A Woman's Wage

Historical Meanings and Social Consequences

Alice Kessler-Harris

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813145396
• Edition: upd
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

In this updated edition of a groundbreaking classic, Alice Kessler-Harris explores the meanings of women's wages in the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on three issues that capture the transformation of women's roles: the battle over minimum wage for women, which exposes the relationship between family ideology and workplace demands; the argument concerning equal pay for equal work, which challenges gendered patterns of self-esteem and social organization; and the debate over comparable worth, which seeks to incorporate traditionally female values into new work and family trajectories. Together, these topics illuminate the many ways in which gendered social meaning has been produced, transmitted, and challenged.

1

The Wage Conceived

Value and Need as Measures of a Woman’s Worth

When a person complains that a certain wage rate is unduly low, he may be making that judgment in the light of what he thinks is due the kind of person performing that work, e.g. a married man. Others may regard the same rate as not unreasonable in view of the kind of work it is.

—Henry A. Landsberger¹

In 1915 New York State’s Factory Investigating Commission asked some seventy-five prominent individuals—economists, social reformers, businessmen, and publicists among them—what factors determined the rate of wages. The answers varied. Some suggested that workers’ organizations were most important; others believed the size of a business’s profits could enhance or restrain the wages of employees. Another key factor was the standard of living anticipated by workers. But the majority of those interviewed believed the efficiency of the worker and the supply of labor constituted by far the two most powerful determinants of wages.² These traditional explanations for wage rates would have found favor with the proponents of the economic theory then popular.

Widely accepted wage theory at the turn of the century was rooted in, though not limited to, the law of supply and demand. If that phrase, as economic historian Arnold Tolles implies, does not do economists justice, it does, at least, convey the economists’ belief “that the reward for every kind of human effort is controlled by some kind of impersonal and irresistible force, similar to the force of gravity.”³ Theory held that wages would rise or fall in response to employers’ fluctuating willingness to pay. That willingness in turn was predicated on what employers thought they could earn from labor as well as on how much labor was available at different wage rates. Thus, in theory, the demand for labor (measured by the additional revenue labor could produce) and the supply (which took into account the differences in education and training of the worker) together determined the wage.⁴

Despite the apparent certainty of economists such as Professor Roy Blakely of Cornell, who testified before the commission that “wages tend to approximate the value of what they produce,”⁵ the theory left room for a substantial degree of subjective judgment on the part of employers as to the value of particular workers. A critical part of the chemical mix that determined the wages of workers in general involved something intangible called “custom.” If a male worker was paid according to some formula that reflected the value of what he produced and the difficulty of replacing him, he was also paid according to what he and other workers thought he was worth. Custom, or tradition, played an acknowledged but uncalculated role in regulating the wage. But custom and tradition were gendered. They influenced male and female wages in different ways. And especially in the female wage, they played a far larger role than we have earlier been willing to concede. The women’s wage, at least for the early twentieth century, rested in large measure on conceptions of what women needed.

The distinction alerts us to the rich possibilities contained in the wage conceived as a social rather than as a theoretical construct. If the wage is, as most economists readily acknowledge, simultaneously a set of ideas about how people can and should live and a marker of social status, then it contains within it a set of social messages and a system of meanings that influence the way women and men behave. We are all familiar with the capacity of these social meanings to reduce the wages of recent immigrants, of African-Americans, and of other groups. But, partly because it is so apparently natural, the capacity of the wage to speak to issues of gender is less clear. Yet the language with which a woman’s wage is conceived throws into relief the same process that exists for men. The wage frames gendered messages; it encourages or inhibits certain forms of behavior; it can reveal a system of meaning that shapes the expectations of men and women and anticipates their struggles over power; it participates in the negotiations that influence the relationships of the sexes inside and outside the family. In all these capacities, the wage functions as a terrain of contest over visions of fairness and justice. This essay will attempt to illustrate some of these processes in the early twentieth century.

The structure of wages that emerged in the course of industrialization in the late nineteenth century reflected a long tradition that revolved around what has become known as the family wage—the sum necessary to sustain family members. That sum had been earned by several family members for most of the history of capitalism. Family income was typically pooled and then redistributed by one family member. But the dream of a family wage that could be earned by a male breadwinner alone had long been an object of struggle among organized working people who thought of it as a mechanism for regulating family life and allowing women to work in their own homes.⁶ Ideally, and sometimes in practice, the family wage was a male wage, a wage that went to a male breadwinner.⁷

What then of a woman’s wage? It reflected not what was but what ought to be. That men ought to be able to support wives and daughters implied that women need not engage in such support. They ought to be performing home duties. Thus, if a woman earned wages, the normal expectation was that she did so to supplement those of other family wage earners. Theoretically, at least, the decision as to who would and would not earn was regulated by the family unit. The wage belonged to her family. Until the third quarter of the nineteenth century, U.S. law and practice reflected these assumptions. Typically, a woman’s wage was legally the property of her husband or father. The average wage of women workers was little more than half of the male wage. And even the most skilled women rarely earned as much as two-thirds of the average paid to unskilled men. If a woman lived independently, her wage was normally not sufficient to support her. Nor was it intended to do so.

The nineteenth century fight for a family wage was thus simultaneously a fight for a social order in which men could support their families and receive the services of women; and women, dependent on men, could stay out of the labor force. Historians have debated the advantages and disadvantages of this mode of thinking, but for our purposes it is important to note only that the family wage reflected popular thinking—a sense of what was right and just.⁸ Widely supported by working class men and women at the end of the nineteenth century, it rested on what seemed to many to be a desirable view of social order.

Its incarnation in the form of the living wage more clearly isolated the female role. Though the content of a living wage varied, like the family wage, it was imbued with gendered expectations. John Ryan, the Catholic priest who was the United States’ most prolific exponent of the living wage, for example, asserted the laborer’s right to a “decent and reasonable” life that meant to him “the right to exercise one’s primary faculties, supply one’s essential needs, and develop one’s personality.”⁹ Others were somewhat more specific. British economist William Smart thought the living wage ought to pay for “a well-drained dwelling, with several rooms, warm clothing with some changes of underclothing, pure water, a plentiful supply of cereal food with a moderate allowance of meat and milk and a little tea, etc., some education, and some recreation, and lastly sufficient freedom for his wife from other work to enable her to perform properly her maternal and her household duties.”¹⁰ John Mitchell, head of the United Mine Workers union, was somewhat more ambitious. The wage, he thought, ought to be enough to purchase “the American standard of living.” This included, but was not limited to, “a comfortable house of at least six rooms,” which contained a bathroom, good sanitary plumbing, parlor, dining room, kitchen, sleeping rooms, carpets, pictures, books, and furniture.¹¹

For Ryan, as for other proponents of the living wage, the “love and companionship of a person of the opposite sex”¹² was an essential element of what a living wage should purchase. The bottom line, according to Ryan, was the laborer’s capacity “to live in a manner consistent with the dignity of a human being.”¹³ The Shoe Workers’ Journal proposed that “everything necessary to the life of a normal man be included in the living wage: the right to marriage, the right to have children and to educate them.”¹⁴

As the family wage held the promise of female homemaking, the living wage, which explicitly incorporated wife and children, excluded the possibility that female dignity could inhere either in a woman’s ability to earn wages or in her capacity to support a family. Because the living wage idealized a world in which men had the privilege of caring for women and children, it implicitly refused women that privilege. And, because it assumed female dependency, to imagine female independence impugned male roles and male egos. Ground rules for female wage earners required only self-support, and even that was estimated at the most minimal level. Champions of the living wage for women counted among her necessities food, clothing, rent, health, savings, and a small miscellaneous fund.¹⁵ Nothing in the arguments for a female living wage vitiates the harsh dictum of John Stuart Mill. The wages of single women, asserted that famous economist, “must be equal to their support, but need not be more than equal to it; the minimum in their case is the pittance absolutely required for the sustenance of one human being.”¹⁶ “Women who are forced to provide their own sustenance have a right,” echoed Ryan, “to what is a living wage for them.” Their compensation, he argued, with apparent generosity, “should be sufficient to enable them to live decently.”¹⁷

At the time Ryan wrote, women constituted close to 25 percent of the industrial work force. More than one-third of wage-earning women in urban areas lived independently of their families, and three-quarters of those living at home helped to support other family members. False conceptions of women who needed only to support themselves did a particular disservice to Black women, who were eight times as likely to earn wages as white women. For Black women racial discrimination and its attendant poverty meant that more that one-third of those who were married would continue to earn wages, and virtually all of those who earned wages participated in family support.¹⁸ Yet the real needs of these women were rarely acknowledged. Nor did the brief, dismissive commentary on “a woman’s living wage” mention recreation or comfort or human dignity or the capacity to care for others.

Ryan readily conceded that men without families to support and/ or with other means of support were entitled to draw a living wage because “they perform as much labor as their less fortunate fellows.”¹⁹ His proposals generously allocated a living wage to men who never intended to marry because “rights are to be interpreted according to the average conditions of human life.”²⁰ But the same generosity was not evident in notions of the living wage for women workers. Rather, it seemed fair to reduce women to the lowest levels of bestiality. Advocates of the living wage confidently explained that women’s “standard of physical comfort, in other words, their standard of life” was lower than that of men. While her ideals were “naturally higher” than those of men, “her physical wants are simpler. The living wage for a woman is lower than the living wage for a man because it is possible for her as a result of her traditional drudgery and forced tolerance of pain and suffering to keep alive upon less.”²¹ Women, with a single set of exceptions, were to be paid only according to their most minimal needs. Only to women who were employed in the same jobs as men did Ryan concede the need for equal pay because, he argued, “when women receive less pay than men, the latter are gradually driven out of the occupation.”²²

Ryan failed to acknowledge that in attributing to women “average conditions” that reflected social myth rather than reality he undermined his own cause. While his vision and that of most living wage advocates came from a desire to protect the home, not from antagonism to the pitiable condition of those women who worked for wages, his proposals left the home vulnerable. “The welfare of the whole family,” he noted, “and that of society likewise, renders it imperative that the wife and mother should not engage in any labor except that of the household. When she works for hire, she can neither care properly for her own health, rear her children aright, nor make her home what it should be for her husband, her children, herself.”²³ Theoretically, that might have been true; but in practice, by reducing women’s potential capacity to earn adequate incomes, he diminished their ability to support themselves and their homes.

Without negating the good intentions of Ryan and others on behalf of the family and without imposing anachronistic judgments about their desire to protect the family and to place family needs ahead of women’s individual rights, one can still see that the consequences of their rhetoric for women who earned wages were no mere abstractions. They assumed a hard and concrete reality, for example, in discussions of the minimum wage for women that took place between about 1911 and 1913. To alleviate the plight of women workers, social reformers attempted to pass legislation that would force employers to pay a wage sufficient to meet a woman’s minimal needs. Between 1912 and 1923, thirteen states and the District of Columbia passed such legislation in one form or another. Each statute was preceded by a preamble that declared the legislators’ intentions to offer protection that ranged from providing a sum “adequate for maintenance” to ensuring enough to “maintain the worker in health” and guaranteeing her “moral well-being.” Whatever the language of the preamble, and whatever the mechanism by which the wage was ultimately to be decided, the minimum was invariably rooted in what was determined to be a “living” wage for women workers.²⁴ But the discussion required some estimate of what a living wage might be. Elizabeth Beardsley Butler, who surveyed working women in Pittsburgh in 1907, suggested that a woman could “not live decently and be self supporting” at a wage of less than $7 a week. Three years later Louise Bosworth estimated the living wage of Boston’s women ranged from $9 to $11 a week—the first amount would keep a woman from dying of cold or hunger; the second provided the possibility of efficiency at work and some minimal recreation.²⁵ The question, said social pundit Thomas Russell, was whether “it is to be an amount that shall provide only the bare necessaries of life or shall it include some provision for comforts, recreation and the future?”²⁶

The budgets drawn up by experts generally opted only for the necessities. Arrived at after extensive surveys to uncover the actual expenditures of “working girls,” and heavily reliant on language and imagery that reduced women to perpetual girlhood, they included almost nothing beyond the barest sustenance.²⁷ A typical survey was undertaken by Sue Ainslee Clark in 1908 and published by Clark and Edith Wyatt in the pages of McClure’s magazine in 1910.²⁸ The authors focused on the effortful struggle to make ends meet, turning survival itself into a praiseworthy feat. They exuded compassion for the girl who “ate no breakfast,” whose “luncheon consisted of coffee and rolls for ten cents,” and who, as “she had no convenient place for doing her own laundry, . . . paid 21 cents a week to have it done.” They estimated her regular weekly expenditure as follows: “lodging, 42 cents; board, $1.40; washing, 21 cents; clothing and all other expenses, $1.97: total, $4.” ²⁹ Such estimates encouraged social investigators to define precisely how much a female wage earner might spend for everything from undergarments to gifts.

The debate over the minimum wage revealed what this outward order dictated: to live alone required the strictest exercise of thrift, self-discipline, and restraint. The budgets warned fiercely against expectations of joy, spontaneity, pleasure, or recreation. Even the carfare that might provide access to a walk in the country was rigidly restricted. The wage prescribed a spartan lifestyle, sufficient, it was hoped, to preserve morality for those destined to earn but not so generous as to tempt those in families to live outside them. It limited fantasy to the price of survival and held open the door of ambition only to a me...