going to speak a phrase. and i want to see what images waft into your mind's eye. what images pop up? the phrase is american women in the 1950. american women in the 1950's. do any images come into your mind in association with that phrase? would you share? >> june cleaver. >> great. we will come back to that area? housewives. anybody else? anybody else have a different picture. how many of you thought of housewives, suburbia? i think it is the most -- when we asked that question of most americans, we ask that of most

americans, not just college students, what comes into our mind is suburban housewives. the person that comes into my mind is 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. my gosh, she is a sitcom character in "leave it to beaver." that is the name of the show. can you describe june cleaver? what is she wearing? >> a dress, prim and proper. an apron. prof. muncy: fancy dress and an apron. >> sometimes a high coller, not too low.

it was still the 50's. prof. muncy: pearls. >> coiffed hair. prof. muncy: when i picture june cleaver, i always picture her, got the pearls, got the coiffed hair, 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 shove 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 because suburbanization was an important trend. when we picture june cleaver, with the vacuum cleaner, that image does obscure one of the most important trends for women

in the 1950's, which is that the american women's labor force participation increased. american women workers 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 going to shove 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. with me? great. here are the main points today. the first main point is after world war ii, american women workers did not retire to domesticity. as you know, and you saw this in the video already on 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. forced out of those jobs, but as you learn in the video, the majority of women workers couldn't afford to go home because they were working because they had to work. so instead of being pushed out of the labor market, women workers were forced down in the labor market. they had to leave the high paying jobs but they couldn't leave the labor market. they weren't 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 so much forced out of the labor market as forced down. that is the direction we want to see when we think of the trajectory of women labor market

participation after world war ii. down, not out. the reason this is important, i 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 tongue, a persistent and pernicious notion of women wage labor since the 19th century. women workers had to work for a living. they were in the labor market because they had to make a living. there has long been a notion

that women workers always had somebody else to fall back on. they would have called it pin money, for the fun things, not the necessities of life, for extras, frivolous reasons. you know that is not true. we can only think women workers went home after world war ii 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. it is for fun. otherwise they could not leave. that notion that 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

wages then men. one of the reasons is that they assume that women have other support. that belief is not just false, it continues to echo in the lower wages of women even now. so if we are going to honor not just the past, but do better in the present, we really have to let go of this notion women workers could go home after world war ii. it is really important. materially 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.

finally, i am not positive we will get to this, 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 did across the late 20th century, and look at women's wages as well. come right on in. there are places up here. you are so welcome. these our main points today. i want to do a bit of narrative. the war ended in 1945. there is a period immediately after the war when the u.s. economy contracted, a mild

and in that period, a lot of industry that had been turning out war material shut down divisions to reconvert to the production of consumer goods. wartime to peacetime production. during those 18 months or so when the economy contracted, lots of women as well as men were thrown out of work. there is high unemployment and numbers of women in the workforce that did decline. as soon as 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 very 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

world war ii. by 1950, no time at all, you have as many women workers in the labor force as at the height at world war ii. they did not go home after world war ii. i wanted to go back, i promised we would talk about the arguments of rosie the riveter that are crucial to our understanding of why we believe the women workers left the wage labor after world war ii and helps to explain the real trends we are going to see afterward. let me quickly sum up the arguments you saw in the video thursday. the overarching argument of that

piece was that -- and see if you think this rings true -- the publicity about women workers in world war ii constantly contradicted the actual experiences of women in world war ii. you kept seeing those newsreels, radio advertisements, pamphlets handed out to and about women workers in world war ii, and you saw interviews with actual women workers. there is constant clashing between those two sets of evidence. just to give you a reminder of some of the particulars, according to government sources and the personnel departments of american corporations, according to them, women workers are coming into the war industries because of patriotism, because they wanted to help their country when the war. and of course american women workers did want to help their country when the war.

they wanted to triumph over the axis powers. 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 either in paid labor or looking for a job before the u.s. was involved in world war ii. so that women of course wanted to help with the war effort. what came second to their having to be in the labor market out of economic necessity. so you see this contradiction between what government officials and corporate officials are saying about women workers and their motive for war work, and what women themselves said about the motive for more work. you also saw 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 easily find childcare. government-sponsored child care, corporate sponsored childcare. that is true. that is absolutely true. but you also saw the majority of mothers in the labor force either had never heard of that daycare or those versions were too expensive or too far away for them to get there, or it didn't help the majority of women at daycare. you saw the heartrending struggles.

you saw husbands and wives working different shifts and never seeing each other. 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. earning a man's pay. the publicity said they take a man's job and earn a man's pay. that is a quote from one of the personnel officials that you saw interviewed in the video. earn a man's pay. while it was absolutely true women's wages skyrocketed, when you went from being a waitress to being a shipbuilder, your

wages increased dramatically. 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 saw this contradiction in the understanding of women's aspirations for after the war. you solve that corporate executives and government officials always were claiming that 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 always the assumption of those officials. and the publicity that was so widespread.

you saw in the interviews with the women workers themselves 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. but they were not allowed to. they had to go back to working as maids and dishwashers. they are pushed down. as i said earlier, women's labor force participation is going to increase across the 20th century.

i want to cut the numbers a couple of ways. i am going to try this laser thing. so fancy. i will try not to put your eye out with the laser. 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. so in 1950, women account for 30% of the labor force. i can't help myself. 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 in the early 20th century. if you could just get in your notes may be the number for 1940-1960, and the 20th century, that would be fantastic. you see the trend. the most remarkable decade is the decade of the 1950's. that women account for an increasing percentage of the labor force of the 1950's is the shocker. because that is the june cleaver decade for so many of us. another way to cut the numbers, to look at the percentage of women 16 years old and over who were in the labor market. again, in 1940 before the u.s. was officially involved in world war ii, about 25% of american women 16 years of age or older were in the labor force. that number again is going to go up steadily through the 20th century. and into the 21st century as well. that number, that percentage has

leveled off at about 60%. that 60% is just about where we are today. the remarkable decade is 1950-1960 when the percentage of women, and it is a growing body of women, the percentage of women 16 and over who are working for wages is increasing. as you know from your study of the new deal, that percentage cannot be increasing among teenagers. because kids have to stay in school longer and child labor has been abolished in most industries by the time we get to 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 period, that immediate postwar period, women were not able to change the gender division of labor. they were not able to change the gender division of labor. what they do is they flood into the occupations that women had begun to move into in the late 19th century. so the same occupations that we saw women dominating in the 20th century, say, 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 in the 1950's, why more women could be absorbed into those occupations. and i wanted to get pictures up here because 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. so by the time we get to these images i hope these images will be crowding june cleaver to the margins. so really stare hard at these images. 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, because 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. right? so because of the baby-boom, there is this huge expansion in the demand for schoolteachers. those are jobs that were already labeled, 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. remember in the 1930's we talked about this. in the 1930's. that most american school

districts in the 1930's would 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 were called marriage bars to teaching. in the 1950's, americans schools 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 kind of boom for nurses. for nurses. you will remember 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.

that is one of the changes, that there are now male nurses. they were almost exclusively female. in the 1950's, the location of american health care began to centralize on hospitals. hospitals, having a hospital in every block was not common before the war. a whole lot of government money put into the buildings of community hospitals in the 40's, 50's and 60's. the hill burton act. that provided federal funds to communities to build hospitals. hospitals, corporate funding and because of government funding, are merging in rural areas, as well within major urban areas in the 1940's, 50's, and 60's. those are places where health care became centralized. even if you wanted to be

diagnosed, to get an x-ray, you wouldn't go to the hospital. there are all these radiology clinics all over the place. in the 1940's and 1950's, just to get diagnosed with strep throat you would go to a hospital. as hospitals became so much more common and 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 the 1950's, and hospitals have an incredibly interesting this is the june cleaver decade. the one we associate with the assumption that women are at

home with their kids. in the 50's 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. so 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 employers and government officials are begging women to come back even after they have become mothers. there are very differet from our image of the 1950's. some of the other workplaces where women had been before the war, opened more opportunities for women in the 1950's.

we want to get these images in our minds when we think about 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 an awfully, awfully hard and deprived lives, going from county to county to harvest for you know in the late 19th and 20th centuries women were moving into office work. the numbers of secretaries and file clerks and bookkeepers increased. that was because of this expansion of the american economy in the 1950's.

it is a steady expansion into the 1950's and then a recession and then 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. the federal government was also growing.

that increased opportunities. 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. in the 1950's, the big change is department stores are merging not only in central cities are where they have been since wannamaker's, they are now emerging on the fringe in suburbs where june cleaver was living. those suburbs, malls become the thing. one historian refered to the 1950's as the malling of america. they need workers. they need sales clerks. sure enough those jobs are already labeled women's jobs. that kind of 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. again, completely contrary to most of our assumptions about the 1950's, and about where women were in the 1950's, and what they were doing. i want to look quickly at one particular leader. here is the number, though. 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 going to hold that peak, 3 million women by 1953. 1956, they accounted for 18% union members.

i would love for you to get that in your notes. women accounted for 18% of union members by 1956. 18% does not sound like that much. and yet, it turned out 18% was enough, it was a big enough contingent of women in the labor movement that in some labor unions in the 1950's, women's concerns began to move closer to the center of the union agenda. so you begin to see for the first time, for instance, labor unions negotiating for maternity leave. paid maternity leave. you see some labor unions began

to negotiate for maintained seniority for women who go on maternity leave. 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. and of course that is a horror, especially for women workers who leave. they are going to lose their wages when they have a baby and then pay for the hospitalization and health care needs after the baby 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 but never successfully. wages are much higher. they don't manage equal pay and don't even yet.

so american women sort of density in the union movement increased and reached a peak in the 1950's. they didn't have a whole lot of success breaking into the higher echelons of union officials. that wasn't on the agenda for the 1950's. but there were some exceptions to that. there some remarkable women in the movement. i want to highlight one of them. see if we can't get addie wyatt into our image of the 1950's. i want to tell you a little bit about addie wyatt and see if we cleaver. girl, she moved in 1941 before the u.s. became involved in the war. chicago and went to work in the meatpacking industry in chicago.

just a kid. goes to work in the meatpacking industry. in the 1950's, her union local elected her vice president. the united packing house union. very interested in women and 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. and she was so successful, so powerful and effective, in 1954, right smack dab in the middle of the 1950's, the international union pulls her into the national staff.

addie wyatt 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. which is one of the organizations that brings on the second wave of feminism. she is an activist for racial she is an activist for racial justice as well as gender justice and of course class 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. in addition, besides eleanor roosevelt, the most famous activist in all the 20th century, mrs. parks, rosa parks refused to get off of her seat

in that bus in montgomery, alabama after a day of work as a seamstress and a downtown montgomery department store. rosa parks is a political activist and a worker in the mid-1950's. it is 1955 when mrs. parks issues the great refusal to get up out of her seat and give it to a white man. she issues that refusal in 1955. she was an officer in the alabama chapter of the the naacp. not only was she -- we are going to talk about her more. 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, as do women like daisy bates. is she a familiar name to you?

>> she is the one who wrote the book about the little rock nine. prof. muncy: yes. she was -- she and her husband co-owned a newspaper in the 1950's and she was the president of the arkansas chapter of the national association for the advancement of colored people. 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 kids into a white high school of 3000. they were risking their lives in the fight against white supremacy in the 1950's. in the 1950's.

in the immediate postwar period. these are working women, and political leaders. i gave something away. i was going to ask you, who do you suppose was the most admired woman in the 1950's? i kind of gave that away. sorry about that. gosh, i am just not used to this. there were all these polls in the 1940's, pollsters like gallup, they began to do polls of the most admired women by americans. they did not have to be american women. often women in other places like women in india, or 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 our own 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. you know, the united nations was created by world war ii, one of the things that emerges. one of th institutions that emerges out of world war ii. and 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.

what i'm hoping is these images of women in fields, vast fields of california, women in hospitals, eleanor roosevelt on the world stage conducting international relations. 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. all right. i am going to talk a little bit about who these women are, and how their demographic changes across the 20th century. this is going to be super brief but important. in the immediate postwar, from 1945 to 1965, the woman who are

flooding into the labor market, responsible for the labor force participation, 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 30's -- in their 30's and 40's. the pattern works like this. often, women when they had their first child, if they could afford to leave the labor market temporarily, 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, then -- it is a common pattern to come back and win their youngest child went to

school. it meant that in their 30's and 40's, those women were reentering the labor market and that is what is pushing the growth of women's labor force participation. that shifts slightly in the period after 1965. after 1965 the growth, increase in labor force participation 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 degree, the reason that this is important because what do you think? why is it important that when this shift occurs, when more and more women who are not in

school, when they enter the labor market, maybe that is not obvious? but just in case it is, let me ask you. >> vietnam. prof. muncy: are not to vietnam yet. the important thing for us or 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 other agency, some other source. the shift in post-1965 is very meaningful for individual families as well as emerging feminist movement and american public policy. all right. oh yeah. i want to talk about occupations

and pay. i have time to do a little work and then 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 occupations 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. by 1963, women are making about $.59 for every dollar men earn. so almost no change. in the 1970's there is a big change. not wholesale but there is a change in the 1970's. and this is the change you have been asking about since the

many of you have been putting questions in the writing box, when did women become managers, doctors, when is this going to happen? i kept thinking i can't answer that yet. i can finally answer that. in the 1970's at last women began to enter into considerable numbers management of businesses and traditional male professions that 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. 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 plumbing, carpentry, firefighting, those skilled jobs remain even now almost exclusively male, closed to women. we will talk about why a little bit later. the wage gap. i thought you would be interested in the wage gap. 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 1910, it is about 50%-55%. median wages between workers in 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. this 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. so i got the latest stats for you so you can see what is happening with the wage gap now. the latest that we have full statistics for is 2011. if you take -- if 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.

followed this, maybe not all of you. in the early five or six years ago, women had moved up to 80%-82% of men's wages. but the great recession has eroded them. there has been a decline, an increase in the wage gap again in the last few years. and you can see here too, this gives you the percentages. if you look at african-american women, they earn 85% of what african-american men earn. 64% of what white men earn. that is dramatic. look at the 1990 figures. african-american women -- you can see for asian americans. a huge drop for asian american women as well.

in the mid-1990's, asian-american women earned 90% of what white men earned. now they are down to 78% of what white men earn. the greatest parity is among latinos, 91% of what latinos earned, earning about 56%, same as 1995. so this is where we are in terms i am going 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]

> reutersstory here from and a visit the website -- hear for writers and a visit to the website. you are watching american history tv. ladies," we "first learn about ellen wilson. she improved housing conditions for the poor in washington, d.c. . after a year and a half she fell ill. woodrow wilson remarries even if thlson and suffers >> -- edi wilson and suffers a stroke. she began the first first lady lady to travel to europe. this sunday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span's original

series first ladies, examining the public and private lives of the women that the position of first lady and influence on the presidency, for martha washington to michelle obama. >> monday night on the , this summer marks the anniversary of digital television. mark talks about the development of the medium in the early 1990's. cbs convinced0, us we should submit it to the fcc for consideration as the next generation standard. we were not sure we wanted to do that because we were satellite and cable guys and did not have a lot to do with the terrestrial broadcast but we ended up doing that so all of a sudden our

cover was blown what we are doing. at first everybody said it is impossible, what we are claiming, but sure enough a year or so later, all of our competitors were following us and it became a real race. night at 8:00 eastern on "the communicators" on c-span two. next, miami university journalism professor james tobin teaches a class on the life over ernie pio and his influence -- pyle.nie his accounts emphasize the human element of the war, the for journalism between soldiers -- the free journalism between sold betweenrnalism soldiers. he continued to influence reporters during the vietnam war and beyond. miami university is in ohio. this class is just over one

hour. prof. tobin: i want to start with this point. franklin roosevelt, 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. six days later, the reporter ernie pyle was killed in the western pacific by japanese gunfire. these were not equally dramatic events for the country. it is remarkable that takes days after roosevelt died, the president who had been president

for 12 years, the new president issued a statement of the white house of bereavement recognizing the death of ernie pile, a reporter. he said the nation is saddened by the death of ernie pyle. no man has so well told the story as american fighting men wanted it told. more than any other man he became the spokesman of the ordinary american in arms. it was his genius to never obscure men who made them. there were lots of other eulogies for pyle. maybe the best of them was written by a famous poet of the era, randall gerald. part of what he said. we could not help realizing that ernie pyle's work was an aesthetic triumph. because of pyle, most people of a country felt in the fullest emotional and