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Historians of women’s labour in the United States at first largely disregarded the story of female service workers – women earning wages in occupations such as salesclerk, domestic servant, and office secretary. These historians focused instead on factory work, primarily because it seemed so different from traditional, unpaid, “women’s work”. In the home, and because the underlying economic forces of industrialism were presumed to be gender-blind and hence emancipator in effect. Unfortunately, emancipation has been less profound than expected, for not even industrial wage labour has escaped continued sex segregation in the workplace.
To explain this unfinished revolution in the status of women, historians have recently begun to emphasize the way A prevailing definition of femininity often determines the kinds of work allocated to women, even when such allocation is inappropriate to new conditions. For instance, early textile- mill entrepreneurs, in justifying women’s employment in wage labour, made much of the assumption that women were by nature skilful at detailed tasks and patient in carrying out repetitive chores; the mill owners thus imported into the new industrial order hoary stereotypes associated with the homemaking activities they presumed to have been the purview of women. Because women accepted the more unattractive new industrial tasks more readily than did men, such jobs came to be regarded as female jobs. And employers who assumed those women’s “real” aspirations were for marriage and family life, declined to pay women wages commensurate with those of men. Thus many lower- skilled, lower paid, less secure jobs came to be perceived as “female.”
More remarkable than the original has been the persistence of such sex segregation in twentieth-century industry. Once an occupation came to be perceived as “female,” employers showed surprisingly little interest in changing that perception, even when higher profits beckoned. And despite the urgent need of the United States during the Second World War to mobilize its human resources fully, job segregation by sex characterized even the most important war industries. Moreover, once the war ended, employers quickly returned to men most of the “male” jobs women had been permitted to master.