Men, women, work and careers. Work in the age of certification

Recently there was some discussion on the nature of modern life and work on the excellent 1870 to 1918 blog.  This came about due to discussion on the entry regarding Newfoundland's soldiers on the Somme, although it isn't directly related to the contexts of that post.  The basic observations that inspired this post had to do with the decline in rural occupations, and indeed the yielding of those occupations to tourist based ones in some instances, and the change in the career and employment options available to women.  A couple of the older posts on this blog, including the one on Romanticizing the Past and Women in the Workplace were linked in, and they are relevant to this post, but already contained posts so I won't go back over and restate what's in those posts.

 Really rosy view of the availability of work from a British motivational series of the 1920s.  The campaign was obviously somewhat naive, but it did come in an era when there was less delineation between categories of work.

The comments to the thread developed a couple of significant themes, one being the nature of modern opportunities in general, and the other being the increased opportunities for women.

This blog, as we know, tries to explore the turn of the prior century, and often compares that period (and others) to the present one. We stray from that quite a bit, but this is a topic, albeit, a big one, that might be explored a bit here, as there are global changes to the nature of work in the US, and of course there's been a huge change in the nature of work for women.  And it raises some massive questions.  Has the nature of lifelong work improved, or declined?  Can that question even be asked when put in a gender context?  Has there been any changes for those entering employment, or sustaining employment, at all?  Was the motivational poster above really reflective of that period and how about now?

Let's start with the topic of female employment.

The entry of women into the non farm, and non domestic, workplace.

The story might not be quite the one that common folklore would have us believe.  We all know that story, which basically holds that women didn't work outside the home prior to World War Two, and the reason for that was both societal, and unfair.  Upon closer examination, that story doesn't hold up.  Rather, what we'd find is that the rise of women in occupations outside the home had been going on since at least the mid 19th Century, and it expressed itself first in occupations that had a close association with with existing female roles.  And the change, as we've already explored somewhat, was more than a little due to technology.  And as we can also see, it was partially due to the spread of wealth somewhat as well.  We can also see that women weren't exactly living a life of leisure prior to this slow shift, or during it.

A World War Two era poster saluting female workers, only one of which would have been in a "traditionally female" occupation at that time.  That tradition was actually quite thin, however, as even females secretaries, such as portrayed in the bottom left hand corner of the print, had only been around for a little over twenty years at that time, and only entered that field following the introduction of the typewriters. As already explored here, we take the position that the introduction of machinery, both domestic and in the office, brought about the introduction of women into the workplace, not World War Two.

a.  The mid 19th Century up to the mid 20th Century

Readers of this blog know that it is our view that the common story about World War Two bringing about a revolution in female employment outside the home is a myth.  Women were not employed in industry for the first time during World War Two and women by and large didn't stick with their industrial occupations post war.  That they were employed during the war is true, but as we've earlier noted, it was domestic machinery that changed their status, and indeed men's status, in regards to household duties.

Woman oiling machine tools, Colt Manufacturing, World War One.  Women occupied wartime industrial jobs during the Great War just as they did during World War Two.  It's just been forgotten.

 

Female English mechanic, World War One.  Supposedly Germany didn't have a female mechanic until after World War One.  This mechanic probably elected to leave her job after the Great War ended.

 British poster using the efforts of women as a YWCA campaign theme.  Women occupied an incredibly broad number of occupations during World War One.

Concerning machines, and as we need to start somewhere in this tale, something we've touched on only a little in regards to this story, is the introduction of a business machine that had a role in this revolution, although we have addressed it a bit before. That machine was the typewriter, and it's really the typewriter that started the revolution in "word processing" that's ongoing today.  When I first went to work in the law, a quarter century ago, typewriters were still in use and even now our office has one for limited use.  But when they came in, they were truly revolutionary.  One of their impacts was that they introduced women into the office.  We'll start this part of this story there.

 A photograph of a revolution.  Black tenant farmer's wife learning how to type, in hopes of off the farm employment.  This photograph comes right at the point in which thousands were making this transition, from necessary farm employment, now made easier due to mechanization and domestic machinery, to business employment.

The exact process of this is murky, but prior to the typewriter secretaries were generally male.  Certain types of secretaries, such as legal secretaries (scriveners) were specialist. Whey they were all males, as a rule, is something that's not clear to me, and it may in fact have been an accidental product of the domestic labor conditions at the time.  That is, scriveners were all day at their desks and in an era, as already explored, when there had to be by necessity people who were all day at their domestic tasks, perhaps that's just the way it is.  Be that as it may, however, the arrival of the typewriter and the arrival of the female secretary happened simultaneously and drove scriveners out of work fairly rapidly. The extent to which this bucked the general trend is hard to overestimate, as here we have a male job, with no domestic female equivalent job, in which women burst on to the scene, and took over the role, fairly rapidly.

More generally, however, taking into account what we know from earlier discussions, and adding to it what we've sent out above, what we can say is that the general effect of this process was that, at some point prior to World War One, and taking place over a very long time, a series of occupations had slowly opened up to women. They were very limited.  Nursing was one such profession.  Teaching was another.  Industrial seamstresses a third.  And starting around World War One, but more the case by the 1920s, secretaries were an exceptional forth.

Red Cross recruiting poster for nurses serving in the rural United States.  This poster shows the extent to which female occupations were already emerging in their own right. Public Health Nurses frequently operated without the assistance of doctors and largely on their own.  This nurse is shown mounted, and is riding in the conventional fashion.  Indeed, with the short stirrups she's actually riding in the English or Military fashion of the time, a fairly advanced seat.

All of this, of course, in addition to one of the most overlooked of traditional female occupations, that being the female unit of the farm family. That may sound odd, but it's amazingly overlooked. We should take a look at all of this a little more closely, starting with farming.

When people look back now, and say their "ancestors" were farmers, they often are more accurate than they know.  Farms were family units, male and female.  From antiquity to the up until even the present, it's really pretty much impossible to efficiently run a farm, if not outright impossible, as a single individual.  Our collective memories of pre World War Two farms, formed by such dramas as Little House on the Prairie or The Walton's, is very far off the mark.  Those who like the "Little House" series probably ought to read Giants In The Earth for a more realistic view of farming the north country.

 

 Greek peasants at Marathon. While this photo was obviously taken for another reason, it shows the ancient nature of farming still ongoing in this location at the time this photo was taken. Farmers in their field, including a woman.  The same scene no doubt existed at Marathon in the time frame of the famous battle.

More than any other occupation, women were involved in farming to an extent that made their role indispensable in the pre mechanization era.  Indeed, it was so critical that the conscription and enlistment of farmers during World War One drove Europe the brink of starvation and women were required to carry on farming alone, or with underage youth. Female farm workers were brought from Canada to farm in Great Britain and France to take up the slack.

Woman farmer, World War One.  Women from cities were trained to farm during World War One and World War Two, but no doubt the more common event was that they simply took over their husbands roles as their children picked up the slack for them.

"Freedom, Work, Bread!"  A German communist recruiting poster appeals to a German landser to turn his bayonet fixed rifle and hand grenade against the government.  Part of the appeal is scene by the depiction of work he doesn't have (farm and train in background) and to poor women working the fields alone.

Now, we know things were changing by the 1920s.  And we know things were changing before then. Perhaps we ought to stop and synthesize things a bit here before moving on. With all of the above in mind, what do we know?  Running up to, let's say, 1910, we know the following:

• Farming was the dominant industry everywhere, and labor on farms was so heavy, no one person could do it themselves.
• Domestic work was so heavy that no one person could do it themselves either.  Men at work had to reply at somebody at home just to live.
• Addressing something we hadn't earlier, there was no public assistance for anything, so the byproduct of male female unions, putting it delicately, had to be the duty of those engaged in that activity.

This leaves us, whether people care to like it or not, with a world in which it's going to necessarily be the case that almost all office and industrial employment is male and all domestic work is female. This wasn't, contrary to what some later theorist would like to imagine, the result of inherent male prejudice, but rather because of the way of the world and the nature of work a the time.

Now, starting in the late 19th Century, things began to change. We've seen that. Women began to have a few occupational roles outside the home.  Nursing came in first, teaching second, seamstresses third, secretarial work fourth, and then by the mid 20th Century, many other occupations. Why was that, and why those roles.

Here too, we can see the hand of mechanization at work.

Mechanization really began to hit farming mid 19th Century, although we generally fail to appreciate that.  Prior to that, the number of mechanized implements in farming was quite small. But by the mid 19th Century engineers had turned their talents to farming machinery, and farming machines began to come in. They still required a vast amount of heavy labor to be used, but it wasn't quite as heavy as before.  A slight decrease in labor on the farm resulted, and it was slight.

Wealth also increased in society, and with wealth comes leisure.  Indeed, some have claimed that leisure is the true measure of the success of a society. At any rate, this opened up the door a bit for some women to take up careers, even if only briefly in their lives.  It was natural that the first careers that opened up were ones they were already associated with.

Nursing has been associated with women forever, and probably due to the fact that in the homes, women filled that role, with that sort of nursing equating really with being a type of physician.  They very rarely became physicians as that career wasn't open, as the education for it also wasn't open.  But that when nursing developed as a career in its own right, that women would enter it isn't too surprising.  Aiding in that, in Europe it had long been the case that nursing was associated with nuns, both Catholic and Protestant, and the word for nurse in many countries outside the US is in fact "Sister", taking that title from nuns.  Even in English, outside the US, nurses are commonly called "Sister" and their clothing for many years mimicked that of nuns.

 Nuns of the Battlefield Monument, Washington D.C.

This also raises a topic that's very much overlooked, in that an extremely long standing female career option was the religious life.  For women in the Christian world, if they were Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans or Anglicans, an option always existed to take religious vows. As has already been seen, women who had taken vows were also often in other roles, the most noted examples being educational and nursing roles.  In much of the Western world female religious (nuns) have decreased in numbers since the 1950s, so it's now easy to forget the role they once played, but in terms of the teaching and medical fields, they were pioneers having a very strong presence long before their secular compatriots occupied the same fields.

Teaching has a similar history.  Early on almost all school teachers were men, but most people were educated at home, and the person doing that teaching was almost always female.  Even in wealthy families that role was usually assigned to a female member of the household.  Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was primarily educated by an aunt.  Patton was educated at home by the female members of his household.  When women began to have the opportunity to work outside the home a bit, being a teacher was a natural role for an educated woman, although early on they were mostly assigned to grade school.  Prior to World War One it was already the case that women were becoming a force at the high school level, and also about that time the self segregation that society entered into in teaching whereby primary school teachers were almost always female had also set in.  This displaced, it should be noted, that role for men, where they had formerly been prominent (and not always too popular).

 Woman schoolteacher in early 20th Century, with pupils on field trip in Washington D. C.

Interestingly, the education of the young had not only been something that women had conducted at home for generations, but here to their role was anticipated by female religious, as nuns, together with monks had fulfilled this role for quite some time.

Nun escorting children to school.

A grimmer role was that of garment worker, or industrial seamstress.  Also leaning on a traditional role, when it remained common for wives to sew the clothing worn by their families, this work was grueling and dangerous.  It tended to be the domain of poor women, who had the skills to do it, but whom lacked the opportunity or education to do anything else.

 

Seamstress strike. These strikers might not actually be poorer garment workers, but perhaps a more skilled class of tailor.  They are certainly well dressed.

All of this is demonstrate, in a long roundabout fashion, that women had started to enter some pioneering female employment roles by the turn of the prior century.

At that point, mechanization, and wealth in society, began to change things at a more rapid pace. Agricultural mechanization started to increase.  Domestic machinery began to be introduced.  And societal wealth increased to the point where the hiring out of some domestic chores began to occur.  None of this was rapid, but by the end of World War One, it was relatively well established.  Women accordingly were freed from some of the labor that they'd previously been required for, and their presence in the workplace increased. They also began to attend colleges and universities in much greater numbers.

Western College for Women University, 1904.

This takes us to about 1920 or so, at which point women really began to move into the workplace, albeit in roles where they already had a toehold.  In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, things would really take off, setting the stage for what would happen in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. but that isn't all that occurred that would impact women in society long-term, the hard objectification of women also began in earnest.  This is a party of the story that has also been widely misconstrued.

Objectification

 

An automobile calendar for the year 1908.  Note how the woman in this calendar is portrayed, just on the cusp of widespread photography and movie film.  A stark contrast to later portrayals.

The portrayal of women as objects has a long history, but modern mechanization really boosted it beyond any measure ever previously seen, and it also gave the means to do it in a mass distribution method that had never previously been encountered. As this directly impacts women at work, it's part of the story.

Photography, most particularly  the moving image, took the image to a new level that it had never before existed in.  No longer slow, and capable of portraying motion, movies and high quality black and white film really burst forward in the decade following World War One.  Nearly entirely unrestricted in any fashion, it also gave the means to distribute images of women in an alluring state, and the means to do so was very rapidly exploited.  The 1920s proved to be a decade in which women were portrayed in this fashion to an extent only recently rivaled, and unfortunately now surpassed.  In the 1920s this received push-back, and while the movie production codes and the like were now ridiculed, it did put the brake on the depictions of women in a purely objectified form, although not before the genie was out of the bottle.  At the very point, therefore, at which women were entering the general male workplace, their objectification as objects had begun. This stands on its head the later notions of Victorian naivete, and instead gives rise to the rather unseemly nature of the dual view of women in Western society that has existed ever since, and which has never been overcome.  The situation which, in a few short years, would give rise to one portrayal in war production posters, and quite another on war machines, and a short while later in glossy magazines, and then ultimately sporting magazines and advertising.

b.  The mid 20th Century until today

 Depression era employment poster seeking (apparently cheerful) female domestics.

From the 1920s until the early 1960s is pretty much a rising slope, in terms of women employment.  It was a steady rise, tied closely to the rise of domestic machinery, as we've already explored.  At no point was it really a dramatic spike, as so often claimed in regards to World War Two, and at no point was there a dramatic decline, as sometimes claimed about the 1950s.  It simply increased, spurred on or depressed by economic conditions or war, but never arrested not never diverted, just as the progress of domestic machinery, along with other machinery, improved.  Today (and I'm obviously taking huge leaps in time and omitting a great deal here) there are few jobs that women cannot pursue, and few careers that they cannot entertain. So, after over a century of transition, everything should be rosy, right?

Well, certainly not uniformly.

c.  Having to work

Articles celebrating the "progress" of women in the workplace, which would be better addressed toward transition in their work roles combined with some progress, generally tend to note what other articles addressing economic distress do, that being that many women must work, and much of that work isn't of a "fulfilling career" variety, even taking into account that the "fulfilling career" comments themselves are much overdone.

Truth be known, even going back a century many women "had" to work, especially if we take into account the high percentage of women who lived on farms. All farm women worked, and by necessity. They weren't the only women working by necessity even then, however.  Certainly every seamstress employed in a garment factory was there by necessity.  But over time one of the grim realities of the progress of women in work is that many women now work by necessity, rather than by election.  This doesn't mean that they've gone from no labor to labor, by compulsion, but rather that they've gone from heavy domestic labor to business labor typically combined with retained domestic labor. And, as we'll note below, the fortunes of the middle class have somewhat in recent years, they've picked up a bigger share of the family labor burden, whether they wished to or not.

And due to societal changes, a certain percentage of women find themselves bearing 100% of a family budget.  The phenomenon of the "single mother" is actually no more common now than it was in the 19th Century, but the reasons are completely different, and the economic impact accordingly quite different.  In the 19th Century the condition of being a single mother tended to be due to industrial and farming accidents which could result in at least some outside effort to provide assistance to the mother left behind, or in the case of farm wives, left them with at least a share of their husband's farm (if he solely owned it) by operation of law.  So, while things were grim for them, they tended to be not quite so long term desperate as typically today.  The situation of the father simply being absent was quite rare, and scandalous. 

By and large, no doubt, women are now left with greater employment options than ever before.  They are also left with greater economic burdens and expectations. And because their options are nearly as great as mien's, they share in the actual nature of the male employment reality, there no longer being a male and female one. So let's take a look at that.

 Depression era poster urging girls to consider career options, with those careers being seamstress, secretary, teacher and something else I'm not sure of.

 Depression era poster urging you men to consider their career options, an early example of something that's become part of education generally today.

The evolution of the workplace for men.

Great Depression era WPA poster.  Frankly, this Depression Era poster is sort of scary in a nearly Nazi like way.

"Man may work from sun to sun but woman's work is never done."  

That old proverb is no doubt heard less now, but while it went to praise the work of women, it was pretty true of male work for most of the pre World War One era. As Henry Fairlie described in his classic essay, The Cow's Revenge, most men worked at least six days a week, and pretty much ten hours a day, if they had jobs in town. And for most people, that was pretty heavy labor.  People educated enough to work in offices were pretty fortunate in that urban setting, which probably gave rise to the comment you'll hear even today of "at least you're indoors" from people who are also working indoors.  Most work in the 19th Century was very physical, to say the least, and working conditions were grueling.  As part of that, the typical calculation of risks was much different than it is today, and the acceptance of industrial accidents was much greater.

 Poster urging employers to hire the returning veterans of World War One.

Of course, a very high percentage of men prior to World War One (and after) worked on farms and the opportunity to own a farm was much higher than it is today.  Indeed, the chance of ultimately owning your own business of any kind was much higher than today.  That's what got us rolling, really, on the thread about the Somme, as Newfies by and large had outdoor employment at that time, although it was focused on the fishing industry.

 Depression Era Farm Resettlement Administration poster. The FRA sought to resettle farmers who had lost their lands during the Depression on new lands, but the program was not widely subscribed to and not greatly successful.

While the rural population began to decline as a percentage of the population, it still remained surprisingly large well into the 1950s.  It was at that time that the impact of mechanization really began to take hold in farming and ranching, with there being a revolution in machinery and transportation, in part because of the impacts of the war.  The peak year in farm income in the United States was actually 1919, and more homesteads were filed during the teens than in any other decade, in part because of the Great War.  This was followed, of course, by a disastrous farm depression following the war, but it was really the onset of mechanization in the full form, fueled in part by the advances in machinery brought about by World War Two, that caused the last of the horse powered machinery to basically go out in the 1950s, to be followed by a decline in small machinery in the decades thereafter.

At the same time, the United States came out of World War Two as the only intact industrial nation in the world.  This greatly eased this transition as many well paying industrial jobs were available in the United States and for the first time many Americans went to college and universities who would not have been able to otherwise. Entire demographics, such as Catholics, started going to university. A university degree had such value that any university degree translated into a well paying job depending upon where a person located themselves.  The professions retained and indeed gained a status such as they'd never had before.  The onset of full scale unification of retail markets had not really started so it still remained the case that small shopkeepers could and did do well. This situation went on up until the 1970s, at which time economic forces ground the country to a halt.  By the time the economy started emerging for the doldrums of the 1970s, the economy had begun to greatly change.

Starting in the 1970s, manufacturing jobs in the United States began to decline in number and in quality in a way that the country had never experienced.  Having really started to emerge as an industrial nation after the Civil War, the US was a latecomer to the industrial revolution and saw the beneficial, as well as the destructive, aspects of industrialization last well into the 1960s.  In the 70s, heavy industry began to shift overseas where nations had never experienced it, or which had their industry destroyed during World War Two, began to emerge and new industrial forces.  The decline has never ceased and industry in the US is a mere shadow of its former self, with its former well paying blue collar jobs a thing of memory only for the most part.  This occurred, moreover, just as women began to enter the workplace in massive numbers.

The resulting new economy was a "service economy", driven by the needs of urban consumers.  Entire classes of retail businesses disappeared as the emphasis developed on economies of scale.  Computerization brought in an entire new industry, but in some ways it accelerated the process.  In the mean time, economies of scale also played themselves out in the farming industry, while an increase in surplus wealth in the upper sectors of the economy became a factor in the ranching industry.  During the depressed 1970s, and even into the 1980s, it remained possible for a person with financing to purchase a working ranch in the United States. By the 1990s that had started to die and by the late 1990s that had died.  It then followed with farming. For the first time in the nations history buying a working quantity of agricultural land became an impossibility, a radical shift on the nation's nature which the nations has refused to acknowledge.

 

 College of Engineering, University of Wyoming, during the 1950s.

Added to this, starting at some point in the 1970s, and probably due to the increasing number of college graduates being in the workforce, we entered the Age of Certification, which we are full in now.

As you'll recall from earlier in this lengthy post, it was once the case that a college degree, any college degree, was the ticket to a while collar career.  It was quite common for a college graduate with a degree in darned near anything to walk through the door of a company and obtain employment in a managerial role, irrespective of what his degree was in.

There were occupations, of course, which required specific educations.  Engineering, for example, always did.  Indeed, the lack of trained engineers in the US gave rise to West Point, as the military lacked a sufficient pool of trained engineers to draw from.   Generally individuals in scientific fields had the appropriate degrees. And of course physicians, dentists and veterinarians did.  By the post war period, lawyers almost all did (the actual requirement for a degree didn't come until surprisingly late).  It's interesting to note, however, that very few of these pursuits, with the medical and legal ones providing the notable exceptions, required a degree beyond a bachelors degree.

By the 1980s, this had really started to dramatically change. With college attendance having gone in the 1970s from a hope to nearly an expectation, the number of individuals with degrees dramatically increased.  In the sciences it became the case that the entry level degree for employment went from the bachelors degree to the masters degree.  Masters In Business Administration became very common for those with a serious desire to pursue a business degree.

Beyond that, many occupations that had never required any degrees started to, or otherwise required certification. Some of this was simply due to the march of technology, which now required special training.  By the time of this writing certification has become very widespread.

For example, policemen and fireman now typically have degrees and are certified. The average policeman has at least a community college degree and has been through a law enforcement academy.  Only a couple of decades ago many were able to enter police forces by virtue of having been veterans of military service, which is now no longer the case.  One highway patrolman in Wyoming actually has a law degree, something that was previously only common in law enforcement with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  Firemen typically have associates degrees and are certified in their field.  Even many blue collar degrees require certificates.  To find that somebody is "OSHA Certified", or something of the type, is not uncommon at all.  Certifications have even spread into many recreational endeavors.

While the increase in education that certification reflects is not a bad thing by any means, a byproduct of it is that skills are generally not terribly transferable in the modern world, or at least not perceived to be.  When looking back on the lives of men in prior eras, it's not uncommon at all to find men switching back and forth between widely varying careers.  You'll often find that somebody worked as a sheriff's deputy, then went to work in a business, then went on to something else.  Examples of firemen becoming policemen and vice versa are not uncommon.  And what has particularly changed is that the hiring of high school graduates, or even non high school graduates, for what are now white collar jobs is nearly non existent.

As an example of the latter, some time ago I listed to a podcast in which the author of a book detailed an interview with a World War One veteran. The veteran related that just before the US entered the Great War, he had graduated from high school.  Somebody had told him about an insurance agency in a neighboring town needing an office worker, so he went there and obtained the job.  Save for his period of service, he'd stayed with the insurance company his entire life and had risen up to a fairly high local position in it.  He'd never gone to university, and he'd never seen the need to. Today, that couldn't happen.

Or, for some personal examples, my great grandfather on my mother's side started working as a boy for a large insurance company in Canada.  He stayed with it, his talents were appreciated, and he rose up to be the head of the Canadian branch of the company.  My grandfather on my father's side started working for packing houses when just a teenager, and was moved to the office where he rose up in the management of one such company, until he opened his own.  In both of these examples, this just could not happen today.  Indeed, given the ages both of these men commenced work (13 years in my grandfather's case), their entry into employment might even have been illegal by today's standards.

So where does that place us today?

 Depression era WPA poster urging worker safety.

The initial question, raised in regards to the posting regarding the Newfoundland troops who served at the Somme, was:

The symbolic change has been farms (usually not far from urban areas) that partially depend on tourism, kids having their pictures taken with the farm animals, and so on. Hay rides, etc . At the other extreme, you have enormous enterprises growing corn or wheat for the “agribusinesses.” I am not either for or against either of these particularly (you can easily see the political fault lines here). Do we just live in an unfortunate period of history?

The answer to that of course depends very much on your prospective and position. We live in a period, without doubt, where  the impact of poverty in the Western world has been so greatly reduced that even the American poor would not generally be regarded as such in most of the world.  Indeed, Europe and North American are so wealthy that it gives a person pause to consider the injunction that "it's easier for a camel to pass through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven".  We can hardly grasp the poverty of other regions of the world, but then it is also the case that we can hardly appreciate the extent to which some of those regions are rocketing into prosperity  For the first time in its history, for example, the majority of Mexican citizens are middle class, and in spite of our fears to the contrary, immigration from Mexico into the United States has basically ceased, and even possibly reversed, with more people coming south over the border than going north.

But at the same time the profusion of university degrees has resulted in a huge number of Americans being able to only enter basic white collar jobs even though they have an education.  Jobs that in 1919 went to men who had high school degrees only now require two year and even four year degrees.  Individuals with college degrees in fields without directly application to a business need, or sometimes even with directly application, sometimes must enter jobs that are at the basic entry level and be content with them.  The classic "degreed barrista" at Starbucks isn't really a joke.  In the professions, consolidation has started to come in, in some quarters, and an oversupply of once safe jobs has lead to a decline in employment combined with a return to their historical, pre World War Two status, as solidly middle class, rather than upper middle class, occupations..  That is most pronounced right now in the law, which was a vehicle for lower middle class Americans to enter the upper class for much of the nation's history, but which sees a fair amount of unemployment in the ranks now.  Those who do obtain employment without full four year degree often find themselves in a certification cycle that ultimately determines a career path for them with some permanence, or at least potentially so.

Making matters worse, the big box cubicle environment of much of American urban work has lead to a dissatisfaction rate with employment in the US which is well up over 50%.  As American employers have become more and more remote from their employees, the employees, it seems, who have less and less of a chance of owning anything of their own, care less and less for their work.  Hopes of starting up their own enterprises, still portrayed as an American Dream, are increasingly in the nature of pipe dreams, and in some sectors, such as agriculture, they approach the level of fantasy.  Former rural occupations have dried up in the face of the inability to buy into them, mechanization and the outright disappearance of many such jobs.  Men and women who dream of owning their own farms, fishing boats or appliance stores probably have to be content with that forever being a dream.

Enter back into this picture the plight of women again.  Throughout the 70s and 90s it was still common to hear the feminist rhetoric about "fulfilling careers", something that was also said to young men but with little actual enthusiasm for the most part except by starry eyed boosters on any one career sector.  Now women have largely come into the same situation as men, in which competition for career spaces is a fact of life, and the fulfillment aspect of that having little to do with reality.  For women without an education, and particularly for those with children but no spouse, the burdens faced in life are substantial.

Oddly, that this has occured seems to be poorly understood in the economy at large, or even somewhat denied.  Occasionally, it's explained away as a good thing, on purely economic terms.  Part of the problem here is that the voice of any one occupational field tends to be dominated by its oldest members, who often have very little connection with things at the entry level.  Taking law, for example, the depth to which institutional changes are being forced upon the field has been slow to be grasped, even as a crisis in certain sections of the field set in.  The voice of the law is probably on average much older than in most industries, so those who claim to speak for the profession often came up in it decades and decades ago, in a completely different environment.  So we've seen law schools continue to churn out new graduates who are lured with promises of lucrative careers and with a degree that "can be used for a lot of things" when the reality of that passed long ago.  In other areas, I've recently seen it claimed by a happy economist that the destruction of rural occupations is a good thing, really, as the displaced workers have been more overall productive in the urban cubicle jobs that some (but certainly not all) have obtained, which may be true in terms of pure efficiency, but which apparently isn't sufficiently appreciated by workers as to change their views towards their individual occupations.  The dominance of large retail outlets in that sector is commonly asserted to be a good thing even though its quite obvious that it has virtually eliminated the small "mom and pop" shop that once existed in nearly ever sector of the retail economy. That prices are lower for consumers is obvious, but that those same consumers now have no hope of every owning a retail outlet of their own is seemingly less appreciated.

On the other hand, working conditions are much better in every manual occupation than they used to be.  We don't have very many Hanna Mine disasters anymore, for example.  And we don't have hundreds of poor women jammed into urban warehouses with poor ventilation sewing close for starvation wages either.  And by and large, while the poor remain with us, we don't have nearly as much desperate starvation level poverty as existed in prior eras.

Some of this is, of course, a pretty grim conclusion, if taken too far, and depending upon your view.  If you dream of owning your own fishing boat, or owning your own farm, or owning your own radio store, things are probably not terribly rosy.  If you are a woman, and entered any one field hoping that field would be "fulfilling", depending upon how suited you were for it naturally, you may have found that the occuaption amounts to work, and by and large it may in fact be the case that leisure, rather that labor, is the basis of an intellectual and fulling society.  But perhaps it need not be as grim as it might seem.  Industrial and farming accidents, dictatorial labor bosses, left vs right strikes, and the like, are all things mostly of the past now.  If work is not as fulfilling as people once hoped for, the old work probably wasn't either.  But at the same time it is distressing that Americans have fewer and fewer personal options, and for many their work-lives will necessarily involve working for remotes bosses they care little about and who care little directly for them.  This can be addressed, of course, but it's doubt that people can conceive of doing that now.  Having benefited so directly from the type of corporate capitalism Americans essentially pioneered, doing anything else brings up claims of "Socialism", that being the system which we so clearly ran into the ground, and which was so clearly unworkable.  But perhaps a little Distributism, that system advocating the principal of Subsidiarity, might be in order.  That "third way", championed by Chesterton and Belloc  during the mid 20th Century, advanced the thesis of an economy geared towards the individual family, a goal everyone claims to always support but which very rarely actually is.

Land Values and American Agriculture

Recently I happened to be out in the sticks doing some livestock type stuff when the person I was with, who does livestock type stuff full time, asked me what I thought of a recent place I know relatively well having sold.  I didn't know it had sold, which shows how I'm both out of it, and how local news really is.

 Nebraska homesteaders. These homesteaders were likely doing well, as they had a couple of horses, some sort of implement a wagon and a band of sheep.

Indeed, not only had the place sold, it had sold for a very high price.  Now, the interesting part of this is that it sold for a middle high six digit figure to the family that just sold it, when they purchased it about 30 years ago. The current sales price was over 10 times higher than that old one.

Now, on that, I'll first observe, and I think it important, that 30 years ago a lot of agricultural land, including Western agricultural land, was at a depressed price due to an economic slump that the country had entered combined with some insurance companies having invested heavily, at that time, in agricultural land.  This combination caused a lot of land to go on the market at a depressed price, for one reason or another. So, those mid 1980s values may not have been realistic or reflective of true worth at the time.  They undoubtedly were not, so the price was probably deflated by 1/3d at that time, meaning that the true long term value was higher, and the recent price in actual dollars was probably more like nine times higher than the mid 1980s price.

And while the 1980s weren't a period of hyper inflation like the early 1970s were, the fact of the matter remains that we still continue to experience inflation and that means nearly any time we look at a figure we find in the past, we  have to take that into account. And it turns out that a 1980 dollar wold be worth about $2.00 in current money, so realistically the rise in price of this parcel of land is really probably a factor of about seven.

Still, something increasing in value by a factor of seven isn't insignificant. What's up?

Well one thing that's up is that the agricultural land that's being sold right now in the West is clearly not being sold at a price reflective of its production value.  A realtor I spoke to told me that its been the case for a very long time that ranches generally only generate 1% to 2% of a return annually, although I'm not sure what the 1% to 2% is based on (I should have asked).  I.e., 1% of what?  With the current high prices, I'd be surprised if they generated that much on a return in investment.  But what is obvious is that a lot of ranch land is currently priced at a level that is aimed at the very wealthy, who only wish to own a lot of land, or at people who have perhaps come into a lot of land and need to invest it.  If you had, for example, $10,000,000 from selling your oil sodden farm in North Dakota, putting it into a $8,000,000 ranch in Wyoming might make sense, as a economic endeavor.  It doesn't make sense if you made $10,000,000 from your widget business in New Jersey, but you might wish to purchase a lot of land as it's an attractive idea if you are in New Jersey (I'll note that I don't know anything about New Jersey, I'm sure parts of New Jersey are very nifty, so I'm not taking shots at New Jersey).

 Nebraska homestead with rather odd windmill.

Or maybe there are all sorts of factors I don't appreciate, as I don't have $10,000,000 to spend on anything, and probably don't grasp the concerns that people with that sort of cash have.  What I can say, however, is that there are people who buy ranch land in the west for emotional and psychological reasons, rather than economically practical ones, and that most land right now is priced at a level that, if its an actual unit, only the very wealthy can afford it.

This is an interesting, and perhaps disturbing, trend.

There is only so much land on earth and not all of that land is suitable for agriculture by any means.  Having started off with so much of it in the US, mentally we're used to the idea that there's land for everyone, including farm land if people want it. That was probably also never really true, but it was truer here than elsewhere.

  

 Nebraska homestead, probably a stock raising outfit.

The originating nature of American agriculture is found in Europe, and the story is ancient.  At one time, small homesteaders, in the loose use of that term, farmed tiny plots. But even as early as the later stages of the Roman Empire, the central government claimed a right to doll out parcels of land.  When Rome fell, land occupation at first went back to that rude sort of homesteading.  And that continued for some time. Even the Vikings were more farmers than raiders, violent homesteaders if you will.  But in the early Medieval period the families that had started off as little more than strongmen became the sovereigns, and were regarded as owning everything in their countries.  In Shakespeare, when a character refers to Henry V as England, it makes sense. Henry V, like every other sovereign, wasn't only the king of his country, in a land ownership sense, he was the country.

 The ruined Abby at Abbotsbury, England.  Picturesque, but it depicts a bleak history.  The Abbey was closed by Henry VIII sacking of the monasteries and the land in England was largely owned by wealthy large land owners up until after World War One, which a change in inheritance eliminated primogeniture and the tax structure changed, causing a rise in the fortunes of individual farmers for the first time in generations.

Kings dolled out land to lessor nobles who rented it to tenants, and that situation, very much developed, is the one that most of our European ancestors fled from.  Farming as a tenant isn't so much fun, in a worrying about how your crop is doing sort of sense.  Owning your own land, and being a "yeoman", is much preferable.  And as England and France (unlike Spain) allowed colonist to do that, in the New World, the inducement to emigrate was a strong basic one.  People like to imagine that all their immigrants were brave souls fleeing oppression, but a lot of them were just desperate farmers fleeing a life of rent.

Land in North America was always cheap, and prior to the Civil Ware there were always ways to acquire it nearly free of cost, with some states granting state homesteads or land grants. Sometimes the grants were tied to military service in a war, much like Roman land grants had been.  One state actually held a lottery for land.  But during the American Civil War the government passed the Homestead Act to encourage the populating of the American West.

Settlement of the west was already occurring.  Americans had been going to Texas (and receiving Mexican grants) since before Texas' Independence, which probably was a source of lasting regret to Mexico, and Americans began to flood into California starting in 1849.  The fact that the US would even think of doing a semi bizarre wartime act of encouraging the working age population to move beyond the draft really says something about the power of the northern states in comparison to the southern ones.  Who does something like during war time?  "Hey John, be prepared to go into the Army. . . or think about moving to Oregon. . . "  Weird.

Anyhow, that the entire process took to the US to a new level in all sorts of ways including that the Federal government now actually dolled the property out for free, to some extent, to those who simply worked it.  And they could buy more at a very low price.

 19th Century Nebraska Homesteaders.  Apparently this family thought sufficiently well of their cow to allow it to graze on their sod roof. 

Now, a couple of corrections are in order here about the story of homesteading.  In the popular imagination, some hardy homesteaders moved to the frontier, and put in a farm.  That sort of skips a step.  In actuality, homesteading was pretty hard.  It probably seems easier in our collective imaginations as most Americans at that time came from an agrarian background and they didn't have to be taught how to farm, usually.  And if they did, their homestead was likely doomed.  And in actuality a homestead required a pretty significant investment.  Storing up stuff for years in order to be able to do it was not common.  Even in the photo above we can see that the homesteading family has at least two mules, some sort of implement, and a cow.  No doubt they had more than that, but at a time when resources were thin, purchasing anything was pricey.  Keep in mind that this group apparently had six people to feed and clothe in addition.  

Most homesteads failed and contrary to the common belief there was a lot more 20th Century homesteading than 19th Century homesteading. Most 20th Century homesteads failed.  You can see photos of some failed homestead here, if you like, together with ones that didn't fail.  The whole process really didn't end until the 1950s, when the last of the homestead entries made before the expiration year of 1932 were finally proved up, save for a small number that were taken out in a special post World  War Two program.  And throughout the homestead period, but particularly later in the 20th Century, it was pretty common for farm and ranch families to dream of a better, easier life, they imagined existed in town.  Indeed, the irony of romantically looking back on homesteading is that homesteaders romantically looked forward to a non farm future for their descendants, in quite a few instances.

But it was still the case, in spite of the extremely difficult work and the very high chance of failure, it was still possible to acquire land that way for a person of modest means.  In order to succeed, including succeed out here in the arid livestock raising West, years had to typically go into the preparation to take out a homestead, contrary to the common view, but it could still be done.  A young man might, for example, work for a decade as a cowboy, acquire a small herd of his own, and then homestead.  Or a family might scrape enough together to give it a go.  As one of my old friends told me about the Homestead Act which his Russian immigrant grandparents had taken advantage of, "It was a good deal for poor people." 

Now, that same land is being sold in a lot of places for extremely high prices that certainly people of modest means, or even though quite well off but not extremely well off, can afford. 

Cheap land was an enduring feature of American history from day one, and in truth has a lot more to do with the success of the American nation (and Canadian one) than any concept of "American Exceptionalism" does.  The country became a big success because:  1) we had a lot of cheap land, and 2) we let people acquire it.  This isn't true of every country that has had a lot of land, but for those that did, and followed that recipe, they were guaranteed to be a success.  Australia and Canada provide other good examples.  I wonder what the meaning of the current situation is to us now?

It isn't as if this is exactly a new situation, but it is one that seemingly hasn't sunk in to people yet.  It's still a common bad drama scenario to have some guy tired of the stress of a big city go out and buy a farm or ranch.  One episode of the nighttime soap opera "Army Wives", for example, featured a series of plots in which a Specialist E4 is going to leave the Army and buy a ranch in Wyoming. Seriously?  On E4 pay you'd be lucky to afford a Lego Ranch.  But that idea, now matter how absurd, remains a common one.

And a bit of a heart breaking one for some.  I've been in groups of young men some 20 years my junior where they are working part time on ranches, or full time, and they speak of buying a ranch of their own some day, the same way that cowboys of 1890 could and actually did. They're not going to be able to, ever.  They probably know that, but dream otherwise.  At least a couple of the individuals I've heard express that sort of hope were working cowboys, who have to know that they can't possibly afford their own place at any point in the future.

This is a remarkable change in the history of the American nation, and maybe not a very good one.  If the foundational aspect of this country was the ability to go out and get your own land, and make a place for yourself, and if that is now dead, and it nearly is, what does it mean for the future of the country?

Now, some economist (and "futurist") would cheerfully (seriously) say that in the modern economy, agricultural production is an antiquated primitive means of generating wealth, and we should be happy as the new "homesteads" if you will, can be staked in the big city urban economy.  Can't start a ranch, well that's because society needs you to start a DotCom.

That's sort of a worrisome view to those inclined to worry, like men, however.  Another observed trend (but maybe not a new one) is that a majority of Americans do not like their work.  Now, chances are high that statisticians didn't take that figure in earlier times.  Did a majority of cigar makers in a cigar factory with no ventilation like their work?  I doubt it. What about a majority of coal miners in places like Hanna Wyoming where the mines collapsed and killed hundreds every now and then?  I doubt that too.

  Memorial to the Dead of the Number One Mine, in Hanna Wyoming.  Mine collapse killed over 200 miners in the first decade of the 20th Century at this location.  From Some Gave All.

Still, there's something about this that's distressing.

And indeed, its been distressing enough that in other countries it's been legislatively addressed.  In some European countries the transfer of farm land is pretty strictly limited to transfers to those who would farm.  Here in the US, an attempt to address can be found in various Young Farmers Programs that seek to provide funding, at a grossly inadequate level, to beginning farmers.  The US example, however, hasn't kept pace with the economic realities and, in addition, the government has worked at cross purposes with the Rural Home Administration also acting as a vehicle to fund the subdividing of land. 

Maybe there's no solution to this at all, and this reflects what happens when a country has over 300,000,000 people in it.  But it's a pretty significant change in the country that will impact its nature at some point.  Americans have tended to look at themselves as a hardy frontier people, but they're really a urban one and are closing the door to their rural past in real ways.  Part of that includes closing the door on people who would live as farmers if they could, thereby choosing a life of service for those people, or an urban life preferred by those who study numbers.

But wait!  Is this really a farm story, or a story that just happens to have been written about farmers.  In other words is the story broader than this. 

What if you wanted to open a grocery store?

 Neighborhood grocery store in Altoona Pennsylvania, 1930s.

When I was a kid, this town had several small locally owned grocery stores.  I can recall the Grant Street Grocery, Elk Street Grocery, Brattis' and two whose names I can't recall, one on Ash Street and another in North Casper.  Added to that were several small markets (whose names I also can't recall) that were sort of on the convenience store model, and not real grocery stores.  Of all of those, one survives, and it survives by being a specialty market to some extent. Brattis', which always had a really good meat department, survives as a butcher's shop, or meat market.

Or what if you wanted to open an appliance store, sporting goods store or an audio equipment store?

 Hardware store in former bank building, 1970s.

Now, of course, all these types of stores still exist, to be sure, and there are locally owned ones everywhere, but there's no denying that locally owned stores selling many types of items are much rarer than they used to be, and they face economic pressures from large retail chains everywhere.  This is, in fact, an increasing, not a decreasing trend.

Now, this is distinctly different from the story of agricultural land, for the most part, presented above, but it is interesting that overall in our economy, it's just tougher for individuals to own a business of any kind, of their own. Even in the classic professions there's been at least local consolidation and the individual shop is less common.  It's an interesting trend, and it shows no signs of abating.  The question would be whether that is something that truly benefits the individual, the collective whole, or either?

At any rate, the change overall has been monumental, and in agriculture it's becoming fundamental.  The long term meaning of it is unknown.  Maybe there really isn't one, in a country that shifted over from having a very significant rural population up to the mid 20th Century but which no longer does, or maybe it means a rethinking, at some point, as to what it means to be an American, where party of the foundational myth of the country is no longer realistic for most people.  Of course, many other nations have similarly now unrealistic foundational myths, but keep them.  Most Australians, for example, aren't hardy residents of the Outback.  Most Arabs aren't Bedouins.  

At any rate, in the context of this blog, here's a change from a century ago that is seemingly unacknowledged by the general public, but which certainly is huge in real terms.  I'm used to people telling me "I grew up on a ranch" or "I grew up on a farm".  In the future, that won't be heard all that much, at least if present trends continue.

Epilogue

I recently read two articles that reminded me of this recent post.

The first one was in the magazine Super Lawyers (I'm not too sure what I think of that title) which featured a short article on a Cheyenne lawyer I know a bit (not much).  I did know that his family had a ranch and that one of his older brothers ranched it.

The article was interesting in that it told an age old tale.  Turns out the lawyer found that there was no place on the ranch for him, as his two older brothers and their families were already on it.  That's not really something new, this lawyer related that he's now 68 years old.  Still it shows the general impossibility for a common person to enter this field.  He came from a ranching background, had an agricultural degree, but there was no place for him to go. So he went on to the law instead.

The second article was in the  Casper Star Tribune today, and had a headline about young ranchers now entering the profession at an increased rate, locally. The increasing age of farmers and ranchers is constantly noted in the press, and the headline would give the impression that young people were successfully taking this up as a career from outside the profession.

Well, the headline was misleading. Rather, the article was about the children of ranchers becoming ranchers, something that's hardly news.  Again, it's illustrative of the points developed above. 

The electric motorcycle acquires a big name. The Harley Davidson Livewire

I've met some people who are fanatically opposed to the concept of electric vehicles.  I don't really know why, other than that they just don't like things changing much and have an attachment to vehicles as they are.  However, even a casual observation would confirm that electric vehicles are starting to come on strong.

Now, as if anyone needs any further proof, Harley-Davidson, a company with over a century in motorcycle making experiencing, is making an electric motorcycle, the Livewire.

They aren't offering it to the public, it's a concept bike they're touring around with now. But the fact that they've done means that the heavy duty electric motorcycle can't be fare behind.

 1922 Harley Davidson with sidecar.

UW law professor receives grant for persuasive writing - Laramie Boomerang Online

UW law professor receives grant for persuasive writing - Laramie Boomerang Online

Not only did he receive a grant, he made the fairly amazing statement in his interview that if something went to trial, that indicated a failure.

Well, in looking him up I noted that his actual years in private practice were exceedingly small, one of the problems I tend to have with academic lawyers.  Perhaps he's done a lot of representation while a university professor, which quite a few university professors do, but still that comment is just flat out off the mark.

The Casper Star Tribune Colunist Dan Molyneax

As I've criticized the Casper Star Tribune from time to time, I have to give it credit where credit is due. While I don't always agree with him (I think, for example, he's wrong on Putin), he writes well, clearly, and isn't afraid of stating opinions that most people hold to themselves out of fear of holding them, if they do.  That columnist would be Dan Molyneaux.

Molyneax has guts.  In the short time he's been writing he came out with an article sympathetic to the aims of Vladamir Putin, with a clear explanation of why he feels that way, he's criticized the common idolizing of John Wayne as a hero, and on a recent Sunday he declared that Islam is not a religion of peace. All pretty bold comments really from a print columnist in a local newspaper.  Just taking on the odd memory people have of John Wayne as an American hero took guts I thought, and actually discussing the tenants of Islam at their written face value is very bold in the west. Having bold opinions is one thing, but actually stating them in the compressed amount of space a columnist has is quite another.  Molyneaux actually manages that.  And he doesn't do it in a superficial manner, in which some inflammatory national columnist do. Agree with him or disagree with him, he actually states a point and why he thinks what he does.

Again, I don't always agree with him, but I hope they keep him around.  As I thought would be the case, one recent column will met with a lot of opposition, probably about 70% of it vitriolic and not bothering to actually address his points in their disagreement..  That's the risk of being a columnist in the age of the instant anonymous comment.  I wouldn't read the comments if I were him, and I hope the Tribune doesn't regard them as a reason to set him aside. 

Of interest, Molyneaux fits into the category of clergymen correspondents, something we tend not to see a great deal of now, but which were at one time quite common.  In his case, he's an ordained Lutheran minister, which the Tribune used to note in its short note on his column, but no longer does.  Anyhow, it's nice to see the Tribune have an articulate serious columnist, no matter what a person might think about any one of his particular columns.

Monday, July 20, 1914. The Kriegsmarine mobilizes.

Germany mobilized the Imperial German Navy and ordered shipping companies to withdraw from foreign ports and return to German ports.

Mobilizing navies is a difficult project, and was all the more difficult in the coal fired engine days.  Coal had to be ordered, boilers for heavy ships, starated, ammunition properly stored and the mechanics of steel vessels fully readied.

Marcus Garvey, age 28, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association with Amy Ashwood, who would later become his first wife.  The organization still exists.

The trial of Henriette Caillaux began in Paris, with the accused reportedly being kept in the same cell that had held the murdered Marie Antoinette.

Last edition:

Saturday, July 18, 1914. The sort of birth of the Air Force.

Labels: 1910s, 1914, Aircraft, July Crisis, Labor unrest, Serbia, Signal Corps, U.S. Air Force, World War One

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyoming's First Tribal People

Wyoming Fact and Fiction: Wyoming's First Tribal People

The Big Speech: Henry Fairlie's The Idiocy of Urban Life or The Cow's Revenge

The late Henry Fairlie was a British born essayist who wrote in the New Republic. A man of biting wit, he wrote the following essay, which is one of my favorites:

The Idiocy of Urban Life Or The Cow's Revenge.

Interesting reading, and a lot of interesting commentary in the article.