Unbecoming Women

It is cliché to say that the Progressive Era (~1890-1920) was a period of great social change and adjustment to a new economic configuration, one based on the mass production and consumption of goods, built in large part by immigrants living in urban centers. However, like many oft-repeated phrases, there is truth behind it. One of the most important economic changes during this era was the increased presence of women in the wage-labor work force. 

As one can see from the excerpt above of a feature article in a 1913 Sunday edition of The San Francisco Call, there was great interest and scrutiny in the occupations women occupied in the early twentieth century. Writers of all political and social stripes tried to understand what this adjustment meant for American society. A division between female and male, private and public, home and work, “had become over the course of the antebellum period one of the most cherished truisms of American culture.” Women performed housework and raised children; men went to jobs in a factory or office. The supposedly natural division of labor between women and men, ingrained in the consciousness of white Americans over the course of the nineteenth century as the nation’s industrial revolution gained momentum, faced a challenge that raised many urgent questions.[1]  

If what it meant to be a woman, her character, naturally aligned with her function, what would be the consequence if that function changed? If women started earning an income outside the home, what would be the consequence for social order in a society that depended on her performing non-wage duties. The sexual division of labor–an economic arrangement closely aligned with the division of authority in society (i.e., patriarchy)–meant that the stakes could not have been higher.

The answers to these questions varied widely. However, there was a sense among most commentators that what “woman” meant was changing. There was a belief that they were “unbecoming women.” That is, the changes in their behavior were such that they could no longer be properly considered “women” in the way they had previously understood [2]. 

Perhaps the most dramatic conclusion along this line of reasoning was a belief that women would literally turn into men. “Are Womanly Women Doomed?” Henry T. Finck asked his readers in an article published in 1901 for the progressive weekly magazine The Independent. “It needs no argument,” he wrote, “to show that if women are to have the same education and ideals, the same employments, the same sports, the same political life, as the men, their thoughts and feelings, their tastes and manners, and even their features and figures, will gradually approximate those of the men” [3]. Quoting a professor from Rutgers Female College, Finck observed of the increasing numbers of women who attended college: “The young women lose their love for beauty and that development for personal taste which is a part of womanhood’s charm. They practice boyish manners and boyish mischief.” Such behavior, Finck argued, demonstrated “the loss of their feminine instincts” [4]. An instinct, of course, is not something one can lose in a single generation or moment in time and in this brief phrase one can see the classic Progressive elision of what was “natural” (or in today’s parlance “biological”) and what was social or learned. This conflation of the biological and social illustrates how writers of the period viewed and feared the connection between a woman’s social role and her nature, characteristics upon which American society was founded. 

A common analogy made by writers was with the “savages” of North America. “The womanly woman,” Finck thought, “is the antipode of the hard working, masculine-looking, early-aging savage woman” [5]. A marked difference in the sexual division of labor distinguished savages from Americans and thus clearly connected ideas about work with modernity and civilization. The “emancipation of woman,” which characterized modern civilization, Finck wrote in a separate article, really meant “her liberation from the masculine and masculinizing work she was formerly compelled to do.” Only “a lot of half-women” or “mostly mannish women…belong to what has been aptly called ‘the third sex,’” clamored for the “right” to work [6]. In fact, the threat to civilization working women posed was so profound, he agreed with those who thought that in another century, should current trends prevail, “human society will resemble an ant’s nest or a beehive,” with undifferentiated individuals [7]. With a hint of desperation, Finck proclaimed the modern woman “is the highest and latest product of civilization, and manly man will never allow her to retrograde into mannishness if he can help it” [8].

There were a number of pieces written by women that argued working women were not in danger of losing their “womanly nature” and, in fact, desperately desired to cling to their femininity. Similarly, other authors, also often female, believed that working made them better wives. Working prepared them to empathize with the difficulties a man faced in the world or gave them leverage to attract a mate on more equal footing. In a direct response to Henry Finck’s 1901 article, “Employments Unsuitable for Women,” Ida Husted Harper wrote that when women had a fulfilling occupation, it gave her “that greatest of blessings, freedom of choice in marriage.” Women still expected to marry, but when the “right man” made an offer. The satisfaction provided by a husband must rise to that provided by her occupation. Women still desired to marry, but working raised their expectations of what they should get out of the relationship and gave them the leverage to demand it. “Under these circumstances,” Harper explained, “the husband may feel infinitely more honored” because it was a relationship based on choice and satisfaction [9]. 

Other writers argued women must actually become more like men if they were to succeed in the working world. That world, after all, was masculine. Several newspaper columnists advised “business women,” a common reference to women who worked, to be selective in holding onto their feminine virtues in the workplace.

An underlying, if unstated, intention of many responses to the changes brought by an increase in the number of working women was an impulse to allay the fears that American society was collapsing as a result of changing gender roles. The changes may appear significant, they would admit, but they were necessary or even advantageous adjustments to a modern social and economic order. Nevertheless, the underlying social order remained undisturbed. In her defense of the right for all women to work, Harper tempered her claim by making another demand that sounded more akin to what contemporary back-to-home advocates wanted which was that “household service performed by the women of the family” be looked upon as a “wage-earning occupation, entitled to a fixed renumeration.” With such compensation, there would be “infinitely less desire on their part to engage in outside work.” Supporters of working women very rarely suggested a reevaluation of the gendered division of labor. However much things changed around the periphery, Harper believed that “as a rule, husband and wife should found a home to be supported by the joint labor of both, his without, hers within” [10] What "woman" meant to Harper had not changed all that much.

Although there was a tremendous range to the claims writers made about how working transformed a woman’s role, most writers believed it was a reversible trend, and as Harper demonstrated, it was desirable to do so. Even the U.S. Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau, an agency established during the Great War to regulate working conditions for women, viewed the employment of married women as a “problem” that would take care of itself if it were made “possible and usual for the normal married man to support his family according to a decent American standard of living” [11].

I intended this exercise to be brief warm-up or prospectus of sorts for a much longer discussion of “unbecoming women.” Unfortunately, it took much longer than I anticipated. (Admittedly, winter break must bear most of the responsibility for that.) But, I am not certain it accomplished what I hoped, which was a brief summary that would let me work out some of the possible angles and issues for a longer analysis. I struggled with brevity versus sufficient explanation. I also switched the “format” midway through. I intended it to be a “he said” [Finck] - “she said” [Harper] approach to highlight the various unbecoming angles. Harper wrote her article as a direct response to Finck’s second article “Employment Unsuitable.” However, Harper’s provided less material for the “unbecoming” topic and both of Finck’s articles were fantastic for it. 

In any event, I’m putting this one to bed and trying to move on. After all, I have forty pages due on Sunday and I do not even know how far behind I am at this point.

Image: “Weaker Sex Crowding Men in Hazardous Employments and Sports,” The San Francisco Call (February 2, 1913). The illustration features (from left to right), an elevated woman painting a pole, operating construction equipment, and a policewoman coming to the aid of a woman being accosted by two men at night. 

[1] Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), x. Boydston’s is the best account of this new normal and division of labor as a response to the nineteenth century’s industrial revolution. Although it is rightly called a “revolution,” it is not one that happened in the span of a few years, but over the course of the century, beginning with the textile mills in New England in the 1820s, but not reaching a fevered pitch until after the Civil War. 

[2] The title itself is taken from another book my teaching advisor spoke of by Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 

[3] Henry T. Finck, “Are Womanly Women Doomed?” The Independent 53, no. 2722 (January 31, 1901), 268.

[4] Finck, “Womanly Women,” 267.

[5] Finck, “Womanly Women,” 271.

[6] Henry T. Finck, “Employment Unsuitable for Women” The Independent 53, no. 2732 (April 11, 1901), 837; Finck, “Womanly Women,” 269.

[7] Finck, “Womanly Women,” 268.

[8] Finck, “Womanly Women,” 271.

[9] Ida Husted Harper, “Women Ought to Work,” The Independent 53, no. 2737 (May 16, 1901), 1124-25. 

[10] Harper, “Women Ought to Work,” 1127, 1125. 

[11] United States Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau, Married Women in Industry, Bulletin 38 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1924), 8.