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Women in the Utah Work Force from Statehood to World War II
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 50, 1982, No. 2
Women in the Utah Work Force from Statehood to World War II
BY MIRIAM B. MURPHY
IN THE EARLY 1900S CHARLES O. HARRIS of the Utah Independent Telephone Company visited the Maxfield homestead in Big Cottonwood Canyon. He asked two daughters of the house if they would be interested in working for the new venture. The girls' father was outraged: "No daughter of mine will ever be a telephone operator. Most of them are nothing but little hussies." As the chagrined Harris quickly explained to his host, such a notion was incorrect. The Independent was looking for "good girls." Lois and Josie Ellen Maxfield were surely that, and, more to the point, they were experienced workers eager to learn new skills. Like so many young women of their time, they had labored not only at home but as poorly paid domestics in the homes of others. With their father's worst fears allayed, the two sisters—one just in her middle teens —went to work in Salt Lake City for the promising, but short-lived, competition to the Bell System.
Utah's capital was a growing, bustling city of about a hundred thousand in the first decade of the twentieth century. Probably many a parent shared R. D. Maxfield's anxiety about letting daughters, especially, work there. However sheltered their lives may have been, the two sisters soon became street wise. The UITC offices were on State Street near the old police headquarters and no more than a silver dollar's throw from the heart of Salt Lake City's red light district. The young women saw policemen drag prostitutes by the hair of the head into the station for booking. They knew something of the patrons of Regent Street, too— pillars of the community, many of them. These men would telephone from one of the notorious hangouts to ask the young operators to call home for them: "Tell my wife I've been detained at the Alta Club." Such experiences neither tempted the Maxfield girls nor made them cynical. Rather, they learned to cope in a complex, changing world where good and evil continually contend.
In 1909 the younger girl accepted a job offer from John E. Clark, manager of the Lyric Theatre, to work as a cashier. Clark cautioned twenty-year-old Josie Maxfield not to engage in any conversation with male patrons of the silent movie palace. She never doubted the wisdom of this warning. A year later, in pursuit of better wages and working conditions, she started to clerk at a dental and surgical supply house. After two years and the disappointment of seeing another, less experienced girl promoted ahead of her, she decided to move on.
About that time, the Independent folded, and both Lois and Josie Maxfield began new careers as saleswomen for the city's leading department stores. Employment there was not necessarily safer — one store owner had a reputation as a womanizer, and a buyer for another firm was deeply involved in a complex thievery plot. Despite these perils, the two women succeeded at their new line of work and rose in the retailing hierarchy. They married in 1919, and having no children continued their careers. Fortunately for their many relatives, the two women and their husbands remained employed steadily throughout the depression years. They continued busily at work in their own restaurant-resort enterprise as World War II ushered in a period of prosperity and different opportunities for working women.
There is something very typical about the experiences of the Maxfield sisters and something less typical as well. These young women went to work originally out of necessity. Their parents were not wealthy, nor even middle class, and children from such families were expected to shoulder some of the economic burden. Not until 1919 was compulsory school attendance through high school in effect in Utah. Working children were hardly exceptional. Compiled employment statistics through at least the 1930 census include persons ten years of age and older.
Paid housework brought the girls their first pay. That seems typical of the times. Domestic help was the most frequently advertised need in the female help wanted columns of the newspapers. But when other, more lucrative opportunities came along, the Maxfield sisters and their peers were quick to seize the bright ring of bigger paychecks and better hours and working conditions. The positions they filled were typical — telephone operator, clerk, saleswoman, and occasionally department head or assistant buyer. Only their eventual leap into the employer class near the beginning of World War II was atypical.
They encountered, or at least were made very aware of, sexual harassment on the job. That, too, was a fairly common experience, one of the hazards of employment for women.
Their paychecks helped to support ailing parents and relatives laid off work during the depression. Other women in Utah were also breadwinners. Coming from a large family, the sisters were unusual in having no children themselves. That would undoubtedly have changed their employment pattern as it did for most women of that time.
It is a temptation for researchers in Utah history to look for the unique, the unusual, indeed, for the "peculiar." One can resist that temptation in studying working women. Utahns generally fit into the statistical pattern for working women in the United States and varied only slightly from the norm, as did the Intermountain region, to the extent that the area was less heavily industrialized than other sections of the country and therefore provided fewer job opportunities.
There is a popular song — written in 1909 — titled "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl." Heaven certainly seems to have favored the Maxfield sisters during their working years. But other forces also attempted to protect working women or advance their cause. During the 1895 constitutional convention in Salt Lake City several rather fascinating events occurred. To begin with, on March 12 the question arose of who would win the coveted position of convention clerk. Miss B. T. MacMasters and Miss Henrietta Clark were among the women nominated along with several men. George M. Cannon, who was to prove the champion spokesman for women at this all-male convention, came out strongly for MacMasters: "... She is perfectly capable of doing the work required, and... we will by this means give representation to the fair sex." Forwarding the skills of Clark was delegate David Evans who, with truth but no gentlemanly class, said: "She is thoroughly competent, I understand, and that will recognize the sex, as she is willing to work cheap. She is an honest lady devoted to her work and does not seem to be very much devoted to the gentlemen around her." The backhanded compliments notwithstanding, according to the Deseret News, MacMasters and Clark won the day and were "employed after a . . . rather unparliamentary set-to lasting fully an hour." The two women were exuberant about their employment as convention clerks and saw it as a "good omen."
Two delegates, George B. Squires and Samuel R. Thurman, contested for the title of "uncompromising champion of the fair sex," with Squires claiming to be "in favor of woman having whatever she wants in this world." Despite the good Squires's claim, however, to George M. Cannon goes the credit for espousing several revolutionary ideas. On March 15, 1895, he introduced to the convention a proposition that would prohibit any organization from discriminating against a person on the basis of sex in "acquiring knowledge of any trade or profession" or in limiting the number of persons of each sex that could be employed in a given field. What a blow that might have been to some unions and professional organizations had it been approved.
The defeat of this measure did not stop Cannon from introducing another, more controversial concept — equal pay for equal work. In a most eloquent, but nonetheless futile, plea, he proclaimed:
Needless to say, Cannon's fellow delegates did not concur. One claimed the measure would interfere with the rights of citizens to make contracts, another that it brought women down to the level of men, a third that it was an impossible task, wages being subject to supply and demand.
Women did achieve some gains in the new state constitution, however. Chiefly, they regained the right to vote that had been taken away from them in 1887 by the Edmunds-Tucker Act. And subsequent sessions of the state legislature also dealt with the problems of working women. Frequently, the legislation enacted in the early twentieth century limited the scope of female employment and often lumped adult women and children under a certain age together, as if they had similar needs. For example, women, along with children under the age of fourteen, were prohibited by the constitution from working in underground mines. Other statutes and local ordinances enacted in the period between statehood and World War I forbade the employment of women in saloons at any time or their hire as musicians in dance halls, public gardens, railroad cars, steamboats, and other such spots. Nor were women to be hired as dancers except for legitimate theatre performances. Women under twenty-one could not work where alcoholic beverages were made or dispensed, and girls under sixteen were forbidden to sell newspapers or other merchandise on the streets or in public places. Finally, employment agencies were warned not to send females to find work at any place of bad repute.
Of greater potential consequence to women, other state laws of that time provided for uniform compensation for female and male public schoolteachers, limited the hours women could work on a daily and weekly basis, established minimum wages for female employees, and instructed businessmen employing women as clerks to provide chairs or other seats for them.
But, as Elise Boulding has pointed out, "A description of the life of women in any society today, from tribal to industrial, based exclusively on a reading of law codes, would be most misleading." Certainly one would be misled by the 1896 law providing equal pay for female and male public schoolteachers. The Utah Education Association has detailed the failure of local school boards to comply.
One result of these rather shocking disparities was high teacher turnover. As the UEA was to ask: Why should a woman prepare herself to teach at a salary of $60 to $85 a month for ten months when a short course at a business college would give her access to jobs paying from $75 to $125 a month the year around, including a two-week paid vacation. Despite continuing efforts by the UEA to boost teacher salaries, little was accomplished. During the 1930-31 school year the average male high school teacher received a salary more than 50 percent higher than the average woman teacher in an elementary school. The following year salaries for both women and men were reduced and teaching loads increased because of the depression.
Besides their generally lower pay, women teachers were saddled with another handicap that cut short their careers and effectively kept them from working toward higher-paying supervisory positions. Most school districts fired women teachers who married. Some women deeply resented this, and some women kept their marriage a secret as long as they could in order to continue working.
Comprehensive data on working women are found in census reports for the years 1900 to 1940. The statistics reveal what kinds of jobs women had and where, as well as age, marital status, and race or national origin. Charts also compare the number of women and men employed in the same occupation. Several generalizations may be made from this data.
First, women have been employed nationally in almost every occupation defined by the census. However, too much should not be made of this, for in the main most women have worked at jobs where they predominated and men were in the minority; and, likewise, men have predominated in jobs where women were in the minority. In the 1900 census, for example, one can find 14 women miners (presumably not underground miners) in Utah but 6,629 men and in nursing 14 men but 452 women. Although such anomalies teach us the dangers of stereotyping the sexes, they are of little consequence satistically. Nevertheless, as one analyst in the 1920s put it, "It is by no means certain that women have as yet filled the place they will ultimately occupy in the industrial world."
Second, in some job classifications women and men continued to be employed in fairly large — but not necessarily equal — numbers. Teaching was one such occupation. In 1900 there were 1,040 female teachers and 648 male teachers in Utah. By 1930 their numbers had increased to 3,649 females and 1,556 males. The job of waitress or waiter was another that consistently attracted both women and men.
Third, some employment categories in which one sex was well established in 1900 became overwhelmingly dominated by the opposite sex. For instance, at the turn of the century in Utah 40 percent of the stenographers were men. By 1930 men could claim less than 9 percent of such positions. Less dramatic perhaps, in the professional field women accounted for 11 percent of Utah's physicians and surgeons in 1900 and only 3 percent in 1930.
Fourth, new job opportunities created dramatic shifts in employment patterns for women. On the national level the 1920 census recorded very large net losses against the 1910 figures in such occupational classifications as servants (-20.5 percent), dressmaker (-47.3 percent), home laundress, milliner, and boarding and lodging house keeper, among others. Showing large net increases in 1920 over 1910 were clerk, other than in a store ( + 288.3 percent), college professor or president ( + 240.6 percent), semiskilled manufacturing operative ( + 33.4 percent), stenographer, bookkeeper, saleswoman, and teacher, among others, A similar shift may be seen in Utah employment figures. For example, the job category of female servant suffered a net loss of 31.4 percent during the decade from 1910 to 1920, while female stenographers and typists increased by 106 percent in the same period.
Expounding on these changes for the Bureau of the Census, Joseph A. Hill suggested that
Additionally, there was a lessening demand for some jobs: More women were buying ready-made clothing instead of employing a dressmaker and using the services of a steam laundry rather than a washerwoman. The small boarding houses of the turn of the century were also disappearing from the urban scene.
For many women the changes visible in the twenties seemed to usher in a new era. "A greater proportion of women were receiving Ph.D.s at American universities at that time than at any time since." Commenting on these phenomena, Elise Boulding noted:
Fifth, a higher percentage of women were employed in urban than in rural areas. Looking at Ogden as a case in point, in 1910 17.7 percent of the women of that city who were over age ten were employed. In the state as a whole the percentage was 14.4 percent. This nationwide trend continued. In 1940, among females fourteen years of age or older in Utah, more than one in five living in urban areas was employed. In rural nonfarm areas of the state the number dropped to one in eight, and for rural farm areas to one in ten.
Sixth, race and national origin were significant factors in defining female employment. In Salt Lake City in 1930 more than one-third of the black women over age ten were employed. For native-born whites the figure was slightly less than one-fourth, and for foreign-born whites about one-fifth. For other races the figure dropped to about one-seventh of the females over ten years of age.
The relatively low economic status of blacks, both nationally and in Utah, would seem to account for the higher percentage of employed black women. Quite simply, black women experienced a greater need to find work, and find it they did, although usually at the lower end of the pay scale.
In the case of some foreign-born white women, entirely different factors operated to preclude their employment. Economic necessity notwithstanding, cultural values effectively kept most first-generation Greek, Serbian, and Italian women from entering the job market. A few eastern and southern European women worked unobtrusively in stores operated by their husbands or other male relatives or ran small boarding houses that catered to newly arrived immigrants (usually relatives or others from their old-country villages). Jobs that took women away from home or out from under the eye df a male relative were considered improper. So strong was the proscription that even a poor widowed Greek woman would have been unlikely to seek employment but rather would rely on support from the extended family or the godfathers of her children.
Seventh, age and marital status affected employment among women. The census data for 1930, if laid out in graph form, would show a significant peak for the ages of 18 through 24. Almost half of the women in that age group in Salt Lake City were employed. From age 25 on the percentages decline fairly steadily. Going down the scale one finds one in five women between the ages of 50 and 54 employed. And with no Social Security to look to, one in ten women between 65 and 69 was working in Salt Lake City in 1930. As for marital status, nationally in 1920 one married woman out of eleven was employed. Or, another way of looking at that statistic is to note that two out of nine employed women were married. Utah did not lag too far behind with 17.5 percent of the female work force married in 1920.
Although the census data provide a large body of information on working women, they tell nothing of the conditions of employment such as wages and hours, not to mention those more subtle but very significant evaluations of the employer or boss.
Some of the problems faced by women teachers have already been discussed. Office workers in Utah had no association to champion their cause, but women who worked as secretaries, stenographers, typists, and bookkeepers have expressed opinions — some positive, some negative — about their experiences. Taken as a whole, their employment seems to have been ordinary enough and fits into the national picture.
In her excellent study of the American working woman, Barbara Wertheimer wrote that white-collar positions were, for a time, anyway, almost the exclusive prerogative of young, single, native-born white women. This was the case in Utah in 1910 when native-born white women, in proportion to their numbers in the population, were five times more likely to find employment in office positions than the foreign-born and almost six times more likely than black women. Only three black women had office jobs in Utah in 1910, and it seems highly probable that these were with black organizations. 29
According to Wertheimer:
Utah women office workers generally found conditions similar to Wertheimer's description. These stenographers, bookkeepers, and typists usually received much of their training in high school, taking such courses as shorthand, accounting, and typing. A few attended business college. Once on the job they found it fairly enjoyable, and often they were thankful just to have a paycheck of any kind during the depression. 31 As one secretary who worked in the 1930s expressed it:
The hours worked were generally longer than today — forty-eight in many instances, although some women claim to have worked longer — with time on the job beginning to approach the standard forty-hour work week later in the period under consideration. Their starting wages in the mid-1930s ranged anywhere from 22.5 cents an hour for a secretary at a mill in Logan — with part of that amount in credit at the company store — to about $60 a month. Some women changed jobs when they could to improve their income. (Starting salaries seem to have been higher in the 1920s before the depression, with one woman reporting an $85 monthly stipend in 1924.) Most office workers received a paid vacation after a year's employment, but they enjoyed few other fringe benefits common today such as health and life insurance, retirement programs, or sick and overtime pay. Perhaps for these young women, most of them single, retirement funds and hospital insurance seemed unrelated to their needs, for many of them left their jobs upon marriage or with the birth of their first child. Some who wanted to continue working after marriage were not allowed to do so. One worker who married was jolted to hear upon returning from her honeymoon that "We don't have married women working for us." 33 Another office worker was required to give up her job as a WPA stenographer following her marriage in 1937 "so that an unmarried girl could take over."
The office supervisor was most often, but not always, a man. And that leads into the debit side of office employment. Although a majority of those interviewed found their work experiences pleasant enough, about one-fifth did not. Here are a few of their complaints:
Conditions improved at this woman's next job, but she objected to "the dirty stories told by the salesmen to each other" in her hearing.
A secretary-typist for two Salt Lake City firms reported excessive overtime on Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays without extra pay. She also resented having a meter attached to her typewriter to keep track of the number of strokes typed. Each typist had to hand in a daily meter reading.
One head bookkeeper found herself in a dilemma. She felt a responsibility to complete the tasks she was hired to do, but that was not easy given an unfortunate precedent.
The physical environment was fairly pleasant for office workers, although some women complained about smoking in enclosed spaces, cramped work areas, and excessive heat or cold depending on the season. As one woman described it, she "worked in [a] small cubicle next to the V.P.'s office — no windows — [and it] became very stuffy at times especially] when cigar-smoking men waited for their app[ointmen]ts."
Canning or food processing was one of the new industries that beckoned many women workers during the early twentieth century. This was arduous labor in many instances, and as Barbara Wertheimer has suggested,
Most women cannery workers were between the ages of sixteen and twenty. Blanche Jensen remembers working for three summers at the Del Monte plant in Spanish Fork during the late 1920s. She was sixteen years old when she began. Supervised by a "stern" matron, the women and girls "sat on benches beside a moving belt and took out leaves, damaged peas, or anything not suitable for canning...." The women had to remain alert and work quickly for hours at a time with rest breaks only "if the pea load slacked up." The length cf lunch and dinner breaks was also determined by the volume of peas to be processed. Depending upon the harvest and the weather, the hours might vary from five one day to ten or twelve the next. The starting wage was 15 cents an hour with seasoned workers making 17.5 cents an hour or about $6 or $7 a week. By 1940, Mrs. Jensen said, one woman worker reported earning 35 cents an hour — more than her farm-worker husband who made only $1.50 a day. The women were required to wear "heavy blue, cotton dresses with matching caps The uniforms were supplied by the company and a small fee was taken out of each check for the rental of the uniform which was handed back to the company at the termination of work."
String beans followed peas in the canning season. At this task the women worked regular hours from 8 A.M. to 5 P.M. with an hour for lunch. They snipped off the ends of the beans, cut them in even lengths, and placed them in boxes. A supervisor inspected each box and punched the worker's tally card. The pay was about 7.5 cents a box, with two boxes per hour being produced by most of the women. "We grumbled about the job but wouldn't think of quitting," Mrs. Jensen said. The plant had "a waiting list of people who wanted work."
At the Morgan canning factory in northern Utah women also canned peas and beans for wages ranging from 12 cents an hour to 22 cents for floor ladies. Shifts lasting up to nineteen hours during peak times were reported. When some of the women became dissatisfied with the pay and threatened to strike, the plant management vowed to bring in Mexican workers if the women left their jobs.
Women worked in other kinds of factories, too. A Grantsville woman was employed at a nearby plant where she filled, by machine, cans and bags with salt and then pasted on labels or sewed up sacks that weighed as much as twenty-five pounds. The wages at this factory were 30 cents an hour in 1927 and 40 cents an hour by the early 1940s. The workers had few benefits until later when the plant was unionized and better working conditions and higher pay were achieved. Like so many women, this factory worker was grateful to have a paycheck during the depression, for her family depended upon her support. She rode a bus to and from work. As a sidelight on those grim depression days, she remembers being paid in cash during the time the banks were closed. "Payday could be any one of 5 days so we wouldn't be held up on the way home "
A Salt Lake City factory worker was employed throughout the 1930s as a stacker and packer for wages beginning at 25 cents an hour and eventually climbing to $20 a week. As she described the duties, "The stacker picked cookies off warm pans and placed them in a trough for the packer to put... in cartons, boxes or caddies." She worked in a large area at a table staffed by sixteen young women. Two conveyors brought the cookies down from the ovens to be stacked and packed. Full boxes were conveyed to the scales for weighing. According to this informant, "the boss screamed and swore at the girls" and often called them back early from their lunch hour. The employees struck for better working conditions in 1937. Although conditions did improve somewhat, the strikers lost and the plant was not unionized.
These factory workers certainly toiled long and hard for their meagre but much-needed wages. Whether some of them "worked like horses," as suggested earlier, is conjectural. However, for Salt Lake City the 1930 census does show that a foreign-born white woman (but not necessarily a newly arrived immigrant) was almost twice as likely to be found working in various manufacturing and mechanical pursuits as a native-born white woman. Black women, on the other hand, were very unlikely to find such employment, at least in 1930. Like their sisters in the East, some women factory workers in Utah struck or threatened to strike, and in these efforts they, too, were unsuccessful at significantly improving employment conditions or gaining union recognition. In fact, during the 1930s Utah women were much more successful at helping their husbands, sons, and brothers achieve union status than in achieving it for their own sex. One remembers, for example, Helen Papanikolas's description of the fearless Milka Dragos and other immigrant women in Carbon County during the 1933 coal miners' strike that led to recognition of the United Mine Workers of America.
If strikers have their folk heroines in women like Milka Dragos and Mother Jones, so, too, do nurses. During the Civil War the tireless Mother Bickerdyke worked at emergency hospitals on the front lines, recruited volunteers, and raised money. When asked by a doctor on whose "authority she presumed to act in his hospital," she supposedly replied, "On the authority of Lord God Almighty; have you anything that outranks that?" More recently, in central Utah, Marva Christensen Hanchett became a heroine of sorts.
Born in the little town of Annabella in Sevier County in 1908, Marva was fascinated by medicine at an early age. In 1927, soon after her eighteenth birthday, she entered the Salt Lake General Hospital School of Nursing.
At that time and on into the early 1930s the old Salt Lake County General Hospital had so heavy a patient load that beds were sometimes set up in halls. "Nurses worked six and a half days a week, took regular classes, and studied in their off hours." After three years of this grueling schedule, Marva graduated and returned to Sevier County as the area's only available registered nurse. With no real hospital to work in, she and the local doctors delivered babies and performed surgery in patients' homes. "Many times she was paid with a bucket of honey or a loaf of bread instead of money. Sometimes she received no pay." After her marriage in 1933 Mrs. Hanchett's career took a new turn as she set up Sevier County's first regular public health program, and later she became nursing supervisor for the new Sevier Valley Hospital in Richfield. Few nurses have been responsible for so large a geographic area — almost one-fifth of the state — as was Mrs. Hanchett.
Nursing was another occupation that experienced a dramatic change in the decade between 1910 and 1920. The earlier census showed 225 trained nurses in Utah and 643 midwives and untrained nurses. By 1920 the number of trained nurses had jumped 241.7 percent while the number of untrained nurses (midwives are not mentioned in this census breakdown) showed a slight loss.
Before the turn of the century few nurses had formal training, and working conditions, including wages and hours, were poor. Standards were gradually imposed and nursing became a true profession. In 1917 a registration law was enacted, and three years later graduating nurses were required to pass a qualifying examination. The first nursing schools in Utah were operated by hospitals, a situation that may have affected the professional status of nurses. As one educator has pointed out, in hospital nursing schools "the doctor became the teacher and supervisor of the nurse, a role which tended to keep the nurse in a subservient position." Not until World War II did nursing programs begin to move from hospitals to universities, with the University of Utah offering the state's first baccalaureate nursing program in 1942. Undoubtedly, universitybased education has enhanced the professional status of nurses.
To cover in some detail several occupations typically associated with women has, in a sense, reinforced a stereotype of the working woman as either a teacher or a nurse, a secretary or a saleslady. And, indeed, these occupations have been important to women and important to society as well. Nevertheless, it is necessary to shatter the stereotype. A look at St. George in 1900 will do that.
A town of about seventeen hundred in the first years of the twentieth century, St. George offered women a variety of occupations. In addition to jobs as dressmaker and servant, teacher and saleslady, women were employed or self-employed as farmer, gardener, printing compositor, merchant, telegraph operator, postal clerk, photographer, and physician — unexpected diversity for a small rural town in the West. Obviously, the variety of jobs in a city such as Salt Lake or Ogden would be too great to list conveniently. So, St. George can make the point for all of Utah.
In summary, then, what can be said about Utah working women? During the forty-five-year span from statehood to World War II women filled a wide variety of jobs. Many of their occupations were of signal importance to education, health care, manufacturing, communications, retailing, business — the lifeblood of most communities, in fact. Despite unfavorable working conditions in some occupations, the percentage of women employed in Utah increased steadily over the years from 11.2 percent in 1900 to 17.5 percent by 1940. Working out of economic necessity as well as for personal fulfillment, women were harassed or handicapped in some instances because of their sex. Nevertheless, they remained dedicated and persistent. As social and economic conditions changed they abandoned old occupations and took up new ones. Their horizons changed constantly. Young and old, single and married, black, white, and foreign-born, Utah women went off to work as did their sisters in other parts of the country. Yet, they remained essentially invisible in history. In 1929 Joseph Hill noted:
Fifty years later such studies are beginning to be made. The invisible woman is becoming fleshed out, her contributions recognized, her significance to all aspects of human society acknowledged.
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