Women's Wage Work: A Conference on New Directions for Research

Abstract

On October 9 and 10, 1981 a group of researchers and educators from the Midwest gathered at Northwestern University for a conference on Women's Wage Work. Northwestern's Program on Women sponsored the conference to bring together scholars, policymakers, and activists from a variety of disciplines and viewpoints to discuss major issues of women's wage work and to create an agenda for new research. Participants from the fields of education, history, indus trial relations, sociology, and psychology addressed the questions of the dynamics of the sexual division of labor, the class structure of women's work, and the rela tionship of work and home. Three papers presenting or evaluating new research on major female occupa tions in the United States?clerical work, and teaching?formed the basis for discussing these issues. In Mutability of the Sexual Division of Labor: The Transformation of Clerical Work, Susan Hirsch, an historian at the Program on Women, noted that most research on this topic has been shaped by narrow con ceptions of the supply of and demand for labor. In particular scholars picture technological change or proletarianization as causing feminization of the office, ignoring the larger context in which proletarianization of the factory and office oc cured simultaneously, the one remaining an arena for men's work, the other be coming one for women's. Hirsch suggested that further research on why feminiza tion occurred in the office but not the factory could lead to a better understanding of the mutually supporting interaction of patriarchy and capitalism. In her com ments, Judith Wittner, sociologist at Loyola University of Chicago, noted that the current wave of automation in the office reinforces the divisions of men's and women's office jobs by further degrading women's work. Tim Diamond, a sociologist at Northwestern, examined the relationship of class and racial differences in the current transformation of in Nursing Labor Force: Professionalization or Proletarianization. Diamond noted that administrators blame nurses for the nursing shortage, which is caused by mushrooming demand, and they pit professionalized RNs?predominantly white