As more than one observer of the current scene has opined, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” There is no question that economic disasters cause widespread destruction and human anguish, but they can also—if properly handled—provide openings for social and economic reform on an unprecedented scale. The New Deal is, of course, the instance that most people have in mind when they speak of good emerging from disaster, but a rapid survey of US social and economic history suggests that the New Deal was the exception, not the rule. No other economic disaster has produced either immediate responses or long-term outcomes on the same scale. Thus it is not surprising that President-elect Obama and his transition team are giving the New Deal some close study as they develop their models for economic recovery.
Few historians would claim, however, that the New Deal was an unmitigated good. While many of FDR’s policies were effective in bringing immediate relief to the unemployed, putting the economy back on track, and paving the way for innovative social provisions and reforms that have endured, some of these same policies also—however inadvertently—created inequalities, particularly when it came to gender roles. Thus while historians are heartened to discover that Obama believes he can learn from the past, we fear that by emulating earlier policies, he may also reproduce the outdated assumptions on which they were based, assumptions, for example, about women’s need for employment support. As a result, while Obama promises to repair our crumbling roads and bridges (many of them dating back to the 1930s) and expand our “green” economy, there are, as Linda Hirshman commented in the New York Times a few weeks ago, “almost no women on this road to recovery.” For this reason, feminist scholars and activists have called on the President-elect and his team to think more carefully about the gendered implications of the policies he is proposing, lest he reproduce the inequities of the New Deal along with its undeniable successes.
How the New Deal Failed Women
How, exactly, did the New Deal treat women? In setting up work relief programs in the 1930s, federal officials used the following rule of thumb: “For unskilled men, we have the shovel. For unskilled women, we have only the needle.” Men were assigned to construction jobs, women to textile production and various types of service work, and men commonly earned more than women. At first glance, it seems that New Deal policies simply reflected the biases of the time: the work done by men--building roads and bridges--was regarded as more valuable than that done by women--nursing, teaching, child care, and housework, not because of any inherent qualities but because it was assumed that men were supporting families, while women were not. But if one probes more deeply, it becomes apparent that New Deal officials ignored some glaring facts about women’s responsibilities in formulating their policies.
The facts are these. In response to the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt and his administration launched a series of innovative programs that brought relief to millions and helped to stabilize what was one of the world’s largest economies at the time. Among the most popular were public works projects that created jobs for some 15 million out-of-work Americans. From 1933 through 1943, New Deal work agencies such as the federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration employed from 1.4 to 4.4 million people each month. Most of those who got jobs were white men, reflecting officials’ assumptions that they should receive preference because they had families to support, while women merely earned “pin money.” Yet in the 1930s, some four million women were also out of work, and they, too had mouths to feed. New Dealers estimated that one out of six urban families was supported solely by a female wage-earner; among African Americans, the rate was twice that. Female officials in FDR’s administration (along with his wife, Eleanor) believed that women should also have the means to achieve financial independence, but the men who led the effort subscribed to the ideal of the male breadwinner and acted accordingly.
In general, women presented what WPA officials called “project trouble.” Because they considered manual labor “unsuitable” for women—at least for white women (the majority of wage-earning women of color at this time were either agricultural or domestic workers)--sewing rooms appeared to be the logical solution. Still, there were problems: sewing rooms could accommodate only a limited number of women, and working conditions were poor. Indeed, to some reformers of the day, they seemed little better than sweatshops. Yet because of its gender suitability, “the needle” became women’s employment of last resort.
At the same time, officials devised other measures to uphold men’s position as chief breadwinners. They sought to keep to a minimum the number of women certified as eligible for work relief. In 1932, this bias became formalized in the Economy Act, which limited civil service positions to one per family. Passage of the law led to the immediate firing of some 1200 women workers and prevented thousands more from being hired in public employment over the next decade. By January of 1934, only 300,000 out of four million jobless women had found public employment—about 12 percent. At its height, the New Deal employed less than a fifth of all women who were eligible for work relief. Moreover, because federal wages were based on prevailing rates, pay differentials between women and men persisted, with women earning on average 51 percent of what men did.
This did not bother male New Dealers, who generally subscribed to the idea that women should access federal support through marriage. Yet the gender gap was also reflected in federal programs for unemployed youths. The CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) set up hundreds of wilderness camps where young unemployed men could earn wages for replenishing forests and reclaiming land (the many trails, cabins, and benches we enjoy in national parks today are the result of their labor.) While these camps were racially segregated, they did pay whites and blacks equally. But there were no CCC camps for women. Instead, Hilda Worthington Smith, a veteran educator of labor women, managed to find enough federal funds to set up fewer than 100 summer camps for young jobless women, where they received paltry allowances rather than wages and focused on training in civic virtues rather than actual labor. Despite the lack of emphasis on preparation for employment, sizeable proportions of camp participants did find jobs at the end of each summer, a tribute more to their determination than to federal policy.
The women’s camps ended up serving some 8500 youths, the men’s, 2.5 million. But in 1937, WPA director Harry Hopkins abruptly terminated the women’s camps, deeming them “too expensive.” Support for the CCC camps continued. The significance of this blatant discrimination did not escape Hilda Smith. “The CCC campus with their millions of dollars for wages, educational work, travel, and supervision constantly reminded me of what we might do for women from these same families,” she noted. “As so often the case, the boys get the breaks, the girls are neglected.”
Similar patterns appeared in other New Deal programs, most notably the WPA. By its end in 1943, eight million men and women--one fifth of the workforce--had labored to improve the nation's infrastructure as well as beautify cities and spread the arts. WPA employees built 2,500 hospitals, 5,900 schools, 1,000 airports, and 13,000 playgrounds. But women made up only one-sixth of the WPA’s rolls.
White women were relatively well represented in the “white-collar” division of the WPA, which was responsible for education, surveys, recreation, and the famous programs in the arts. As teachers, nurses, and librarians, they made up from one third to one half of the white-collar employees. People of color, however, held only five percent of these jobs. Most women were assigned to traditional "women's work"--domestic service projects, sewing rooms, semi-skilled nursing services. Minority women were confined to the bottom rung, given the most menial tasks. When cuts came, women were usually the first to be let go, on the assumption that they could qualify for the benefits afforded them through the newly created Aid to Dependent Children program—what became known as “welfare.” Officials overlooked the fact that ADC allotments were even more meager than what they had been able to earn through WPA jobs.
On the whole, then, the New Deal was not a new deal for all women. While it afforded some white women professional opportunities, it generally restricted them to “feminized” lines of work, and it excluded women of color from those occupations almost entirely. By minimizing young women’s access to job training through projects like the CCC camps as well as experience in different types of WPA jobs, it foreclosed women’s future occupational advancement and reinforced assumptions about gender roles and responsibilities for family support. It also crystallized racialized and gendered patterns in the division of labor in American society. Finally, by privileging men in employment programs while diverting women to public assistance, the New Deal created a gendered split that would continue to haunt domestic policymaking for decades.
Old Patterns, New Realities
Thus while New Deal programs offer models the Obama team might wish to emulate, they should be wary of repeating the mistakes made by their predecessors. At the same time, they must take into account the ways in which American society and its economy have changed over the past seven and a half decades. For one thing, since enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOA—welfare reform) in 1996, the gendered distinction between employment and welfare policy no longer holds. Now, at least in theory, low-income mothers as well as fathers are expected to seek jobs rather than depend on public assistance to support themselves and their children. Given the impact of the recession, Congress may decide to reduce pressure on welfare recipients by easing their employment requirements, but this will not help the large percentage of women who bear financial responsibility for themselves and their families with no public assistance. Any equitable job-creation plan must provide for women as well as men by attending to the occupations in which women predominate. Today women make up 46 percent of the U.S. labor force, and they are almost as likely as men to be the principal supporters of their families. Currently over 70 percent of both married and single mothers hold jobs, earning money that is vital to paying mortgages and putting food on the table.
While women’s unemployment rates are slightly lower than men’s (5.9% vs. 7.2%), women tend to be less resilient than men in dealing with joblessness. In general, women’s incomes are still considerably lower than men’s. A child care worker, for example, earns on average $9.46 per hour, or $19,670 per year, while the average wage rate for a construction worker is $14.88 per hour, or $30,950 per year. Because women, are more likely to be employed in part-time and casualized occupations, they are less likely to be given severance packages and tend to have lower savings than men. This means, among other things, that they are less likely to be able to purchase COBRA plans to provide their families with health insurance until they find another job. (Over the past year, some 1.2 million children have lost health insurance as a result of parents’ unemployment.) With less of a financial cushion and fewer job prospects, women experience greater difficulty in dealing with the extended economic downturn.
Yet some in the Obama administration are using women’s lower rates of unemployment as a rationale for marginalizing them as they design plans for economic recovery. I am not suggesting that Obama and his team are deliberately excluding women from the recovery plan, but rather that they are not adequately considering women’s occupational patterns and skill sets, or the types of social services (such as child care and after-school programs) that women need to be satisfactorily employed.
According to members of the transition team, the plan contains multiple components. In addition to public works (the famous “pick and shovel” jobs), such as school construction and renovation as well as roads and bridges, it includes investments in energy-saving “green technology,” and in health care financing and reform. On a purely economic level, this makes good sense. With much of America’s heavy industry relocated offshore and the bulk of consumer goods arriving on container ships, it is clear that domestic manufacturing is not going to provide a path out of the current economic crisis. To be successful, a recovery plan must go beyond the country’s immediate needs to provide sustainable patterns for the future. It must, in other words, focus on jobs that cannot be outsourced, as well as those that open up new directions for economic growth. Obama’s proposals for infrastructure renewal as well as “green jobs” and health care reform clearly reflect these concerns.
But how well do they accommodate women’s need for employment? Some will say that all of these jobs should—and can—be open to women. This would be fine in principle, were it not for the fact that, despite several decades of efforts to train women for “non-traditional” employment and professions, very few are prepared to take up jobs in construction or engineering, the fields that are most likely to expand under the proposed plan. True, women may be trained to do such work in the future, but this will not help them in the short run.
The Benefits of a Pink and Green Recovery Plan
In order to provide women employment security, the recovery plan must directly focus on the fields in which women are currently concentrated, namely, health, education, and various forms of caring and service work—in other words, the types of work that are performed in the buildings to be built, or that are generated by increased employment in infrastructure creation. (It has been estimated that every job in construction spins off 1.6 jobs in service occupations of one kind or another.) Such jobs typically pay less than positions in male-dominated occupations, and many feature low wages, irregular hours and assignments, physical and mental stress, and few or no fringe benefits. Workers in occupations such as home health care are treated as independent contractors and denied basic rights such as paid sick days and paid vacations and holidays. All such work should be regularized and regulated
Federal investments in these fields would carry the double benefit of “doing well by doing good.” That is, they would not only provide employment for the jobless (primarily female), but they would also help to augment the nation’s social capital. Now is clearly an opportune moment for implementing worthy policy initiatives that have been stagnating for decades and implementing promising ideas of more recent vintage. With federal dollars, the U.S. could, for example, finally begin to approximate other advanced market democracies by offering affordable high-quality child care for working families and quality long-term care for the elderly, areas in which it has long lagged behind. Such programs are more urgently needed now than ever, as recent reports indicate that the recession has forced many families to forego both child and elder day care, leaving vulnerable people on their own, or in the care of others not able to provide adequately for them. At the same time, a socially oriented recovery plan could provide openings for new policy goals such as healthier school breakfast and lunch programs and nutritional information programs to accompany food stamps.
The area of education is one that lends itself particularly well to both fostering employment for women, and doing well by doing good, but the Obama administration must plan carefully in order to achieve these multiple goals. Investment in new or renovated school buildings will not directly help the majority of women, whereas investment in educational services will. Reducing class size, restoring arts, music, and physical education (programs that were being cut even before the current crisis), and adding new programs such as pre-school and child care can provide immediate employment for out-of-work teachers and teachers’ aides with appropriate training. Adding or upgrading cafeterias to include gardens, nutrition education, and “locovore” initiatives can open up new jobs, many of which would require only on-the-job training or associate degrees.
One obstacle that might slow down such investments is the structure of American governance, which relegates control of K-12 education to state and local bureaucracies, leaving little room for federal oversight. Yet state and local systems are seldom adverse to initiatives that bring federal funds into their coffers, and with budgets in crisis, they are hardly like to turn away new money. Congress may choose to channel funds through existing state bureaucracies or give them directly to local school systems if they encounter resistance. While the former may be more efficient, the latter would allow for greater flexibility and encourage greater program creativity.
At the same time, many policy experts, both feminist and otherwise, have warned that higher education is at great risk and called for direct injection of funds into state budgets to maintain these programs. Here again, such investments can achieve multiple goals. In the short term, they can reverse the outflow of jobs, reduction of incomes, and increased work loads that many state governments are currently implementing to offset budget shortfalls. Measures such as massive lay-offs, mandatory unpaid furlough days and/or higher teaching loads, and failure to replace retirees lower the quality of education and must be ended as quickly as possible. In the long term, infusions of federal funding could be used to add or augment existing training programs in early childhood and K-12 teaching—measures that would enhance the quality of education, not only for students in higher ed, but also for the students they will encounter once they themselves become teachers. Federal funds could also be used to provide stipends for trainees in the types of school-based or community food programs described above, and/or to defray tuition costs for community college degrees, many of which have immediate practical applications. (In conjunction with this, Congress should immediately restore TANF recipients’ right to pursue education, something that was summarily—and foolishly--stripped away when the program was implemented.) All of these initiatives could depend on federal funds as seed money, but eventually, assuming at least some degree of economic recovery, states and localities would be able to take over funding, and the jobs would become part of the nation’s permanent social capital infrastructure. At least at the outset, the federal government should exercise careful oversight and work to bring “best practices” to light, so that ideas can be shared across the country.
Similar opportunities—and impediments—face the Obama administration in other fields dominated by women, namely, health care, elder and child care, and care for those with disabilities. Because much more of this work tends to be privatized, women in these occupations are more likely to face poor working conditions, but for the same reason, it may be more difficult for the federal government to intervene. At least one model is, however, readily available, namely the more than seven thousand public health clinics currently treating more than 16 million Americans in underserved areas, many of them established, surprisingly, under the Bush administration. Widely recognized for their efficiency as well as the respect with which they treat patients, such clinics also offer excellent working conditions for employees. Other models for community and neighborhood care centers—whether for young children, the elderly, or the disabled—including satellite facilities offering support for home-based caregivers, may be found across the OECD countries.
Here, too, reforms will end up doing well by doing good, providing or improving jobs for women while augmenting social capital. With federal funds and oversight, it is much more likely that such goals will be reached. The need for investments in child care and health care for the young and those of working age is obvious: to create and maintain a productive labor force. For children, as the economist James Heckman has argued, early interventions such as high-quality child care and vigilant health care are key to offsetting the effects of poverty and social disadvantage and enabling them to become effective members of society. For all workers, but especially those who are parents, such provisions lower stress, absenteeism, and tardiness, leading to greater productivity. But the need for investments in elder care and care for those with disabilities should be equally obvious: to exemplify the values of mutual respect and responsibility among the members of our society and to demonstrate that no member need fear that she will lose her right to be treated with respect and dignity, no matter what her age, income, or condition.
Indeed, many if not most of the occupations in which women predominate not only provide them with employment but also contribute to the physical and mental well-being and productivity of the entire society. For years now, policymakers have been discussing ways to achieve “work-family balance” in order to reduce the stress involved in women’s responsibility for both wage-earning and caring for family members. Now is the time to establish, expand, and improve social services such as child and elder care which are essential if women are to gain the right to participate in the labor market on an equal basis with men without creating a “care deficit” in our society. In other words, we must begin to pay the true cost of caring work, much of which is now provided, unpaid, by American women.
Federal planning, funding, coordination, and regulation are the most rapid and efficient way to achieve this transformation. While investment in services may seem—indeed is—less concrete than investment in infrastructure or green technology, it is equally necessary at this moment in time, and the payoff in terms of human capital will be equally significant. Much of this type of reform can easily be coordinated with “pick and shovel” and green technology projects; officials should simply be required to do “gender impact assessments” of specific programs, as they now assess environmental impacts. Such assessments should consider the gender balance in the jobs required to complete the project and to run it once it is completed. If, for example, the bulk of the work needed to construct a child care center will be done by men but the services it offers will be provided by women, then the project will be in balance. (Note: both types of work should be regarded as of comparable work, and therefore receive equal compensation.) If the care services themselves benefit still other women workers, then the entire project might earn bonus “gender equity credit”—credit which could be traded, like carbon offsets.
Would this be a hard sell? I think not, if the Obama administration is willing to put its weight behind such investments. In the name of economic recovery, billions of dollars have already been poured into Wall Street vehicles, with negligible impact on the situations of average Americans, and now Congress is poised to pour in billions more. Surely Americans will respond positively to programs that promise not only to achieve gender equity (a goal that is, alas, still not a high priority for many) but also---probably more importantly--to improve their everyday lives and wellbeing.
Obama is, by all reports, preparing to ask for fresh infusions of funding to create new jobs and new programs. In recent days, his transition team has taken pains to register Americans’ views on health care reform, setting up thousands of community meetings, many of them aimed toward giving former campaign activists a voice in policy making. Similar efforts could and should be made to gather women’s views about their employment opportunities, working conditions, and the kinds of provisions they need to balance work and family obligations.
Perhaps such “listening tours” will provide valuable new information and policy ideas, but in my view they are useful as political tools—to mobilize support—than for shaping policy. To a great extent, we already know what needs to be done. Social services and provisions must be expanded, the cost to consumers of provisions like health care and child care must be reduced (child care, for example, currently costs from $4000 to $10,000 per child per year—close to half of an unskilled worker’s annual income), and compensation, benefits, and working conditions for those who provide the services must be substantially improved. A comprehensive approach to such initiatives—one that includes attention to those who provide as well as those who receive—can achieve all of these goals. Just as Social Security emerged from the ashes of the Great Depression, so gender equity and a new work-family configuration can emerge from the current crisis—social reforms that can set us on the right course for the rest of the 21st century.
Sonya Michel
Department of History
University of Maryland, College Park, USA
