Economic Conditions of Women Workers

Any true assessment of women’s present status in the United States must begin with an evaluation of the effects of the growing economic crisis upon the working women, farm women, workers’ wives, Negro women, women of various national origins, etc. The ruthless Taft-Hartley-employer drive to depress the workers’ wage standards and abolish labor’s right to strike and bargain collectively, as well as the wholesale ouster of Negro workers from many industries, was presaged by the post-war systemic displacement of women from basic industry. While women constituted 36.1 percent of all workers in 1945, this figure was reduced to 27.6 percent by 1947. Despite this, there still remains a sizable force of 17 and a half million women workers in industry, approximately three million of whom are organized in the trade unions, the vast majority still being unorganized. 

The sparse economic data available show that the burdens of the crisis are increasingly being placed on the backs of women workers, who receive unequal wages, are victims of speed-up, and face a sharp challenge to their very right to work. Older women workers are increasingly being penalized in the growing layoffs. Close to 30 percent of the estimated 6 million unemployed are women workers. 

Side by side with this reactionary offensive against their living standards, women workers have increasing economic responsibilities. More than half of these women, as revealed in a survey by the Women’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, are economic heads of families. The continued expulsion of women from industry, the growing unemployment of men and youth, as well as the high, monopoly-fixed prices of food and consumer goods generally, are impoverishing the American family and taking a heavy toll on the people’s health. Impoverishment has hit the farm women to an alarming degree. Almost 70 percent of all farm families earned less than $2000 in 1948, when the growing agricultural crisis was only in its first stage. 

Women workers still find a large gap between their wages and those of men doing the same work, which the wages of Negro women are particularly depressed below the minimum wage necessary to sustain life. 

There are increasing trends toward limited curricula for women students and limited opportunities for women in the professions. Employment trends also show increasing penalization of married women workers who constitute more than half of all working women.

The attempt by employers to foment divisions between men and women workers—to create a “sex antagonism”—is an increasing feature of the offensive to depress the wages of women and the working class in general. Male workers are being told that the dismissal of married women and the “return of women to the kitchen” will lead to an end of unemployment among the male workers. But this whole campaign against “double earning” and for a “return of women to the kitchen” is nothing but a cloak for the reactionary Taft-Hartley offensive against wages, working conditions, and social security benefits, with a view to a wide-scale dumping of workers, male as well as female. It must be frankly stated that there has been lethargy on the part of progressives in the labor movement in answering and combating this insolent demagogy. It should be pointed out that the German finance capitalists also used this demagogic line prior to the rise of Hitler. By perpetuating the lying slogan that “woman’s place is in the home,” monopoly capital seeks to conceal the real source of the problems of all workers. 

Excerpted with permission from Internationalism in Practice, published by Iskra Books.