Women in the workplace--the unfinished revolution: "society has not focused on the need to provide alternative types of care, particularly for children and the elderly, during the time that caregivers are employed.".

• Author: Strober, Myra H.
• Position: American Thought

AMONG THE MANY remarkable upheavals of the 20th century, the huge increase in women's employment stands out. The shift of women to paid labor has led to a widespread transformation of the traditional rules and practices of daily life, not only at workplaces, but in families. As work and family changed, there were reverberations throughout society. The roles women play today would be unrecognizable to our forebears of 100 years ago.

Still, for all the change, the revolution remains incomplete. The arithmetic is simple--if women's jobs require 30, 40 or more hours a week, they cannot spend those same hours caring for their families. Society has not focused on the need to provide alternative types of care, particularly for children and the elderly, during the time that caregivers are employed. To finish the revolulion, new institutions and new arrangements are in order.

In 1900, 20% of workforce women were married. Only in minority, immigrant, or destitute families were married women likely to be engaged in paid work. Employed mothers were even rarer. Over the course of the next 100 years, though, a variety of forces drew additional females, including mothers of very young children, into the labor force.

Throughout the last century, employers particularly sought women for several rapidly growing occupations, including clerical duties, teaching, and nursing. These were jobs that men usually declined, in part because they were relatively low paying and offered little chance for advancement, and in part because they were stigmatized as "women's work." At the same time, more and more women completed the high school or college degrees necessary to hold these jobs. In the last 25 years, fields have opened up that virtually had been closed to females and vast numbers were educated in law, medicine, business, and engineering. Women's earnings increased commensurate with their education, making employment even more attractive.

Women became interested in paid employment because, as the economy became more complex, they and their family members began to want new products and services. This required additional income. For example, as medical advances were made, women no longer found it sufficient to provide nursing care directly to their seriously ill children as their mothers and grandmothers had done. They needed income to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medications. In later years, they wanted medical benefits that crone with being employed.

In the...