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What I Learned Today

2009 February 25
by Anne Dalke

So I’m still mulling over today’s panel: what it showcased, what it didn’t, what we (okay: I!) learned from the range of positions that were represented. At the very end, when I was trying to make some sudden “meaning” of it all, trying to tease some meaningful pattern out of my “graphic facilitation,” I asked about possible causes for the professional gender segregation that the panel seemed to highlight. Speaking as an expert on mill operatives, aaclh challenged the idea, then floating, that such “gender ghettos” were a result of gender stereotypes and roles, simply enacted in the professional realm. She said (and I hope you will weigh in here, refine this?) that actually the opposite (was that it?) might have been occurring, @ least historically: i.e.: that the professions had the effect of reinforcing gender roles, rather than the reverse: that is (for example) it was not that the mill girls got their jobs because they were girls, but rather that they learned girlishness on the job. It’s a loop, in other words: bi-directional, with no simple causation.

One Response
  1. aaclh permalink
    February 27, 2009

    What I understood your (Anne Dalke’s) question to be was: why are the professions (and professionalism) so segregated on gender? I heard two ideas – because society is segregated on gender, so is professionalism and also – genders are innately different (eg strength) and some jobs require different characteristics that only one gender has (eg heavy lifting jobs). These answers did not satisfy me – they did not seem to mesh well with the reading I had done on the mill operatives in the early 1800s.

    What, in particular, struck me as incongruent in what I read was part of the book “Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women” written by A. Kessler. In this book it seems to me that she is saying both that societal gender constructions contribute to the gendering of professions but ALSO that the professions contribute to even more gender reinforcement. To quote:
    “The growth of industry [industrial factories not hard work] and urbanization had increased the number of men who worked in impersonal factories _outside_ the immediate surroundings of home and community. Simultaneously, the old Puritan ethic which stressed morality, hard work and community welfare was supplemented by the ethic of laissaiz-faire economics which emphasized individualism, success and competition. The concurrent redefinition of of home and familty _required_ more constricted women’s roles. […] Piety, purity and submissiveness became the ideal [for women].” [emphasis mine]

    She goes on to explain how men no longer being at home most of the day contributes to women’s rise in importance of mothering – to the point that many middle class people thought that this was one of a mother’s most important roles – her raising her children properly. The importance of _women’s_ “self-realization, ambition and independence” was pretty much eliminated.

    While there was plenty of gender segregation prior to the so called “industrial revolution”, these passages (and others) from this book say to me that the rise of factories further constricted women’s acceptable place in society.

    I think I finally figured out what was so bothering me in reading about the change in attitude regarding the female mill operatives from the 1820s to the 1840s (from positive to negative). I think that I assumed as _time_ went forward, women’s roles would become _less_ constrictive, and not more.

    I think it is really interesting that strength/biology came up in class and on the forum (see Cat Durante’s post about It comes back to Biology) as a possible _reason_ why professions are gender segregated. The only think I can think when I here this strength argument is that: if it really is about strength – why aren’t the jobs STRENGTH segregated instead of GENDER segregated? In GENERAL, men are stronger than women, but there are particular women who are stronger than men. I think there is a problem in moving from the general to the particular. Knowing in general group A of people is something more than group B of people, tells you NOTHING for sure about a particular person in A compared to another particular person in group B – especially when the groups are ill-defined and overlap and don’t cover every person.

    I had some more thoughts, but forgot – I will post more later.

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