Earning Power

Women and Work in Los Angeles, 1880-1930

Eileen Wallis

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780874178142
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

The half-century between 1880 and 1930 saw rampant growth in many American cities and an equally rapid movement of women into the work force. In Los Angeles, the city not only grew from a dusty cow town to a major American metropolis but also offered its residents myriad new opportunities and challenges. Earning Power examines the role that women played in this growth as they attempted to make their financial way in a rapidly changing world. Los Angeles during these years was one of the most ethnically diverse and gender-balanced American cities. Moreover, its accelerated urban growth generated a great deal of economic, social, and political instability. In Earning Power, author Eileen V. Wallis examines how women negotiated issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and class to gain access to professions and skilled work in Los Angeles. She also discusses the contributions they made to the region's history as political and social players, employers and employees, and as members of families. Wallis reveals how the lives of women in the urban West differed in many ways from those of their sisters in more established eastern cities. She finds that the experiences of women workers force us to reconsider many assumptions about the nature of Los Angeles's economy, as well as about the ways women participated in it. The book also considers how Angelenos responded to the larger national social debate about women's work and the ways that American society would have to change in order to accommodate working women. Earning Power is a major contribution to our understanding of labor in the urban West during this transformative period and of the crucial role that women played in shaping western cities, economies, society, and politics.

1

Women in White-Collar Work

“THE SPIRIT TO DARE AND DO”

Beginning with its March 1911 issue, Sunset magazine regularly devoted space to profiling women across the American West and their work. As might be expected for a magazine born as a promotional effort, the women profiled seem to have been selected for their potential to represent how women in the West were different from their eastern counterparts.¹ As Los Angeles–based journalist Bertha H. Smith noted in the very first article:

What women are doing in the West might be told in one word—everything. . . . The woman in business, the professional woman, the woman in philanthropic and civic work is common everywhere. But the West, with its abundant and varied natural resources, its youth and its promises, appeals to the imagination of women as of men and offers them the same diverse and tempting opportunities. . . . In the air of the West is a subtle and potent essence which creates in the soul of man the spirit to dare and do. Men and women are pretty much alike, though each resents the accusation, and that women are influenced no less than men by the elixir of the West this series of sketches bears witness.²

Female ranchers, farmers, canners, teachers, and entrepreneurs, many of whom lived and worked in Southern California, all earned space in these columns over the next ten years.

Such profiles existed in part thanks to developments almost twenty years earlier. The boom years of the 1880s had opened up new opportunities for women, often in unexpected ways. These new opportunities allowed women to make real contributions to their family economies during a time of unstable regional growth. Professional women, in particular, benefited from a combination of timing, demographics, and structural opportunities. Sunset painted a rosy picture of women succeeding purely on their own merit. But such a view masked the complex economic, social, and political shifts at work across the region.

The last two decades of the nineteenth century were a time of profound change in Southern California. Anglo-Americans had solidified their control over the region, and Los Angeles was growing from a small town to an American city. For the descendants of the Californios, these were particularly bitter decades in which many saw a steep decline in both their economic and their political clout. Although ethnically and racially diverse, Los Angeles was highly stratified, and its economy was far from being a level playing field. Women, in particular, found it hard to make a respectable living. Few categories of jobs were open to women, and competition for them could be fierce. But economic necessity continued to propel women from all walks of life into the workforce. By 1880 15 percent of the women in Los Angeles worked for wages, slightly lower than the national average but higher than the average for the West as a region or for California as a whole.³ In 1883 a new wave of rapid growth began, one that further exacerbated the problems of ethnic discrimination, geographic segregation, and a lack of job opportunities for women.

By the early twentieth century a woman’s best chance to ensure both her economic and her social future was to enter professional or white-collar work: teaching, medicine, law, business, and other jobs that required advanced education, specialized training, and access to capital. Los Angeles attracted more than its fair share of professional women who took advantage of the city’s rapid growth to carve out positions for themselves in the local economy. However, for most women in professions, such work did not translate into equal earning power or the ability to advance in the chosen career. On the contrary, Los Angeles’s white-collar workers remained sharply segregated by gender. A dearth of manufacturing and large numbers of white-collar immigrants made jobs scarce, particularly for women of color and those without the training for skilled professions such as teaching.

One of the greatest challenges facing the scholar of women’s employment is how to identify and group occupations. While each job has its own particular set of skills, in order to make meaningful comparisons similar jobs need to be grouped into some sort of larger organizational scheme. Where one chooses to place a particular occupation can have profound implications for the larger study, as this can partly predetermine the pattern of social stratification and social mobility one will find. For this project I have chosen to use the occupational classification scheme developed by Mary Lou Locke for her study of working women in San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles in 1880. Locke developed eleven categories based on a consideration of a job’s skill level and required training, its status, and its working conditions.⁴ Under this scheme professional and other white-collar jobs include teaching, medicine, editing, the law, and university teaching. Women who worked as wholesale merchants, as manufacturers, and in business are also included here. This chapter explores the interplay between the historical development of Greater Los Angeles and the role of women in its economy, with a particular focus on how the boom of the 1880s shaped women’s white-collar work.

The Boom of the 1880s and Its Impact on Women’s Work

Women’s entrepreneurship in Southern California was not a new phenomenon. During California’s Spanish and Mexican periods, women had been able to obtain or inherit ranchos. This not only provided an income but also, in keeping with Californio tradition, elevated the owner’s status considerably. Such women occupied the highest rungs of Los Angeles society. Many bought, sold, traded, and invested their holdings. Some also borrowed and loaned money. A ranchera, like her male counterpart, supervised the raising of cattle; managed dairies, vineyards, and orchards; and sold ranch produce. She usually presided over a large household of family, relatives, servants, and guests. Many elite Californios had further consolidated wealth by encouraging the marriage of their sisters and daughters to American and European men. Even more middling townswomen in the pueblo of Los Angeles had been able petition the city council to receive grants of land. During this period the council allocated plots of land to residents, preferably heads of households, who needed it to graze animals and grow food. With these smallholdings a woman could usually raise enough food to feed her family.

The decades immediately after the Mexican-American War saw the beginning of Los Angeles’s transition from a Mexican pueblo to an American city. But it was really the economic boom of the 1880s that completed that change. The significance of the boom to this story is twofold. The boom economically and culturally incorporated Los Angeles into the rest of the United States. It also attracted the first great wave of American men and women intent on settling, and not just speculating, in Los Angeles. Because the area’s economy in that decade centered on tourism, land sales, and health, it did little in the short term to create economic opportunities for the city’s women. But because most of these immigrants to Los Angeles intended to stay in the area permanently, most arrived as families or sent for them soon after arriving. This in large part explains Los Angeles’s almost balanced ratio of women to men. Los Angeles also had fewer middle-aged persons of either sex and large numbers of elderly.⁵

Many characteristics of the boom contributed to these women’s need to seek paid employment, and the influx of American women would have a significant impact on the city’s occupational structure in the decades to come. For Californios and Californianas, however, who suddenly found themselves in the minority, the boom often deepened economic and social inequalities.⁶

The initial trigger for the boom of the eighties came with the completion of the Southern Pacific Railroad line to Los Angeles in 1875. The Central Pacific founded the Southern Pacific in 1865 specifically to tap the new markets of Southern California. The new line ran down the center of the state from San Francisco to Los Angeles. By 1881 this California line joined the Texas and Pacific at Sierra Blanca near El Paso, and by 1883 the line extended all the way to New Orleans. With the line extended to New Orleans winter migration by eastern and midwestern Americans to California became a regular occurrence. Boosters hired by the Southern Pacific Railroad proved adept at recruiting new travelers. Publications and advertisements circulated by the railroads lauded the climate and rich agricultural land of Los Angeles. These men wrote, lectured, and organized exhibits about California all over the world.

In 1885 Angelenos celebrated the completion of the city’s second railroad connection, this one belonging to the Santa Fe Railroad. The two competing railroads promptly entered into a rate war that further fueled migration. Normally, a one-way trip from the Mississippi River to California would cost around $125, but the two lines now dropped their prices in an attempt to capture each other’s business. Prices hit rock bottom in 1886, when $1 would take a traveler from Kansas all the way to Los Angeles. In addition to cheap fares, the railroads offered other attractive features to the would-be traveler. So-called emigrant cars offered poorer travelers seats that could fold down into beds and included cooking accommodations. In some cases he or she could purchase a “land-seeker’s ticket,” in which the fare paid would be applied to the purchase of railway-owned western land. The excursion, or specially directed trip, became the most popular option. The Santa Fe line started excursions on a large scale in 1886. These trips became so popular that by 1887 three to five excursion trains entered California each day.⁷

Many of the new arrivals enjoyed relative wealth. Newspapers of the day remarked on the affluence of these visitors. One observer commented, “The quality of the newcomers is not less noteworthy than their numbers. They are almost invariably persons of American birth, good education, and some means. . . . [T]his is the best American stock; the bone and sinew of the nation; the flower of the American people.”⁸

This influx of population and money in turn attracted land speculators. These men flooded the city, triggering a buying frenzy unlike anything the state had ever seen. During June, July, and August 1887 an estimated $38 million in land transactions occurred in Los Angeles. Investors bought up land and then subdivided it and offered tracts for sale to the public. Buyers rarely paid cash. Instead, they purchased land on contract, paying anywhere from one-third to one-fourth down and the rest in installments. Land changed hands so frequently, however, that many transactions were never recorded.⁹

New businesses sprang up across the city, coupled with the rapid growth of old ones. Land prices downtown climbed steadily upward. Speculators noticed the city growing in a southwesterly direction, toward the Pacific. The westside of Los Angeles, they predicted, would become the wealthier section of the city. East Los Angeles and Boyle Heights, however, also attracted buyers once the new Buena Vista Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River connected the area to downtown. Newcomers, rather than natives, made up the bulk of purchasers, and many wrote to relatives back East urging them to move to Los Angeles and join the fun.¹⁰ But not every newcomer found bliss in Los Angeles. Perhaps the city did not always live up to the promises of boosters, because some one thousand people left the city each month during the boom years of 1885–1887.¹¹

In spite of promoters’ promises that the boom could continue indefinitely, by the winter of 1888 it had collapsed. Easterners had tired of the hysteria over the city, and fewer and fewer arrived. Tourism dropped off dramatically that winter. Fortunately for the speculators, banks had handled the boom conservatively, and few failed. The collapse left the landscape dotted with undeveloped townsites and unsold lots, but many of the city’s suburbs can trace their birth to this period. Northern cities like San Francisco and Sacramento for the first time looked at Southern California as a real competitor rather than a dusty cow town.¹²

Although the end of the boom signaled the end to the greatest period of speculation, it also permanently reshaped Southern California. Most notably, Los Angeles County’s population, which had increased some 30 percent between 1860 and 1870 and then doubled the following decade, now more than tripled during the 1880s—all this in spite of the subtraction of some thirty thousand citizens with the creation of Orange County in 1889.¹³

But the boom had failed to attract many manufacturing concerns to the city. The reasons were purely economic. Southern California’s still relatively sparse population did not provide enough local demand for most manufacturing businesses to survive. The distance from eastern markets made costs for shipping Los Angeles–made goods across the nation prohibitive. Investment capital could be difficult to obtain. Those already living in the area, as well as easterners looking for investments, chose to put their money elsewhere, most notably into real estate. The professional orientation of immigrants also meant that the city had a very limited labor supply: its new residents were doctors or businessmen, not unskilled laborers or craftsmen. Because of such problems, in 1890 Los Angeles, with its fifty thousand people and 750 firms, manufactured only $9.9 million in goods. This placed the city behind not only larger western cities like San Francisco and Denver but even smaller ones like Portland and Seattle.¹⁴

While retail and a few light-manufacturing enterprises dotted 1880s Los Angeles, most employed few if any women. Relatively few women worked in dressmaking, millinery, tailoring, and general needlework because workers in San Francisco filled much of the demand for these consumer items.¹⁵ But unlike previous regional “booms,” by the end of the 1880s Southern California’s economy was now sufficiently well developed to offer a relatively broad range of opportunities to women.¹⁶ White Anglo and European women who worked did so largely in teaching and domestic service, with a few also finding work as clerks or in the skilled trades, such as printing. African American and Mexican American women who sought paid employment outside the home were limited by the openly racist hiring policies of the late nineteenth century. Most could find work only in service occupations like domestic service and tending the sick. However, other factors, such as easy transportation to California, widowhood, and the high cost of housing in Southern California, ensured that women of all ethnicities would still be looking for work and to build new lives in Los Angeles.

Women as Migrants, Women as Workers

The boom of the 1880s provided the underpinnings for much of the region’s subsequent economic development. It also had a profound impact on how and why women migrated there. In order to understand women and work, we must pause briefly to consider who these women were and why they came to Southern California.

One of the reasons Southern California attracted so many women, including single women, in these years was the availability of railroads. Unlike previous generations of women, who endured arduous journeys by wagon, ship, and even foot to reach California, by the early 1880s many women had only to buy a ticket and spend a few relatively pleasant days on a train to reach Los Angeles. Railroads had in fact quickly learned how to make travel appealing to women by emphasizing its safety, its respectability, and its convenience. In her superb analysis of gender and American railroads, Amy G. Richter argues that railroads were in fact tapping into the “New Woman” ideal of the 1880s and 1890s: “Capable yet feminine, strong yet demure, she embodied the possibility of a public life that maintained gender differences without burdening men with the protection of women.” By the 1890s the New Woman was cropping up regularly in railroad advertising, engaging in “vigorous, albeit respectable, activities . . . playing sports, posing on beaches, or walking the seashore with binoculars.” These sorts of combinations, Richter argues, were key to the success of railroad advertising. The New Woman might travel to California for the winter, or even move to California and luxuriate in a tropical garden, but she could never completely separate from more traditional “Victorian” womanhood.¹⁷

The Southern Pacific Railroad in particular frequently made attractive young women the centerpiece of some of its advertising. One ad from 1904 featured a photograph of a rosy-cheeked, fashionably dressed young woman with the slogan, “I’m going to spend the winter in California—why don’t you come, too?” A 1905 cover of Sunset magazine featured a lovely woman standing in a lush California garden, her arms laden with large breastlike fruit. If one believed the promotions and advertising, Southern California was no Wild West frontier. It was a Mediterranean Eden that women could easily reac...