'The true sphere of women'? Gender, work and equal pay in Britain, 1945--1975
Abstract
This dissertation examines the pursuit of equal pay after the Second World War to reveal the debate about women's “skills” and worth as workers and in society. Traditionally, British women were segregated into low-paid jobs classified as unskilled, while men held higher-paid skilled jobs, a division reflecting dominant attitudes that women's true role in life was domestic. Officials expected the changes wrought by World War II, which drew unprecedented numbers of British women into the workforce, to be temporary. Instead, postwar economic expansion and changing living standards drew more women, especially married women, into paid work even as traditional attitudes continued.
This dissertation explores the continuation of those beliefs, examining statistical changes, popular attitudes about women as workers, and the persistence of increasingly antiquated government, union and business policies towards workers, which hardly evolved in 25 years despite major economic and societal change.
This policy delay occurred because the role women played in creating the “affluent society” was largely unrecognized, despite the fact that women's earnings paid for many of the goods and luxuries considered the essence of the affluent society. Women worked in record numbers, yet did not undermine the ideology of the male breadwinner, because the public considered their earnings secondary and believed men still had prime responsibility for family support. Working mothers themselves, however, began to defend their work by arguing that a good mother was not one who stayed home, but one who worked and put herself out for the good of her family.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom that this was a period devoid of woman's activism, women worked tirelessly for equality during this era. The militancy of women workers was instrumental in equal pay legislation passed in 1970 before the traditionally recognized “second wave” feminist movement appeared. An unprecedented wave of strikes for equal pay and against discrimination in the late 1960s made it more costly, both economically and politically, to not have equal pay than to finally pass legislation.
Subject Area
HISTORY, EUROPEAN (0335); WOMEN'S STUDIES (0453); SOCIOLOGY, INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS (0629); ECONOMICS, LABOR (0510)
Recommended Citation
Dolly Smith Wilson,
"'The true sphere of women'? Gender, work and equal pay in Britain, 1945--1975"
(January 1, 2005).
Boston College Dissertations and Theses.
Paper AAI3167367.
http://escholarship.bc.edu/dissertations/AAI3167367
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