Pencils?

ANALOG ATTORNEY

A Pencil as a Status Symbol? Yes, Please

The market for old-school tools has flourished.

The Long Slow Rise. Was Lex Anteinternet: Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two.

Some time ago I published this item:

Lex Anteinternet: Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took R...: A virtual icon of the liberated strong woman, Rosie the Riveter proclaimed "we can do it" to the nation and became a symbol of ...

This came up elsewhere, where I also posted on it, and in doing that I looked up some of the statistics. They're pretty revealing.  I'll quote, but only in part, the item I was replying to, and then post my reply. That items was:

The post-War labor saving device boom did indeed allow a lot more women into the workforce.  There is also the additional problem of all those ‘Rosie the Riveter’ women were being forced out of the workforce by the returning servicemen.  They wanted their own jobs.

The reply.

It is true that women who worked in industry in World War Two wanted their own jobs, in at least some instances, but I think that story has been pretty heavily oversold and surprisingly the data doesn't really support a large wartime increase like we'd expect, although it does support an increase.  Female labor was heavily used in World War One as well and in some areas may have been more critical in WWI than it was in WWII.

You can find published examples of women who were reluctant to give up their jobs after the Great War, or who even attempted to hang on them nearly by force.  But by and large they pretty quickly reverted to pre war roles.  By the same token, while I've never seen figures on it, I think women who were employed in World War Two in industry had largely returned to pre war roles by some point in 1946.  It began to change after that.

Even at that, some of the statistics you can find are surprising and suggest that a lot of the way that this is now remembered is pretty heavily subject to myth.  In terms of just women working, the real boom is well after World War Two and the trend towards it started well before.

You an find varying data, but it's all pretty close, what it tends to show by decade is the following, with the categories being year, numbers (thousands) employed, percentage gainfully employed, and percentage of the workforce over age 16.

1900 5,319 18.8 % 18.3 %
1910 7,445 21.5         19.9
1920 8,637 21.4         20.4
1930 10,752 22.0         22.0
1940 12,845 25.4         24.3
1950 18,389 33.9         29.6
1960 23,240 37.7         33.4
1970 31,543 43.3         38.1
1980 45,487 51.5         42.5

This doesn't really take into account the spike in employment during either World War One or World War Two, which may be significant in that it tends to potentially be overemphasized.  Taken out, what we see is a slow increase from 1900 onward, which coincides with the rise of domestic implements.

If we figure in the years after 1980, it might be even more revealing.

1980 45,487 51.5     42.5
1990 56,829 57.5     45.2
1993 58,795 57.9     45.5
1994 60,239 58.8     46.0
1995 60,944 58.9     46.1
1996 61,857 59.3     46.2
1997 63,036 59.8     46.2
1998 63,714 59.8     46.3
1999 64,855 60.0     46.5
2000 66,303 60.2     46.6
2001 66,848 60.1     46.5
2002 67,363 59.8     46.5
2003 68,272 59.5     47.0
2004 68,421 59.2     46.0
2005 69,288 59.3     46.4
2006 70,000 59.4     46.0
2007 67,792 56.6     46.4
2008 71,767 59.5     44.0
2010 71,904 58.6     53.6 (which is another watershed year in that the majority of the                                                                     workforce became female and stayed that way)
2014 73,039 56.9     57.0

If we do all of that, we find that the number of women gainfully employed doesn't reach 50% at any point (including WWI and WWII) until 1980 and that it peaked for several years at 60% starting in 1999, before dropping down slightly.

If we also keep in mind that the 1930, 1940 and 1950 numbers we should keep in mind that the 1930 number and the 1940 number may have been artificially low due to the Great Depression.   In other words, we have to wonder if it was higher because of that (women taking jobs because men couldn't find work), or if the opposite was true (female employment artificially low due to lack of employment).  The general statistics curve would suggest it was a little lower than it should have been due to the Depression.  Having said that, my own mother and a couple of her sisters were employed in that period due to the Great Depression.  Their employment probably carried on into World War Two, but it was the Depression, not the war, that brought it about, which is always the way they themselves recalled it.

During the war the number of American women employed outside of the home went from 13.9% to 22.5%, which shows another element to this.  Lots of employed women were employed, but not "outside the home".  I'm not sure exactly how that was categorized, but even as late as World War Two a large number of women were regarded as not employed outside the home, while still gainfully employed.  It makes me wonder if domestic servants were categorized as employed inside the home, as large numbers of women were employed in that capacity.  If that's correct, it was still apparently the case during the war.  The number of women who were employed (which would include those employed inside of their own homes in some capacity) reached 37%, which is a large number and a big jump, but it also means that a lot of women were employed were in some classification that included being employed inside their own homes. The 10% or so jump in the figures represented millions of women, but it's not the impression that people tend to have today which would suggest that the majority of women were in the workforce.  In fact, the majority weren't.  This would also have been an increase in the Great Depression level of employment at 24.3%, but only by about 15% or so. Given the wartime emergency, and the end of the Great Depression, that's a much lower jump than we'd generally suppose.

It's also interesting to note that the wartime 37% figure wouldn't be reached again until 1960.  1960 was only fifteen years after World War Two, and therefore quite a few of the women in that workforce had been employed during the war (to include, again, my own mother).  But because it was a fifteen year gap, that also likely means that some of the women employed during the war had dropped out and returned to work by 1960.  It also, however, would reflect a lot of women entering the workforce who had been children during World War Two.

By 1950 33.9% of women were employed overall in the workforce, which is higher than at any point during the 1940s outside of World War Two.  But even that was only a 10% climb from the 30s.

Leaping back to the Great War, 20% of the war industry work force in the U.S. during World War One was female, a pretty big percentage.  I don't know what the overall percentage of women working in the U.S. workforce was during WWI, but that figure alone suggests it was pretty big.  If we consider that a lot of farm labor was simply left to women during the war it becomes more impressive.  30% of the German workforce during World War One was female, probably a much higher percentage than during WWII.  France was so denuded of men that women occupied all kinds of occupations.  Nearly anyone who has handled a long arm that was used by an American soldier in France during WWI is handling a weapon rebuilt by female labor in France following the war.

All that's a lot of blathering on my part, and I'm clearly proposing a revisionist history, but all in all, I think the data supports that 1) women were hugely important in the workforce in WWII; but 2) they also had been in WWI; and 3) female employment dropped really rapidly to immediate prewar levels following the wars (partially, no doubt, due to social pressures that were high, but higher in 1919 than in 1946);  but 4) those levels of employment were steadily increasing due to something other than workforce acclimation and had been rising since at least the 1890s. So the question then becomes, what caused that?

Probably a lot of things, to be sure, some of which I can suppose but will omit. But one definite factor, and I'd argue a much more significant factor, was the rise of domestic machinery.

So, if it seems like I'm suggesting that Maytag and Hoover may have had more to do with putting women in the workplace rather than the example of Rosie the Riveter, while an unpopular view, that's what the data suggests.

But what else might that data suggest, if we look at it carefully?

Well, as the person posting on the topic noted, quite correctly:

There weren’t a lot of fields open to women to work outside of the home, either.  School teacher, nurse or secretarial for the most part, were the majority of the jobs available to women.  Now you have women working as guards in men’s prisons.

So my further elaboration, or blabbering, follows, in this interesting topic.

I was going to come back and post on that after thinking about it, but I also don't think that the change there was brought about due to World War Two.

One thing the Rosie the Riveter type image sort of predisposes us to think is that women hadn't worked in heavy industry before World War One, and then after World War Two,t they stayed in it. But neither is true.

Whats definitely true is that women's occupational options were much more limited in prior times, but that seems to have started changing in real terms in the 1970s, although even there, there had been a slow change earlier in the 20th Century. 

Going into World War One women's occupational opportunities were really limited, which is part of the reason the statistics might reflect a large number of "inside the home" employed women, as they may have been domestics, one of the few fields open to them.  Other than that, teaching, like you mention, was an option, but not much beyond that. Secretarial roles, which later became a woman's field, wasn't open to them much at the time.  Store clerks, waitresses, and other occupations in that low paying arena were, together with some manufacturing such as clothing manufacturing, but it was pretty limited.  Given that, it's interesting that the number of women employed was as high as it was, and it was probably almost in low paying jobs as a rule.

World War One saw a big increase in women employed in heavy industry.  Here's one such example:

British factory worker, 1919.

Jobs like that no doubt paid a lot better than traditional women's roles, and lots of other examples can be found from that time frame and a lot of them are really surprising.  Lots of nurses, of course, but also lots of women drivers and women working in agriculture and timbering roles (both involving horses, linking back into our focus here).  After the war, however, employment in all those roles save for nursing dropped off.  Women really came into the Army, Navy and Marines in strength in telephone and secretarial roles as well, although they were mustered back out after the war.  In some isolated instances (including in Germany) women saw some use in law enforcement.

Between the wars women pretty much replaced men in the secretarial role. That had started prior to World War One, but as late as that time men occupied most secretarial roles.  The first female secretary to be employed by a U.S. Senator was one employed by Wyoming's Francis E. Warren, and that was just before World War One.  But by the 1920s women secretaries had not only become common, they dominated the field.

Anyhow, the industry jobs disappeared after the war. During the Second World War we get all the industrial occupations once again, but then again right after the war it dropped off again.

After World War Two women's fields were likely more open than they had been, but even then it was really several decades before women were commonly in most occupational areas.  While its only a movie, as sort of an example, the film The Deer Hunter was on the other day and I happened to watch it and it didn't strike me as odd that 100% of the iron workers in the film are men.  It was filmed in 1979, depicting 1973, I think, and it was right about that time that it was thought to be interesting to show a woman working in a blue collar job because it remained so unusual.  Locally the first women police officers and firemen came in right about 1980 or so and it was unusual enough that it wasn't really well thought of.  But that's 35 years after the Second World War. 

I think that too all points to something else going on, and what I think it is, is that the rise of domestic machinery made women surplus to domestic labor.  All of us here were born after the rise of domestic machinery and so we only have the recollections of our parents, who came up during the tail end of that rise.  My mother used to speak of the girls taking rugs out to hang on the line to be beat to clean them, something I've only seen on rare occasion but which seems to have been pretty common in the era she was speaking of.  More than one woman her age spoke about hanging out the laundry to dry to be a collective chore, and with big families, I'm sure it was.  Cooking took all day at the time as a lot of people didn't have modern stoves and both my father and my mother had some recollections of their mothers or grandmothers being involved in cooking on an average day nearly all day.  Indeed, my mother was a terrible cook as she'd learned from her mother who had never adjusted to a gas stove and who simply boiled everything endlessly if that was an option, that being pretty common when people had to cook on wood burning stoves.

All of that isn't very long ago, but if we look back, as late as the 1930s the majority of men didn't graduate from high school but went to work in their teens while still living at home.  If they left home, they lived in a boarding house.  Domestic labor was too difficult for people to really "live out on their own".  Army barracks of the old era (which more than one of us here have lived in) showed that, as collective living of the simple type was about as good as a group of men could manage, the same being reflected in bunkhouses on ranches.  Female labor tended to be heavily employed at home, and therefore out of the workforce, by necessity.

But once you don't have to haul rugs out to beat them but run a vacuum cleaner over them, and you don't have to have somebody cooking from around 5:00 a.m. through 5:00 p.m., and you don't have to buy food every other day as the ice box is now a refrigerator, things really change.  That probably reflected itself first in young women starting to attend college in large numbers (47% of college students in 1920 were female), showing that they weren't needed at home, followed by young women occupying new occupational fields, and then with the big increase in education following World War Two the opening up of many field to women starting in the 1970s.

Indeed, that probably does have a connection with World War Two, but it'd be oddly with the GI Bill, which benefited mostly men.  That opened up fields to men of entire demographics that were previously closed to them, and with the advance of domestic machinery freeing up young women from employment in that role, and in their getting education in other areas, the results came about by the 70s.

So where does all of this leave us?

Well, things have rather obviously changed for women in the work place, but the reasons for that aren't, it seems to me, what they might seem to be.  Rather, they're technological and economic.

All of this was addressed in the first post we linked into here, which is one of the better ones on this website.  And the social implications of that are enormous and play into a huge amount about how things developed, rather than how we believe they developed.  And that really matters.  But we've gotten it mostly wrong.

Blog Mirror. A Hundred Years Ago. Old-fashioned English Pudding with Hard Sauce

One of the very first posts on this blog, which to my amazement was over a decade ago, was one entitled the following:

The Speed of Cooking

I've actually touched on that several times since, including in an area that will appear again tomorrow, that being how domestic implements, and not wartime labor requirements, are what really caused the change in women's employment roles in the 20th Century.  That links in with what I think is one of the better posts on the website, that being:

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

In that post, I noted:

Cooking the food was a long process also. Nothing existed that was already prepared.  People didn't have frozen food to prepare. Canned food, of course, did already exist.  But by and large people had to prepare everything that day, whatever meal was being considered.  And part of that was due to the fact that modern stoves were only coming in during this period.

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.

Wood burning stove in Denver.  Typical pre 1920 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1930 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1940 stove.

Turn of century advertisement for stove polish.  Cleaning a wood burning stove would be no treat.

Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.

 World War Two era propaganda photograph, trying to depict an inattentive woman letting toast burn, and therefore wasting resources.  Note how complicated this electric toaster is.

You'll still occasionally see old fashioned toasters in sheep and cattle camps, and probably elsewhere. They just hold the bread so that the toast can be toasted over a burner.  Pretty simple, and not much of a labor saving device, right? Well, consider the totality of it.  To toast you had to watch the toast, rather than just slip the bread down into the toaster.

For that matter, everything was relatively labor intensive save for boiling and roasting, which is probably why things tended to be boiled or roasted.

 Man cooking in a cow camp for cowboys.  He's using two cast iron dutch ovens (I still use one routinely) to cook over a fire.  This photo first appeared on this blog in 2009 in a very early entry on cooking changes.

Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

An interesting example of how this change impacts things appeared recently on the excellent A Hundred Years Ago blog

Old-fashioned English Pudding with Hard Sauce

Steamed puddings are a traditional holiday food which once were slow-cooked on a wood or coal stove that was used for both heating and cooking. They are less popular now that our stoves aren’t constantly operating; 

I've mentioned how wood burning stoves such as noted on A Hundred Years Ago impacted how food was cooked, but I've never really thought of it in terms of recipes such as this.  Mostly what I've considered is how it impacted main meals,  not in terms of how recipes were designed for the cooking conditions.

That's really a pretty notable omission on my part, probably impacted in part by the fact, as noted elsewhere, that my mother had learned to cook from her mother, who cooked with such stoves, and my mother was an awful cook.  So I've sort of naively assumed that all food cooked that way must be bad.

That's probably a wildly erroneous assumption.

It makes me wonder how many other recipes and foods that were planned out for cooking in this style aren't really made much anymore, indeed if at all.

Monday At The Bar: ANALOG ATTORNEY Fountain Pen Obsession Starter Kit Even better than golf for wasting money.

ANALOG ATTORNEY

Fountain Pen Obsession Starter Kit

Even better than golf for wasting money.

I wonder how many people, other than me, still use these?

Hand drill.

I have no idea how old it is.  It was in my father's tool set.  It may have been in his father's tool set.

It still works.

I use it when I'd rather not string an electrical cord some place.  It works fine.  When I was a junior high student, we actually learned how to drill with these, but I'll bet that is no longer the case.

Monday at the Bar: ANALOG ATTORNEY Fountain Pen Obsession Starter Kit Even better than golf for wasting money.

Oh my.

ANALOG ATTORNEY

Fountain Pen Obsession Starter Kit

Even better than golf for wasting money.

I don't golf (I know how to golf, I don't golf), so I won't comment on that.  But I do love fountain pens.

Shoot, if I knew that Sheaffers had been hiking the Alaskan trails as far back as 1919, I'd have one by now.

And I do conceded there's a point to his comments.  Some can be really pricey, and people who start off with one, seem to get more and more.

If they were good enough for Uncle Sam's fighting boys, darn it ,they're good enough for me.  I wish I could find an Army/Navy special.

I presently  have five. And it is always tempting to get another.  But none of mine are really pricey.  Two are Pilot Metropolitan's, which are the cheap starter pens mentioned here.  My most expensive one is a Lamy, but it's not really an expensive pen, and it has a reputation for being tough and durable.  My favorite one is an aluminium bodies Japanese pen that I bought for the same reason.

But all in all, I think I actually save money with them. When I was using the nice roller ball pens, which are cheap, I lost them all the time.  As I've twice lost the same Pilot Metropolitan, I'm really careful with my fountain pens as I don't want to loose them.  And so I'm not constantly replacing pens.

And the Church of England a couple of years ago recommended them as an environmentally friendly pen, as they aren't disposable.  No, I'm not an Episcopalian, but what the heck, I like the logic and I can comfort myself with that.

Ink

 

 

How you can tell your fondness for fountain pens over ballpoints has gone a bit far. . . traveling with the fountain pen.  Parker pen, Noodler's Ink and Filson briefcase.

Tools of the trade.

Mid Week At Work: "Putting the 1918 GE to work!"

Keeping with our 1918 theme here, in 2018, not a person that's working, but a thing.  A G.E. Electric Fan.  Indeed, speaking of work, a very nicely restored fan.

We don't think much about things like this, but such a common item as this really gives us a glimpse into life at the time we'd otherwise miss.

So, watch.  . . and listen.

Friday Farming: The implement

The implement

Washing machines

No machine goes more unsung, but does more to relieve domestic drudgery, than the washing machine.

Vermont, 1940.

New York, 1943.

Arizona, 1940

New Mexico, 1940.

1942.

The Kitchen Stove

Moravian kitchen stove, late 20th Century

Ranch kitchen stove, 1940s.

Cow flop fueled kitchen stove, Montana, 1937.

Kitchen stove, Vermont, 1939.

Gas stove, Arizona, 1940.

Gas stove, Texas. 1940.

Minnesota, 1940.

North Dakota, 1940.

Girl reading by kitchen stove, New Mexico, winter 1943.

Colorado, 1938.

Gas stove, 1924.

Electric stove, California farm, 1944.

Business Machines of Antiquity: Check Writing Machine

This machine has shown up on display in our office.  I don't know where it came from, and I really don't know how they were used.  My guess is that they were just a crisp means of drafting checks, but that is a guess.

 

And the same as to this one.  It clearly served the same purpose, but exactly how they were used, I don't know. Perhaps they did nothing other than serve as a clear way to print checks.

Cold, then and now.

 Crow Indians, early 20th Century.

There's a really arctic cold snap predicted for Wyoming later this week and its 17F right now.  Bitter, bitter cold. The paper has the temperatures regularly dropping down below 0F.  Some folks I've spoken to, who must get their weather report from elsewhere, have even more dire weather reports.  I've heard predictions of temperatures reaching -21F.  I've personally seen temperatures here below -40F, so it isn't impossible.

So, what will occur is that we'll plug in our vehicles and keep the temperature up a bit at night.  And we may run facets at night as well.  Most folks will run their vehicles awhile in the morning before heading out to work, to let the cab heater (or whatever we call them) heat up a bit.

We'll also worry about the heat bill. Those of us with electric heat (such as me) will particularly worry about that.

So that's what we do in 2013.  And frankly that's not really any different than what we did a half century ago in 1963.  Cars seemed to be more sensitive to extreme cold at the time, but I don't remember much else being different.

But what about 1913?

In 1913, in most places, heat was by coal or wood.  I suppose folks with coal furnaces, which would have been most folks, made sure they had a plenty of coal in the coal bin. That houses had coal bins is probably something most folks don't know now, but I can remember being a bit fascinated with a house that one of my aunts and uncles had which had a heavy iron door for a coal chute.  The house, of course, had long prior been updated and didn't use coal.

Coal burns dirty, and smelly.  Even really high quality coal has a distinct petroleum smell.  A lot of people do not recognize that smell at all anymore, as they've never smelled it, but every now and then you'll run across somebody who heats even now with coal, almost always as an auxiliary to their main heat.  Towns must have smelt like and had a layer of smoke over them all winter.  This must have been particularly true during heavy cold snaps, as that almost always causes a temperature inversion, at least around here.

 Coal furnace.  I've never seen one.

Even now, where people burn a lot of wood for heat, and in some places in the west that's common, you'll often smell wood smoke during the winter, and that's just from auxiliary use as a rule.  This became more common in the 1970s and 1980s than previously, reflecting the nationwide rise in fuel costs.  A quarter century ago while a student in Laramie I lived in a rental house where we did that.  We largely heat the house with a wood burning stove and with wood that we'd cut in the Snowy Range on a Forest Service permit.

 World War One vintage poster urging the early ordering of winter coal.

Of course, this all deals with houses. What about office buildings, or even substantial apartment buildings?  I know that heat was provided via a boiler, but what was the fuel?  Oil?  I can't imagine that a building like the Con Roy Building, for example, was heated through burning coal. And it's been around since 1917.  Plenty of substantial buildings in the west are older than that.

 World War One vintage poster urging coal conservation.

In 1913 the majority of people walked to work, but cars were around to be sure, with a majority of those cars no doubt being Model T Fords.  I don't know how hard to start they were in cold weather, but they started with a hand crank, so I'm guess that they wouldn't have been easy to start.

Walking, of course, implied heavy dress, in weather like we're speaking of, and frankly the winters of that era imply heavy dress in general,  walking and being out in the cold on a regular basis will mean that the person who engages in it will dress warmly.  Indeed, people who work outdoors a lot will tend to wear warmer clothes all year long, rather than the current trend, for our indoor age, of people wearing shorts in the middle of the winter.

 Jack and Etta Johnson in winter finery, 1910.

Winter clothing of the period was heavier, sometimes considerably heavier, than now.  All the modern synthetics that most people sport in winter to some degree did not exist, and therefore natural fibers, and furs, were what were used to avoid freezing.  Heavier dress even applied to some extent indoors, as buildings were simply not heated as well as presently, and were sometimes fairly cold even under the best of circumstances.

German soldier, 1914 or 1915.

Postscript

Today provides a good example.  I got u pat 05:00, it was was -1F.  I turned up the electric heat a bit.  What would I have done had it been 1913?  Threw some logs in an iron stove?  Checked the coal burning stove?  I'm not sure.

I went and made coffee with an electric drop coffee maker.  I know I wouldn't have done that in 1913.  I would have had to put some logs in the kitchen stove and boiled coffee on the stove top.  And I had cereal for breakfast, which I likely would not have done in 1913, unless it was oatmeal, which I would have had to cook on the stove top again.

Any my truck is warming up outside.  If it were 1913, I doubt I would have driven downtown, I probably would have walked.  Had I needed an automobile for something, it probably would have been a Model T, which no doubt is okay in snow, but not the same as my Dodge D3500.  And I would have had to hand crank it in subzero weather, which would have been iffy.

Postscript II

Or what about a day like today.  -22F when I got up at 05:00.

Postscript III

One thing that weather like this serves to illustrate is how much easier cars have gotten to start in cold weather.

Even up to the 1970s, weather like this required that a car with a substantial engine have its block heater plugged in overnight.  Every vehicle I've ever owned has had one, but frankly it has to get this cold before I plug them in anymore.  They just don't need it as they'll start in very cold weather.

This is particularly true of diesels.  I have a diesel now, and I've had one made in the 1990s before it. They both start in very cold weather.  When its this cold, I use the block heater. But at one time people wouldn't even buy diesels in this region because they'd freeze up, sometimes on the highway, during winter.

Also, it's interesting to note how much better insulated houses are. This started to be emphasized in the 1970s during the country's first energy crisis.  The cries has waxed and waned, but the emphasis on insulation has not, and modern houses are very well insulated as a rule.  Not all, of course, but most are.

The degree to which this has changed is perhaps best illustrated by my wife's belief that we need to run the water at night if its really freezing, which happens to this level a couple of times a year.  The only places I ever lived in that required that were in Laramie, and were very poorly insulated.  Here, I've never done that, and we've never needed to.  It still, however, makes her uncomfortable.  But then the farm house she lived in was probably built in the teens.

Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two

A virtual icon of the liberated strong woman, Rosie the Riveter proclaimed "we can do it" to the nation and became a symbol of the working woman.  In reality, most Rosie's put the riveter down and actually did return to their prewar lives.  This image pales in comparison to Rockwell's stunning original version.

In the popular imagination, it was World War Two that took women out of the homes, and into careers.  Removed from the domestic scene for the first time by the necessity of the workplace in the greatest war in human history, the story goes, women realized that they could do a man's job and refused to return to their domestic roles.  It's a nice simple story.

It also just isn't true.

 General motors worker, World War Two.

It wasn't beating the Axis that changed the domestic scene, it was the conquering of domestic chores by machines that changed things, and not all that rapidly at that.  Indeed, women didn't even experience the workplace in large numbers for their first time in World War Two.  They'd already been there during World War One.

Riveting is hard, dangerous work.  But dragging a plow in the absence of draft animals, is hard, dangerous, brutal work.  This World War One poster isn't a flight of fancy, it's actually an illustration of an actual photograph of three French farm women dragging an implement as they no longer have any draft animals on their farms, and they no longer have their husbands their to help.

It is, as is well known, very true that women picked up the laboring oar in the Allied countries, by choice and by necessity, during World War Two.  But they also had during World War One.  It was women who loaded the explosives in artillery shells in the Great War, at a time when that had not yet been automated.  The men who would have done it were largely in the service, and their smaller hands made it an easier thing for them to do. And women filled scores of other industrial roles as well.

 Women war workers in dormitory, 1917.

And they filled farming roles at a level which was not approached again, ever.  So many women were needed for agricultural roles that Canadian women were recruited to work as timber cruisers in Scotland.  Women plowed the fields and did the sowing in France, England and Germany.  And they also were pressed into that role in the US and Canada, although in smaller, but not insignificant, numbers.

 

Recruiting poster for the Women's Land Army.

 

 

 The YMCA also recruited for young women to work as farmers during World War One.

Indeed, in some warring nations the role of women was more significant in World War One, than it was in World War Two.  Women worked in every warring nation in both wars, in what had been men's roles, but the need for female heavy labor was greater in France and the UK in the Great War than it was in World War Two.  During World War Two, because of German occupation, French women did not find employment much outside their traditional roles, while in World War One they had been employed in heavy labor.  World War Two was a horrific nightmare for the UK, but it actually required less manpower than did the Great War, which was a British bloodbath.  Women were largely not employed in Germany, due to some strange Nazi revulsion against doing so, and a view of women that was rather creepy. 

And women entered military service for the first time in World War One, not World War Two. The U.S. Navy recruited "Yoemanettes," prior to WWII's "WAVES."  The British and Commonwealth forces used large numbers of female nurses, including tow of my mother's aunts, who traveled from Canada to France for the war.  British and Australian horsewomen broke horses for their respective armies.  Russian women found a place as theoretical combat troops for the first time in World War One, not World War Two, when the Imperial Russian Army rose a Women's Battalion of Death (it didn't see action).

So what changed?

Well, in one sense, not much. The concept that World War Two's working women stayed in the workplace is grossly exaggerated.  For the most part, they didn't.  Most in fact left their wartime employment and returned to domestic lives they'd hoped for, or at least expected, prior to the war.  Indeed, a lot of occupations did not open up for women for decades.  Lawyers I know, for example, who went to law school right after World War Two have related to me that it was extremely difficult for a woman to get through the schools as they were harassed, in part, by male professors (and students) who didn't feel they belonged there.  I know one woman who did go through law school in the 1940s, and was a highly respected lawyer, but she's an example of one. For the most part, women's occupations weren't a lot wider in variety after the war than they were before. A big exception was the role of secretary, which had become an exclusively female role by the 1940s, but then it was very much well on the way to that prior to World War Two.  And that role is telling as to the reason.  The reason women replaced men as secretaries (which was controversial at first) was due to a machine. . . the typewriter.

 

Manual typewriters, 1940s.

It was machines that changed the relationship of people to work, and by extension it was women who were most impacted.  For women, the machines that would have the greatest impact in their relationship to work were domestic machines.

Electric washing machine, with hand wringer, 1940s.

We've blogged about it here before, but it wasn't just women who had a different relationship with domestic chores.  Indeed, this is so much the case, that it's hard to appreciate it now. This impacted what men and women did, and had to do, on daily basis.

Most modern domestic machines are post World War Two inventions, or post War War Two perfections.  Consider, therefore what average conditions were like prior to the modern era.

There are certain things that everyone has to handle, in one way or another, every day.  We all need to eat, we all need to acquire food to eat, and we all need keep ourselves and our clothing decent in some fashion.  Seems simple enough, doesn't it. And, for us now, it really is.

For most of us, today, we can easily keep several days food in a refrigerator.  We can easily cook that food with a gas or electric, or microwave, stove everyday.  Most of us have clothing that is easily washable as well.  No big deal.  And when we go to clean our living quarters, that doesn't create much of a problem either.

Well, consider now the situation prior to World War One.  That's now a century ago, but it's part of our modern era.  Quite recognizable to most of us, and when presented in film seemingly a dressier, if somewhat different, version of our current era.

But in that recognizable era there was no domestic refrigeration.  People did preserve food in the house, but via an "ice box."  Indeed, my father had grown so accustomed to this term when he was young that he always called the refrigerator the "ice box" even though he'd probably not lived in a house that had one since he was a small child.  

Woman pouring mild for her son, kept cold in a trailer equipped with an ice box. This is a WWII vintage photo of a Defense War Worker trailer. The really telling thing depicted by this photo isn't the ice box, which was an old technology, but that the woman is dressed in shorts, which reflected a very recent change.  She could appear as modern in nearly every home today, which her World War One counterpart would not.

Folks who cooled food with an ice box, acquired food everyday. If you wanted fresh food, you bought it that day.  Many women went to the market for fresh meat everyday.  There was little choice but to do that.  And ice was delivered periodically also, by a horse drawn wagon.  Both of my parents had recollections of the ice wagon.

Cooking the food was a long precess also. Nothing existed that was already prepared.  People didn't have frozen food to prepare. Canned food, of course, did already exist.  But by and large people had to prepare everything that day, whatever meal was being considered.  And part of that was due to the fact that modern stoves were only coming in during this period.

Today we have gas and electric stoves everywhere. But up to at least 1920, most people had wood or coal burning stoves for cooking.  They didn't heat the same way.  Cooking with a wood stove is slow.  It takes hours to cook anything with a wood stove, and those who typically cooked with them didn't cook with the same variety, or methods, we do now.  Boiling, the fastest method of food preparation, was popular.  People boiled everything.  Where we'd now roast a roast in the oven, a cook of that era would just as frequently boil it.  People boiled vegetables into oblivion.  My mother, who had learned to cook from her mother, who had learned how to cook in this era, used the boiling into oblivion method of cooking. She hated potatoes for this reason (I love them) but she'd invariable boil them into unrecognizable starch lumps.

Wood burning stove in Denver.  Typical pre 1920 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1930 stove.  Heck, typical pre 1940 stove.

Turn of century advertisement for stove polish.  Cleaning a wood burning stove would be no treat.

Even something as mundane as toast required more effort than it does not.  Toasters are an electric appliance that most homes have now, but they actually replaced a simple device.

 World War Two era propaganda photograph, trying to depict an inattentive woman letting toast burn, and therefore wasting resources.  Note how complicated this electric toaster is.

You'll still occasionally see old fashioned toasters in sheep and cattle camps, and probably elsewhere. They just hold the bread so that the toast can be toasted over a burner.  Pretty simple, and not much of a labor saving device, right? Well, consider the totality of it.  To toast you had to watch the toast, rather than just slip the bread down into the toaster.

For that matter, everything was relatively labor intensive save for boiling and roasting, which is probably why things tended to be boiled or roasted.

 Man cooking in a cow camp for cowboys.  He's using two cast iron dutch ovens (I still use one routinely) to cook over a fire.  This photo first appeared on this blog in 2009 in a very early entry on cooking changes.

Indeed, if you think of all the electric devices in your kitchen today, it's stunning.  Electric or gas stoves, electric blenders and mixers, microwaves, refrigerators.  Go back just a century and none of this would be in the average home.  And with the exception of canned goods, which dated back well into the 19th Century, nothing came in the form of prepared food either.  For that matter, even packaging was different at that time.  If you wanted steak for five, you went to the butcher, probably that day, and got steak for five.  If you wanted ground beef, you went to the butcher and got the quantity you wanted, and so on.

And such innovations weren't limited to kitchen and the laundry room but other devices entered the house that saved domestic labor in all sorts of ways.  For example, the vacuum cleaner came in.

Woman in Montana vacuuming in her home, about 1940.  Of note, the book case on the right is a barristers case, something normally associated with lawyers.  She's vacuuming a large rug on a wooden floor.

It might be easy to scoff at that, but it shouldn't be.  Homes built before the vacuum cleaner generally didn't have wall to wall carpeting, and for good reason, but people did have large area carpets in them, like the one if the photo above.  And they were cleaned by beating them.  For those with large area rugs, of course, that's still done today after a while, as they can't really be adequately cleaned simply by vacuuming, but you don't have to do it as often.

To beat a rug, what you do is roll it up and cart it out to the clothes line, a feature in the yard that's actually prohibited in many subdivisions today, and you whack it repeatedly until the dust quits flying out of it.  It's a two person job for a heavy rug.  

Of course, as noted, wall to wall carpeting was not the norm, as cleaning wouldn't allow for it, nearly anywhere.  What that meant is that people had to take on the rest of the cleaning of the floor by some other method.  The other flooring surfaces were wood and tile, with both being in most houses to some extent.  Tiles were cleaned as they still are, with mop, scrub brush, and sponge.  Wooden floors, however, were polished.  Floor wax is something most of us don't think about today, but they did then.  A wooden floor was damp mopped occasionally and then polished with floor wax.  In larger commercial buildings there came to be a machine for this, and there still is.  A floor polisher is a large machine with a circular disk that will do this. At Ft. Sill, where I went to Basic Training, we polished the floor every Sunday.  My father had a floor polisher for his office, so I knew how to operate that before I went to Basic.  Now, most folks don't have floor polishers.

Although, I'll  note as an aside, tile and wood floors have come roaring back into the use. They were always pretty, but when the machines came in, people went berserk with carpeting. All carpeting wears and becomes dirty, but people carpeted everything, including having carpet laid over the top of beautiful wood and tile floors.  By the 1970s carpet became shaggy, the way that the eras teenagers did, and sometimes came in hideous loud colors.  On odd occasion, if you can find an office or home that's never been updated, you can see the special in all of its bizarre glory.

Okay, so we now have a lot of appliances of all sorts. So what?  How can that support the thesis stated above.  Well, consider how things worked prior to these things started to really come in during the 1920s.

Let's start with a farm example. The US was much more rural a century ago than it is now, and many more men and women lived on them than do now.  Indeed, a fairly high percentage of the country did.  And lets take the example of a labor intensive time of the year, say harvesting.

Some years ago I saw a documentary which interviewed old men who had been boys in Wisconsin during the waning days of big horse farming.  One of them described very well how this worked, and serves as an excellent example.  Harvesting was communal in nature, just like branding remains here today.  So a collection of farmers worked on each other farms to get it done. And in order to get it done, the women started the day really early, about 4:00 a.m.  They started the day that early, as they pooled their labor in order to cook a large breakfast for the collection of men who would be harvesting.  That large breakfast was necessary as they were going to expend a lot of calories that day. All that cooking was done by hand, nothing was prepared in advance as nothing could be.  They fed the men about 5:00, who then went to work in the fields.  

That didn't mean a break for the women, however.  Immediately after breakfast they started cleaning, by hand (no dishwasher) the dishes and cooking implements.  That took some time, which left just enough time to start cooking a large noon meal, which they delivered to the fields. After that, they cleaned again, which left just enough time to cook a large dinner, following which the men worked until low light shut the day down.  The women, in turn, were kept working in that task until late.  It was a long, long, day for men and women, and labor intensive all the way around.

Okay, that's a farming example, but it'd be different for folks in town, right?  Well, not really.

Elsewhere on this blog I have Henry Fairlie's excellent essay "The Cow's Revenge" up somewhere.  In that, he ably describes life of a century ago in towns and cities, for the average working man.  They average blue collar worker walked to work an average distance of seven miles.  He worked about ten hours a day, and he obviously didn't go home at noon.  To support that, once again, he ate a pretty hardy breakfast and packed a pretty hardy lunch.  Many also packed the tools of their trade with them on a daily basis. And with all labor being more intensive at the time than it is now, he ate a pretty hardy dinner to replace the calories expended during they day.

If a man is working ten hours a day, six days a week, and if the preparation of food, the washing of clothing, and even just keeping the house was a full time job, he wasn't going to be able to do it himself, or at all.  

Indeed, for most white collar workers, a much smaller percentage of the population, the same was also true, even though their working conditions were very much different.  Consider doctors or lawyers.  This was before the pay bubble, now ending, in which these professions were high paying as a rule, so offices were modest or even inside of their homes.  But they still lacked the individual ability as a rule to prepare their own meals or take care of their homes, offices, clothing etc.  

In other words, there was just too much labor to go around.

The example of single men and women at the time is telling.  Young men in this era typically did two things when they were of working age, if not married. They lived at home, if they stayed where they were from, until they were married.  If they never married, they just kept living at home.  Presently there's a bit of a supposed mini crisis of adult children returning to their parent's homes, but if that is a new trend, it's only a return to a former condition, to a degree.  These men weren't exhibiting being tied to their mother's apron strings, they were acting in accordance with reality.  By staying home and contributing to the household, the things they couldn't do were being taken care of by their mothers and probably by their sisters.

The other common male option was to live in a boarding house.  Men who did that paid for these tasks to be taken care of as part of their lodging.  We don't have boarding houses much today, but they were common right through the 1940s.  Indeed, the soldiers' song still common in the 1940s, "Hard Tack and Bully Beef" is actually simply a variant of "There Is A Boarding House."

There is a boarding house, far, far away,
Where they have ham and eggs three times a day
O how them boarders yell
When they hear the dinner bell,
They give the landlord

Three times a day.

The fact that this was used as a soldiers song based on this says something about another young man's option.  We don't think of food and lodging being an incentive to joint the service today, but it provided one in part of that bygone era.  With the age old custom of soldiers' grousing, of course, the ham and eggs becomes hardtack and bully beef, with other sarcastic comments worked in.

Young man engaging in the dangerous endeavor of cooking dinner in an apartment over a Primus gas stove. These aren't meant for indoor use at all.

Of course, some men took apartments in towns and simply ate out every day, or resorted to less than desirable means of cooking.  Even now, quite a few men engaged in heavy labor hit a working man's restaurant early in the day, and pack a lunch of some sort with them for lunch.  The point is, however, that for most working men, the conditions of the day didn't give a great number of options in terms of getting food cooked, clothing washed, etc., and still allow them to work.

That work, that is the domestic work, fell to women, but not because of some societal conspiracy thought up by men so much as by necessity.  The were some female out of the house occupations, as noted, but they were generally few, and the women who occupied them tended to be just as oppressed by the needs of every day life as men.  When you look at old advertisements that seem quaint or even a bit odd now, in which some poor young woman is depicted as being in desperate straits as she's in her late 20s and not married, it should be kept in mind that for most women getting married did indeed improve their lot in life as they'd be taking care of their own household, rather than be auxiliary to somebody else s.

It was mechanization that changed all of this. With the introduction of domestic labor saving machinery, there was time in time in the household that didn't previously exist. With the extra time, came other options of filling it, in one way or another.  And with the machinery also came the option to look at a wider range of careers if they wanted.  The implications of that were and are vast, but the cause of it seems rather widely misunderstood.