-17.

3 See, for example, Marjory Hartman Strom, Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

4 Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

5 Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 108-138.

6 Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century, p. 116. Lynn Y Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985).

7 Susan A. Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 73-76. Alice Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 125.5

8 Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century, p. 114. Teresa Amott and Julie Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work: A Multi-Cultural Economic History of Women in the United States (Boston: South End Press, 1996), p. 412. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 123-24.

9 Breckinridge, Women in the Twentieth Century, p. 126. Julia Kirk Blackwelder, Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1997), pp. 12, 62.

10 Muncy, Female Dominion, xiii-xv.

11Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 64.

12 Alice Kessler-Harris, A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings & Social Consequences (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1990).

13 Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 5.

14 Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890- 1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Jacqueline Anne Rouse, Lugenia Burns Hope, Black Southern Reformer (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, p. 140. Blackwelder, Now Hiring, p. 17.

15 Amott and Matthaei, Race, Gender, and Work, pp. 207, 220, 247. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Issei, Nisei, War Bride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

16 Annelise Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900- 1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 32-36.

17 Jenny Carson, A Matter of Moral Justice: Black Women Laundry Workers and the Fight for Justice (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021), pp. 4, 28-38.

18 Vicki Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 14-18.

19 Mara Keire, “Shouting Abuse, Harmless Jolly, and Promiscuous Flattery: Considering the Contours of Sexual Harassment at Macy’s Department Store, 1910-1915,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 19, 1 (March 2022): 52-73. Annelise Orleck, “’There is Not a Factory Today Where This Same Immoral Condition Does Not Exist’: Strikes against Sexual Harassment, 1912-2019,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, 19, 1 (March 2022): 74-95. Margaret Sanger, “’The Unrecorded Battle’ (1912),” preface by Christopher Phelps, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 19, 1 (March 2022): 165-174. Carson, Matter of Moral Justice, 29.

20 Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 53-80.

21 Stephen Norwood, Labor’s Flaming Youth: Telephone Operators and Worker Militancy, 1878-1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990) p. 109-242.

22 Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

23 Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in DC, 1910-1940 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1994).

24 Dorothy Sue Cobble, For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 15-26. Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, 165-166.

25 Nancy Woloch, A Class By Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s-1990s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 1-32.

26 Woloch, Class By Herself, pp. 87, 92–93.

27 Orleck, Common Sense and a Little Fire, 87-113; Jenny Carson, Matter of Moral Justice, pp. 48-50.

28 Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).