Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University: Trapped in the Past? A Historical View of American Workplace Policies

The following are my notes from Kessler-Harris's keynote address at the Redesigning, Redefining Work Summit at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research, November 7, 2013. This address was conducted in a question-and-answer format. Questions are in bold italics, answers are in regular font.

How has the U.S. workplace been imagined over time?

For most of history, work was imagined as part of the household - work and the household were all tied together. Women pitched in, men pitched in, and this union was indivisible though most of the 19th century for most households.

In the 1960s -- in the space of a single lifetime -- we have gone through a revolution in work, reimagining it as something far away from the household. It is no longer a part of it, but is rather alienated from it, in conflict with it. We can imagine ourselves today in a sort of revolutionary moment. In a space of 50 years, men and women have reimagined the household in ways unimaginable 60 or 70 years ago, when the household was imagined in larger dimensions, with perhaps servants, slaves, women attached to the family but not married, grown children within it -- all these members were part of the household. It was not so much about profit making but self-sustaining. Everyone worked, from children through the matriarch or patriarch, according to demands, needs. There was integrity between the household and work. Work was non-alienating, and meaningful -- a part of life, not separate from it. Work was not imagined as something we went out to do, or a "career path." This is one of the reasons we're having so much difficulty with work today.

The gendered imagination of the past -- how men and women thought about themselves within a gendered context (class, race, position, and production has been the focus of much historical research) -- it is clear that how people thought about their gendered position and roles affected how they imagined work. Part of our current gendered imagination of the past is to think of women as having been subordinated, oppressed, in differentiated roles, tasks, and spheres. But at that time it was felt to be part of the natural God-given order of things. The gendered imagination of that time would step back a bit at a woman who refused to get married. Today we might see marriage for many women as narrowly confining her to serving a husband for life, living where and how he decided.

The gendered imagination, which includes basic assumptions about how the world works, involved shared expectations. When they stopped being shared -- 1970s, 80s -- this was seen as rebellion against traditional gendered imaginations. The cessation of a shared imagination spurs social movement, and dramatic movement toward change.

What was the experience of women workers in the early 20th century?

The female workforce constituted about 25% of the industrial workforce and about 50% of the agrarian workforce. This female workforce was mostly unmarried, immigrant, African American, and poorer women, economically and educationally. About 50% of women were in domestic servant jobs (e.g., laundry, janitorial, cooking, caregiving), and about 30% of women worked in factories (e.g., shoe, button making). The workplace was highly sex segregated. About 90-92% of women worked in jobs in which other women worked.

Women earned 1/3 of the daily wage that a male laborer of comparable talents earned. One could not live on that daily wage. Women laborers who were unmarried, widowed, or abandoned lived on this very marginal wage, working 10-12 hour workdays during busy seasons, and then facing unemployment and zero pay during off seasons.

The conditions for working women were so bad, there was concern that the family could not survive under such circumstances. Rather than helping families, the response was to protect the labor force with legislation -- usually at the state level, which would then get knocked down by the Supreme Court. Then in 1908 the Supreme Court endorsed legislation "protecting" women (not men) workers by limiting their working hours, imposing sanitation conditions, not allowing them to work at night, and so on. This was not done to protect women workers, it was done to restrict the number of women workers and the hours they worked in order to reduce competition for men, protecting jobs and wages for men.

Suddenly the idea of "family" leapt into the gendered imagination, calling for a "family wage" to give men the family wage so women didn't "have" to work. This ignored the fact that women were working at jobs men weren't, and that many women did not have husbands, etc.

Who counts as a "worker"?

At the turn of the century everyone began to agree on the "male-as-breadwinner" model. The 1920s was a period of relative prosperity (yet an 8% unemployment rate). Young unmarried women of somewhat higher social class and standing started to work. There was a new sector opening up -- retail sales, clerical work (which began as male jobs, then transitioned to female jobs), that required respectable and well-spoken workers, and educated well-off women were well suited to these roles.

Then during the depression male unions pushed to get women out of the wage labor force. They directed their efforts against married women. Large numbers of daughters lived in family homes who did not move out after college. The reasoning went, why should households have two jobs -- a household should have only one job.

People agreed that married women should not be in the labor force and "should not take the job of a man." Still many women were unmarried etc. who began to question these assumptions of why they could not work.

In 1935 Congress passed the Economic Social Security Act -- federal level programs that single out workers to give them unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, etc. The question was, Who gets those benefits? Not the women workers. The legislation was written to exclude sectors dominated by women. It covered less than 50% of the workforce, and 92% of the beneficiaries were men. It excluded education, retail, non-profit organizations, domestic servants, etc. -- that is, the female labor force. It excluded people who were not in continuous employment (which was mostly women), anyone unwilling to move out of the domicile of their husband's choosing for employment purposes.

A "worker" thus became someone covered by social security, unemployment insurance, etc. In other words, women were not really "workers." This fed into the way women perceived themselves. "Opting out" of marriage was, in a male breadwinner society (the "normal, God-given way to live"), unusual. The idea of being in the labor force until one found a husband took hold. Work was not envisioned as being about an identity or a career for women.

When did married women really enter the wage labor force?

In the 1930s, actually, out of sheer necessity, when husbands could not get work. At the end of the 1930s, about 13-14% of the wage labor force consisted of married women, many of whom had disguised their marital status to gain/retain their employment.

Then World War II: The country desperately needed women workers. Good jobs opened up. Bottom level jobs were filled by poor women who had been shut out. One would think the federal government would think it needs to make efforts to keep women in the labor force, but it told married women with children that their children needed them more than the workplace. Factories and workpalces started providing laundry services, cooked meals -- not providing flextime, there was enormous pressure to get women there -- even employer financed daycare was provided, some even paid for boarding schools -- and factoring these in as hidden "costs." The ideological underpinnings were the same, but the practical realities were different.

In 1945/46, women were kicked out when men got back from the war. In the early 1950s, though, there was the Korean War, and it required soldiers. The G.I. Bill, jobs for teachers, in education, opened up for women, many of whom had experience from the 1940s. As consumer pressures ramped up (automobiles, washers/dryers, etc.), women who had worked during the war were happy to go to work to earn "extra" money to fulfill these consumer pressures.

In 1952, the proportion of women in the labor force was the same as the proportion of women at the height of World War II. This included women who were married, who stayed at least until they had kids, then came back when their kids began school. This proportion kept climbing.

In the 1960s (the era in which the doctor's wife was expected to stay at home), women were beginning to resist prevailing assumptions and questions about marriage. In the 1970s the male breadwinner ideology started to be questioned.

Tell us about the formation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). 

In 1961 President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) created the Commission for the Status of Women, which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. The first Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act was passed, with Title VII forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. This was the implementing act to the Fourteenth Amendement that prevented discrimination on the basis of race. This had systematically excluded women, who were not considered "persons" or "citizens" under the law. Sex was put into the Civil Rights Act only under the job discrimination provision.

This legislation created the EEOC, which consisted of five members in 1965, with two women (one African American woman). The commission did not know what to do with the word "sex." It could not identify discrimination on the grounds of sex -- so much of this seemed "natural" -- it could see discrimination on the grounds of race, but not sex, because reasons for not hiring women (pregnancy, etc.) were considered "natural." Women at the time had to sign a contract saying they'd let their employer know they were pregnant by 3-4 months into the pregnancy, and that they would leave paid work at that time (Kessler-Harris herself had to sign such a contract).

What is "discrimination" became key questions in the 1960s. Often people turned the other way, avoided implementing the Civil Rights Act with respect to women. Then the National Organization for Women was organized, which forced the EEOC to take sex discrimination seriously. They took on the airlines, which required women to wear 3" heels -- discriminatory? -- women were supposed to be sexually desirable to male clients (around the same time Gloria Steinem, a Playboy bunny, sued Playboy for refusing to hire men) -- all this seemed "natural."

1969 was a breakthrough moment when the gendered imagination began to shift. The idea used to be that you'd file help wanted ads under male or female. A key case was the "Help Wanted" case, which made employers meld male and female want ads together.  African Americans fought against this because they thought employers might hire White women instead of Black men to fulfill anti-discrimination EEOC guidelines.

The Sears case was one in which the EEOC tried to engage Sears/Roebuck, the largest employer of women, into lower-level sales/retail jobs and did not promote them into managerial jobs or commission sales jobs because women weren't "interested" in those jobs. This was the "lack of interest" defense. Sears would not settle, the EEOC sued, and it came to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984. Clarence Thomas was at that time Chairman of EEOC and was unintereted in the case. He assigned it to Karen Baker, then 32 years old, and it was her first case out of law school. Kessler-Harris was the expert witness. At the plaintiff's table were African American legal aides and Karen; at the Sears Roebuck table were 12 blacked suited lawyers (one woman). Sears argued successfully that women weren't really interested in these jobs.

Kessler-Harris' argument as an expert witness was that women do know about washing machines, are happy to work extra hours, life has changed, they can do sales commission work, etc. The judge turned to Kessler-Harris and said, "How often do these women go shopping?" Kessler-Harris was baffled and replied, "For what?" The judge said, "For food." Kessler-Harris guessed, wondering what this had to do with the case, "Maybe once a week?" The judge then said, "My wife shops every day. She doesn't have time to hang around an office working." The judge ruled against the women and in favor of Sears-Roebuck. Clarence Thomas declined to take it forward.

No one uses the "lack of interest" defense anymore. In the late 1980s people were beginning to say, "Let's think about what women really want out of jobs, rather than what men say women want out of jobs."

Flexibility programs are so fragile (e.g., at Yahoo) -- why?

Flexibility is a strategy that is doomed to fail in the present context.

In the 1930s, the same Social Security Act that defined who was and was not a worker (women, mothers, were not) helped women stay out of the labor force and the state helped mothers as long as their children remained small. They were not "real" workers -- the conception was that society had a collective responsibility to children without fathers to help get them the mothering they needed.

The conception behind these flexible arrangements is just the opposite: Individuals are responsible for their children and household relationships and demands. This individual responsibility can be met in whatever way the individual can meet it. Employers will help -- not by giving parents a break, but by helping parents meet their individual responsibilities. When employers do this, they're not lifting or sharing the responsibility with the worker, and these workers and arrangements are doomed to fail. The worker will not be doing such a good job, and no one will be happy.

Let's think of a more social way to accommodate children. Let's not juxtapose work with children. All of society benefits from children and from children who are thriving and are well are taken care of. Scandinavian countries, creches in France, Sweden and Norway, give six hour workdays to parents with children under the age of 12, with no reduction in pay. They don't call it "flextime," they call it "child time" -- recognize that society values parents caring for children.

In the 1920s we had a movement for corporate welfare. Americans connect their benefits to their jobs -- if they don't have jobs, they don't have benefits. Benefits in other countries are related to citizenship or residency, not to one's employer. As long as our benefits are attached to our employer, they are subject to the economic and social interests of the employer. Does it make any sense to restructure the workplace without thinking of the bases through which people derive these benefits?