Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United States, 1900-1995. By Julia Kirk Blackwelder. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1997. xvi, 308 pp. Cloth, $39.95, isbn 0-89096-776-8. Paper, $17.95, isbn 0-89096-798-9.)

Now Hiring is organized around the concept of the "feminization of work," which to its author, Julia Kirk Blackwelder, means both the expanding numbers and types of waged jobs open to women in the twentieth century and the consequent increasing numbers and percentages of women in the work force. Blackwelder argues against the thesis that changing gender ideologies caused ever-greater numbers of women to enter the paid labor force outside the home. She asserts that the causation ran the other way: Structural transformations in the United States economy created a demand for workers; women eagerly rushed to fill the new jobs; and because so many women were working, attitudes about women, work, and family altered as a result. 1

Oddly, however, she argues for the force of ideology when she asserts that the "gender conventions" of employers led them to create sex-typed jobs and that the resultant sex-typed occupational structure supported a gender gap in wages. More consistent with her market-driven analysis would have been to argue that the need for cheap labor, not ideology, led manufacturers to exploit ideas about women to create sex-typed, low-wage jobs. . . .

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