by Ijeoma Oluo
As promotion after promotion goes to men, as men are encouraged to start businesses and women aren’t, as men flow into fields that are more open to them, the definition of an ideal worker and leader becomes even more stereotypically male—even if those “ideal” traits and skills are not the most beneficial.
The ways in which women have been undercut in the workplace don’t harm only women. When women are denied fair wages, the entire household that depends on their money is harmed. Workplaces that fail to mentor women or build networking environments that are inclusive of women miss out on the talents women offer. Workplaces that refuse to address issues of sexism and sexual harassment suffer not only higher turnover in their female employees but also lower productivity in all employees, regardless of gender. Workplaces that don’t promote women or fully support women in their leadership ranks miss out on the diversity of thought, skill, and approach that having more women in management can provide. Workplaces that devalue traits and skills like empathy, communication, and cooperation, which women are more likely to be socialized to have, almost always overvalue traits like hypercompetitiveness, aggression, and impulsiveness, which men are more likely to be socialized to have, even when those characteristics harm a work environment.
Although consistently shown to be counterproductive, a pattern emerges in how men treat women in the workplace. Women have to fight to enter the workforce. Then when men need women—whether it’s to help keep families afloat during economic hardship, to fill labor shortages, or to lead a new business strategy when traditionally masculine approaches have failed—women are denied the necessary tools and support to achieve their full potential. In many cases, the more a woman is needed in the workplace, the more hostile men seem to act toward her—even if that hostility puts their own livelihoods at risk.
At the root of this seemingly nonsensical behavior we can observe the almost pathological need for many men to see their identities as wholly distinct from, and superior to, women’s—especially in the workplace, which has long been a primary source of ego for men in America and is a place that women aren’t even supposed to be. Separation from and degradation of the feminine in the workplace have been reinforced by our popular culture, replicating themselves generation after generation to our collective detriment.
This power structure is built and maintained primarily by white men. Not because men of color are naturally less driven to control women than white men are—but because white men view their superiority over people of color as equally important to their identity as their power over women. In the public sphere white men rule over people of color, and in the home they rule over women. The extent to which they can do so defines their success as white men. The presence of women in the workplace not only undermines white male authority there; it also lessens men’s opportunity to dominate women at home. The power and ego of entitled white men—who maintain firm control of the vast majority of government offices, manager’s offices, corporate boards, and other realms of leadership—remain the biggest obstacles that most women face in their careers.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE SUPPRESSION OF FEMALE LABOR
Simply fire the women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto!
—Norman Cousins, 19393
The Great Depression was one of the most devastating economic events in our nation’s history. An entire generation was shaped by the trauma of rapid economic decline and uncertainty. My great-grandmother Inez, until her death in 2019 at the age of 104, insisted on washing and reusing the red plastic disposable plates you buy for picnics and parties because “once you’ve lived through the Depression, you don’t let anything go to waste.”
She lived in the same small house she had bought with her husband eighty years earlier. She covered all her furniture in plastic and only replaced items when they were literally falling apart. She purchased only one new car in her entire life, when she was well into her eighties. I have many friends who have similar stories of their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ amazing frugality that grew from living through the Depression.
Not only were members of that generation shaped by the Great Depression; many of our current economic theories and policies were developed in response to the Depression. It is the crisis against which all other American crises are measured. Did the fuel shortages of the 1970s signal an upcoming Great Depression? No, perhaps not. What about the burst of the tech bubble in the 1990s? No, too limited in scale. How about the housing crisis and Great Recession of the early 2000s? Closer, but still no.
To this day, economists disagree about what caused the Great Depression. Some say it was the decline in exports to Europe after World War I, when the massive production of food in the United States to meet the needs of wartime Europe decreased sharply and suddenly, leading to a huge surplus that devastated the agricultural industry and other peripheral trades.4 Some claim it was the growing economic disparity in American society and the vast hoarding of wealth by those at the very top. In 1929, the top 0.1 percent of American households held as much money as the bottom 42 percent. With such a huge amount of available income removed from circulation, and with so little remaining for the lower classes to spread around, there was not enough surplus wealth in the average American household to maintain the consumption needed for a healthy economy.5 Many point, too, to the unregulated, Wild West environment of Wall Street at the time. It was a place where everybody believed they could make their fortunes in the stock market, and people (as well as businesses and banks) speculated and short-sold stocks with abandon, regardless of their financial knowledge or whether they had the income to back up the risks they were taking.
Many more theories have emerged, from environmental devastation of resources to overseas trade wars. But no matter what economic school you come from, no matter which cause you choose—if there’s one thing we should all be able to agree on, it’s that the Great Depression was man-made.
Man-made as in caused by dudes. More specifically, white dudes. The socioeconomic exclusion of women and people of color in political decision making, stock trading, and business running means that no matter where you place your blame, there are likely some white men.
And in the midst of the Great Depression, there was plenty of blame to go around. People pointed fingers at ungrateful Europeans, at greedy and incompetent business owners and CEOs, at irresponsible and selfish stock-market pillagers like General Motors founder William Durant. But a lot of blame and anger were also focused on one group that contributed in absolutely no way to the Great Depression: women.
At the beginning of the Depression, 24.3 percent of all workers in the United States were women. At the end of the Depression, 25.1 percent of workers were women.6 At a time of rising male unemployment, an increase in the percentage of women workers, even an increase of less than 1 percent, made it seem as though women were taking jobs from men. Men grew angry, scared, and desperate as the idea took hold that women workers were, if not the primary cause of the Great Depression, at least exacerbating the problem.
“There are approximately 10,000,000 people out of work in the United States today; there are also 10,000,000 or more women, married and single, who are jobholders. Simply fire the women, who shouldn’t be working anyway, and hire the men. Presto! No unemployment. No relief rolls. No depression.”7 Those were the words of Norman Cousins in 1939, and they summed up the feelings of a lot of white Americans. Cousins, recognized widely as an intelligent and informed political journalist, certainly should have known that his logic was, well, nonexistent. The simple fact was, during that time in American history, women and men were not going after the same jobs. Women were not filling industrial plants and factories. They were not in trade. Those areas were where the majority of job and income losses were felt. Women were working as housekeepers, teachers, seamstresses, and laundresses. This was “women’s work,” and not even financial desperation could send men to their nearest school or hotel to compete with women fo
r low-paid and less-respected employment.
The percentage of women workers increased because as men were losing jobs and income, more women needed to enter the workforce to help provide for their households. If a husband or father lost his job or was forced to take a large pay cut, then the additional income from a wife’s or daughter’s job might just help a family scrape by. (That said, the wages of women were not nearly enough to replace the incomes of men—especially when incomes were reduced by businesses that took advantage of a desperate job market to slash the wages of male workers.)
Ironically, employment that was considered “women’s work” or “colored work” (primarily service and domestic work) was far less impacted by the Great Depression. The one exception was in the urban North, where low Black population numbers prevented the necessity of a classification of “colored work,” which meant that Black people—in particular, Black women—lost jobs en masse to white workers the moment jobs became scarce.8 It would have been smart for young white men to seek work in those fields. But white men would not dare lower themselves to do the jobs that women or Black people were doing. They also could have encouraged their wives and daughters to enter those industries to supplement the family income, but many would not countenance watching more women enter the workplace while so many men looked for “suitable” work. (And they say we’re the irrational ones.)
Resentment toward working women during the Great Depression was a uniquely white problem. In many Black households, women had always worked to supplement the discriminatorily low wages paid to Black men and to help balance the effects of widespread hiring discrimination that kept Black workers out of many fields of employment. Black women were not expected to stop working due to any misguided efforts to preserve jobs for Black men.
“The Negro was born in depression. It didn’t mean too much to him, the Great American Depression, as you call it. There was no such thing,” recounted Clifford Burke in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. “The best he could be is a janitor or a porter or shoeshine boy. It only became official when it hit the white man. If you can tell me the difference between the depression today and the Depression of 1932 for a Black man, I’d like to know it.”9
In reality, it didn’t make any more sense for white men to force women out of the workforce during the Great Depression than it would have made for Black men to do so, but they did it anyway. As anti-woman-worker rhetoric heated up, employers increased their hiring discrimination against married women (who, in sexist theory, shouldn’t have had to work because they were married—and were therefore only working selfishly, for personal gain). In 1932, federal economic recovery efforts required that if both husband and wife held a government job, one would have to leave or be fired. We can guess which spouse in this equation was usually out of a job.
Before the Great Depression, only nine states had laws on the books restricting the employment of married women. By 1940, twenty-six states did.10 The argument against married women working was both economic and moral. One 1935 Wisconsin resolution against the employment of married women stated, “The large number of husbands and wives working for the state raises a serious moral question, as this committee feels that the practice of birth control is encouraged, and the selfishness that arises from the income of employment of husband and wife bids fair to break down civilization and a healthy atmosphere.”11
In the 1930s, 77 percent of school districts in the nation had a policy against hiring married women as teachers, and 50 percent had a policy of firing women teachers once they got married.12 Working mothers were blamed for young people’s truancy and other bad behavior and for the general decline of good society. Women’s magazines like True Story published lurid tales of working women whose selfish ways led them down disastrous paths of sexual promiscuity, divorce, and infertility.13
Married women who did not work participated in the social shaming of married women who did work. Frances Perkins, the New York Commissioner of Labor, gave a speech in 1930, just as the economy was beginning its downturn, attacking married women who worked as selfish and interested in their own personal pleasure at the expense of those in need of employment: “The woman ‘pin-money worker’ who competes with the necessity worker is a menace to society, a selfish, shortsighted creature, who ought to be ashamed of herself.”14
Many women continued to work because, regardless of public opinion and societal abuse, they had to in order to feed their families. But a lot of women were kept out of much-needed jobs because of social pressure: the wrongheaded idea that a woman in the workplace would mean the loss of a job for a man.
Women were not the only scapegoats during the Great Depression. Although Black unemployment overall during the Great Depression didn’t rise nearly as much as it did for white workers (due to the fact that Black workers in the South had long been kept out of the industries hardest hit), Black factory and service workers in the North faced immediate and widespread layoffs as their jobs were taken from them and given to white workers. In the western United States, economic anxieties gave xenophobic politicians and locals the fodder they needed to push out Mexican American workers. As was the case with Black and women workers, the few jobs that were open to Mexican Americans in states like California were not regularly sought after by white workers, even during the Great Depression. Still, there was a rising fear that Mexican American workers were taking “American” jobs, and that an “indigent” Mexican American population would suck up the few resources available to white Americans during hard economic times. Government officials, including Labor Secretary James Doak, pushed the idea that deporting Mexican Americans would solve job woes in the West. In his hunt for undocumented Mexican American immigrants, Doak authorized raids of private homes, businesses, and churches, and the deportation of thousands of people without proper hearings.15
Even more devastating than Doak’s deportation efforts was the massive “repatriation” of Mexican Americans to Mexico. Between 1931 and 1934, over three hundred thousand Mexican Americans were coerced, threatened, or forced to leave the United States for Mexico—an estimated one-third of the national Mexican American population. Let’s pause to let that sink in: one-third of Mexican Americans were driven from the country against their will because white men, unable to fix the mess they had made of the economy, decided to take their frustration out on brown workers in a fit of xenophobia. Sixty percent of those repatriated were American-born.16 Entire Mexican American communities were decimated by this widespread and often violent discrimination and removal and did not recover in numbers for decades.
Jose Lopez, a US citizen who was forcibly removed to Mexico with his family as a child, later testified at a hearing before the California legislature about the devastation the deportation brought to his family and community. “I was five years old when we were forced to relocate,” he said. “I… bec[a]me very sick with whooping cough, and suffered very much, and it was difficult to breathe.… Living conditions in Mexico were horrible, we lived in utter poverty. My family ate only tortillas and beans for a long time. Sometimes only one meal a day.” Both of Lopez’s parents and one of his brothers died in Mexico before he and his surviving siblings were able to make their way back to the United States in 1945.17
The mistreatment of women workers and workers of color did not end when the Great Depression ended. Women and people of color were excluded from the bulk of job-creation efforts during the New Deal. Black sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and domestic workers were by and large omitted from federal relief efforts, jobs programs, and minimum-wage enforcement. Many youth and young-adult job programs refused to admit Blacks.18 Many employment opportunities, such as those with the Civilian Conservation Corps, were open only to men, cutting young women out of steady work with federal agencies like the National Park Service.19 Other programs, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA), hired millions of Americans across the country for various public-works infrastructure projects. Black and brown Americans fou
nd that prime placement in those jobs went to whites, and many of the jobs were deemed unsuitable for women. There was also a limit of one WPA job per household, effectively eliminating women if a man in the family needed work.20
Hostility toward women workers and workers of color did not start during the Great Depression, but even during that white-man-made disaster, white men diverted a sizeable amount of time and resources to ensuring that women and people of color understood that the American workplace—whether it be factories, plants, or offices—was only for white men.
WORLD WAR II AND THE NEED FOR QUITE A FEW GOOD WOMEN
Patriarchy is oppressive, cruel, destructive, inefficient, and—sometimes—quite absurd. A few years after the Great Depression, the editors of True Story magazine faced a bit of a conundrum. How could a magazine that had spent years villainizing women workers in scandalous “true” (but really fictional) stories help get women into the workplace? True Story and other “confessional” magazines had made their money by weaving lurid tales of women who went seeking adventure or a career (two things decidedly reserved for men) and were met with infertility, miscarriage, divorce—even sexual assault. Brought to the brink of absolute ruin, the women would repent for their misdeeds of ambition or audacity, and then were shown grace and mercy with the opportunity to embrace the life they were meant to have—that of a happy, docile, and grateful wife and mother.
This formula worked quite well for providing women readers with scandal and excitement during their often long and predictable days caring for home and children, while also helping to make sure that they appreciated the fact that this was their only thrill. But it did not work for the Magazine Bureau, a government office created in 1942 to help coordinate war coverage and propaganda in mostly women’s magazines like Women’s Day, Ladies’ Home Journal, and True Story.21
