An Outline, of Sorts
Preface
This is the second time I am starting this entry because I just experienced an all-too-familiar tragedy for writers in the digital age: an app crash that loses all of one’s hard work from the past thirty-plus minutes. So instead of waking up at 5:15am, I could have just awoken at 6:15am and ended up in the same place. A hard lesson learned there: don’t draft in Safari. Back to our regularly scheduled program.
A change of plans. I suggested in my previous post that I would write up an analysis (or description) of the California Industrial Farm [for delinquent women] I recently encountered. However, I think it makes sense to follow up a bit more on what I wrote in that previous post on where I am with my research. (This is also helpful preparation for my next writer’s club meeting Wednesday.) After going through my research notes–I have nearly 300 pages with more than 125,000 words of primary source research notes–I came up with several important topics:
The first one will not be a surprise to anyone familiar with the Progressive Era: vice. Vice meant anything that did not conform to expected, perhaps traditional, middle-class ideals of behavior. This meant activities like dancing, drinking in public, and partaking in a variety of newfangled commercial leisures such as the moving picture shows, commonly called nickelodeons. A further multiplier of Progressive angst over these issues came because they were usually mixed-sex crowds. The reforming, respectable class seems obsessed with “vice” in the literature I have encountered.
This does raise the question about whether my source base is such that I am more likely to read about the efforts to end urban vice and thus have a distorted view of its importance or whether it really was a national obsession the way terrorism is today, for example. The topic of vice is certainly one that has been well-covered by historians of any subject on the era because of its connection to the types of reform for which progressives are so well-known. (That type of reform meaning college-educated professionals, sometimes working as members of social welfare organizations, advocating for state intervention based on some modern, moral imperative and the latest sociological study.) It is also true, however, that the topic of vice reappears with such frequency in my sources because of my subjects: working women. I have found that working women commonly appeared in the historical record for two reasons: when they were in trouble (e.g., police and newspaper reports) or when they were dead (e.g., coroner’s reports).
One of the questions that guides my inquiry into the relationship between working women and vice is when and why was it dis/advantageous for women to be involved in vice occupations. Admittedly, this question is a bit sophomoric, but certainly the tension between the exploitation of women in a sexualized industry (sex was never very far from progressive concerns about everything but especially vice) and the reports of how well they were paid cannot be ignored. Related to this question is also the clear existence of an “informal economy,” a concept that I have seen over and over again in my studies of women and gender. The description of the work women performed in San Francisco’s notorious Barbary Coast coincides with many other examples if various places and times.[1] An important component of my “argument” is the ways in which San Francisco’s transition from the “topsy-turvy” order of society in the nineteenth century to the modern, industrial, hierarchical world of the post-earthquake decades and the elimination of the informal economy seems to be a part of this transition.[2]
Two final points I would make about vice and working women: First, I suspect there was a connection between the presence of liquor- and sex-related vice in S.F. and the inordinate power of organized labor in the city. Until the 1920s, San Francisco’s sex ratio skewed heavily male and in a city where unions maintained “undisputed sway,” many men had disposable income to spend on vice. There may also be a connection between the political power of organized labor and the inability for the reforming class to make any lasting headway (particularly over the question of prostitution) until the balance of state power shifted away from San Francisco and anti-vice measure began to pass at the state level.[3]
My second point addresses the deep historical literature on vice during the Progressive Era. Whether or not I encounter this topic because of my particular interests, it certainly was a mainstay of Progressive concerns and the primary sources on it are easy pickings. Its coverage by other historians has caused me a great deal of grief because, obviously, I cannot simply replicate what others have written. However, what I hope my contribution (or angle) will be is my concerted attention on the working women rather than the reforming class, which is where most historians are led by the sources available. And it is easy to see why. One out of one hundred annual reports by organizations that reach out to working women actually include details about working women. Most of the ink spilled in the pages of these reports is self-congratulatory drivel or soliloquies on the nature of the problem they think they are solving and the benefits to humanity for the solutions they offer. I console myself on my slow progress by keeping the difficult nature of this focus in mind.
A second topic that floated to the top of my notes is the relationship between California and working women. I have tried to maintain a steady focus on San Francisco issues but California’s part in this story is not easy to ignore. For one, because of San Francisco’s political and economic prominence in the state, until the 1910s and 1920s, the two interests (city and state) were often coterminous. However, that begins to change halfway through my time period (1906-1936). The transition of S.F.’s first- to second-class status is nicely illustrated by women’s suffrage. “California” rejected women’s suffrage in 1896 due to the overwhelming opposition by San Francisco voters. However, it passed in 1911, again despite the city’s vote, due to the growth of Los Angeles and rural counties. San Francisco legislators lost the power to dictate policy and the interests of the wider state gained a political voice.
A second factor that supports looking at the wider view of California’s relationship to working women was the growth of state agencies dealing with employment issues. The state legislature created the Industrial Welfare Commission in 1913 as part of a minimum wage bill to study and propose wage rates for female workers. The Commission of Immigration and Housing of California, also established by the state legislature in 1913, stated “In its most fundamental aspect, the problem of immigration is almost identical with that of employment”; the Bureau of Labor Statistics; and the State Board of Charity and Corrections, are but a a few of the agencies that grew with the state during this period.[4] California led the nation in labor laws for women and according to an article in the progressive periodical Outlook, California Governor Hiram Johnson ordered an inquiry into the wages paid to male and female state workers and demanded a path to parity.[5] In other words, there may be benefits in terms of the quantity and relevance of information available by expanding my focus to include California.
A third topic, which I have to admit, I found very intriguing but cannot figure out the proper way to discuss is what I am calling “views on” working women. The newness of the phenomenon of working women–and, by “new” I mean working for wages in an occupation that paid by the hour–led almost every writer who dealt with it in a different direction. Ideas about what “working woman” meant were ambiguous at best. (One common hope among many of them was that it was a problem that could be solved and not an inevitable social shift. The best example I have found so far comes from the U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau, an agency established after the Great War to represent female workers’ interests. In a bulletin published in 1924, Married Women in Industry, they offered a solution to “the problem of married women in industry…Make it possible and usual for the normal married man to support his family according to a decent American standard of living, and we shall find that the problem of the employment of married women is taking care of itself.”[6]
Some writers tried to understand why women worked: did they do it because they had to, because they desired the power that accompanied a pay envelope, or because they desired the latest consumer fashions? This question of “why” often overlapped with ideas about “modernity.” Was this the future and was it desirable (particularly with respect to the consumer aspects of modern life)? Other writers examined how working altered conceptions of femininity and the female sphere. Some commentators argued women would literally become men after several generations of working. Again, there are connections to modernity here in that writers equated the presence of working women to primitive societies and domestic women to civilization. Others argued that working represented a sacrifice on the part of women and therefore it was the most feminine character imaginable.
This topic on the views of working women seems to be the most appropriate place to incorporate a deliberate discussion of the Progressive Era. (It’s weird, I know, but if there is one thing the world does not need it is another historian of the Progressive Era so I have been trying to conceive of my topic without tying it inextricably to an analysis of Progressivism.) Progressive-era reformers were the main constituents of the anti-vice campaigns that viewed women as either the victims or perpetrators of vice. They were the driving force behind new public health initiatives that targeted working women habits. And, of course, there were a plethora of working women clubs formed and funded by the respectable, reforming class. In all of these issues, the writers, politicians, and civic do-gooders had a view on what the growing presence of women who worked meant that was informed by Progressive-era culture.
A fourth and final topic, which is perhaps an overarching topic, that weaves through all of the aforementioned is the relationship between working women and the justice system. San Francisco established a Woman’s Court in 1916, which nominally was meant to recognize the needs and offenses of women were different than men. (It may also signal an increase in the presence of women in the criminal justice system, but I am not certain.) This was the era of changing community property and age of majority laws, spurred by politically-active and vote-armed women.
In a larger sense, I have also been intrigued by the question of the relationship between the justice system and minority rights. To what extent do courts (in particular) led public opinion in granting disadvantaged groups civil rights? There is one anecdote I always come back to in my mind as I contemplate this question. In 1909, or thereabouts, one of the many, many attempts to shut down dance halls and dives in the Barbary Coast gained momentum and threatened the lucrative livelihoods of hundreds of “dance hall girls.” The workers quickly organized into an ad hoc interest group and petitioned the Police Commission, the Board of Supervisors, and Mayor but received no satisfaction. However, only after they filed a motion with the court for an injunction against the pending Police Commission action (which was based on a poorly supported Grand Jury report), did they receive justice.
As you can see, nearly two thousand words later, I have some ideas but not much of a project or an argument. In fact, even titling this entry as an outline is an unwarranted stretch. More a loose grouping of similar-ish ideas.
Now back to that write-up of the California Industrial Farm. And don’t forget the series of write ups on my summer session class I promised last month.
[1] Two prominent examples that discuss working women and an informal economy include Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001) and Luise White, The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
[2] An observer in 1855 described the city in this way: “The great recognized orders of society were tumbled topsy-turvy…all things seemed in the utmost disorder.” John H. Gihon, and James Nisbet, The Annals of San Francisco (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1855), 246. Edith Sparks makes an important argument about this transition for business-owning women in Edith Sparks, Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). This idea of a transition to a more hierarchical society has been richly informed by Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007).
[3] Ray Stannard Baker, “What is Happening in San Francisco Where Unionism Holds Undisputed Sway,” McClure’s Magazine 22 (February 1904): 366-78.
[4] California, Commission of Immigration and Housing, Report on Unemployment (San Francisco: State Printing Office, 1914), 5.
[5] “State Affairs,” The California Outlook 14, no. 14 (March 29, 1913), 10.
[6] United States, Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Married Women in Industry, Bulletin 38 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1924), 8.