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The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown

Changing Gears: Lynda Strahan

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A Gendered Work Environment The experiences of men in work, like in many areas, are treated as the default. Whether in a clinical trial only including male test subjects or car safety features being tested only on how well they protect an average male body, women are frequently studied, written about, or treated as though they are just like men— except they just so happen to be women. However, when studying women’s experiences, it is imperative to consider how their experiences are uniquely impacted by their gender. This section will explore attitudes towards women’s participation in paid work, women’s treatment in the workplace, and dynamics of social participation with colleagues and how they were shaped by gender.
ATTITUDES TOWARDS WOMEN IN THE WORKFORCE
Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s as women continued to enter the paid workforce, a variety of attitudes towards these “girls who work” took shape in Muncie. The concerns or admiration expressed by individuals and publications evolved took on different tones depending whether it was in regard to married or unmarried women. For some husbands of employed women, the Lynds observed, their wives’ employment represented a psychological threat to their identity as the provider for the family. In Middletown Families, Theodore Caplow and his coauthors reported that by the 1970s, “Husbands [were], understandably, reluctant to admit that their wives’ working threatens their feelings of self-worth. The majority of husbands reported that they approve of their wives’ working, and the few objections that were voiced were couched in terms of neglected children or unfulfilled family responsibilities.”[1] From another point of view, Sophie Irene Loeb, a journalist and social-welfare advocate, writing for the Muncie Evening Press in 1927, expressing reverence and respect for the “work-a-day sister” over the “lady of leisure”. She argued that the “idle” or “matinee” girl should respect and show courtesy towards shopgirls and see them as sisters, rather than treat them with disdain.[2]

Others still expressed concern for the well being of the women entering the paid workforce— a sentiment that was not limited to the early days of the industrial era, but was repeated into the 21st century. Particularly for women working in factories, part of this concern was for their safety from the physical danger of the job. However, more frequently when discussing women’s safety at work, it was women’s safety from male coworkers which was seen as the primary threat. In an oral history interview for the 2009 documentary “Changing Gears”, Bruce Reynolds expressed this fear when speaking about his hesitancy to allow his daughter to join him in working at BorgWarner. In Middletown, Helen and Robert Lynd argued that women working alongside men would become less feminine and, as a result, less desirable to men, writing:
"It is a sad comment on our civilization when young women prefer to be employed where they are compelled to mingle with partially clad men, doing the work of men and boys, for little more than they would receive for doing the work usually allotted to women in the home…[one fears] the loss of all maidenly modesty and those qualities which are so highly prized by the true man."[3]
While much discussion could be had on the belief implicit in the Lynds’ writing that a woman’s desirability to men is in some way linked to her value and that her being “less desirable” should be considered a problem in need of solving, more relevant to the topic at hand is that this quote proposes that women are intrinsically unsuited for the workplaces they are entering because of their gender— that is the cause of the problems they are observing. This, according to Middletown, is the belief of residents of Muncie in the first decades of the 20th century. However, in a 1926 article on how to improve the problems faced by women who work, Loeb argued that the solution lies in changes to society, not in changes to women or their employment choices.[4] In particular, she calls for changes in the behavior of men who exploit or undervalue women and women’s labor labor— calling out “the business employer who hires a girl because she has beautiful eyes and lovely hair,” and “the father of the girl who goes on the theory that the mother alone has to deal with the children."

This variety of attitudes in Muncie on women’s presence in the paid workforce is representative of discussions happening nationwide. Although no unified opinion exists or existed, the materials gathered during various Middletown studies over the years show a faint throughline of anxiety: anxiety about women’s safety, anxiety about gender roles and whether they will be upheld, existential anxiety about men’s self worth if they are not sole providers, general anxiety about change, about the fact that the world of the 1920s or 1970s or 2000s was irreversibly different from the pre-industrial world.
GENDERED EXPERIENCES AT WORK
When it comes to differences in treatment in the workplace based on gender, causes vary. From legislative or regulatory standards to misogynistic beliefs of coworkers or managers to the impact of differing social expectations—some of these uniquely gendered experiences are more obvious than others. One of the more easily observable differences between men’s and women’s experiences in the workplace is pay. From Sophie Irene Loeb’s writing for the Muncie Evening Press in 1926 to oral histories collected in the early 2000s about working for BorgWarner, observations about women receiving lower rates of pay than men were not restricted to one industry or period of time. However, perceptions of the effects of pay differences and who benefits from them are not uniform. Loeb admonishes “the man, the employer who pays the wages by which no girl can possibly live comfortably…the legislature that turns a deaf ear to a minimum wage for women but creates fat political jobs.”[5] In this, she argues that the primary causes of wage inequality are greed on the part of the employer and the lack of legislative intervention on behalf of women, and that said low wages prevent women from being financially independent. This issue was not isolated to the 1920s. During a discussion of deindustrialization and the loss of jobs at the Muncie BorgWarner plant, Charles E Martin said:
"Well, when the line went down, they told him, ‘Your job went to Mexico. You’re out. You’re fired, or laid off or whatever.’ He had a lot of time, and they put a girl in a job over me. Her mother was close to one of the bosses—and Heather was a very good boss. I won’t knock her. But this person was better, except they had to pay him more money. So, they ousted him with nothing, and he wasn't even 65".[6]
His comments indicate that he believed women’s lower pay gave them more job security, seemingly directing his frustration towards the woman he believes was less deserving of the job, rather than the cause of both the closure of the line and the women’s lower pay: company owners maximizing profits at the expense of the workers— the same cause identified by Loeb in the 1920s. Even after the passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, when the Middletown III research team conducted the 1978 Women’s Occupational Survey, 14.% of women surveyed reported that women in their workplace were paid less than men for doing the same work and 16.1% reported that women faced limited opportunities for advancement or promotion compared to men.[7]
Also impacting many women’s workplace experience is the greater load of unpaid care work and household labor expected of them. In her interview for the Changing Gears Oral History project, Lynda Strahan spoke about the disrupting effect of being bumped between shifts, uprooting all sense of routine. She describes a period of several years where she got almost no sleep— getting home from the midnight shift and immediately shifting into taking care of her children. In addition, during this period, she and her sister were caring for their elderly mother, so even when Strahan was home, during her time intended for rest, she was frequently called away to help her mother. She comments that she often only got 45 minutes or an hour of sleep at a time.[8] Comparing this to the Lynds’ assessment of the impact of shift work in the 1920s, the contrasts between men’s and women’s experiences with this type of work comes into stark relief. The Lynds wrote:
"The repercussions upon home, leisure time, community life and other activities of these periodic dislocations of the rhythms of living, when anywhere from several hundred to three or four thousand heads of families ‘go on night shift,’ should be borne in mind; the normal relations between husband and wife, children's customary noisy play around home, family leisure-time activities, lodge life, jury duty, civic interest, and other concerns are deranged as by the topping over of one in a long line of dominoes… The fact that, with few exceptions, this dislocating factor affects only the working class has direct bearing upon the differential concern of the two groups for such things as the civic welfare of ‘Magic Middletown’"[9]
In this description, when “heads of families” work the night shift, it is the family who adjusts their activities to accommodate the breadwinner’s new routine. Missing social activities—leisure time, lodge life, etc.—while certainly detrimental to overall wellness, does not mean forgoing necessities of life. They can be and are sacrificed to allow the men rest, which is a necessity. Lynda Strahan mentions sometimes missing her children’s after school events when she worked the afternoon shift, a parallel to the fathers the Lynds are writing about, but overwhelmingly she was working the night shift and performing the same household labor she would if she had worked the day shift— or not had a paid job at all! The men of Middletown who had to “go on night shift” had to sacrifice family life to get their hard-earned rest. Strahan and women like her sacrificed their rest to maintain and facilitate family life.
Alongside differences in work experience caused by life outside of work, many women, sadly, experience gender-based mistreatment or abuse in their place of work. In the interviews of BorgWarner employees, all three women whose interviews were transcribed— Laura Janney, Jean Slay, and Lynda Strahan— described being made to feel unwelcome, being micromanaged, or having their work sabotaged by male teammates on account of their gender and/or race. Janney describes starting the job at BorgWarner saying:
"It was scary for me because people warned me that women weren’t treated well, and that they would talk awful—and even though I grew up on the south side of Muncie, went to the South Side High School, I did not experience much racism until I got there. And I was really floored by some of the blatant racism that went on there…then they got aggravated with me because I was the only woman in that area, and I was left-handed. And the older gentleman came to me and said that ‘I can’t train you. Number one, you’re a woman, you’re fat, and you’re left-handed.’ He goes, ‘You might as well go home.’ So, then they sent another, a left-handed gentleman over to train me, and he worked with me for a while, but everything that came out of his mouth was pretty racial and—so, being green, I didn’t know I could tell somebody to shut up. Years later, I learned that, I learned I could tell people to shut up, so I just kind of went along with it scared and trying to do what they told me to do"[10]
Strahan echoes the sentiment when she was asked what it was like being a woman at the plant:
"They didn’t like women working there. They hated women working there, so they’d like, set you up a lot of times. Put you on machines that weren’t running, and then you were on a time system, and then it looked like you were scr—messing up—I’ve got to really watch it, I’ve been in a factory—it looked like you were messing around all day not doing anything. And you didn’t know what to do to fix the machine, you’re just sitting there waiting"[11]
Both women when asked if treatment of women improved over time initially answered that it did, before adding that they’re not sure if treatment actually improved, or if they got used to the treatment and it didn’t phase them as much. Janney said, “I don’t know if it’s because my attitude changed and my fear was gone, and I was more confident to speak my mind and stand up for whatever, or if it actually changed—the attitude changed. But it was probably more of me changing than management.”[12]
While the topic of sexual harassment did not come up with any of the women interviewed for Changing Gears, it did come up in a few of the men’s interviews. Terry Coop, when asked “Were there ever any problems with women being, I don’t know—you think of a factory’s kind of being a crude environment in a lot of ways, you know?” responded:
"No, I think—I can only think of a couple instances in all those years when I heard that a woman had been insulted by another worker. I’m sure it happened, but—no, that was not an issue that I ever saw. No, the female employees, they might have a different answer for that… Sexual harassment was not an issue. There were few guys that, you know, that the women probably stayed away from, but I never saw or heard of anyone being fired or charged with sexual harassment. It may have happened, but I don’t know about it. There again, my department was all men."[13]
On its face, Coop denied the presence on sexual harassment, but his answer when viewed in full hints that the plant may have had issues out of his view or his perception of what constitutes harassment. For example, if there were men who women “probably stayed away”, there was likely action by these men that preceded the “staying away”. Likewise, in any workplace a lack of people fired for or charged with sexual harassment does not equate to a lack of sexual harassment. If anything, it could as easily indicate a workplace where said harassment is occurring but perpetrators are not being reported or held accountable. In a look at another industry— the meatpacking industry— Eric Schlosser also observes the phenomenon of gender-based abuse, specifically through sexual harassment or exploitation. He describes how supervisors become “little dictator's" over the hourly workers they lead and that for many women this meant being pressured for dates or sex, groped, verbally berated, and laughed at.[14] And though he describes the sexual relationships between supervisors and subordinates as “for the most part consensual”[15] the power dynamic in such relationships makes many coercive at best. Even if these relationships were entered into consensually, supervisors would hold an enormous amount of leverage over their partners. Were a woman to try to end a relationship, or generally do something her partner did not want her to do, as a supervisor, he would have the authority to fire her, make her time at work a living hell, or even report her to ICE if she was one of the many undocumented immigrants employed by the plants Schlosser studied. Do women really have a choice to say “no” if doing so could cost them their job or even their ability to remain in the country?

Gender was not the only variable impacting women’s experiences in various work environments, as intersections of race and class were also determining factors of treatment, security, and access to opportunities.
[1] Theodore Caplow, Howard M Bahr, Bruce A Chadwick, Reuben Hill, & Margret Holmes Williamson, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 99.
[2] Sophie Irene Loeb, “Urges Courtesy to the Girl Who Work”, Muncie Evening Press, June 7, 1927.
[3] Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study In Modern American Culture, (New York: Harcout, Brace & Company, 1929), 25.
[4] Sophie Irene Loeb, “Mothers Often Fail to Gain Confidences” Muncie Evening Press, December 21, 1926.
[5] Loeb, “Mothers Often Fail to Gain Confidences”.
[6] Charles Martin, interview with Christopher Atkinson, July 15, 2009, Changing Gears Oral History Interviews, Ball State University Digital Media Repository. https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/ChngGrsDoc/id/30/rec/24
[7]Theodore Caplow, Howard Bahr, Bruce Chadwick, Vaughn R.A. Call, and Louis Hicks, Compilation of Middletown III and Middletown IV Data, 1977-1999 [Muncie, Indiana]: Women's Occupational Survey (1978), Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2007-10-16. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR04604.v2
[8] Lynda Strahan, interview with Christopher Atkinson, June 25, 2009, Changing Gears Oral History Interviews, Ball State University Digital Media Repository. https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/ChngGrsDoc/id/16/rec/40
[9] Lynd and Lynd, Middletown: A Study In Modern American Culture, 55.
[10] Laura Janney, interview with Christopher Atkinson, June 25, 2009, Changing Gears Oral History Interviews, Ball State University Digital Media Repository. https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/ChngGrsDoc/id/24/rec/19
[11] Strahan, interview.
[12] Janney, interview.
[13] Terry Coop, interview with Christopher Atkinson, July 9, 2009, Changing Gears Oral History Interviews, Ball State University Digital Media Repository. https://dmr.bsu.edu/digital/collection/ChngGrsDoc/id/34/rec/26
[14] Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, (Boston: Houghton Miffilin, 2001), 176.
[15] Ibid