Alice Kessler-Harris's A Woman's Wage
Milkman, Ruth
A WOMAN'S WAGE: HISTORICAL MEANINGS & SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES, by Alice Kessler-Harris. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990. 168 pp. $19.00. Historians of women were confronted with...
...In support of Sears's claim that, far from being victims of discrimination, women simply were not attracted to the highly paid commission sales jobs at issue in the case, Rosenberg testified that throughout American history women had shunned some types of work and preferred others...
...The gender gap in wages thus appears as a historical relic, and as it loses legitimacy, the gendered character of the wage becomes increasingly transparent...
...Equal pay for equal work was always a limited demand, however, since in a sex-segregated labor market few women perform work "equal" to that of men, except under the peculiar conditions of wartime...
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...Thus Kessler-Harris unequivocally rejects the simple opposition between cultural expectations and economic interests that was so pivotal in the legal construction of the Sears case...
...The wage participates in social custom and practice," she writes, highlighting specifically those customs and practices involving gender...
...Throughout, Kessler-Harris rejects the dichotomy between culture and "the economic" that was central to the Sears case...
...The debate between Rosenberg and KesslerHarris, perhaps inevitably given the courtroom setting, became a sharply polarized contest between a perspective emphasizing women's cultural values and one emphasizing their economic interests...
...In a pattern that has still not entirely disappeared, men were seen as entitled to a "family wage," that is, a wage sufficient for family support (although in reality pay levels fell short of this standard for many workingmen), while women's much lower wages were justified by the assumption that they were supplementary wage earners...
...The book's goal is to reveal "how gender is inscribed into the wage and how the wage helps to construct gendered expectations for both men and women...
...A product of Progressivism, such legislation was rooted in conceptions of gender difference that favored the family...
...While women were performing "men's jobs," ensuring that they received "men's pay" was in the interests of all: it protected male jobs and wage rates over the long term by removing the attraction of female substitution and it served the cause of gender equality...
...The reason so few women are found in such jobs, Kessler-Harris argued, is that employers have rarely offered them these opportunities...
...The situation changed once depression gave way to war...
...Today the popular conception of wage justice is focused on the individual and is explicitly gender neutral, undercutting any notion that the market can be relied upon to set wages in a just fashion...
...If support for intervention in the marketplace in the name of social justice redounded to women's benefit in the case of minimum wages, the opposite was true when it came to married women's right to work...
...For this volume is concerned with the complex interconnections between culture and economics as they shape women's workplace experience—precisely the connections that the Sears debate obscured...
...Drawing on letters women wrote to Franklin D. Roosevelt and to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, Kessler-Harris explores the conflict over this issue during the depression...
...Kessler-Harris examines the recent debate over women's wages generated by the campaign for "comparable worth," which goes beyond "equal pay for equal work" to question the basis for wage differentials between traditionally male and traditionally female jobs...
...here she focuses on the other side of this dynamic, showing how a phenomenon that appears to be narrowly economic—the wage—is itself a cultural and ideological construction...
...This challenge to gender inequality emerged against the background of rapid increases in labor force participation among married women and mothers and the resurgence of feminism, both of which have seriously eroded the family wage ideology...
...Although the Sears case is mentioned only briefly in the final chapter of Kessler-Harris's fine new book, in a sense it lurks behind every page...
...KesslerHarris takes up a question that is usually viewed in purely economic terms: the wages paid to women...
...Her earlier book, Out to Work (Oxford, 1982), exposed the ways in which cultural definitions of gender shifted over time in response to changing economic and political forces...
...In this same period, many states passed minimumwage legislation for women...
...Drawing on the notion of "women's culture," which stresses the distinctive values and cultural orientations women develop as a result of their social location, Rosenberg suggested that the sex-segregated pattern of employment at Sears could best be understood as the product of women's own choices...
...Kessler-Harris shows how the tension between individual women's rights to equality and men's right to a family wage dissolved during World War II under the banner of "equal pay for equal work...
...In a series of essays, each elucidating a distinct type of social struggle over the definition of the wage and its implications for women, the book 310 • DISSENT Books explores the changing historical context in which women's wages were shaped over the course of the twentieth century...
...Faced with this, the EEOC sought its own expert witness and found one in Alice Kessler-Harris, easily the nation's most prominent historian of women's labor...
...In 1984, defending itself against an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) lawsuit alleging systematic sex discrimination, Sears Roebuck, the world's largest retailer and the nation's largest private-sector employer of women, engaged historian Rosalind Rosenberg as an expert witness...
...Women began to challenge this assumption in the late 1910s and 1920s, motivated not so much by aspirations to equality with men as by new, individualistic needs and wants stimulated by the emergent culture of consumerism...
...The first chapter argues that wages in the early part of the century were based on explicitly gendered notions of economic need...
...In the context of high unemployment, the claim articulated by some married women to equal treatment as individuals in the labor market collided with the more popular counterclaim (even among women) that men should have priority—again in the name of family support...
...At the same time, as a form of state regulation of the market, minimum wages challenged the hegemony of the ideology of "freedom of contract" that had triumphed in the late nineteenth century...
...Now the same cultural assumptions used to justify women's lower wages were mobilized to protect women from superexploitation...
...After supporting minimum wages in the Progressive era, the courts turned against them in the 1920s, only to reverse course once again during the depression—now, however, endorsing a gender-neutral minimum for the first time...
...She shows the absurdity of seeing wages as purely marketdetermined, while simultaneously exposing the naiveté of accepting at face value (as Rosenberg's Sears testimony did) the cultural assumptions influencing economic behavior...
...Kessler-Harris's second chapter, an exercise in legal history, shows how court decisions about the minimum wage issue shifted with changing political tides...
...Kessler-Harris testified that, contrary to Rosenberg's claims, historically women have eagerly seized any opportunities to enter highly paid "men's" jobs...
...She argues that the "economic" processes shaping wage rates are deeply embedded in the larger society or, in other words, that economics and culture are inextricably intertwined...
...Historians of women were confronted with an unusual dilemma a few years ago, when their work became the object of impassioned debate in an unlikely forum: the courtroom...
Vol. 38 • April 1991 • No. 2
