Women In Susan Ware's Women And The Great Depression

The Great Depression started in 1929, with the stock market crash of October 24. This crash and the crash 16 days later, lead to millions of shares being worthless and investors being wiped out. The stock market crash lead to an incline in spending and investment, which in turn led to factories reducing down their production and firing employees. American who had bought on credit fell into debt and the foreclosures and evictions rose. During the Great Depression, many men were saddled with unemployment or a reduction in wages. This meant that a nuclear family could not depend entirely on a husband pay check, as they have done is the past. This lead to a large number of women joining or trying to join the workforce. Unfortunately for women during this time, many people viewed married

According to Ware:

“Women who sought relief or paid employment risked public scorn or worse for supposedly taking jobs and money away from more deserving men.”

Ware goes on to show why this idea was flawed. To begin with, many women were the sole source of financial support for themselves or their families. Furthermore, the jobs that women mainly got were in what we now consider traditionally women work, such as nurses, or sectaries.

This influx of women in the workplace managed to both upset and reinforce the status quo. While women flooded the workforce and in many cases became the main breadwinner of the family, the jobs that they had were in traditionally female areas, and thereby helped reinforce what was viewed as feminine jobs and what was viewed as masculine jobs. By the end of the Depression in 1939, the areas in which women had predominately worked such as nursing and clerical work, were viewed as women’s work, which in turn made in more difficulty for the government to persuade women to enter the workforce during the Second World