It's a Girl Boss! A truly brief history of gender roles in the workforce & domestic labor
Unit 2: Modern Aesthetics of Gender Roles; Topic 2: Historical Context of Domestic & Professional Labor
Hello Angel,
A quick note on how to engage with this article.
1. Like a class curriculum, each topic is part of a larger unit that dives into a distinct subject. Think of it like a vinyl record, each topic can be enjoyed as a track or fully experienced like an album. Subscribe to get them weekly in your inbox!
2. No knowledge gatekeeping here! We’re neophytes ourselves, presenting our laywomen’s research from topics that make us curious. If you see a bolded term, it is defined in the glossary at the end of this article.
3. Look out for underlined passages, these are your portal down the knowledge rabbit hole and lead to further reading. Insatiable? Original sources are merchandised on our interactive reference page at the end.
4. This is a *reciprocal* experience! We invite you to contemplate the discussion questions at the back. Or even cooler, forward the topic to a friend, colleague, or your crush and start a meaningful conversation.
Curiously,
Ambi & Abbey
Gender roles are so concretely constructed in our society that they appear to be axiomatic to our existence. Whether breaking, subverting, or embracing gender norms, they are at play in all of our social dynamics.
Our definitions of what is “normative’ around gendered labor are not self-evident. These roles have shifted across time and space, our current Western construct is not “traditional” but was manufactured by industrialization.
It wasn’t until the commodification of agrarian life that spawned a Western trope of women as homemakers and men as breadwinners. In pre-industrial times, farm labor was often shared among men and women.
As sustenance farming was replaced with specialization and industry, the division of farm labor began to create gender discrepancies. This was a newer phenomenon, as rural communities have historically been able to sustain themselves outside of capital exchange through strong gift networks and relationships with nature.
Women’s labor was keeping up the home, while men participated in market exchange, selling their labor for wages outside the home.
Wage labor and money for goods mobilized rural men from the home, leaving women to hold down the farm.
Domestic work, which was previously performed alongside the family unit, was devalued in that it was not compensated by the market.
For men, the work they took on in office roles borrowed from the family structure to foster cooperation. Being the sole income earner asserted males as the patriarch and provider of the domicile. Even if not a boss or foreman at work, every working man was at the very least, the head of the house.
Men’s work outside the home garnered social capital, while women’s domestic work was not compensated and did not have market value.
In response, the feminist movement advocated for women to join men in the workforce. Over the next few centuries, women would slowly integrate into the workforce alongside male peers. Fast forward through public education, war efforts, and the Civil Rights movements, women are now a fixture in the workforce.
While women now have more career opportunities than ever, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. Under the hood is the greasy reality of a working world that demands so much from both genders; time, individuality, and attention, without similar respect for the un-renumerated and life-sustaining domestic labor that awaits in the home.
Dual-income households are more often motivated out of economic necessity than feminist aspirations and working women are often shouldering the housework simultaneously.
It wasn’t until the 1940s that all fields were opened to both genders, a statute that would be integrated over the next few decades into the present.
When women first entered the workforce in roles such as nurses, schoolteachers, and secretaries, they did not have the same domestic to rest upon.
Working women participated in a double day, taking on the role of domestic labor in addition to, not instead of their career.
This too contributes to women having to choose positions that allow for convenient or part-time hours to that they can maintain their domestic duties. Psychologically, it forces them to devalue the labor that they spend caretaking for that work giving them no social or financial capital in reward.
Recent WFH trends show how malleable these traditional home roles are — with both men and women migrating to the home, with greater time and closer vicinity in between corporate responsibilities to take care of home tasks — and both parties taking on more of these duties. See below cognitive reinterpretation for a lil rabbithole on this.
The unique collective event of shutting down the world and retreating into our homes allowed domestic labor to be celebrated more openly, spawning viral at-home recipes, sourdough starters, and notably the cottage core movement.
It only makes sense why COVID acted as a fever-dreamy microcosm in which domestic labor could be more deeply savored. A point in history that did provide the potentially adequate hours in a day to handle both shifts…
As life has reverted to the demands of traditional working arrangements, the unrelenting to-dos and specialized labor. The gnawing hunger for a simpler time in which domestic labor could be enjoyed with guiltless presence, not rushed to fulfill the pressures of both corporate success and domestic harmony, goes unsatisfied.
We’ll discuss the roots of escapism and how its social tropes are affecting our desires, both in the physical and digital realities.
Discussion Questions:
How do you think your gender has influenced your career?
How do you think your gender has influenced your experience of domestic labor (e.g. chores, cooking, cleaning)
Do you think that experience is different from your grandparents? In what ways is it the same & what was is it similiar
Glossary:
Double Day or Second Shift: refers to people, mainly women, maintaining the responsibilities of both a day’s work in a corporate role and the duties of the home, which require the output that too equates to a day’s worth of duties, making it a “double day’s” work.
Cognitive Reinterpretation: holds that people adjust their gender-role attitudes to accommodate changing family and employment dynamics. Shown through the pandemic, this is possible and societal gender roles could be out of reinforcement rather than coded in our DNA.
Sources:
Gender, Domestic Labor Time, and Wage Inequality by Shelley Coverman
Resistance to “Modernity”: Southern Illinois Farm Women and the Cult of Domesticity by Jane Adams
The Rise of the Working Wife by Helen McCarthy
“History of Women in the Workplace” by Joni Sweet for Stacker