Abstract
Ruth Milkman’s lifetime work of interrogating the contexts of women’s paid labor offers a necessary corrective to popular notions that feminists’ economic struggles for parity in the workforce are no longer necessary. While Milkman’s essays in this ambitious collection do highlight some areas of progress and hope for continuation along those lines, she also notes that rising tides for professional (mostly white) women have not lifted the economic boats of all women, especially those of women of color. The basis for that claim is carefully built across decades of analysis of large population data sets, starting with a look at women’s labor force participation in the emerging manufacturing and auto industry of the early 20th century and tracing women’s paid work through the Great Depression, World War II (WWII), postwar, and through the second wave of feminisms, and ending with an examination comparing the impacts of the Great Recession and the Depression on women’s livelihoods.
Milkman is a feminist sociologist who “came of age” in the second wave of feminisms and claims socialist feminism as the ideological starting point that compelled her to interrogate the intersections of the intertwined processes of class and gender inequalities. In the Introduction, Milkman offers a succinct peek into her intellectual development; she started out with a hypothesis about women as a “reserve army of labor” who were easy to dismiss from the labor force, only to be contradicted by the data that men were more likely to lose their jobs during the Depression than women. “As my own empirical research revealed that the hypothesis I had begun with was totally incorrect, I realized that being ‘wrong’ was precisely what could lead to new insights” (p. 4). This is a wonderfully humble slice of reflexivity indicating the quality and rigor of the research and highlights an experience I would wish for all embarking on a research career.
Each essay offers carefully argued and developed insights. For those who love history, Milkman’s careful examination of craft versus industrial unions exposes how unions could help or hurt the cause of women as workers, depending on their strategies of organizing workers. Most of us are familiar with the WWII era, government-sponsored strategies to increase women’s paid employment in war-related industries. But Milkman takes the analysis further by showing us how management in these industries titled women’s jobs differently in order to maintain sex segregation in the labor force, as well as to make it easier to dismiss women from those jobs in order to hire returning veterans after the war. Importantly, Milkman’s analysis of the labor data shows that there were enough jobs for women and men and that the fear-based argument that keeping women employed would increase unemployment for returning vets was without basis.
Milkman brings us into the present with a sharp comparison of the impacts of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women’s economic status. In both eras, birth, marriage and divorce rates fall, and men have higher unemployment rates than women. But in the wake of the Great Recession, when women are the majority of paid workers, there is no backlash against women workers as there was in the 1930s as women’s paid work is, in the 21st century, considered normative. After the Great Depression, though, what followed is sometimes called the Great Compression, as New Deal policies and rising unionization led to diminishing income inequality. There was no such compression after the Great Recession; instead, Milkman shows us that market fundamentalism, or deregulation, has led to greater income inequality, particularly among women. While the gender wage gap seems to be narrowing, much of that is due to the relative decline in men’s wages, rather than overall increases in women’s wages. The result, notes Milkman, is that there is growing inequality among women as workers, with mostly white, educated women benefiting from growth in professional opportunities, and mostly women of color at the low-wage end of the economy. When combined with endogamy, the tendency to choose partners from within one’s class background, these opportunity differences help fuel growing household economic inequality.
Milkman’s work should spur social workers to tackle major social issues, such as intergenerational poverty and extreme income inequality, through careful empirical examination of existing data, and to use the findings to inform social policy, as well as grass-roots organizing, to intervene.