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Notes -
My understanding is that there used to be fewer women in the workplace and more at home. When people say that before the 1970's, women had fewer rights than men in America, I assume that this is what they're referring to.
But it just occurred to me that there was no Jim Crow equivalent for women. Was anything stopping women from entering the workplace before? Was there anything that propelled them to do so?
Historically poor women have always worked, and have worked outside the home in large numbers in cities since the Industrial Revolution made the previous system of cottage industries economically untenable. In the US, single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930, so well before the sexual revolution. The archetypal Victorian factory - if in textiles, paper, pottery or a number of other industries - also employed large numbers of women. A lot of female labor force participation graphs from the mid-20th century also limit the y axis to somewhere around 45-75%, so the growth looks larger as a proportion of the starting number. Even in the 1960s, a substantial number of women worked outside the home.
People who talk about the civil rights era and women usually have no idea what they’re talking about. Equality of the sexes was inserted as a poison pill by a Southern Democrat in the 1964 act, but it passed anyway and nobody paid it much attention. Profession specific bars were dropped for a variety of reasons, while prosecution of sexual harassment in the workplace was more of a cultural shift than a legal one, since a lot of it had always been a crime under various other terms.
“Single women reached 50% labor force participation outside the home by 1930” shouldn’t be surprising, though. What’s more interesting is the quality of job (front-end clerk? barista?) and what the labor force participation was for married women. It’s not like single women throughout history were unoccupied from work, just lounging around reading books.
The point is that both single and married women worked through history in ways that have and haven’t been captured by official data in various forms. And the main thing that spurred women’s work outside the home was that traditional industries (widget production, most commonly textiles etc) that women (single and married) did from home were automated by new industrial technology that required workers at a central factory instead of dispersed at home. The second thing that happened in the 20th century was that the invention of labor saving technologies at home like dishwashers, refrigerators, modern ovens and microwaves, washing and drying machines, vacuums and so on meant that once children were no longer extremely young, the task of running a household was significantly less labor intensive than it had been, and it’s this that also led to increased workforce participation.
For a specific subset of upper-middle class and wealthy women, labor participation was indeed largely cultural rather than driven by material need. But this is only a minority of women, and was itself spurred in part by the fact that declining inequality meant that a Victorian PMC lifestyle (which involved many more servants than the average modern upper middle class American has) was no longer as sustainable on one income, so the choice was more between becoming a maid for your own household or working to be able to hire help; many women still face that choice and prefer the latter.
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