Introduction

This anthology of Connecticut History Review articles on Connecticut women's history reveals women's multi-faceted experiences over the last two hundred and fifty years. This collection does not include all facets, but it is meant to review what we do know about Connecticut women's experiences and point to what research still needs to be done. From the nineteenth century to the present, women have been changed by social forces and have served as forces for change. The controversy centered around women's “proper” place in society, especially as the industrial economy developed in the 1800s, creating the modern “free market” economy and its waged workplace. Along with this debate came the question over a woman's political role in an emerging democratic polity.Nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of “Home and Work.” The national setting has attracted a large volume of studies on this topic, but there has been little research on Connecticut. The articles gathered here rely on this broader national story, but they delve into Connecticut examples to place women in their specific places and times. “Women have always worked,” stated the title of an important book on the modern women's movement. This perspective, connecting the private “Home” and public waged “Work,” summarized a new gendered view of the modern industrial economy, though the phrase also subverted that view. This generalization encompassed both an earlier era and a modern one in the European economic evolution. It evoked the “family economy,” a term used by anthropologists, economists, and historians to describe the broad ways in which families lived. In the early-modern European economy, home and work took place in the same space, where either agriculture or home-production occupied most of the population. The home space was a place of production as well as reproduction: work and home were combined. Women's contributions were complementary to men's and considered essential to family survival.1Entering the modern era of market capitalism and free trade, this picture became more complicated by the separation of work and home. Gender roles became differentiated. Historians have labeled this development as “Separate Spheres,” where male roles were supposed to be in the Work sphere, producing goods, and women's roles were in the Home sphere, raising families and caring for them. The Work sphere was “Public,” while the Home sphere was “Private.” The politics of the time reflected the distinction, with men accepted as active citizens and women and children left unwelcome. Repercussions followed for women's roles as public activists, since they were assumed to hold no public role in politics. So, up until the mid-nineteenth century, women's economic roles were circumscribed and their political roles in reform movements was controversial. This idea of Separate Spheres remains useful for understanding the evolution of Western women's history, even though not all women's circumstances fit the model, and the binary nature of the concept requires more flexibility and openness to diverse circumstances.These circumstances and roles changed in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as market-capitalism expanded the public world of work. Women now entered the public sphere of work as “wage-earners,” where they worked for employers outside the household. They worked for many reasons: to provide for themselves, to support a family, to add to a husband's income, to pursue a “career,” to contribute to their communities. There were many categories of “worker” during this era. Many early European immigrants had come to the Americas as indentured servants—un-free laborers who contracted for a limited time-period, generally seven years, to repay a debt (usually in exchange for their passage). And of course, this “wage-earner” model does not fit the experiences of enslaved peoples in the Americas, where Africans (and some Indigenous peoples) were captured and sold in American markets and where both men and women were put to work in agricultural settings and occasionally in domestic work. The enslaved were not part of the wage-work system, except when they were hired out by their enslavers to work for someone else. Their masters received the “wages” that the enslaved earned. Enslaved people's situation changed at the end of the Civil War, when slavery was abolished. But freed African Americans gained “nothing but their freedom,” since they were not given the means to carry on with farming in the South and were circumscribed by Black Codes and then Jim Crow laws that limited their economic freedom. Their movement into Northern cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fleeing Southern oppression, was met by racially charged social and economic limitations.2The waged workforce was mostly the world of the new working class in the nineteenth century, where the family economy still needed many contributors to the family purse. In this era, working-class women's wage work was part of a life-course that also included marriage, housekeeping, childbirth, and childrearing, all prescribed by traditional gender roles. Thus, single teenage girls went off to work outside of their home, hired in domestic service or in the new textile mills and other factories only for a certain period of time, earning money to give to their parents. Teenage boys, by contrast, were able to keep a portion of their wages for themselves. After this work stage, girls expected to marry and work in the Home sphere raising their own families. Only later in life, if their family's economic circumstances faltered, if their husband was injured or died or if they had been abandoned, would wives re-enter the waged workforce.Certainly, women were central to the family's existence and material prosperity. In the new textile factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, farmers’ daughters were targeted for employment by mill agents who searched rural areas for recruits in the 1820s through the 1840s. Mill agents were exploiting Yankee farmers’ circumstances, when New England farms were unable to produce all the income needed to sustain large families. Placing a daughter in the mills meant one less mouth to feed and more income for the family unit. This “Lowell system” worked in some Connecticut towns as well, though many Connecticut textile mills used the “Rhode Island system” of recruiting entire immigrant families, mostly Irish, to their workforces in the 1840s and afterwards.3American and immigrant white women slowly filled the new factory jobs that were becoming available in many industries, where they were generally only allowed in women-labeled jobs that did not require extensive training. Key industries employing women in the late nineteenth century listed domestic service, garments, and textiles as their top waged employment. Although by the late nineteenth century Connecticut law prohibited children under fourteen from working in factories, the law was easily evaded. The Connecticut Department of Labor interviewed a garment worker in 1912: I am eighteen. I am a Russian Jew, and have been working for seven years. For three, I have worked here and for the rest at home. I can make pants as good as any man. . . . I get $6 [a week], I give it all to my father. . . . We have five working in our family, there are eleven children besides.4Moreover, wives often supplemented the family budget by taking in boarders, or by taking in piecework (called “home-work”) from local factories, usually helped by the children at home.The expansion of the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in more clerical and retail jobs, which American-born young women filled. Nevertheless, from 1900 to 1920, the average “working girl” was unmarried, aged sixteen to twenty-four, and from an immigrant family, either foreign-born or American-born of foreign parents. The largest number of working women were domestic servants, a statistic that held true for most of the nineteenth century and until the 1920 Census.World War I briefly altered this picture, especially in Connecticut as a munitions state, where women were recruited into new semi-skilled factory jobs. Many metal-working shops around the state began making war goods, none more important than in the city of Bridgeport. By summer 1915, Bridgeport was producing two-thirds of all small arms and ammunition used in the European war theater.5 The Bridgeport labor movement became reinvigorated by the booming economy and re-introduced the demand for the 8-hour day, which in summer 1915 meant a 48-hour work week since Saturday was a full working day. Strikes in Bridgeport during summer 1915, demanding the 8-hour day and union recognition, captured national attention and included workers from all industries and all ethnic groups, among them non-munitions factories like the Warner Corset Company with its mostly female labor force. The strikes were settled by wage increases and an end to irksome management rules and fines, but only the established American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions won contracts with the 8-hour day and union recognition.In 1917, Bridgeport employers began bragging that teachers and nurses were moving from their professional jobs to factory war-work because the pay was better. Women were met with hostility by many skilled male metalworkers because women were introduced as semi-skilled machine tenders, jobs created by management's new production methods that undercut skilled labor. Nonetheless, the Bridgeport labor movement, led by the International Association of Machinists (IAM), sometimes welcomed women into their movement. The IAM, which organized all metal workers including women during the war years, establishing a Women's Lodge for these new members. These women machinists even participated in the Washington DC suffrage demonstrations in 1919. Similar, if less dramatic, examples existed elsewhere in the state, as wartime was good for the Connecticut economy. But women were removed from this industrial work when the war ended, and war jobs vanished.6The new “middle class” of professional and businessmen's families defined the “family economy” in a different way from the working class. For them, only the adult male was to be the breadwinner; no other family member worked for wages. This expanding economic class reinforced the ideology of “Separate Spheres.” Nonetheless, a small but highly visible number of college-educated women defied this trend by entering the professions and creating new roles such as social worker and librarian. Some women of the middle and upper classes participated in public activity as social reformers. The Settlement House movement, launched by Jane Addams in her Chicago Hull House project in 1889, sought to serve working-class and immigrant families through social services and education in American ways. Addams particularly wanted to highlight immigrant women's merits to their own families and to the broader society. Reform-minded women in the Consumers League, founded in 1899, lobbied for safe products and safe working conditions for the mostly female workforce in consumer products. This included support of women wage workers in the Progressive Era, as these middle-class reformers were first alarmed by the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in NYC and then invigorated by the new labor movement of the World War I era. They also participated in the woman's suffrage campaign, as Part II of this anthology underscores. However, wage-earning women often resented reformers’ moralizing and attempts to inculcate middle-class decorum in working-class women.7After World War I, the general work pattern changed, when women's employment expanded along with the economy as retail and clerical work increased. Married women began entering the waged workforce once their children reached school-age. Mothers replaced daughters in the waged workforce if their family circumstances called for it. Both boys and girls were encouraged to complete their high-school education.The Great Depression in the 1930s changed this dynamic, as all working-class families competed for work. As one example, in New Haven, families interviewed by Yale economist E. Wight Bakke, described their family circumstances.Unfortunately, many working-class boys and girls did leave school to help their families. In addition, married women in the waged workforce were often harshly treated as if they were taking a job away from a man, who presumably had a family to support. As one example, married women were dismissed from the federal payroll if their husbands held a federal job.The Depression reinforced the traditional view of Separate Spheres, where the waged workforce was still considered a male domain. Nonetheless, the 1930 Census noted that 23 percent of working women in Connecticut were married. Office work now claimed 25 percent of working women, while 14 percent were professionals, many of whom were teachers and nurses.9 The rise of run-away sweatshops from New York City into Connecticut provided jobs for some women and children, reversing years of protective labor legislation, until the state government cracked down on the practice in 1931–32. New Deal initiatives for employment, such as Works Progress Administration (WPA) jobs, were normally geared toward male occupations like construction, until women's groups pressured the federal government for “women's jobs.” Garment shops were then set up for unemployed women, as was the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Arts Project, and the Federal Theatre Program for unemployed teachers and artists.10World War II altered this pattern, as adult women were urged to enter the waged workforce to assist the war effort, often in jobs that had previously been male only. These new women workers were labeled “Rosie the Riveter.” Women, both Black and white, were now being trained for and hired for factory jobs that paid better wages and gave working women a taste of a man's wage. Federal contracts now mandated equal pay for equal work, a forty-hour work week, with time-and-a-half for overtime, and a National War Labor Board that oversaw union representation. This result of the New Deal-era 1935 National Labor Relations Act was expanded to meet the war emergency. Black women and men were aided by protests by Black unionists and community leaders, followed by President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which forbade discrimination based on race in hiring for companies with federal contracts. For many, especially Black women who were rarely hired in factories, this was the first time they were hired into industrial jobs, with a significant increase in pay.Even though there was still a significant pay gap, this better economic position of the female labor force did not continue at war's end. Women were laid off from their war jobs, first as part of a general slowdown in production, but then to give jobs to returning veterans. Public opinion generally approved of this mass firing, reinforcing the traditional gender assumptions that men were the chief breadwinners in the family. Gender labels for jobs had remained unchanged. Nonetheless, women's participation in the waged workforce grew larger in the post-war period. The clerical and sales economic sectors expanded, along with the rise of professional employment. A larger percentage of Connecticut women participated in the waged workforce than the national average throughout the twentieth century.This question of women's place in the waged workforce has been a significant issue in the post-World War II era, as many more women now work. Yet employed married women have consistently done more of the childcare and housework than their employed husbands, raised consciousness about the “double-day” or “second shift,” as it was called during the 1960s and 1970s by second-wave feminists. Economist Claudia Goldin, in her recent survey on college-educated women over the course of the twentieth century, documented the now-familiar pattern of women choosing to marry and have children later so they could pursue careers. This pattern does not always hold for less-educated women, whose work path typically does not include careers and subsequent life choices. Table 1 above does not differentiate among women from different economic levels. Goldin's comments on workforce changes during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020–21 made clear that childcare needed to become a community responsibility, as has happened in such European countries as Denmark, France, and Sweden, where care-work is heavily subsidized by the government.11 The debate continues. The articles in Part I range from the late nineteenth century to the First World War. The section begins with the 2011 ASCH conference keynote address by history professor Barbara Sicherman, who highlights women's activism in Connecticut and the national women's rights movement. She describes Connecticut events that have not gotten significant scholarly attention, though they reveal much about women's position over time. These events point out the limitations of women's rights in society along with the demand for meaningful public roles and representation for women. Her footnotes cite many important foundational books in the field of U.S. women's history.The second article, by Claudia Clark, places women squarely in the industrial world in the early twentieth century, where they were exposed to deadly radium through paint used on luminous dials on watches in Waterbury. Aided by middle-class reform women in the Consumers League, dial-painters struggled to have their symptoms recognized as an industrial disease. Their experience represents an important chapter in the history of modern health and labor policy. Here was the origin of the “industrial hygiene” movement dealing with workplace safety, broadened to eliminate dangerous working conditions for both men and women.The final two articles, the first by archivist Toby A. Appel and the second co-authored by historian Heather Munro Prescott and Appel, explore the professional women's world, where women trained as physicians. Until the early twentieth century, women were mostly trained in homeopathic hospitals, where medical knowledge a to with the emerging medical field of which was labeled more and Nonetheless, women as the final women provided service during World War Women's of were in by the war's as more men's medical their to women. For example, women had been as to Yale of in New in They had to work male in the However, their movement into war work was met with many and with the American who wanted to all medical of war work. Thus, women took up the on the home for male who had left for the European war women a significant role in the development of public health services in the during this of these articles the of economic roles that women in they do not differentiate generally by class or by race or immigrant they at what be in