Abstract
Throughout the industrialised world women are entering the labour force in unprecedented numbers: a movement that began as a trickle in the last century has become a torrent. No longer content to stay at home, impatient with the ties that bind them to the kitchen and the nursery, women are exchanging the apron and baby carriage for the business suit and computer, and now seek new experiences and rewards in paid employment. But women have done more than merely join the labour force; they have changed it. To a degree unparalleled in history, women have achieved lucrative and important positions in government, in the skilled professions, and in science and business, irreversibly changing the sexual composition of the labour force. Today, women work in all sectors of the economy and compete with men, often successfully, for advancement in fields long dominated by males, a revolutionary break with the past that is changing women and society.
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Notes
Bettina Berch, The Endless Day: The Political Economy of Women and Work (New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1982) pp. 32, 42.
Berch, p. 5. Useful information about the current condition of women in the labour force can be found in Ann H. Stromberg and Shirley Harkess (eds) Women Working: Theories and Facts in Perspective, 2nd edn (Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing, 1988).
Barbar Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood’, in Michael Gordon (ed.) The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1978).
Frederick Engels, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972).
Jane Kramer, ‘Reflections’, The New Yorker. 24 September 1979, p. 64.
Norman Podhoretz, Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir (New York: Harper and Row, 1979) p. 116.
John W. Osborne, The Silent Revolution: The Industrial Revolution in England as a Source of Cultural Change (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1970) p. 17.
Charles R. Morris, A Time of Passion (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) p. 230.
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976) pp. 223–4.
Marvine Howe, New York Times, 5 November 1972.
Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby, Social Character in a Mexican Village (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970) p. 18.
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© 1989 Bernard Carl Rosen
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Rosen, B.C. (1989). The Waning of Sexual Inequality. In: Women, Work and Achievement. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20026-9_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20026-9_1
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