What Is The Role Of Working-Class Women In The 1920's
Yet, for the working-class non-essential items were unaffordable, and the Victorian ideal of separate spheres and respectability was not possible.
Working-class women had no choice but to adhere to the social construct even if they could not play the role of the idle, kept wife. They were paid less than men and in a competitive market, men had an interest in keeping them out of the labour force. When the demand for labour made this impossible, they were excluded from skilled, highly paid positions. Few belonged to powerful trade unions, since they were for skilled workers and dominated by men, and many women were scattered in workshops and sweated industries, wher unions (if any) were too weak to support their members if they went …show more content…
This is not to say all women resisted: and some even opposed the actions of the suffragists and suffragettes. In 1908, the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was set up with thirty peeresses as members. Its founding president, Mary Augusta Ward, had also helped establish Somerville College, Oxford. It published the Anti-Suffrage Review and held frequent public …show more content…
Echoing the psychology books that were asserting that maternal deprivation caused retardation, delinquency and neuroses in their offspring, those who labelled themselves ‘feminists’ stressed that the needs of children and the home and social stability had priority over the needs of women. This merely strengthened the gender construct at a time when the new Welfare State could be regarded as protective paternalism towards women and children. Rehashed and published in newspapers and magazines, the message to women was clear: they were victims of their own bodies which disqualified them from public life, and to deny their ‘natural role’ would merely damage their children.
Second wave feminism, a new way of thinking
The feminist movement lost support, many of its messages having no relevance to working-class women, particularly mothers, because they had always worked out of necessity. Feminist thinking still looked through male eyes, until a new approach first appeared in the USA in Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, with the ‘problem that has no name.’ Wollstonecraft had hit upon the same problem: I cannot help lamenting that women of a superior cast have not a road open by which they can pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and
Working-class women had no choice but to adhere to the social construct even if they could not play the role of the idle, kept wife. They were paid less than men and in a competitive market, men had an interest in keeping them out of the labour force. When the demand for labour made this impossible, they were excluded from skilled, highly paid positions. Few belonged to powerful trade unions, since they were for skilled workers and dominated by men, and many women were scattered in workshops and sweated industries, wher unions (if any) were too weak to support their members if they went …show more content…
This is not to say all women resisted: and some even opposed the actions of the suffragists and suffragettes. In 1908, the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League was set up with thirty peeresses as members. Its founding president, Mary Augusta Ward, had also helped establish Somerville College, Oxford. It published the Anti-Suffrage Review and held frequent public …show more content…
Echoing the psychology books that were asserting that maternal deprivation caused retardation, delinquency and neuroses in their offspring, those who labelled themselves ‘feminists’ stressed that the needs of children and the home and social stability had priority over the needs of women. This merely strengthened the gender construct at a time when the new Welfare State could be regarded as protective paternalism towards women and children. Rehashed and published in newspapers and magazines, the message to women was clear: they were victims of their own bodies which disqualified them from public life, and to deny their ‘natural role’ would merely damage their children.
Second wave feminism, a new way of thinking
The feminist movement lost support, many of its messages having no relevance to working-class women, particularly mothers, because they had always worked out of necessity. Feminist thinking still looked through male eyes, until a new approach first appeared in the USA in Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, with the ‘problem that has no name.’ Wollstonecraft had hit upon the same problem: I cannot help lamenting that women of a superior cast have not a road open by which they can pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and