Employment, Relief and the Breadwinner Ideal A...

Hollingsworth and Tyyska discuss the employment of women in their article, both wage work and work performed outside of the â€Å"paid labour force.† (14). They also look at work discrimination of women based on gender and marital status. They argue that disapproval of married women working for wages during the Depression was expressed not only by those in position of power, such as politicians, but also by the general public and labour unions. They suggest that the number of women in the workforce increased as more young wives stayed working until the birth of their first child and older women entered the workforce in response to depression based deprivation. Hollingsworth and Tyyska also give examples of work that married women did that†¦show more content†¦She argues that supporters of working women also appealed to equality and critiqued the restrictive definitions of masculinity and femininity, including the gender division of labour in the family. Sirigley s tresses that high rates of unemployed men generated concerns about the positions of male breadwinners in the family and that rising rates of female employment increased anxieties that the Depression was weakening female domesticity as well. She states that women and men working alongside each other in offices caused concern that mixing would lead to immorality or that so many women working suggested an end to male breadwinning. However Srigley states that men and women usually worked different jobs and agrees with Hobbs that despite tough times men were usually unwilling to take on jobs that were seen as stereotypically female, such as office work. Baillargeon also suggests that both men and women in Montreal were reluctant to engage in role reversal that was at odds with society’s socially accepted division of labour. Out of the women she interviewed only two became the main breadwinner, both had no more than two children, and someone other than theirs husbands took care of the children, despite that these men were unemployed. Baillargeon argues that maleShow MoreRelatedOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 Pagesat the same time, without serious attention to the processes and misguided policies that led to decades of agrarian and industrial depression from the late 1860s to the 1890s, as well as the social tensions and political rivalries that generated and were in turn fed by imperialist expansionism, one cannot begin to comprehend the causes and consequences of the Great War that began in 1914. That conflict determined the contours of the twentieth century in myriad ways. On the one hand, the war set