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Essay on Images of Women
People often mistakenly believe that the depression had little effect on women because they were housewives. Not all women were housewives; those who were expanded their daily labor, practically and emotionally, and some entered the labor force. Racial and class discrimination disproportionately harmed women of color in employment and eligibility for government-sponsored work and relief. Almost all women suffered emotional and economic depression, but they exercised their ingenuity in their homes, jobs, and communities to create the best possible lives they could imagine.
At the nadir of the depression in 1933, one-third of the nation's people were "ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-nourished,"1 in the words of President Roosevelt. The worst economic crisis that the country ever experienced elicited women's resourcefulness and creativity to ensure that they and theirloved ones survived. Women held on to jobs or found paid employment for the first time, expanded their housework and caregiving, and volunteered in union struggles and community organizations.But their efforts were not uniformly successful—long-standing racism and sexism influenced their strategies, their triumphs, and their defeats Sex segregation1 of the labor force both protected and harmed women workers.
Unemployment decimated the jobs of men in the skilled trades, in manufacturing, and at unskilled labor, while women clerical workers lost comparatively fewer jobs, because paperwork continued when production ceased. Female employees in restaurants, hotels, laundries, and other women's homes, on the other hand, suffered enormous joblessness, because consumers could not afford these services; women industrial workers also sustained high unemployment. If they lost their jobs, women scrambled to stay employed and moved down the ladder of desirable occupations in order to find work......
