Finding Respectable Work for Women in Interwar Liverpool

2018 ◽  
pp. 85-105
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Limited Range ◽  
Geographic Mobility ◽  
Domestic Service ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
Financial Independence ◽  
Working Class Women

This chapter considers the ways social purists in interwar Liverpool sought to use traditional forms of employment to control and regulate working-class female morality. Whilst employment could offer women the sort of financial independence and geographic mobility that worried local social purists, organisations like the Liverpool Vigilance Association placed women they deemed to be vulnerable to moral corruption in domestic service, nursing and in mills. Jobs in these sectors were promoted as alternatives to prostitution and they were considered to be more realistic and respectable options for working-class women with ambitions of working in less stable industries, such as the performing arts. As such, the efforts of social purists to find work for women was much less about championing women’s employment and much more about using a limited range of employment options to contain and monitor women branded morally vulnerable.

Dictating with Dollars

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Marie Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Financial Independence ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Wealthy Women

Wealthy women’s understanding of financial independence and sisterhood are themes that are crucial to the ideas of women wealthy throughout the book. The Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) largely failed to effectively develop a cross-class coalition of wealthy women and labor women. By studying the WTUL in comparison to Grace Dodge’s working girls clubs and YWCA work, and the support of wealthy women for the 1909 Shirtwaist Strike, the chapter explores why many wealthy women sought gender equality. Their interactions with working-class women and their desire to control their own finances drove them to link financial independence with political equality. When the wealthy held the purse strings, cross-class cooperation, while potentially empowering to laboring women, was also a potent source of conflict. Working women resented the fact that Margaret Dreier Robins and Mary Dreier dominated the funding for the WTUL and insisted on having their way, despite the sisters’ deep commitment to feminism and their professed desire for cross-class coalition.

Crisis at Work: Gender, Class, and the Dehumanization of Jobs

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-136
Author(s):  
Harriet Bradley
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Organization ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Gender Segregation ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
The Uk

Drawing on Huw Beynon’s paper in HSIR 40 (2019), this article surveys the position of women in the UK labour market over the last fifty years. It suggests that many of the developments Beynon describes are relevant to women’s employment, but with the added twist that women’s position in the labour market and society is structured by their responsibility within the total social organization of labour for reproductive labour. Despite increased women’s employment, gender segregation, both horizontal and vertical, is obstinately persistent, especially in working-class occupations. Two of these occupations, care work and retail, are used to illustrate how increasing precarity of jobs combined with technologies of control have brought about a dehumanization of work. It is concluded that the restructuring of global capitalism on neoliberal principles has negatively affected opportunities for women workers.

Glamour and Aspiration: Women's Employment and the Establishment of Midlands ATV, 1956–68

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 635-649 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gillian Murray
Keyword(s):  
Significant Influence ◽  
Television News ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
Television Production ◽  
News Broadcasts ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
Female Employees ◽  
Status Of Women

This article uses an extant collection of television news inserts and other television ephemera to examine women's employment at Midlands ATV. Focusing on the years between the first Midlands News broadcasts in 1956 until major contract changes across the ITV network in 1968, it examines the jobs women did during this formative period and their chances for promotion. In particular it suggests that contemporary ideas of glamour and their influence in screen culture maintained a significant influence in shaping women's employment. This connection between glamorous television aesthetics and female employees as the embodiment of glamour, especially on screen, did leave women vulnerable to redundancy as ‘frivolity’ in television was increasingly criticised in the mid-1960s. However, this article argues that the precarious status of women in the industry should not undermine historical appreciation of the value of their work in the establishing of television in Britain. Setting this study of Midlands ATV within the growing number of studies into women's employment in television, there are certain points of comparison with women's experience at the BBC and in networked ITV current affairs programmes. However, while the historical contours of television production are broadly comparable, there are clear distinctions, such as the employment of a female newscaster, Pat Cox, between 1956 and 1965. Such distinctions also suggest that regional news teams were experimenting with the development of a vernacular television news style that requires further study.

Working-Class Autobiography, c.1970–1985

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Domestic Service ◽  
Political Education ◽  
Post War ◽  
Class Divisions ◽  
Community Publishing

This chapter examines working-class autobiographies and oral history testimonies created in the 1970s by the ‘history from below’, oral history, and community publishing movements. It finds that most working-class autobiographers felt that class divisions had weakened and changed radically in the post-war years: they identified improvements in housing, the NHS, education, and the power of workers as key alterations. The disappearance of live-in domestic service was a particularly powerful symbol of the changes that had taken place. Though none thought class had disappeared, many thought class divides were less powerful. While some working-class autobiographers wrote that their experiences made them instinctive socialists, in fact political activism did not flow straightforwardly from experience, but was the result of political education and context. Working-class experience was highly diverse, and as this became clear to many in the community publishing movement, it led to changes in their activist practice in the 1980s.

Sexual Division in Parenting: A Normative Context That Hinders Co-Responsibility

2021 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2110380
Author(s):  
José María García-de-Diego ◽  
Livia García-Faroldi
Keyword(s):  
Child Rearing ◽  
Women's Employment ◽  
Sociological Research ◽  
Women’S Employment ◽  
Sexual Division ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Family ◽  
Social Images ◽  
Employment Rates ◽  
Using Data

Recent decades have seen an increase in women’s employment rates and an expansion of egalitarian values. Previous studies document the so-called “motherhood penalty,” which makes women’s employment more difficult. Demands for greater shared child-rearing between parents are hindered by a normative climate that supports differentiated gender roles in the family. Using data from the Center for Sociological Research [Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas] (2018), this study shows that the Spanish population perceives that differentiated social images of motherhood and fatherhood still persist. The “sexual division in parenting” index is proposed and the profile of the individuals who most perceive this sexual division is analyzed. The results show that women and younger people are the most aware of this social normativity that unequally distributes child care, making co-responsibility difficult. The political implications of these results are discussed.

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