Employment of Women

I

Introduction

Employment of Women, the work of women has been economically vital since prehistory, although their contributions have varied according to the structure, needs, customs, and attitudes of society. In prehistoric times, women and men participated almost equally in hunting and gathering activities to obtain food. With the development of agricultural communities, women's work revolved more around the home. They prepared food, made clothing and utensils, and nurtured children, while also helping to plough fields, harvest crops, and tend animals. As urban centres developed, women sold or traded goods in the marketplace.

From ancient to modern times, four generalizations can be made about women's paid work. (1) Women have worked because of economic necessity; poor women in particular worked outside the home whether they were unmarried or married, and especially if their husbands were unable to sustain the family solely through their own work. (2) Women's indentured work has often been similar to their work at home. (3) Women have maintained the primary responsibility for raising children, regardless of their paid work. (4) Women have historically been paid less than men and have been allocated lower-status work. Some major changes are now occurring in industrial nations, including the steadily increasing proportion of women in the labour force; decreasing family responsibilities (due to both smaller family size and technological innovation in the home); higher levels of education for women; and more middle- and upper-income women working for pay or for job satisfaction. Statistically, they have not yet achieved parity of pay or senior appointments in the workplace in any nation.

II

Early Women Workers

In Babylonia, about 2000 bc, women were permitted to engage in business and to work as scribes. In most ancient societies, however, upper-class women usually were limited to their homes, and working women were either semi-free plebeians or slaves used for unskilled labour and prostitution. In ancient Greece, women worked outside the home as sellers of goods such as salt, figs, bread, and hemp; seamstresses; wet nurses; courtesans and prostitutes; laundresses; cobblers; and potters. The work patterns of women in Asia and the Americas were similar. In India, working women crushed stones used to make roads and worked long hours weaving cloth.

A

Medieval Europe

Artisans working in their own homes not infrequently used the labour of their families. This custom was so prevalent during the Middle Ages, craft guilds of the period, including some that otherwise excluded women, often admitted to membership the widows of guild members, providing they met professional requirements. Some early guilds barred women from membership; others accepted them on a limited basis. By the 14th century, in England and France, women were frequently accepted equally with men as tailors, barbers, carpenters, and saddlers and spurriers. Dressmaking and lacemaking guilds were composed exclusively of women.

Gradually, the guilds were replaced by the putting-out system, whereby tools and materials were distributed to workers by merchants; the workers then produced articles on a piecework basis in their homes. Some of these workers were women, who were paid directly for their labour, while men with families were commonly assisted by their wives and children.

B

The Industrial Revolution

During the 18th and early 19th centuries, as the Industrial Revolution developed, the putting-out system slowly declined. Goods that had been produced by hand in the home were manufactured by machine under the factory system. Women competed more with men for some jobs, but were concentrated primarily in textile mills and clothing factories. Manufacturers often favoured women employees because of relevant skills and lower wages, and also because early trade union organization tended to occur first among men. Employees in sweatshops were also preponderantly women. The result was to institutionalize systems of low pay, poor working conditions, long hours, and other abuses, which along with child labour presented some of the worst examples of worker exploitation in early industrial capitalism. Minimum wage legislation and other protective laws, when introduced, concentrated particularly on the alleviation of these abuses of working women.

Women workers in business and the professions, the so-called white-collar occupations, suffered less from poor conditions of work and exploitative labour, but were denied equality of pay and opportunity. The growing use of the typewriter and the telephone after the 1870s created two new employment niches for women, as typists and telephonists, but in both fields the result was again to institutionalize a permanent category of low-paid, low-status women's work. Teaching, especially at the lower echelons, remained a career customarily open to women, and medicine also became one important field where women enjoyed some early success. Nursing was traditionally a female preserve, and the first woman doctor in the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell, received her degree in 1849. Edinburgh University, famous for its medical expertise, was one of the first universities to admit women (from 1889). The professions, whose statutes were one of the first targets of equal opportunity legislation, formed something of a vanguard for female workers in the 20th century, but equal pay and opportunity in these fields has yet to be matched by comparable developments in the business sector.