Drought and Depression refugee
from Oklahoma working in the Imperial Valley, California.
Photograph by Dorothea Lange, March 1937. (Courtesy
of the Library of Congress)
Women and the Great Depression
by Susan Ware
In 1933 Eleanor Roosevelt’s It’s Up to
the Women exhorted American women to help pull the
country through its current economic crisis, the gravest
it had ever faced: “The women know that life must
go on and that the needs of life must be met and it is
their courage and determination which, time and again,
have pulled us through worse crises than the present one.”
While women as a group could not end the depression (mobilization
for World War II deserves that credit), the country could
never have survived the crisis without women’s contributions.
“We didn’t go hungry, but we lived lean.”
That expression sums up the experiences of many American
families during the 1930s: they avoided stark deprivation
but still struggled to get by. The typical woman in
the 1930s had a husband who was still employed, although
he had probably taken a pay cut to keep his job; if
the man lost his job, the family often had enough resources
to survive without going on relief or losing all its
possessions. Still, Eleanor Roosevelt noted, “Practically
every woman, whether she is rich or poor, is facing
today a reduction of income.” In 1935-1936 the
median family income was $1160, which translated into
$20-25 a week to cover all their expenses, including
food, shelter, clothing, and perhaps an occasional treat
like going to the movies. Women “made do”
by substituting their own labor for something that previously
had been bought with cash or practicing petty economies
like buying day-old bread or warming several dishes
in the oven to save gas. Living so close to the edge,
women prayed that no catastrophic accident or illness
would swamp their tight budgets. “We had no choice,”
remembered one housewife. “We just did what had
to be done one day at a time.”
In many ways men and women experienced the depression
differently. Men were socialized to think of themselves
as breadwinners; when they lost their jobs or saw their
incomes reduced, they felt like failures because they
couldn’t take care of their families. Women, on
the other hand, saw their roles in the household enhanced
as they juggled to make ends meet. Sociologists Robert
and Helen Lynd noticed this trend in a study of Muncie,
Indiana published in 1937: “The men, cut adrift
from their usual routine, lost much of their sense of
time and dawdled helplessly and dully about the streets;
while in the homes the women’s world remained
largely intact and the round of cooking, housecleaning,
and mending became if anything more absorbing.”
To put it another way, no housewife lost her job in
the depression.
Those traditional gender roles assumed that all women
were members of families with a male breadwinner at
its head, but that description did not always match
reality. Women who were widowed or divorced, or whose
husbands had deserted them, struggled to keep their
families afloat; single women had to fend for themselves.
These women were truly on the margins, practically invisible.
The iconic image of the depression is “The Forgotten
Man”: the newly poor, downwardly mobile unemployed
worker, often standing in a breadline or selling apples
on a street corner. Women who found themselves in similar
dire straits rarely turned up in public spaces like
breadlines or street corners; instead they often tried
to cope quietly on their own. “I’ve lived
in cities for many months broke, without help, too timid
to get in breadlines,” remembered the writer Meridel
LeSueur. “I’ve known many women to live
like this until they simply faint on the street from
privations, without saying a word to anyone. A woman
will shut herself up in a room until it is taken away
from her, and eat a cracker a day and be as quiet as
a mouse.”
Women who sought relief or paid employment risked public
scorn or worse for supposedly taking jobs and money
away from more deserving men. When Norman Cousins realized
that the number of gainfully employed women in 1939
roughly equaled the national unemployment total, he
offered this flippant remedy: “Simply fire the
women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire
the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No
depression.” Yet this attempt to make women scapegoats
for the depression rested on shaky grounds. Many women
had no choice but to work, providing the sole source
of support for themselves or their families. Plus, given
the segmentation of the workforce by gender, it was
not so simple – or even desired – for men
to move into women’s jobs, as a sociologist realized:
“Few of the people who opposed married women’s
employment seem to realize that a coal miner or steel
worker cannot very well fill the jobs of nursemaids,
cleaning women, or the factory and clerical jobs now
filled by women.” Since traditionally male fields
like heavy industry and manufacturing were the hardest
hit by the depression, while clerical and sales fields
populated by women were somewhat less affected, this
division of labor gave women workers a slight edge.
Unfortunately it came with a price: reinforcing traditional
stereotypes of what constituted women’s work.
Still, even the terrible economic crisis could not derail
the overarching twentieth-century trend of women increasingly
working for pay outside the home. According to census
figures, the percentage of employed women fourteen and
older actually rose during the depression from 24.3
percent in 1930 to 25.4 percent in 1940, a gain of two
million jobs. Even more dramatically, the number of
married women working doubled during the decade.
When talking about women as a group, it is always important
to ask “which women?” when generalizations
are offered. Women experienced the depression differently
based on their age, marital status, geographical location,
race and ethnicity, and a host of other factors. For
example, the 1930s urban housewife had access to electricity
and running water, while her rural equivalent usually
struggled with the burdens of domesticity without such
modern conveniences. (Only one in ten farm families
in 1935 had electricity.) Farm families also struggled
with declining agricultural prices, foreclosures, and
in the Midwest, a terrible drought that contributed
to the Dust Bowl migrations of that decade.
African Americans, long subject to discrimination and
prejudice, often viewed the depression differently from
whites. Times had always been hard, and suddenly they
just got a lot harder. The novelist and poet Maya Angelou,
who grew up in Stamps, Arkansas, recalled, “The
country had been in the throes of the Depression for
two years before the Negroes in Stamps knew it. I think
that everyone thought the Depression, like everything
else, was for the white folks.” In 1930 nine out
of ten African American women worked in agriculture
or domestic service, both areas hard hit by the depression.
Housewives who previously hired servants began to do
their own housework; sometimes white women competed
for jobs previously abandoned as too undesirable to
black women. In the South and West Mexican-American
women on the bottom rung of the economic ladder faced
similar conditions, but with an added dimension: the
threat of deportation back to Mexico because of fears
about competition for jobs and relief. In the depths
of the depression, perhaps one-third of the Mexican-American
population returned to Mexico, straining family ties
and causing extreme financial hardship.
Herbert Hoover’s initial response to the onset
of the depression in 1929 had been to turn to business,
private charity, and state and local welfare councils
to address the problem, but those resources quickly
proved inadequate. When Franklin Roosevelt took office
in 1933, his New Deal forged new ground in expanding
the presence of the federal government in the economy
and making concrete connections between federal programs
and the lives of everyday citizens.
And yet women struggled to be treated as equal citizens
when trying to qualify for these new federal programs.
One-quarter of National Recovery Administration codes
set lower minimum wages for women than men performing
the same jobs, and New Deal agencies like the Civil
Works Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps
gave jobs almost exclusively to men. Not considered
suitable for heavy construction jobs, women on relief
were shunted into sewing rooms; black and Mexican-American
women faced racial discrimination as well. The Social
Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Acts did not
initially cover major areas of women’s employment
such as agricultural work or domestic service. Furthermore,
social security benefits were structured around a traditional
model of a male breadwinner and dependent female housewife,
which disadvantaged women who didn’t fit that
profile and implied that women deserved economic rights
only in relation to men. The Wagner Act of 1935 fueled
a dramatic growth in organized labor, and women workers
participated in major CIO strikes and union organizing
drives, but few women held leadership positions.
The needs of women might have been forgotten entirely
were it not for the efforts of an informal network of
women administrators who held important positions in
the New Deal. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the
first woman in the cabinet, oversaw many of the social
welfare initiatives and Ellen Sullivan Woodward supervised
women’s relief projects for the Works Progress
Administration, while Molly Dewson promoted an issue-oriented
reform agenda from her position at the Democratic National
Committee. Their effectiveness was dramatically enhanced
by access to Eleanor Roosevelt, who used her position
as First Lady to advance the causes of women, blacks,
and other marginalized groups. Besides serving as a
symbol of public-spirited womanhood in a time of national
crisis, Eleanor Roosevelt served as the conscience of
the New Deal.
According to writer Caroline Bird, the depression left
“an invisible scar” on those who lived through
it, including the nation’s women. Forced to take
on even more important roles in their homes and families,
women played often unrecognized roles in helping the
country through the Great Depression. Hard times worked
to reinforce traditional gender roles, not subvert them.
Ironically, women’s depression-era contributions
and strong identification with home and family may have
helped lay the foundation for the so-called feminine
mystique of the 1950s.
From 1997-2005 Susan Ware served as
editor of volume five of the biographical dictionary
Notable American Women at the Radcliffe
Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Her
research interests include twentieth-century American
history and the history of American women, as well as
biography. She has published books on women in the New
Deal and the 1930s; biographies of Molly Dewson, Amelia
Earhart, and Mary Margaret McBride; and a women's history
anthology.
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