Neither Mothers Nor Breadwinners: African-American Women's Exclusion From US Minimum Wage Policies, 1912-1938

Abstract

We examine two key US labor market policies: state-level minimum wages for women from 1912-23 and the federal minimum wage established under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Each of these regulations implicitly defined which groups were and were not expected to conform to the hegemonic male breadwinner/female homemaker model of gender relations. In fact, social reformers and labor leaders advocated these policy measures as a means of extending the male-breadwinner family to recent European immigrants and white southerners. The male-breadwinner family and public policies designed to foster it became one means of defining a commonality of whiteness among different ethnic groups during a period of assimilation. Through the inclusion and exclusion of particular occupations and industries, African-American women were assigned a subordinated gender identity as neither full-time mothers nor legitimate breadwinners. They responded by forging their own gender identity as co-breadwinners.