Electric City : General Electric in Schenectady (9781623492212) by Blackwelder Julia Kirk

Author:Blackwelder, Julia Kirk [Blackwelder, Julia Kirk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Texas A & M Univ Pr
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

6

“The G-E Girl”

“The G-E girl is a happy worker, and she makes her working hours very pleasant, for hers is that pleasure and satisfaction only derived through successful work.”

—ELLEN NIELSON, General Electric Publicity Department

When the Edison works opened its doors in Schenectady in 1886, women as well as men entered the plant gates. As Schenectady General Electric grew, its female workforce increased and diversified. Numbering 2,500 (or three for every twenty workers) in the 1920s, women accounted for one third of all Schenectady employees at the height of their presence during World War II. The company’s employment officers understood that many families relied on the earnings of daughters, wives, and mothers. In Schenectady, GE stood as the employer of first and last resort for widows with office or factory experience. Interested in retaining workers it had trained, the company was not reluctant to rehire women with credible service records who had left the labor force temporarily. GE also recognized the importance of women’s economic contributions to the company, but managers held women within a separate sphere that severely constrained or negated chances of advancement. As did most employers in the first half of the twentieth century, General Electric maintained women’s secondary status in gender-specific services, activities, and rewards as well as through occupational segregation. GE publicists encouraged and praised the women’s employment, but they carefully subscribed their status: “G-E girls work and play and enjoy it under the protective wing of the Company.”1 Women’s protections included the stated invocation that women’s tasks would, as presented by writer Ellen Nielson, be “pleasant,” whereas GE men could expect satisfactions in solving technical puzzles or mastering powerful machines. During and after World War II, GE gradually moderated its discriminatory hiring and promotion policies, but Schenectady publicity agents consistently emphasized women’s differences from men when praising their accomplishments.

During their decades of oversight in Schenectady, chief engineer E. W. Rice and publicity director Martin Rice demonstrated no skepticism about GE’s discriminatory policies or the unhealthful conditions in which many women worked. Third GE president Gerard Swope departed from Rice’s disregard for women, manifesting the progressive sensibilities that propelled workplace improvements for both women and men in the 1920s. Nonetheless, Swope and Charles Wilson after him retained the dual system of benefits and opportunities that Rice had institutionalized.

Benefit disparities affirmed men’s superior claims to the fruits of labor force participation. Schenectady management made home mortgages available to men but not to women. The Schenectady works set aside garden plots on company property during World War I, but stipulated that only men could receive a plot. In designing its original welfare programs, GE proposed to exclude women from its medical and retirement benefits, but vocal female workers forced an accommodation. As early as 1917 more than 600 women had joined “women’s sections” of the company’s employee benefits association. Women’s protest of their discriminatory treatment demonstrated differing interests from those of their male bosses who presumed women had no long-term employment cares. Management accepted female shop floor and

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