Iowa Women in the Workplace
by Mary Allison Farley
These photographs, taken by an unknown photographer in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1912, are part of an extraordinary collection housed at the Center for Dubuque History at Loras College. Grouped together as the William J. Klauer Collection, the more than four hundred photographs serve as an exceptional record of workers in a variety of settings shortly after the turn of the century. The all inclusive camera angle captured men and women as part of their total work environment, while the photographer’s large view camera produced sharp and detail-filled images. Much valuable information can be gleaned from the photographs about daily work patterns and working conditions.
The twenty-four photographs selected for this presentation document some of the employment opportunities available to women in urban or small-town communities. The images of Dubuque women ironing in laundries, sitting at typewriters in small business offices, and serving customers in millinery shops represent typical work settings that could have been photographed equally well in other parts of Iowa and the Midwest. The employment opportunities for women in industrial settings varied with the nature of the industries that thrived in particular communities, but in general, women worked in light industry. Thus, in Dubuque, women worked at the mattress factory, the candy factories, the paper box factory, and the garment factories. In Muscatine, women made up a large proportion of the labor force at the button factory. Des Moines women found employment at a hosiery mill. Sioux City women were employed by a biscuit company.
The women wage earners in these photographs were part of the growing number of women who worked outside their homes at the turn of the century. Nationally, the number of women workers increased dramatically in the twenty years between 1890 and 1910. One million women had been counted as part of the labor force in 1890, but by 1910 eight million wage-earning women were included in the work force count. More and more women—and particularly young, single women—began to work for wages away from their homes. They followed traditional, domestic jobs like baking and sewing from their homes into new industrial settings. Further, increasing numbers of women graduated from high school during the 1890 to 1910 period (25,182 in 1890 and 92,753 in 1910) and filled newly-created office positions in business and industry. Some women acquired additional job skills through business school training.
Men and women shared considerable ambivalence about the increased movement of women from the home into the wage-earning work force. Almost everyone agreed that the home roles of wife and mother should be the most important roles for a woman. They believed, further, that if a woman had to work for wages before marriage she should select a job that would prepare her for her future domestic responsibilities. Jobs thought appropriate for women, therefore, were those that emphasized cleanliness, neatness, gentility, and the skills of the homemaker. Yet many women had to take jobs that did not meet these standards. And employers were quick to recruit women into a variety of workplaces because women cost less to employ than men and women were less likely to organize into unions.
At the time when people had stated to realize that more women needed to earn wages to support themselves, the “family wage concept” hindered women’s effort to secure a living wage. Many people believed that only men needed to earn a living wage since men were responsible for the support of their families. People assumed that women were economically dependent on fathers or husbands and did not require a full wage. However, in reality, the unemployment, injuries, and low wages that plagued male wage earners often caused them to depend on the economic contributions of women in the their families. The increasing number of women who headed their own households also contradicted the assumptions behind the family wage concept.