What Women Have Wrought

Abstract

CULTURAL STEREOTYPES ABOUT THE NATURE OF WORK AND WOMEN are so persistent in the history of working women that the wide range of women's experiences as laboring people is often ignored in favor of stereotypical expectations. most pervasive such assumption has been that women avoid high-pressure or strenuous jobs and are unwilling take risks in advancing their own interests on thejob. Only recently have we begun break away from these expectations uncover a rich and rewarding history. Yet recurrent themes continue plague the literature. Although women?s work has changed across time and has differed among economic, ethnic, racial, and age groups, the difficulty of combining wage earning and domestic work has remained remarkably constant. This continuity contributes a sense of timelessness, robbing working women of historicity. Consider, for example, Henry Ford's dictum cited in one of the books reviewed here: The man does the work in the shop, but his wife does the work in the home. Yet Ford lived in an era when women entered the paid labor force in millions, when women stayed in the work force after marriage, and when world wars brought women into the same jobs that male auto workers occupied.' Still, Ford believed that women who worked did so to buy fancy clothes. Assumptions about the nature of women have also led restrictions on the work available women; these restrictions shaped the contours of the labor market and the choices held open women. resulting historical shape of the female labor