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The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown

Women at A.E. Brown Company

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The Crossroads of Intersectionality
Women faced many unique challenges during the industrial era in Middletown. There are many experiences that were unlike others due to the intersections of race, class, and gender. This section presents a broad overview of experiences about how these categories shaped women's experiences in the labor force. For example, women who were white and members of what the Lynds called the "business class," had a very different experience from women who were black and working class. Here we look at differences between women in the business class and the working class, white women and black women, and how their experiences changed over time.
EXPERIENCES OF WOMEN'S WORK BY RACE
Women in Middletown were responsible for raising a family, keeping a home, and if needed, taking over for the husband in the labor force if he went off to war, died, or was unable to aid the family in making money. African-American women were offered fewer opportunities in the paid labor force than white women. There were a couple of different types of work that women would engage in. Housework, and raising a family were the first types of work that kept women occupied in Middletown. Paid work was the second. African-American women had even fewer options than white women did when it came to paid labor. When African-American women migrated to the North, they had limited options outside of domestic service. In Muncie some factories, including Ball Brothers, Hemingray, and the Butterfield Canning Company were open to hiring African-American women.[1] Some industrial employers would advertise jobs by coming up with slogans that were marketed towards African-American women and men and they said things like “steady work, high wages and a good time.”[2] Hurley Goodall’s mother spoke about being employed at the Ball Brothers factory. She was unable to get a white-collar job or an administrative job despite having a college degree, so she instead turned to factory work.[3] Women of all races found new job opportunities in factories during and after the World War I, but black women in particular found themselves taking these jobs instead of domestic work.
Historian Joe William Trotter described the Great Migration as a “second emancipation” for black women, in part because they had the chance to enter the industrial workforce (or not work at all), although there were still black women getting jobs in household service. These women were taking jobs in industry instead of households because they had higher wages and they felt they could keep more of their dignity working in a factory over someone else's house.[4] Some women would even turn to the illegal or informal economy because there was better money in sex work.[5] The informal economy gave African-American women an escape from domestic service and a way to provide for their families and allowed them to take control over their own self-worth for economic survival.[6] This type of work also allowed them to break free of the stereotype of mother, homemaker, reformer and a “respectable” worker.[7] This particular job market became more prominent in cities after World War I.

On the other side of this coin, we have white women’s experiences in the workforce. White women were also getting jobs in industrial work, taking jobs that were sex-segregated, and also administrative jobs. White women were also taking business-class jobs, getting out of factory work. A new position for white women looking to enter the business class was to be a sales girl. They needed neatly dressed, polite women to be inoffensive looking and sell their product.[8] The white women whom they were hiring would be young girls who can raise productivity without raising earnings, and have good social skills with customers.[9] In the Middletown III study, researchers found that between the years 1910 and 1980 clerical, operator, professional, and sales jobs were held predominantly by white women in these professions. African-American women dominated jobs in service, private household domestic service, and some labor jobs.[10]
EXPERIENCES OF WOMEN'S WORK BY SOCIAL CLASS
Even as they changed, women's work experiences still differed by class. In 1920, one out of every four women over the age of 14 was in the labor force; by 1978 it was one out of every two.[11] More than half of working-class wives were employed full time and by the 1970s many business-class wives were had entered the workforce as well.[12] While working-class women still tended to gravitate towards factory work, there were more women employed in white-collar jobs than blue-collar jobs by this time. As the Middletown III data suggested, white women continued to dominate clerical, craft, managerial, sales, operator and professional work.[13] When the Lynds wrote Middletown, the majority of the city's business-class workers were white men. Few business-class wives were a part of the paid labor market. They would let their husband work to support the family and then they would then run the household and take care of the children. However, this started to change when the working class and business class swapped schedules. The business class were now waking early and the working class were sleeping in.[14] Additionally in the 1920s, traditional roles of homemaker and breadwinner started to shift. Along with this shift came a little differently for the business class and the working class respectively. The working class families seemed to be holding onto traditional roles, while the business class embraced the shifts in responsibilities.[15]
Women's motives for working, which varied by social class and marital status, changed over this time. During the 1920s, unmarried women were employed in the paid labor force more than married women. The Federal Census for 1920 showed that twenty-eight women for every one hundred women that were gainfully employed in Middletown were married.[16] Married women workers were mostly working-class. These women were often shunned in their workplace because many people thought they were using this job to get out of child-rearing.[17] But normally it was out of financial necessity. The Lynd’s wrote about this phenomenon in Middletown:
Only one of forty business class women interviewed had worked for money during the previous five years (1920-24), and she was in work of a semi-artistic nature. Of the fifty-five wives out of a sample of 124 working class families 11 who had worked at some time during the previous five years (1920-24), twenty-four pointed to their husbands' unemployment as a major reason for their working, six to money needed for their children's education, five to debt, four spoke of "always needing extra money,, or "It takes the work of two to keep a family nowadays," three of needing to help out with "so many children" ; the other answers were scattered: "Just decided I'd like to try factory work. I was tired of housekeeping and had a baby old enough [five months] to be left"; "I needed clothes"; "I wanted spending money of my own"; "Other women could and I felt like I -ought to"; and "The mister was sick and I had to." The cases of a few representative women will make more specific the complex of factors involved in the wife's working.[18]
Working-class women worked for different reasons, and the Lynds captured this variety in their observations of Middletown. Some wanted industrial work because being a household servant or helper sounded worse than factory work. Consumerism also drove women away from the household and into the labor force as they started to buy more things ready-made from the store instead of making it themselves. Motives for working outside the home increasingly differed from woman to woman. Later in the century business-class women in particular began to work to gain personal satisfaction. There was truly no stopping these women as they took their rightful place in the labor force and lived their lives knowing that they could do more than just daily household chores.

[1] Jack S. Blocker, “Black Migration to Muncie, 1860–1930.” Indiana Magazine of History 92, no. 4 (1996): 297–320. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27791957.
[2] Joe William Trotter, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
[3] Luke E. Lassiter, Hurley Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell, Michelle Natasya Johnson, The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community, (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2004).
[4] Trotter, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.
[5] Trotter, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America.
[6] Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
[7] Wilcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit.
[8] Susan Porter Benson, “The Cinderella of Occupations: Managing the Work of Department Store Saleswomen, 1900-1940,” The Business History Review 55, no. 1 (1981): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.2307/3114439.
[9] Bensen, “The Cinderella of Occupations: Managing the Work of Department Store Saleswomen, 1900-1940.”
[10] Middletown III project records, Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University Libraries.
[11] Theodore Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
[12] Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity.
[13] Middletown III project records, Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University Libraries.
[14] Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity.
[15] Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity.
[16] Helen Merrell Lynd and Robert S. Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965).
[17] Lynd and Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture.
[18] Lynd and Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture.