>> you can watch the classes here every saturday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight, and sundays at 1:00 p.m. next, robin munsey analyzes the women after world war ii focusing on their areas is in the labor market. into lowerforced othe paying jobs. this class took place at the university of maryland in college park. we're going to go ahead and get started eerie we are going to begin our analysis of american women's lives after world war ii, and route that analysis in a summary of the arguments that you heard in the video thursday.

then we are going to zero in on women in the labor market after the war, and follow that through the late 20th century. today isimportant task to dispel the notion that american women went home after world war ii. american women workers did not go home after world war ii and we are going to do our best to wipe that notion out of our minds. primary goal. if we can accomplish that we have done a lot. before we dive into the arguments, i want to do a free association exercise. this is going to involve having you close your eyes, relax for a second, and i'm going to speak a phrase. i want to see what images walked

into your mind's eye. what images pop up? is american women in the 1950. 50's.can women in the 19 do any images come into your mind? would you share? >> june cleaver. >> great. we will come back to that area? housewives. anybody else? a different picture. how many of you thought of suburbia? whennk it is the most -- we asked that question of most americans, we ask that of most

americans, what comes into our housewives.rban june cleaver. i have been studying women's history for decades in the first image that pops into my mind is june cleaver. she wasn't even a real woman. character inom leave it to beaver. cleaver?escribe june what is she wearing? >> a dress, prim and proper. an apron. prof. muncy: fancy dress and an apron. low.gh caller, not too prof. muncy: pearls. hair.ffed

when i picture june ,leaver, i always picture her the pearls, in stiletto heels frying bacon and vacuuming. this is very often the image we have of american women in the 1950's. one of the things we want to do is to shop june cleaver to the margins of our images of american women in the 1950's. we don't want to get rid of her entirely eerie suburbanization was an important trend. cleaver, withune the vacuum cleaver, that image does obscure one of the most important trends for women in the 1950's, the american women's labor force

participation increased. not only did not go home after world war ii, but they increase the third the labor market. a decade that we associate with women's domesticity. we are whitish of june cleaver to the side and fill our minds eye with a much more diverse set of images of american women in the 1950's. great. here are the main points today. americanld war ii, women workers did not retire to domesticity. thisu know, and you solve thursday, women workers were forced out of high paying good jobs in world war ii. forced out of those jobs at gm

and the shipyard. video, then in the majority of women workers couldn't afford to go home because they were working because they had to work. instead of being pushed out of the labor market, women workers down ine down -- forced the labor market. they couldn't leave the labor market. they were free to do that. they had to go back to the lower paying job with fewer benefits that they had been able to get before the war in the first place. women are not forced out of the .abor market as forced down that is the direction we want to see when we think of the trajectory of women labor market participation.

down, not out. , i reason this is important would devote an entire lecture to this, it is important to dispel this notion that women went home, because one of the reasons that it is easy for us to believe and it trips off the persistentastly, a womenrnicious notion of wage labor since the 19th century. women workers had to work for a living. marketre in the labor because they had to make a living. women workers always had somebody else to fall back on. they would have called it an not the necessities of

life, for extras, frivolous reasons. you know that is not true. we can only think women workers went home because we are implicitly buying into an understanding of women's wage work that says it is for fun. it is not out of economic necessity they are there. otherwise they could not leave. that notion of women workers always had somebody else to fall back on in terms of economic necessity, that has been one of the reasons for women's lower , they assume that women .ave other support that belief is not just false, theontinues to echo in

lower wages of women even now. if we are going to honor not just the past, but do better in the present, we have to let go of this notion women workers could go home. it is really important. that will be our main point. the second main point is that not only did women workers not leave the labor market, participation actually increased across the 1950's, and then for all of the remaining decades of the 20th century. it is going to continue across the postwar decade, even decades we associate with women domesticity. , we want to look at the changing demographics of women in the labor force across the

late 20th century and the occupations they were in, how they changed to the degree they across the late 20th century, and look at women's wages as well. these our main points today. narrative.o a bit of the war ended in 1945. there is a curiou -- a. period when the u.s. economy retracted, lasted 1947. until that period, a lot of industry that had been turning out war material shut down divisions to reconvert to the production of consumer goods.

they are going to reconvert from peacetime production. during those 18 months or so when the economy contracted, lots of women and men were thrown out of four. there is high unemployment and numbers of women in the workforce that did decline. the factories reopened and the economy was gearing up for one of the longest expansions in the economy in american history, as that happened women flooded back into the labor market, and by 1950, the beginning of the june cleaver decade, by 1950 there were as many women in the labor force as had been in the labor force at the height of work to -- world war ii.

you have as many women workers in the labor horse at the height at world war ii. he did not go home after world war ii. back, i promised we would talk about the arguments of rosie the riveter that are crucial to our understanding of why we believe the wage workers left labor after world war ii and help to explain the real trends we see afterward. let me sum up the arguments you saw in the video thursday. the overarching argument of that the publicity about women workers in world war theonstantly contradicted actual experiences of women in world war ii.

you cap seeing those newsreels, radio advertisements, pamphlets handed out to and about women workers, and you saw interviews with actual women workers. this constant clashing between those two sets of evidence. just to give you a reminder of the particulars, according to thernment sources and personnel departments of american corporations, women workers are coming into the war industries because of patriotism , because they wanted to help their country when the war. american women workers did want to help their country when the war. they wanted to try them -- triumph. but the majority of the women during world war ii had already been in the labor market before

the war broke out. the majority of women were or lookingaid labor for a job before the u.s. was involved in world war ii. women wanted to help with the war effort. what came second to their having to be in the labor market out of economic necessity. you see this contradiction between what government officials and corporate officials are saying about women workers, and what women themselves said about the motive for more work. you so i contradiction in claims about the availability of childcare. government officials and corporate executives are claiming any mother who wanted to work in the war industries and willing to work to support the war effort could find childcare. government-sponsored child care, corporate sponsored childcare.

that is true. in theority of mothers labor force either had never heard of that daycare or those versions were too expensive or too far away for them to get help the it didn't majority of women at daycare. you saw that childcare and the lives of the majority of women, mothers working, that was

a constant stress. there was not easily available daycare as the publicity would have led you to believe. they take a man's job and earn a man's pay. that is a quote from one of the personnel officials you saw interviewed in the video. while it was absolutely true women's wages skyrocketed, when you went from being a waitress to being a shipbuilder, your wages increased romantically. they never equaled the pay of man. women's wages were below those of men. they were always lower than white women's wages. there continues to be that

gender wage gap during world war ii. finally, you solve this contradiction in the war.standing for after the you solve that corporate executives and government officials always were claiming women were coming into the war industries for the duration of the war and then that they were expected to be delighted to turn their jobs back over to returning servicemen. that is the assumption of those officials. you saw in the interviews that they had been working for wages before the war or looking for work before the war, or widowed by the war. after the war they had to keep

working for wages and they would have loved to keep those higher-paying jobs. they would have loved to keep those jobs that gave them benefits. even vacation pay. some had maternity benefits during the war. incredible increase in standards of living for women as result of those jobs. they would have loved to keep those jobs. they had to go back to working as maids. as i said earlier, women's labor force participation is going to increase across the 20th century.

one way to look at the percentage of the total labor force that was female. as you can see then those numbers just go steadily up through the 20th century and into the 21st century. 1950's, women account for 30% of the labor force. i'm going to point to it with my physical hand. i can't believe in the laser. it just goes up until women account for half of the labor force. if you could just get in your notes may be the number for

1940-1960, and the 20th century, that would be fantastic. is most remarkable decade the decade of the 1950's. that women account for an increasing percentage of the labor force of the 1950's is the shocker. numbers,ay to cut the to look at the percentage of women 16 years old and over who were in the labor market. in 1940 before the u.s. was officially involved in world war ii, 25% of american women 16 years of age or older were in the labor force. that number is going to go up steadily through the 20th century. and into the 21st century as well. that percentage has leveled at 60%.

that 60% is just about where we are today. the remarkable decade is 1950-1960 when the percentage of ,omen, a growing body of women who are working for wages is increasing. as you know from your study of percentagel, that cannot be increasing among teenagers. kids have to stay in school longer and child labor has been abolished in most industries by the 1950's. that increase is coming overwhelmingly from older women. those are the bits of evidence for the claim that women did not go home after world war ii. i want to talk about the occupations they could go into as they came out of the war and

cross the 1950's. in that original post war time. women were not able to change the gender division of labor. they were not able to change the gender division of labor. occupationsnto the that women had begun to move into in the late 19th century. the same occupations that we saw women dominating in the 20th century, they are dominating in the 1950's, the same occupations where this growth is going to occur in women's labor force participation. i want to remind you of what some of them were and talk a little bit about them, why they are changing, why their demand is increasing, why more women

could be absorbed into those occupations. because to get pictures i want these pictures to move into our minds to help us move june cleaver aside. she is occupying a little bit less of our imagination when we think of women in the 1950's. by the time we get to these images i hope these images will be crowding june claim or -- cleaver to the margins. you want to engrave these in our mind. as you well know, american women had taken over the elementary school teaching by the end of the 19th century. they dominate the school teaching force by the end of the 19th century. in the 1950's, the famous baby-boom that began in the 1940's, i am one of those babies

, the cause of those babies, the increase in fertility among american women, because of the baby boom, new schools were being built all over america and those schools needed schoolteachers. ,he cause of the baby-boom there is this huge expansion in the demand for schoolteachers. those are jobs that were already categorized. the demand for women workers as teachers expand dramatically in the 1950's. so dramatically the demand was so great, in the 1950's the marriage bars to teachers finally dropped. in the 1930's we talked about this. that most american school districts in the 1930's but not higher woman to teach if she were married. many of them would fire her if she got married when she was on

the job. those are called marriage bars to teaching. americans goals desperately needed teachers, they began to drop those marriage bars. even if you were married you get a job as a teacher in most american school districts and even have to fear being hired if you got married while employed. this is when older women can stay in the teaching force instead of having to quit when they get married. there is a similar boom for nurses. in the late 19th century, women professionalize nursing and it became one of the professions women, wide open to women. virtually no man at that point. they were almost exclusively female.

ofthe 1950's, the location american health care began to centralize on hospitals. hospitals, having a hospital every block was not common before the war. a lot of government money put into the buildings of community act.tals, the hill burton that provided federal funds to communities to build hospitals. , corporate funding and because of government funding, are merging in rural areas, as in the 1940's, 50's, and 60's. health care became centralized. even if you wanted to be diagnosed, to get the next ray, you wouldn't go to the hospital. there are all these radiology

clinics all over the place. 1950's, just and ep wrotenosed with str you would go to a hospital. as hospitals became so much more common in health care so much more centralized, those hospitals needed nurses. it increased the demand for nurses dramatically, so much so that nurse wages increased in , and hospitals have an incredibly interesting history. the june cleaver decade. the one we associate with the assumption that women are at home with their kids, american hospitals began to open on-site day care because they were so desperate for nurses that when

good nurses had babies, they did not want them to leave the workforce. they wanted them to stay in. they raised wages and opened on-site day care some others could come back as soon as possible and nurse patients. nursing was another one of the occupations that offered all kinds of new opportunities for american women workers, and where the employer's and government officials are betting women to come back even after they have become mothers. thee are from our image of 1950's. some of the other workplaces where women had been before the more opportunities for women in the 1950's. we want to get these images in our mind only think the 1950's. so that you know women worked as migrant workers in the fields of

the southwest, and the numbers of women devoting themselves to field labor increased to hundreds of thousands of women. often they were migrant workers living in hard and a pride lives -- and deprived lives, going from county to county to harvest for farmers. 19 and 20ththe late centuries women were moving into office work. secretaries and file clerks and bookkeepers increased. that was because of this expansion of the american economy in the 1950's. there is expansion again for the

rest of the 1950's. that is drawing more and more women into the labor force. the same was happening with the federal government. especially for the cold war. they want these office workers, they want these farmworkers and nurses and teachers to take their place alongside june cleaver.

also, we have talked about women in department stores. change is0's, the big department stores are merging not only in central cities are they have been, they are now emerging on the fringe in suburbs where june cleaver was living. those suburbs, malls become the thing. the mauling of america. .hey need workers they need sales clerks. sure enough those jobs are already labeled women's jobs. change opens new opportunities for women workers in the 1950's. in addition there are new possibilities and breakthroughs for women in unions in the

1950's. the completely contrary to most of our assumptions about the 1950's, and where women were in the 19 if these, and what they were doing. i want to look quickly at one particular leader. here is the number. in the 1950's, the number of women in labor unions continue to grow until the mid-1950's when they reached their peak and they are one to hold that 3 million women by 1953. 18%, they accounted for union members. 18% of unioned for members by 1956. 18% does not sound like that much.

out 18% wasturned enough, a big enough contingent of women in the labor movement womenn some labor unions 's concerns began to move closer to the center of the union agenda. you begin to see for the first negotiatingunions for maternity leave. you see some labor unions began to negotiate for maintained señora d women workers -- señor niority. in the 1950's, because of the work of the unions, health insurance policies began to cover childbirth.

the overwhelming majority of health insurance policies before the 1950's did not cover childbirth. horror.a there one to lose their wages when they have a baby and then a for the hospitalization and the babyre needs after is born. women workers press to get insurance companies to cover childbirth. they are doing that especially for unions. equal pay is something that some unions began to press for the never successfully. higher.e much they don't manage equal pay and don't even yet. american women density in the union movement increased and reached a peak in the 1950's.

they didn't have a lot of success breaking into the higher .chelons of union officials that wasn't on the agenda. there were some exceptions to that. remarkable women in the movement. i want to highlight one of them. i want to tell you a little bit about addie wyatt. girlas an african-american , she moved in 1941 before the u.s. became involved in the war. she moved from mississippi to chicago and went to work in the industry in chicago. just a kid. her union logo

elected her vice president. house union.cking women andested in racial equality. she is elected vice president in the 1950's by a local dominated by white men. you have this young african-american woman elected a leader in her union local in the 1950's. she was so successful, so 1954,ul and effective, in smack tab in the middle of the 1950's, the international union pulls her into the national staff. she becomes one of the national leaders of the packing house

workers. she would go on in the 1960's to be an important player in the founding of the national organization for women. one of the organizations that brings on second wave feminism. she is an activist for racial justice and gender justice through her union activism. addie wyatt needs to be in our images of women in the 1950's. she needs to be in there. addition, besides eleanor roosevelt, the most famous activist in all the 20th , mrs. parks, rosa parks refused to get off of her seat and that bus in montgomery, alabama after a day of work as a seamstress and a downtown montgomery department store. a politicals

activist and worker in the mid-1950's. the when mrs. parks issues great refusal to get up out of her seat and give it to a white man. 1955. she was an officer in the alabama chapter of the the. not only was she -- we are going more.k about her she is a political leader in the 1950's and needs to be a part of our image of american women in the 1950's, and daisy bates. is she a familiar name to you? quite she wrote decks >> she wrote about the little rock nine. prof. muncy: yes.

husband-- she and her call owned a newspaper in the 1950's and she was the president of the arkansas chapter of the national sows asian for the naacp.ment -- as president of the chapter she led the integration effort in little rock which became violent and required sending in federal troops to integrate nine black ofs into white high school 3000. they were risking their lives in the fight against white supremacy in the 1950's. women, andorking political leaders. i gave something away.

, who doing to ask you you suppose was the most admired woman in the 1950's? i kind of gave thataway. there were all these polls in the 1940's, they began to do polls of the most admired women by americans. places likein other women in india, or clean queen elizabeth. you did not have to be an american woman but the woman at the top of the list through the 1950's was eleanor roosevelt. her husband died in 1945.

she is no longer in the white house. she is most admired in the 1950's because of her work with the united nations. united nations was created by world war ii, one of the things that emerges. she was in charge of this new institution, commission on human rights. she oversaw the development of the declaration on human rights in the 1940's. she is a major player on the international stage. she is a leader in international relations and the most admired woman in america. is these images of women in fields, vast fields of california, women in hospitals, eleanor roosevelt on

the world stage conducting relations.al i want these women, we want those women to take their place alongside june cleaver in our images of american women in the 1950's. i want to talk a little bit about who these women are, and how the demographic changes across the 20th century. in the immediate postwar, from 1965,o 19 exceed five, -- the woman who are flooding into the labor market, those women are middle-aged mothers, middle-aged mothers. they have kids in school.

the growth, the increase in women labor force participation is going to come from middle-aged women in their 1930 and 40's.r 30's the pattern works like this. often, women when they had their first child, if they could afford to leave the labor market, they did. if they could afford it they would stay out until the last child went to school. when the last child was five or six years old the mother would go back into the labor force. she might go back to work as a nurse in a downtown hospital. -- it is a common pattern to come back and win

their youngest child went to school. those women were reentering the labor market and that is what is pushing the growth of women's labor force participation. after 1965.slightly after 1965 the growth, increase is going to come more and more from women who have young kids. kids who are preschool, babies, toddlers. the mothers of these younger kids are going to increase labor force participation to such a this is important because what do you think? whens it important that this shift occurs, when more and more women who are not in

school, when they enter the labor market, maybe that is not obvious? we are not to vietnam yet. us orportant thing for policy is the childcare is an issue. schools are not going to absorb the childcare for those mothers. it is going to have to be some .ther agency, some other source the shift in post-1965 is meaningful for individual families as well as emerging feminist movement and american public policy. all right. i want to talk about occupations and paid.

we will have to call it a day. in the immediate postwar period, after the war, there is very little change in the kind of occupation women can enter. the pay reflects that. there is no change in the wage gender gap in the 1940's, 50's, and 60's. it holds steady. by 1963 women are making $.59 for every dollar men are in. almost no change. in the 1970's there is a big change. there is a change in the 1970's. it is the change you have been asking about since the first week of class. many of you have been putting writings in the

box, when did women become managers, doctors, when is this going to happen? that.finally answer in the 1970's at last women began to enter into considerable numbers management of businesses and traditional male professions they couldn't break into in the late 19 and early 20th centuries. women's or presentation in fields like management and in medicine, in law, even in the clergy in some religions. women's representation in those fields begin to change dramatically in the 1970's area as a -- 1970's. from 19% of managers to 31%.

that percentage is going to increase across the rest of the 20th century. blue-collar work turned out to be much harder for women to break into. skilled blue-collar work like thoseng, carpentry, skilled jobs remain even now almost exclusively male, closed to women. we will talk about why later. the wage gap. between men and women began to close in the 1980's as women entered the jobs that had been upheld exclusively by men in the earlier century. if we look at the wage gap between women and men in 1910, let's go back to the beginning

of the century. 50-55 percent. workers ins between 1910. women are going to make 50-55% of what men made. there is just very little change across those first decades of the 20th century in the wage gap. beginning in the 1980's the gap is going to close, most are medically it has ever closed. by the time we get the mid-1990's, white women are earning 78% of what white men earned. black women are earning 67% of what white men earned. represents a dramatic improvement in the wages of

women workers. it is not because women are paid more for those occupations they dominated but because they are moving into jobs that have been exclusively reserved for men. i thought you would care more about now maybe then the late 20th century. i got the latest stats for you to see what is happening with the wage gap now. the latest that we have full -- iftics, if you take you look at all women full-time workers, all men, you take them in aggregate, we are about where we were in terms of wage gap in the mid-1990's. some of you probably have five or six years ago, women had moved up to 80-82% of

men's wages. degraded recession has them. there has been a decline, an increase in the wage gap again in the last few years. you can see here this gives you the personages. if you look at african-american women, they are in 85% of what african-american men earned. 64% of what white men are in. that is dramatic. look at the 19 90 figures. african-american women -- you can see for asian americans. a huge drop for asian american women as well. asian-american women earned 90% of what white men earned.

now they are down to 78%. parity.atest parody -- [ what latinos, 91% of latinos earned, earning about 56%, same as 1995. so this is where we are in terms of the wage gap. unwind to have to let you go. we pick up with explanations next time we get together. thank you for finding room. i will see you on thursday. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] eveningus each saturday

for classroom lectures from across the country. on different topics and arrows of american history. lectures and history are available as podcasts. download them from itunes. >> monday night, the 25th anniversary of digital television. the author of television areas talks about the development of the medium. agon june of 1990, 25 years , cbs convinced us we should fcc foro the s e c -- the next generation broadcast standard. we weren't sure we wanted to do that because we were satellite and cable guys and didn't have a lot to do with terrestrial broadcast network's nest. we ended up doing that. june of 1990 our cover was

blown. .veryone said it was impossible sure enough, a year or so later all caps competitors were following us and it became a race. c-span 2.night, on >> you're watching american history tv all weekend, every weekend. to join the conversation, like us on facebook. >> next, miami university journalist professor james tobin teaches a life on ernie pyle and his influence on war reporting. president truman called ernie pyle the spokesperson of the ordinary person.

professor towbin explains how ernie pyles work continue to influence american war were orders during the vietnam war and beyond. this class is just over an hour. i want to start with this point. president roosevelt died on the 12th of april, 1945. this is a few weeks before world war ii in europe was over, a couple of months before world war ii in the pacific theater was over. roosevelt made it almost to the end. reporterlater, the ernie pyle was killed in the western percent thick -- pacific by japanese gunfire. these were not equally dramatic events for the country. it is remarkable thake