Give Us Bread but Give Us Roses by Sarah Eisenstein

Author:Sarah Eisenstein [Eisenstein, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Modern, 20th Century, United States, Reference, General
ISBN: 9781136245022
Google: feQcAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-07-18T01:18:08+00:00

Conclusion

Despite significant changes around the turn of the century in Victorian attitudes about women in general and their involvement in the labor force in particular, contemporary ideas about women and work remained exclusive of the reality of a large section, even a majority, of the working-class women of the period.

Although there was increased recognition of the role of women in the labor force, and of the importance of earning their own living for many women, the basic conception of woman's role was that she was and ought to be primarily a wife and mother. Working outside her home was still seen as basically incompatible with that role.

Although there was a stronger sense of the emergence of working women as a definite social group, expecting as a matter of course that they would work at some point in their lives, there was still a strong reluctance to recognize the characteristic working woman in industries like garment or textiles, as a representative type. There was perhaps an uneasy recognition of the existence of such women, for whom work under deplorable conditions was a basic and determining factor, but no acceptance of their representativeness.

Despite some broadening and loosening of definitions of respectability and femininity, the standards of acceptability were still tailored to an image of working women whose character and appearance were supposed to be their own to determine. The level of necessity which shaped the appearance and behavior of working-class women was too raw to be accommodated by them.

Working women were, then, excluded from the acceptable image of womanhood and respectability shaped by the dominant values of the period. The question becomes, what was the impact of this situation on working women themselves? I want, in the following chapters, to look at the degree to which working women were aware of the dominant ideas of the period about women, and the degree to which they accepted them; to discuss the ways in which they responded to this ideology; and finally, to explore the degree to which they developed criticisms of it, and under what circumstances they did so.

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