Children of the Great Depression by Glen H Elder

Author:Glen H Elder
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429981364
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Women’s Careers and Husband’s Status

The Oakland women are members of a cohort which tends to prize family roles (mother, wife, and homemaker) far more than any other activity. One study has found this priority even among married women who were gainfully employed or engaged in civic responsibilities. By and large, the collective opinion of these women affirms the view that “every woman should be married, that she should have children, and that none but family roles should be of even secondary importance to her before, during, or after the time that she is intensely involved in these relations by virtue of the life cycle” (Lopata 1971, p. 49). Even if these priorities seldom match the roles women actually perform, they do identify dominant themes in the lives of the Oakland women. Bona fide occupational careers, which have a measure of autonomy and equality relative to the husband’s worklife, are practically nonexistent. From the day of high school graduation to middle age, all but 8 percent of the women registered at least one year of experience as a full-time employee, though less than 15 percent followed a relatively orderly career after marriage and children, with only brief interruptions. The latter category includes women who completed college or professional school—a landscape architect, a registered nurse, etc.—as well as women who achieved little more than a high-school education—an IBM operator, an insurance salesman, a draftsman, and a buyer for a department store. With few exceptions, there is little evidence in these work lives of a substantial increase in authority or status during the postwar years.6

Four employment patterns were identified in the life history protocols.7 A fourth of the women followed a conventional pattern of employment; they were employed after leaving school, but soon left to marry or to have their first child, and did not return thereafter. A larger percentage of women in the sample (34 percent) established a double-track career, in which employment was only temporarily interrupted to have children or keep house. A third type of career line is best described as unstable (20 percent) and closely corresponds with the disorderly worklife of men. Women in this group alternated between employment and homemaking for reasons external to the job itself, such as financial need, health, and residential change associated with the husband’s work. The fourth group (8 percent) delayed entry into the labor market until after marriage and homemaking.

Whether a woman continues working after children arrive depends on a host of factors beyond values, but especially on her economic situation, and this point is reaffirmed by the life course of women in the conventional category. As a group, women with conventional careers married exceedingly well, and have since cultivated interests in a wide range of activities beyond workplace and family. They were more likely to have achieved some college education than women in double-track or unstable careers, to have married men of high educational and occupational status, and to rank within the upper middle class by the late 50s. Seventy percent

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.