scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Topic

Women's work

About: Women's work is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1625 publications have been published within this topic receiving 33754 citations. The topic is also known as: woman's work.


Papers
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In the early nineteenth century, women held 61 percent of all teaching positions in Massachusetts and around 30 to 50 percent in the other New England states as discussed by the authors, and teaching became "feminized" in Massachusetts in 1861, in 1864 in New Hampshire, 1865 in Connecticut, and 1866 in Rhode Island.
Abstract: W HEN Agnes Walker wrote her friend Kate Foster in 1863 that "Next summer I want to teach.... Oh, Kate, I am sold on teaching," she expressed a desire common to many nineteenth-century New England women, and one commonly fulfilled.' Although men dominated the profession from colonial days, in the nineteenth century, towns increasingly hired women to teach their children. By 1840 women held 61 percent of all teaching positions in Massachusetts and around 30 to 50 percent in the other New England states. If we use 80 percent as an index of feminization, teaching became "feminized" in Massachusetts in 1861, in 1864 in New Hampshire, 1865 in Connecticut, and 1866 in Rhode Island. The phenomenon was evident in Vermont (1880) and Maine (1890) significantly later, but by the end of the

41 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Apr 1973-Africa
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the contribution of men and women by means of 'The Ethnographic Atlas (Ethnology, 1967) and found that women played the major part in cultivation in 45 per cent of societies in Africa as a whole, and in 53 percent of sub-Saharan societies.
Abstract: AFRICA is notable for the extent to which women participate in cultivation. An gexamination of the contribution of men and women by means of 'The Ethnographic Atlas (Ethnology, 1967) shows that women play the major part in cultivation in 45 per cent of societies in Africa as a whole, and in 53 per cent of sub-Saharan societies. We are concerned here with the contribution women make to cultivation (in pastoral as well as purely farming economies) and not to its over-all control, which is largely in the hands of men.

40 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The family and work lives of Chinese ethnic migrant women, both mothers and daughters, in families who run Chinese take-away businesses in Britain are explored, finding evidence of both continuing forms of women's subordination, as well as empowerment and change, in Chinese women's lives.
Abstract: This article explores the family and work lives of Chinese ethnic migrant women, both mothers and daughters, in families who run Chinese take-away businesses in Britain. In reviewing the literature on the lives of “Black” women and “women of color” in both the United Kingdom and the United States, the author argues that the specific intersections of family and work found in Chinese take-aways is distinct from those of other “Black” women who are not engaged in family businesses. The family and work lives of these women, which are very intertwined, are both more varied and ambivalently experienced than has been suggested thus far in writings about women in ethnic businesses. The meanings associated with “helping out” for the younger generation provide a new and different perspective on the gendered and generationally disparate ways in which families organize their labors. By focusing upon the experiences of both mothers and daughters (and children more broadly), there is evidence of both continuing forms of women's subordination, as well as empowerment and change, in Chinese women's lives.

40 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors conceptualized labor force exits as a parallel option to employer changes in the gender-specific opportunity structure for employed young women and argued that the same working conditions should predict both employment exits and employer changes.
Abstract: This article conceptualizes labor force exits as a parallel option to employer changes in the gender-specific opportunity structure for employed young women. It argues that the same working conditions should predict both employment exits and employer changes. Family characteristics (including pregnancy and presence of preschool children), rather than working conditions, should differentiate between job changers and job leavers. These hypotheses were tested with 1970-1980 data from the National Longitudinal Survey. Results from logit analyses showed that employment conditions do affect young women's decisions to change jobs or exit the labor force, and influence them in similar ways, and that household factors affect labor force exits more strongly than they do job changes. While pregnant women are more likely to leave the labor force, both improved job conditions and existing preschool children (implying prior experience with substitute care) enhance the likelihood of continuous employment for pregnant women.

40 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The relationship between American economic reform and the biology of human inheritance remains relatively unexplored because, new scholarship notwithstanding, the influence of eugenics is poorly understood by historians.
Abstract: I Introduction AMERICAN ECONOMICS BECAME a professional, expert policy discipline during the Progressive Era (roughly 1890-1920), a period that marked, not coincidentally, the beginning of a vastly more expansive state relationship to the economy. By World War I, the U.S. government created the Federal Reserve, amended the Constitution to institute a personal income tax, established the Federal Trade Commission, applied antitrust laws to industrial combinations and to labor unions, and restricted immigration, while state governments regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted "mothers' pensions," capped working hours, and set minimum wages. (1) Professional economists, especially the progressives among them, played a leading role in the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy. What is less well known is that eugenic thought deeply influenced the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy. Progressive Era economics, like the regulatory state it helped found, came of age at a time when biological approaches to social and economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists (and other social scientists) argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers--whom they labeled "unemployables," "parasites," and the "industrial residuum"--so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Immigrants, blacks, and those deemed defective in character or intellect were regarded by leading labor legislation activists less as victims of industrial capitalism than as threats to the health and well-being of deserving workers and of society more generally. Mostly neglected by historians of American economics, these invidious distinctions crucially informed the labor and immigration reform that is the hallmark of the Progressive Era (Leonard 2003a). (2) This crude, eugenically informed sorting of workers into deserving and undeserving classes was applied to women as well. Many reformers classified women among the "unemployable." In the United States, where nearly all Progressive Era labor legislation applied to women exclusively, laws regulating women's work were promoted for the benefits thought to obtain when women were removed from paid employment. Leading progressives, among them women at the forefront of labor reform, advocated excluding women from the labor force on the grounds that (1) work outside the home threatened women's health and morals; (2) working women usurped jobs that rightly belonged to male heads of household entitled to a "family wage"; and (3) women in the labor force improperly abandoned their eugenic duties as "mothers of the race." (3) The progressive justifications for women's labor legislation were diverse. Paternalists invoked women's health; moralists invoked women's virtue; "family wagers" sought to protect fathers from the economic competition of women; "maternalists" promoted the virtues of motherhood; and eugenicists advocated for the eugenic health of the race. (4) But all of these different justifications for women's labor laws shared two common characteristics: all were founded upon invidious distinctions between the sexes, and all argued that society is better off when women are excluded from work for wages. II The Influence of Eugenic Thought BIOLOGY INFORMED PROGRESSIVE ERA social science enough that one cannot fully understand the economic ideas that underwrote labor and immigration reform without also understanding the biological thought that influenced them. The relationship between American economic reform and the biology of human inheritance remains relatively unexplored because, new scholarship notwithstanding, the influence of eugenics is poorly understood. Eugenics is still widely regarded as an aberrant, pseudoscientific, laissez-faire doctrine, a 20th-century version of Gilded Age social Darwinism that was wholly abandoned after the eugenic atrocities of German National Socialism. …

40 citations


Network Information
Related Topics (5)
Social change
61.1K papers, 1.7M citations
75% related
Wage
47.9K papers, 1.2M citations
75% related
Politics
263.7K papers, 5.3M citations
73% related
Unemployment
60.4K papers, 1.3M citations
72% related
Poverty
77.2K papers, 1.6M citations
71% related
Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20235
20228
202139
202046
201952
201848