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The Evolution of Getting a Living in Middletown

YWCA Group Photo

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Labor Within and Beyond the Workplace Up to the 1890s, most married women found themselves living outside of the paid labor force, often living with their lives centered around the home.[1] In the 1920s, women, especially those who were married, were entering the paid labor force out of necessity. There were many reasons that Middletown women needed extra income for their families but one of the most common was due to their husband being unemployed. By the 1970s, the reasoning behind women entering the labor market changed. Fewer Middletown women were getting jobs out of necessity, instead opting to work because it gave them a feeling of satisfaction and increased independence.[2] Although there is often a focus on the patterns and trends of women moving into the paid labor market, women have always participated in other areas of unpaid and civic work. As more women began to enter the labor market throughout the years, their paid, unpaid, and civic contributions began to evolve and their reasons for working changed.
UNPAID LABOR
Before the industrial era hit Middletown, the majority of women worked inside the home. In 1890, there were approximately 25 women in Middletown who worked for pay. However all but one of the women worked at home or in a job that only occasionally took them out of the home.[3] Therefore, most of the work done by women was done in the home and much of it was unpaid as it was their own homemaking duties. Over the course of the 20th century both married and single women began entering the paid labor market. Whether their reasoning was to supplement family income, provide for themselves, or for satisfaction, women left their homes in search of growing opportunities to make their own money outside of the home. Between the 1920s and the late 1970s, there was a large shift as women moved from housekeeping to gainful employment. In the 1920s, approximately one out of four women over the age of 14 were active in the paid labor force outside of the home. By the 1970s, the portion of women in gainful employment jumped to one out of every two women.[4] Even though women were leaving the home for work, this shift did not mean that their housekeeping duties were diminished or lessened. There were some husbands reported to have begun helping women with housework in the 1920s as women started working full time outside the home, but in a sample done on Middletown households it was reported that the wife still did all of the housework in nearly half of the families in 1978.[5] As women began to push for more opportunity outside of the home there was a significant increase in employed women in 1978 compared to 1920. Women in the late 20th century also began to seek work out for satisfaction instead of necessity. There was more access to male-dominated jobs, and women were beginning to become financially independent.[6]

PAID LABOR
Although women were limited in their choice of occupation, they found themselves present in a variety of occupational fields throughout the 20th century. Just as women were limited due to their gender, they were also limited based on their race. Segregation and discrimination may have been less pronounced in Middletown compared to the South but these factors still dictated what job sectors African Americans were able to occupy. The Middletown III study's long-term occupational data, presented in the two graphs above, gives insight into the types of occupations of both white and African-American women in Middletown throughout the 20th century.[7]

One occupation commonly geared towards women was that of a salesperson in a department store. These positions were predominately for white, working-class women.[8] Managers, mostly men, wanted saleswomen to be appealing to the eye, polite, and have the ability to sell mechanically and inoffensively to the middle- and higher-class women who frequented the stores.[9]

The informal economy was also very present in Muncie during the industrial era. However, data surrounding the topic of sex work is hard to locate or track due to the taboo surrounding the topic during the height of its time. There are few records that give insight into the sex work that occurred in Middletown during the early 20th century but researchers have discovered local centers of prostitution. Brothels were active in the red-light districts of Middletown and were primarily made up of white women. African-American women in other cities more commonly found themselves in buffet flats, as sex work was better paid and allowed for more independence and opportunity for black women.[10]

As the Middletown III data presented above shows, domestic service was the most common occupation for African-American women in Middletown until the 1960s as it was one of the primary jobs available to them.[11] This was not a prominent occupation for white women in Middletown as business class white women would be the employers, and white working-class women were more interested in opportunities outside of the home and domestic sphere. Although there were limitations on the kinds of work women could do, white women were able to exit the domestic service industry at a faster rate due to increased opportunities for native whites to find work compared to immigrants and African Americans.

The movement of African Americans from the South to the North in the early 20th century, which Joe William Trotter describes as a "second emancipation for Black women, led to a shift in their occupational trends. As African American families moved to the North from the South, there were more opportunities for men to earn a living wage that would support their families.[12] As men were now able to provide for their families with a single income, African-American women were given the choice to leave the labor market for the first time. This led to many women steadily leaving domestic work for other opportunities, or to experience life as a “housewife.” As African-American women began searching for opportunities in other occupations, their options were limited due to their race as well as their gender. Most opportunities were found through jobs in industrial settings such as city factories.

White-collar occupations in the clerical and professional sectors were more common for women than blue collar jobs during the industrial era.[13] This is mostly true for the white women of Middletown, as African-American women were often excluded from these opportunities and lines of work, especially at the beginning of the 20th century. The move from blue-collar occupations to the clerical and professional sector was not entirely the choice of the women, as they were forced to retreat in occupations seen as “men’s work” and placed in work traditionally done by women.[14] This led to the domination of women in clerical and professional jobs, although they were still limited to lower tier work as men took precedence.[15] Nearing the middle to end of the decade, African-American women were able to find opportunity in hospitals and nursing homes as they continued their movement from domestic work to other sectors such as institutionalized care.[16] Later in the decade, white women also began to enter the medical field as nurses and caretakers in order to make up for the loss of industrial jobs with the decline of Industrialization in places like Middletown.
CIVIC LABOR
We think of the work women accomplish as centered in the home and in the paid labor market, while their civic efforts are often omitted or left unmentioned as a type of work. Women accomplished many things through their civic groups whether they be clubs, church groups, or other forms of civic gatherings. As women were often excluded from unions and other professional groups due to their gender, working women had to create their own social institutions as an effort to create and harbor consolidation between other working women. Civics clubs were strong in Muncie, and there are a plethora of records concerning club activities, although many of them are centered around middle-class white women.[17] There were many different civic and clubs geared towards women in Middletown through the industrial era. Two notable examples include one focusing on African-American women and one for women in professional occupations. They show some of the work that women did through civic organizations.

One example, on the national level, involved African-American working women organizing through a program of the YWCA. The 1st national YWCA program for black working women sought to provide both professional and personal opportunities for these women.[18] This program brought together African American women and their anti-racist white allies in a search for labor-based equality for Black women. As the influence of the program spread, thousands of African-American women were provided with education, recreational opportunities, spaces to meet, encouragement, and allies. The development of this program led to the creation of industrial clubs for African-American women in a variety of different occupations.[19]

Muncie’s Business and Professional Women’s Club is another strong example of the work accomplished by women through civic efforts. This group was focused on women in professional and business occupations, which were generally held by middle-class white women, but there was some emphasis on helping the women in industrial occupations. The club had a list of goals and standards that focused on promoting the interests of working women, bringing women together, extending opportunities to women through education, and elevating the standards for women in their occupations.[20] The group was not only concerned with their own interests as professional women, but their efforts extended into the community. There was emphasis on civic and community issues as well as international dealings.[21] Fundraising efforts were a consistent theme among the Business and Professional Women’s Club activities. One notable fundraising campaign aided a number of Middletown girls in finishing their high school education with the addition of helping them find good jobs afterwards.[22] The club was also active in the political sector, most notably through their opposition to and vote against the Equal Pay Bill.[23] As it was part of a larger picture, Muncie’s Business and Professional Women’s Club and its sister groups across the globe were able to accomplish a variety of goals by providing a space of consolidation and opportunity for working women while simultaneously spreading their influence through the community around them.

[1] Alice Kessler-Harris, "Women's Choices in an Expanding Labor Market," in Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 109-122.
[2] Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1929).
[3] Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts., (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937), 29.
[4] Theodore Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 88.
[5] Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity, 112-113.
[6] Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity, 114.
[7] Work tables by different variables, 1986, Box: 46, Folder: 18. Middletown III project records, MSC-001. Middletown Studies Collection.
[8] Susan Porter Benson, “The Cinderella of Occupations: Managing the Work of Department Store Saleswomen 1900-1940.” The Business History Review 55, no.1 (Spring 1981).
[9] Benson, “The Cinderella of Occupations: Managing the Work of Department Store Saleswomen 1900-1940,” 5-6.
[10] Joe William Trotter, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021).
[11] Luke E. Lassiter, Hurley Goodall, Elizabeth Campbell and Michelle Natasya Johnson, The Other Side of Middletown: Exploring Muncie's African American Community, (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2004).
[12] Trotter, Workers on Arrival: Black Labor in the Making of America, 83.
[13] Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity, 100.
[14] Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America’s Rust Belt, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 105.
[15] Caplow, Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity, 100.
[16] Gabriel Winant, “Deindustrialization, Working-class Decline, and the Growth of Healthcare,” New Labor Forum 30, no.2 (2021): 54–61.
[17] Lynd and Lynd, Middletown: A Study In American Culture, 9.
[18] Dorothea Browder, “Working Out Their Economic Problems Together: World War I, Working Women, and Civil Rights in the YWCA,” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 14, no. 2 (2015): 244.. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43903081.
[19] Browder, “Working Out Their Economic Problems Together: World War I, Working Women, and Civil Rights in the YWCA,” 247.
[20] Ester M Snyder, History of Muncie Business and Professional Women’s Club: 1919-1962, 56. Accessed via Middletown Women’s History Collection, Ball State University Libraries Archives and Special Collections.
[21] Ibid, 6.
[22] Ibid, 55.
[23] Ibid, 50.