Showing papers on "Women's work published in 2004"

Abject Economics The Effects of Battering and Violence on Women’s Work and Employability

Abstract: Research on the effects of battering on women’s lives has focused on poverty, homelessness, and welfare receipt, often centering on women who are uneducated or undereducated. The authors analyze how battering impacts the work and employability of women from various employment levels and backgrounds. Data were obtained through qualitative interviews with 19 residents of a domestic violence shelter, some of whom had obtained substantial education and built solid and lucrative careers prior to being abused. The women described instances in which battering had obstructed their ability to find work, maintain employment, and use their wages to establish greater economic independence and safety.

Creating Status of Women Reports: Institutional Housekeeping as "Women's Work"

Abstract: Growing awareness of the underrepresentation of women in male-dominated fields like science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), has inspired universities across the United States to examine more carefully their strategies for recruiting, retaining, and promoting women students and faculty. To do so has required assembling personnel to organize and execute data collection, analyses, and interpretation. Not surprisingly, women faculty are the primary participants in this type of work. We examine the process of creating a status of women report at Iowa State University, including what this process means for institutional responsibility for gender issues and for the careers of women who produce such reports. We also recommend ways to address the problems associated with women's unrecognized service work. We refer to such work as "institutional housekeeping" because it involves the invisible and supportive work of women to improve women's status within the institution.

Education, wage work, and marriage: Perspectives of Egyptian working women

Abstract: We explore young working women's perceptions of marriage and work in contemporary Egypt, when an increase in age at marriage was evident from national survey data. Both working conditions and employment opportunities declined significantly for young women even as their educational attainment increased and marriage was delayed. In-depth interviews were conducted over a 2-year period between 1998 and 2000 with 27 young women between the ages of 15 and 29 who were from relatively poor families and working in a range of salaried jobs in three locations. The qualitative data indicate that young women have high expectations in terms of marital living standards. They seek to achieve this in part by saving intensively before marriage when they work, and otherwise by ensuring substantial monetary support from their families. We conclude that rising material aspirations and family nucleation rather than change in female labor force participation drive marriage change in contemporary Egypt. The driving force behind this conclusion is that there is a reinforcement of the traditional values associated with the institution of marriage rather than its erosion.

Women's work, child care, and helpers-at-the-nest in a hunter-gatherer society.

Abstract: Considerable research on helpers-at-the-nest demonstrates the positive effects of firstborn daughters on a mother’s reproductive success and the survival of her children compared with women who have firstborn sons. This research is largely restricted to agricultural settings. In the present study we ask: “Does ‘daughter first’ improve mothers’ reproductive success in a hunting and gathering context?” Through an analysis of 84 postreproductive women in this population we find that the sex of the first- or second-born child has no effect on a mother’s fertility or the survival of her offspring. We conclude that specific environmental and economic factors underlay the helpers-at-the-nest phenomenon.

Children’s Domestic Work in Abidjan, Côte D’ivoire The Petites Bonnes have the Floor

Abstract: This article tries to analyse the evolution over the past 40 years of children’s domestic work and its representations in urban Cote d’Ivoire, and, particularly, how these practices evolved from family work linked to educational processes, into the kind of wage work that exists today Listening to the children themselves, the aim is to find out how the petites bonnes (young maids) perceive their situation as workers, how they make it their own and how they see their future

Household Childcare Choices and Women’s Work Behavior in Russia

Abstract: The author models mothers' participation in the labor force, their working hours, and household demand for childcare in Russia. The model estimates the effects of the price of childcare, mothers' wages, and household income on household behavior and well-being. The theoretical model yields several predictions. To test these, reduced-form equations of the discrete and continuous household choices are estimated jointly using the method of semi-parametric full information maximum likelihood. This method controls for the correlation of error terms across outcomes, and the correlation of error terms that can result when panel data are used. The results of this analysis indicate that the extent to which mothers participate in the labor force, and for how many hours, depends on the costs of childcare and on what level of hourly wage is available to them and to other members of the household. The author's simulations show that family allowances - intended to reduce poverty - do not significantly affect the household choice of childcare arrangements. Replacing family allowances with childcare subsidies might have a strong positive effect on women's participation in the labor force and thus could be effective in reducing poverty.

Widening Women's Work in Information and Communication Technology

Abstract: Why are there so few women among the professionals of information and communication technology (ICT)? What are the barriers to women choosing and developing careers in ICT professions, and what changes are likely to improve their access and position in this labour market? This European project (Information Society Technologies, 5th Framework Programme) hinges on the development of an integrated approach to the different aspects of gender disparity in the ICT professions. It combines explanatory factors linked to education and training, with the conditions of work and employment, and with the technical and professional culture of ICT. Research teams in seven countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and United Kingdom) have carried out in-depth empirical studies. They suggest targeted recommendations for agents of change in this area.

CHILD CARE USE BY LOW‐INCOME FAMILIES IN RURAL AREAS: A contemporary look at the influence of women's work and partner availability

Abstract: Using data from interviews with 323 low‐income women living in rural counties in 11 states, child care arrangements for 672 children under 13 are described in relation to women's employment status, partner availability, and child age. As found in previous studies of rural areas, informal care is frequently used, regardless of full‐ or part‐time work or partner availability. Single mothers rely more on regulated care arrangements than mothers with partners and are more likely to pay for informal care than other mothers. Work in part‐time and service jobs suggests the need for flexible arrangements. Public data on child care availability and access in rural areas, the cost of care, and state subsidy programs suggest reasons for rural women's child care decisions. Policy implications of the study findings are shared.

The Effects of Global Economic Restructuring on Urban Women's Work and Income-Generating Strategies in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract: This research examines women's work and shifts among factory, domestic service, sex work, and urban micro credit sectors in Bangladesh using a continuum of formal-informal-household labor. We explore women's income generating strategies and possible alternatives during global restructuring and changes in trade agreements. The end of Multi-Fibre Agreement in 2004 threatens women's garment employment and Bangladesh's dependence on garments to produce 76 percent of its export earnings.

Women's Work and Market Hierarchies Along the Border of Lao PDR

Abstract: Contrary to claims by some neo‐liberalists that international borders are becoming irrelevant, market liberalisation can actually enhance the effect that borders have on the lives of the people living along them. This study examines how the opening of border trade between Laos and Thailand has influenced gender divisions of labour, and definition of women's work along the border zone. Studies were undertaken in two border areas in Lao PDR—Sayaboury province and Kammoune province. In the former, cotton‐weaving activities were studied and in the latter, sticky rice box production. The production and trading of these commodities brought crucial cash income to the women studied and their households. How the women benefited from these activities in terms of income and status depends on how other members of the family perceived these activities. However, the formalisation of the border trade has changed women's ‘sense of space’ and their relations with men and other women.

From the Valley to the Summit: The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Work

Abstract: Meaningful discussions about women at the top' can take place today only because a quiet revolution occurred about thirty years ago. The transformation was startlingly rapid and was accomplished by the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that transformed the workforce. It can be seen in a number of social and economic indicators. Sharp breaks are apparent in data on labor market expectations, college graduation rates, professional degrees, labor force participation rates, and the age at first marriage. Turning points are also evident in most of the series for college majors and occupations. Inflection or break points in almost all of these series occur from the late 1960s to the early 1970s and for cohorts born during the 1940s. Whatever the precise reasons for change, a great divide in college-graduate women's lives and employment occurred about 35 years ago. Previously, women who reached the peaks often made solo climbs and symbolized that women, contrary to conventional wisdom, could achieve greatness. But real change demanded a march by the masses from the valley to the summit.' That march began with cohorts born in the late 1940s.

Women's work and household economic strategies in industrializing Catalonia

Abstract: The weight of the cotton sector in the industrialization of Catalonia, known as the ‘factory of Spain’, highlights the importance of women’s work in the formation of the Catalan industrial labour market. In the mid-nineteenth century, Catalan industry accounted for one-quarter of all Spanish industry and, in the case of the textile sector, a much higher share: two-thirds. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the Second World War the growth of the textile industry in Catalonia, together with the expansion of trade and personal services that accompanied the urbanization process, increased the differences between female activity rates in Catalonia and the rest of Spain. That is why Catalonia is the best context for establishing international comparisons regarding the continuities and changes in women’s work during industrialization. This question, a classic in several disciplines of European history, had not received the attention of Catalan historiography until the last decade. Studies now exist that introduce a gender perspective into analyses of the organization of production, mainly in the

From the Valley to the Summit: The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Work

Abstract: Meaningful discussions about women at the top' can take place today only because a quiet revolution occurred about thirty years ago. The transformation was startlingly rapid and was accomplished by the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that transformed the workforce. It can be seen in a number of social and economic indicators. Sharp breaks are apparent in data on labor market expectations, college graduation rates, professional degrees, labor force participation rates, and the age at first marriage. Turning points are also evident in most of the series for college majors and occupations. Inflection or break points in almost all of these series occur from the late 1960s to the early 1970s and for cohorts born during the 1940s. Whatever the precise reasons for change, a great divide in college-graduate women's lives and employment occurred about 35 years ago. Previously, women who reached the peaks often made solo climbs and symbolized that women, contrary to conventional wisdom, could achieve greatness. But real change demanded a march by the masses from the valley to the summit.' That march began with cohorts born in the late 1940s.

Digitising Inequality: The Cul-de-Sac of Women's Work in European Services

Abstract: This paper considers the skills and development prospects of women working in European services. Skills are increasingly job-specific, including the relational skills necessary to the delivery of customer service. Formal training is declining and being replaced by informal learning techniques. Opportunities to acquire comprehensive or transferable skills are rare, as are women's progression opportunities in the 'knowledge society'.

Digitising inequality: the cul-de-sac of women's work in European services

Abstract: This paper considers the skills and development prospects of women working in European services. Skills are increasingly job-specific, including the relational skills necessary to the delivery of customer service. Formal training is declining and being replaced by informal learning techniques. Opportunities to acquire comprehensive or transferable skills are rare, as are women's progression opportunities in the ‘knowledge society’.

Young women, work and family in inter-war rural England

Abstract: While previous studies of youth have concentrated on urban, commercial leisure developments, this article scrutinises young women through the prism of their labour. It argues that young women's paid employment and domestic labour were crucial to the family economy of the rural poor in inter-war England. However, they were also subject to profound social, economic and cultural changes. In 1918 domestic service was the largest employer of these women, offering limited income and leisure. Twenty years later, an increasing number were entering industrial work in urban areas, prompting the decline of domestic and farm service and forging a new pattern of migration from the countryside. Over the last two decades, women's work and, more recently, their leisure, have been brought into the limelight by historians of interwar England.1 However, the experiences of rural women are, in this respect as in so many others, still greatly neglected. This gap in the existing studies represents a serious omission, not only because it neglects a substantial group of women, but also because it prevents a satisfactory analysis of two important trends in twentieth-century social and economic development: the decline of domestic and farm service and rural depopulation. This article attempts to fill that gap by examining young rural women's labour force participation in interwar England, paying particular attention to the changing role of employment in domestic and farm service and to migration patterns. It also highlights important aspects of the oft-neglected relationship between town and country in inter-war England and stresses the importance of the life-cycle, as well as gender and social class, in shaping life in rural communities. The few existing studies of women's work in inter-war England have concentrated on urban areas.2 Part of the reason for this is the strong sexual division of labour in many rural areas throughout this period, with married women's labour force participation being lower than the national average in many rural communities.3 While the increase in historical research on rural 1 S. Alexander, 'Becoming a woman in London in the 1920s and 1930s', in Alexander, Becoming a woman. Essays in nineteenthand twentieth-century feminist history (1994), pp. 203-24; E. Roberts, A woman s place (1984), pp. 39-80; A. Davies, Leisure, gender and poverty: Manchester and Salford, 1900-1939 (1992); C. Langhamer, Women's leisure in England, 1920-1960 (2000). 2 See for example, Roberts, Woman's placer, id., Women s work, 1840-1940 (1988); M. Glucksmann, Women assemble (1990). 3 L.Tilly and J.Scott, Women, work and family (1978); J.Lewis, Women in England, 1870-1950. Sexual divisions and social change (1984); D. Beddoe, Back to home and duty (1989), p. 8. AgHR 52, 1, pp. 83-98 83 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.201 on Tue, 24 May 2016 06:30:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 84 THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW women's work over the last decade has demonstrated that it is a worthy subject for inquiry, the inter-war period remains neglected, frequently being perceived as the 'long weekend' when women returned to 'home and duty' following the First World War.4 However, this neglects the importance of young, single women within the interwar workforce, as breadwinners within rural working-class households, and also as migrants into towns, who had an influence on socio-economic trends in urban as well as rural areas. Young women between the school leaving age 12 prior to 1921, 14 thereafter and 24 years of age constituted over 45 per cent of the female workforce throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In this article, young women are subdivided into 'girls', denoting juveniles under 18 years of age, and young adult women, aged between 18 and 24, a division evident in contemporary records, including the Census. The average age of first marriage among women never fell below 25 throughout the period the reason why it forms the upper age limit of this study and consequently paid work was a distinguishing characteristic of youth for many women. Despite the gradual expansion of industrial, clerical and retail employment for young women after the First World War, the largest occupation for this group remained domestic service into the 1930s. This actually increased its share of the young female workforce slightly between 1921 and 1931, when it accounted for 24.3 per cent of them.5 Domestic service was a particularly large employer in rural and semi-rural areas: the largest concentration of servants was in East Sussex, where 36.4 per cent of juvenile girls were thus employed in 1931, and 30.8 per cent of all women above the school leaving age.6 These figures highlight the significance of young countrywomen in the development and decline of domestic service, a decline which, this article will argue, was greatly accelerated in the 1930s. A similar trend can be traced in farm service, which employed a far smaller proportion of young rural women. In this paper a wide range of sources is used to examine young rural women's participation in the labour force. The occupation tables of the Census of England and Wales for 1921 and 1931 are the richest datasets available, despite ambiguities in the classification of servants which we shall consider later. Most contemporary social surveys were urban in focus but the New Survey of London Life and Labour and the Social Survey of Merseyside offer some insights into the migration and employment patterns of young women from rural districts. Reports on youth employment and unemployment, compiled by the Ministry of Labour and by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) supplement the Census data. Finally, this article draws on 24 testimonies from women who grew up in inter-war rural England which have either been collected by oral historians, or are published.7 These sources suggest that older children, identified by Verdon as essential to the nineteenth-century family economy in many rural areas, remained important 4 Beddoe, Back to home and duty, p. 4. 5 Census of England and Wales, 1921, Occupation Tables, 1924, table 3; Census of England and Wales, 1931, Occupation Tables, 1934, table 3. 6 Census of England and Wales, 1931, Occupation Tables, 1934, table 18. 7 The 'personal testimonies' used here are drawn from three published autobiographies and 21 recorded and transcribed interviews. The recordings were located through the ESRC qualidata archive and held in the following archives: East Sussex RO, Lewes in Living Memory collection (hereafter ESRO, Lewes); Modern Records Centre (hereafter MRC), University of Warwick, Coventry Women's Work collection; Nottingham Local Studies Library, Making Ends Meet oral history collection (hereafter NLSL, MEMC); Tameside Local Studies Library, Manchester Studies collection (hereafter TLSC, MSC); Lancashire RO, NorthWest Sound Archive (hereafter LRO, NWSA). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.201 on Tue, 24 May 2016 06:30:58 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms YOUNG WOMEN, WORK AND FAMILY 85 as household breadwinners in the interwar period.8 Their economic significance varied, shaped by household composition and the local labour market, but in many areas it increased, rather than diminished, as a result of high male unemployment. Young rural women's experiences thus qualify optimistic assessments of the working class standard of living in the inter-war period. They also undermine the image of inter-war rural England as an unchanging, static society, for while continuity in employment trends is evident across the 1920s and early 1930s, the later 1930s witnessed an expansion of labour demand in the retail, tertiary and industrial sectors which led to changes in young rural women's employment patterns, and encouraged their migration to urban areas. Youth thus emerges as a distinct and memorable life stage for many rural women, although it was shaped by paid work and migration, rather than by the commercial leisure consumption which historians of urban areas have seen as characterising this stage of life. Their employment and migration patterns meant that these young women were at the forefront of social and economic changes in the countryside. The remainder of this article is in three parts. The first uses Northumberland as a case study to examine the effect which the household and local labour market had on young women's employment patterns. The continuing importance of domestic service as an employer of this group is highlighted. The changes within, and decline of both domestic and farm service are then analysed in section two. Young women's growing desire to avoid or leave residential service was fuelled by and in turn shaped industrial expansion in the 1930s, the subject of section three. It is argued that young rural women, particularly those who experienced unemployment, were particularly important in shaping the new industrial workforce, and were thus significant in the changing relationship between town and country in the inter-war period. The evidence presented here supports Saville's assertion, strengthened by Hill's research, that women were instrumental in rural depopulation, as employment opportunities expanded for them in urban areas, and their own socio-economic aspirations rose.9 However, it pinpoints the 1930s as particularly significant in this regard, and highlights the centrality of young, single women as a social and economic group distinct from their male peers and older women in their employment and their aspirations.

Rethinking Masculinized Tools: Machetes, Women's Work, and Suburban Yard Maintenance

Abstract: ��� This paper examines masculinization and colonial ideologies that immediately come to surface at the intersection of “machete” (with its connotative associations) and the suburbs in the United States. By using the lens of feminist theory, we explore the contradictions in suburban home maintenance discourse (gardening discourse in particular) and present texts and images of women using and talking about the tools identifi ed as masculine in Western industrialized contexts. In such examples, we observe that using machetes in the maintenance of suburban homes not only subverts unspoken rules about women and technology, but also reveals a gendering process that intersects with class and race/ethnicity, as well as those power relations that distinguish “third world” from “fi rst world” environments. We argue that masculinized and colonial images associated with machetes renders invisible some women’s work as well as their involvement in technology in the global economy. Stories in this paper emerged from an experience of one of the authors using a machete in an exclusive suburban home environment.

Women's work, household and property in two Mediterranean societies: A comparative essay on proverbs XXXI 10-31

Abstract: Major topics that feature in the capable wife's portrait in Prov xxxi 10-31-domestic manufacture of clothing, female responsibility for food, and the upper-class wife's supervision of the slaves' indoor work-can also be illustrated from Xenophon's Oeconomicus, a fourth-century BCE Greek manual of estate management This treatise also explains how labour in the household (oikos) is divided according to gender Unlike her Athenian counterpart, the Hebrew wife seems able to own and manage landed property from which she derives independent income The rule 'one conjugal household, two estates'-the wife's and the husband's separate estates-may sum up the economic situation presupposed, but not explained, by the poem While the Hebrew poem celebrates only the contribution of the wife, we should not forget that it was her husband who provided the household's economic basis, presumably from an agricultural estate

From the Valley to the Summit: The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Work

Abstract: Meaningful discussions about women at the top' can take place today only because a quiet revolution occurred about thirty years ago. The transformation was startlingly rapid and was accomplished by the unwitting foot soldiers of an upheaval that transformed the workforce. It can be seen in a number of social and economic indicators. Sharp breaks are apparent in data on labor market expectations, college graduation rates, professional degrees, labor force participation rates, and the age at first marriage. Turning points are also evident in most of the series for college majors and occupations. Inflection or break points in almost all of these series occur from the late 1960s to the early 1970s and for cohorts born during the 1940s. Whatever the precise reasons for change, a great divide in college-graduate women's lives and employment occurred about 35 years ago. Previously, women who reached the peaks often made solo climbs and symbolized that women, contrary to conventional wisdom, could achieve greatness. But real change demanded a march by the masses from the valley to the summit.' That march began with cohorts born in the late 1940s.

The Function of Age and the History of Women's Work: The Career of an Australian Teacher, 1907-1947

Abstract: In this paper, we consider what it might mean to hold age as an analytic lens in historical research on women workers, in particular women teachers. Our study serves as a springboard for further discussion about what these new narratives might look like, and what they might reveal, or, moreover, what work they might do. In constructing an account of a woman physical educationist whose work traversed the first half of the twentieth century, we show how age could be seen to be functioning in the institutional spaces of South Australian education. While we do not suggest that specific details of this account are representative of women's work in education, let alone women's work more broadly, we do argue that it draws together and brings to the surface a range of general discourses that serve as a context for how we understand the ways women inhabited and shaped their work. Our account serves as an illustration of what happens to narratives when age is on the agenda, suggesting a more sustained interrogation of how a historical sense of women's positioning in work is deepened by a serious sensitivity to the ‘age function’. This is a necessary and, we feel, timely gesture, because of the way that the category of age in women's historical studies–where the interaction among discourses such as professionalism, education, feminism, citizenship and sexuality is considered–is little more than an absent presence, at best lying in the background, obscured from view and yet always demanding its own appearance.

Stage Mothers: A Qualitative Analysis of Women’s Work Experiences as Mothers in Toronto Theatre

Abstract: Despite the fact that the representation of patriarchal motherhood has been ubiquitous in dramatic literature as it continues to be reified, codified and upheld as one of-if not the most-central relationships in the nuclear family, making it a much studied element of early human development and leaving it well documented in the annals of theatre history, mothering remains, with the exception of a handful of references, a topic that has been all but absent fiom writing on women's theatre practice. There are reasons for this dearth of scholarship, to be sure. Ostensibly, patriarchal divisions of the public and private spheres of life have deliberately relegated women's theatre practice as external from their domestic responsibilities by seeing childrearing as women's work that is separate from any they might perform in the public realm. But as Adrienne Rich (1986) and other feminist theorists (i.e., Peters, 1997;Abbeyand O'ReiUy, 1998; Fox, 1998; D u q , Mandell & Pupo, 1989) have taught us, motherhood is a part of the paid labour force and is present in each and eve~ywork sector in which women participate. As feminist sociologist Bonnie Fox notes: