In movies, newspapers, posters, photographs and articles, the Rosie the Riveter campaign stressed the patriotic need for women to enter the workforce and Rosie encouraged women to apply for industrial jobs they may not have previously considered.
Women came from all over the country to work in the assembly lines of defense production plants that were converted or built to mass produce ever more sophisticated armaments. Between and , the female percentage of the workforce in the United States increased from 27 percent to nearly 37 percent, and nearly one out of every four married women worked outside of the home by Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. This left many of the civilian and military jobs on the home front unfilled—and that's when women stepped in.
Before the war, some women In , year-old Naomi Parker was working in a machine shop at the Naval Air Station in Alameda, California, when a photographer snapped a shot of her on the job. The instability created in Europe by the First World War set the stage for another international conflict—World War II—which broke out two decades later and would prove even more devastating.
Rising to power in an economically and politically unstable Germany, Adolf Some , women served in the U. Meanwhile, widespread male enlistment left gaping holes The Equal Pay Act is a labor law that prohibits gender-based wage discrimination in the United States. Signed by President Kennedy in as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, the law mandates equal pay for equal work by forbidding employers from paying men and women Food, gas and clothing were rationed.
Communities conducted scrap Jeannette Rankin was a Montana politician who made history in as the first woman ever elected to the United States Congress. She was also the only member of Congress to cast a vote against participation in both world wars.
Before World War II, most unions refused to represent women workers, believing that women should remain in the home. Despite these advancements, most women, whether they wanted to or not, returned home upon World War II's conclusion. Those who tried to remain in the workforce faced lower wages and discriminatory hiring and promotion tactics. The men's expectations that women would forsake their wartime positions added impetus to the women's rights movement during the s and the s.
Nevertheless, women across the United States, including in Ohio, contributed to American victory in the war, serving as "Rosie the Riveters. Toggle navigation. Remember, as soon as Rosie got good at riveting, factory work was all about welding. Adding to the complexity of this issue is one inescapable truth: women today cannot avoid being judged as women.
Take the case of Ann Hopkins, a woman who approached her job as an accountant by exhibiting a traditional male approach to authority. Hopkins was in her early forties in when she was denied a partnership at the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse.
Ann Hopkins had succeeded at being an accountant, but she had failed, in their eyes anyway, at being a woman. This double yardstick of gender appropriateness and managerial effectiveness often leaves women in an unbreakable, untenable double bind. Women who attempt to fit themselves into a managerial role by acting like men, as Ann Hopkins did, are forced to behave in a sexually dissonant way. After looking at a large number of sex discrimination cases, Deborah L.
Rhode, a law professor at Stanford University, found that women have been denied promotions both for being ambitious and argumentative and for being old-fashioned and reserved.
In other words, she found that there is often no acceptable way to bridge the gap between womanhood and work. And no way to break the bind that keeps women out of the top ranks of corporations. If the norm is male, women will always be the other, the deviant. Superior or inferior, she is not the same. She is caught in a catch If she attacks the problem by trying to be male, she will be too aggressive.
If she attacks the problem by trying to be female, she will be the ineffective other. Day to day, this translates into a minefield for women who must manage both their sexuality and their managerial performance. Even though the women who use these phrases run the risk of undermining their message.
Carli asked undergraduates to rate female and male speakers on persuasive ability. Ask any woman who has ever tried to navigate this cultural and linguistic minefield, and she will tell you that it is next to impossible. Indeed, a growing number of researchers are pointing to this complex set of contradicting gender and managerial expectations as the chief nemesis of women in the work world. At the very least, the need to first and foremost manage their sexuality puts an extra burden on women already carrying a heavy load and trying to compete as managers.
As Rosie proved, what matters most is the ability to get the job done. What matters least is whether a man or a woman is doing it. Yet, ironically, that is what we have come to focus on. Rosabeth Moss Kanter in Men and Women of the Corporation put forth the hopeful hypothesis that sheer numbers of women in the work force could overcome this problem. Once a critical mass of women had been achieved in any organization, she surmised, people would stop seeing them as women and evaluate their work as managers.
Unfortunately, and only with the benefit of hindsight, is it possible to say that this hopeful hypothesis has not been borne out. Large numbers of women are clustered at entry-level and mid-level positions in both the professions and the corporations, and still women have not reached the top nor broken many of the sexual stereotypes that hold them back.
Kennedy School of Government by Robin J.
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