This essay researches the question “To what extent did gender constructs harm women in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century, specifically in the cases of those working as human computers at NASA?”. The essay starts by acknowledging the culture of sexism which has pervaded the United States and the world for centuries. It then examines the sexism prevalent in the labor industry and workforces of the 1950s and 1960s, and what exclusions women faced because of their gender. This section looks at country-wide issues such as the cult of domesticity. The essay then narrows to talk about related issues found specifically in the white male dominated hierarchy at NASA. This part of the essay starts by looking at the human computers at NASA’s Langley Research Center, most of whom were women, and how, as a result, they were treated differently than their male counterparts. It also determines what challenges they faced because of this, like their higher-up’s refusal to promote them or the lack of credit they were given for their work. The next part of the essay deals with a different group of women: the computers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It studies how they too were discriminated against and details their challenges, such as the expectation to leave their work and not return after having children. The essay concludes by determining that the unfair constructs put in place by society in this era harmed women mainly by preventing them from gaining promotions, forcing them to become housewives, and affording them little respect in the workplace.
Word Count: 260
Introduction:
As World War II raged on in he mid-1940s, working women were in a better place than at almost any other period in history: because of a shortage of men, millions of previously unemployed women had been pulled into the labor force. Before the war, most women had not been employed, and if they were, they had obtained jobs that correlated with the “domestic” lifestyle women were supposed to lead; jobs in textile mills or, as technology developed, in offices as secretaries (Colman 16). But now, women were working jobs in the production of planes, tanks and ammunition, decidedly un-feminine work. Many even wore pants to work. But in only a few years, the war ended, the men came back home, and women were once again pushed out of the labor force (Colman 17). And here, a shift began. Due to a number of factors, which will later be examined, the next two decades attempted to discourage women from working at all, instead presenting the only truly fulfilling life for women as one in which she stayed home to cook, clean and take care of children, while letting her husband perform the labor and make the money (Friedan 17).
This essay will examine how as a result of these social constructs and attitudes-those which glorified the housewife lifestyle-women who did choose to work in mid-twentieth century America were severely harmed through lack of opportunity, respect, and encouragement, with special attention to the challenges faced by women working in the highly patriarchal scientific and technological fields at NASA. In order to fully understand the ways in which women were harmed by these attitudes, the essay will begin with an in depth look at the social constructs surrounding women and their “proper place” in the mid-20th century, and how they were instituted into American life, including views that women should not have jobs, that they should only work in or around the home, and that motherhood was the epitome of a women’s life. The essay will look at the history of working women in America and examine how this history affected the ways in which working women were viewed in the mid twentieth century. The essay will also take a detailed look at how World War II and its aftermath affected the status of working women. It will then look at two specific examples of how women were harmed by these social constructs, both dealing with women working in the extremely patriarchal environment of NASA. The first example will be of women working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and will include specific examples of discrimination and harassment these women received due to the views surrounding women and especially working women. The second example will detail the struggles faced by women working at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. This section will focus on the same issues as the first: how the women were harmed by the gender roles and constructs forced on them, as well as how said constructs affected their treatment by male co-workers and bosses. The essay will then conclude by determining that the constructs put in place by society in this era harmed women in all professions by causing them be viewed unfavorably, preventing them from elevating themselves, and affording them little respect in the workplace.
Analysis of Social Constructs Involving Women:
The 1950’s and 1960’s are considered some of the most oppressive decades for women and especially working women, due to their high emphasis on domesticity and strong discouragement of women participating in any activities outside of the home. However, this was not a new attitude. Since the founding of the United States, women had faced similar issues; they had always been “expected to function in quasi subservient ways” (Kessler-Harris Gendering Labor History 98) and had been relegated to jobs in or surrounding the home. In the late 18th and early 19th century, when the U.S. was still largely an agricultural country, women were expected to stay in their homes and cook, clean, and raise the children they would inevitably have; in the 1830’s, this view was further intensified. The “cult of true womanhood” appeared, in which women became seen as “meek and passive, modest and silent” (Kessler-Harris 102), expected to sit at home and do nothing while their husbands labored. “Submissiveness became the ideal” and “homemaking reached professional heights” (Kessler-Harris 102). It was during this period that the idea of different “spheres” for men and women were formed: man’s sphere was outside the home woman’s was in it (Kessler-Harris 103). When the U.S. economy began to move away from agriculture, and the age of industrialization began, the public became more accepting of working women. However, even this step forward required “a need to reaffirm and articulate “proper” places for women” (Kessler-Harris 100). This resulted in the expectation that women “would…earn wages for several years before marriage” (Kessler-Harris In Pursuit of Equity 24) and then quit their jobs in favor of marriage and child raising (Kessler-Harris Gendering Labor History 103). In turn, this gave employers the power to exploit working women: they were paid significantly less than their male counterparts, as their earrings were “merely supplemental” (Kessler-Harris 103). Additionally, these lower wages were not supposed to be spent on the well being of the woman herself, but rather would be “saved for their trousseaux”, (Kessler-Harris 100), used “to put their husbands through school, their sons through college, or to help pay the mortgage” (Friedan 17). Another stipulation on working women during this period was that they could only obtain certain jobs, jobs that were seen as more domestic or feminine. These included teaching, printmaking, and dressmaking (Kessler-Harris
Gendering Labor History 103) as well as mill work, work in textile factories, and as offices became more common, as typists and secretaries.
But then the U.S entered World War II on December 8, 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The war required unprecedented numbers of soldiers as well as vast amounts of supplies such as tanks, planes and ammunition. However, as millions of men were drafted to serve in Europe, the U.S. realized it had none left to produce the supplies. The U.S government began a campaign starring Rosie the Riveter to encourage women to join the work force (Colman 15). Thus more than six million women who had never before worked obtained jobs at factories, producing the essentials for war, as well as in shipyards, foundries, and lumber mills (Colman 16). More women were working than ever before and in jobs far outside the norm. Within only a few years though, the war ended, as did the wealth of jobs for women. The men returned, expecting to reclaim their former positions, and millions of women were forced out of their jobs (D. Lee, transcript, November 10, 1999). For the next two decades, the attitudes of the 1800’s were reinstated in full force. Women of the era were harshly discouraged from working and instead were expected once again to stay at home while their husbands made the money. The reintroduction of these social constructs which were so harmful to working women were born out of a few different coinciding factors. The first was the mounting fear regarding the Cold War: it was imperative that the U.S maintain a large population in case of combat with the Soviet Union, and scientists urged women to focus on having children (Douglas 47). Additionally, women in the Soviet Union were allowed to have what were considered “masculine” jobs (Douglas 47). It then followed that in order for America to remain a democracy, women must take on the utmost feminine jobs. Additionally, around the same time, pop psychologists were spreading the message that feminists-any women who wanted to work and was not content at home-were “delinquents” and “criminals” who were a burden to society (Douglas 48). These new cultural norms were largely enforced through the use of advertisements printed in magazines and newspapers, such as Ladies Home Journal (Douglas 51). These ads showed women with fashionable hairstyles and dresses taking foods out of ovens, cleaning, and serving their husbands, with captions such as “Show her its a man’s world” (Douglas 51). In a complete turnaround from the decade before, many women accepted this lifestyle (Friedan 17). While there were still many women entering the workforce, these were mostly older women, and most did not pursue careers (Friedan 17). In general, few women were entering the professional labor force and instead, like in earlier centuries, working only when necessary, performing only unskilled labor, and quitting as soon as they got married or became pregnant (Friedan 17). Young women wanted “what every other American girl wanted-to get married, have four children, and live in a nice house in a nice suburb (Friedan 17). This mentality was a problem in the sciences especially. The Cold War was just beginning, the U.S. needed its brightest minds to outsmart the U.S.S.R., and some scientists speculated that America’s “greatest source of unused brainpower” (Friedan 17) was women. But because of the era’s housewife mentality, young women, hesitant to work at all, went taking jobs in science and technology. Girls “refused…science fellowship[s] at Johns Hopkins to take…job[s] in a real estate office” (Friedan 17). Science was considered “unfeminine” (Friedan 17) and women who did choose to work in professional fields were viewed as “‘inferior in some way, frustrated and dissatisfied’” (Konek & Kitch 6). A 1950’s study of female engineering graduates of MIT found that their professional underachievement was “associated with family and social arrangements, rather than with technological demands of their profession” (Konek & Kitch 200). At NASA, the country’s foremost scientific agency, the situation was no different. During this period of U.S. history, the agency was predominantly white and male, and was unwelcoming towards anyone else. This made the lives of the few women who did attempt to pursue careers at NASA difficult. One group of women in particular is important to note when discussing the social constructs that hindered women in science in the mid-twentieth century. This group is the female “human computers” who performed, by hand, many of the calculations that got the U.S into space and won the Cold War. These women were faced with harsh discrimination at NASA due to the societal attitudes surrounding women’s roles and especially the professional nature of their work. Within this field, there were two main groups operating at in the mid twentieth century on opposite sides of the country; the first were the computers working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Jet Propulsion Laboratory:
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory was founded in the late 1930’s and in 1958, was taken over by the newly created National Air and Space Administration (Holt 10) and tasked with “planning and executing crewless lunar and planetary missions in addition to developing the rockets needed to get there” (Holt 148). Before, during and after this transition, JPL employed numerous female computers to work on many of the most famous NASA projects of the twentieth century, including the historic Apollo moon landing. However, because of the period in which they worked, these women faced many struggles.
The disgust surrounding working women and especially women in sciences and technology led to little to no diversity in the fields of science and technology. Many of the JPL computers recall being “the only woman in a group of men” in both classrooms and workplaces (Holt 13). When the women did make it into a professional career, they had far less chance of being promoted than their male counterparts. Many of the JPL women longed to become engineers, a title with more distinction than that of computer, but not only were women discouraged from pursuing degrees in the profession but most engineering schools in the country wouldn't even accept them (Holt 118). This was a prominent and long-standing issue at JPL. When she was hired, Helen Ling’s knowledge of math and science was such that “if she had been a man applying for the job, she would likely have been hired as an engineer” (Holt 118). At the time, there wasn't a single female engineer at JPL; Barbara Paulson says that in her mind “an engineer was a man”, adding that she “couldn’t imagine that a man would listen to her”, and that she believed “men …were likely to see themselves as bosses and women as employees” (Holt 64). Additionally, though the work the women did was immensely important, they were “rarely credited in academic journals” (Holt 203), and went virtually unknown for decades.
Yet another result of these sexist attitudes was that maternity leave didn't exist. If a working woman became pregnant, she didn't just feel obligated to leave her career, she was forced to, as any leave taken after giving birth would most likely result in her job being given away. Unfortunately, affected even the smartest computers at JPL, which lost many of its best and brightest women to motherhood, including Barby Canright, one of the facility’s founders, and Janez Lawson, it’s only African-American female employee (Holt 127). Early in her career, Sue Finley, another computer at JPL, was forced to leave her job at Convair, an aircraft manufacturer because of pregnancy (Holt 49). Even Barbara Paulson, a dedicated and respected computer, was promptly fired when the facility’s administration found out about her pregnancy. “We can’t have a pregnant employee,” they told her, citing “insurance purposes” (qtd. in Holt 163). Although Paulson eventually returned to JPL, it was a blow to both her career and self-esteem; at home, she cried “I thought I was worth more than that,” (qtd. in Holt 163). These constructs also meant many lost opportunities for women, as many employers considered them to be unreliable employees, and refused to waste their time on someone who would “get married, get pregnant, and then quit” (qtd. in Holt 154). If the institution did hire women, it would often set a quota on how many female employees were the “ideal” number, and refused to hire any more after the quota was filled.
In addition to the most overt problems housewife culture presented for women at JPL, the effects of these attitudes extended to virtually all aspects of working life, including clothing and office traditions. Until the mid-1960’s, JPL, like many other workplaces, hosted a beauty pageant, in which the company’s female employees were paraded before an audience and judged. JPL’s was known as Miss Guided Missile and later Queen of Outer Space (Holt 223). In this era, the tradition didn't cause much controversy, and was considered normal; women were seen less as contributing members of the workforce and more like trophies. Another effect of the era was the extent to which women’s wardrobes were policed. At JPL, women, many of whom worked in the field testing rockets and propulsion systems, were expected to wear skirts or dresses, with very specific, and uncomfortable, hosiery. It was only after many of the women had been working at JPL for years that a secretary caused Barbara Paulson to purchase a pantsuit, and even then she says she felt scandalous, as even something so simple as wearing pants was considered improper and unfeminine, for women (Holt 209).
Langley Research Center:
While the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena employed many human computers, hundreds of other women were working as computers at different branches of NASA as well. However, the other facility that housed a large group of human computers was Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (now known as Langley Research Center), located in Hampton, Virginia. As it name suggested, this facility focused mainly on aeronautical and engineering research, and was heavily involved in the development of fighter planes and other similar technologies through the early 20th century and especially during World War II. During the war, Langley began to hire women, and kept many of them as employees even after the war had ended. These women, though incredibly qualified, passionate, and eager to help their country, were, similar to the computers at JPL, were looked down upon and constantly underestimated because of the societal standards concerning women.
Most of these women worked at Langley for years, even decades, but were still subjected to discrimination and even harassment from male colleagues. Dorothy Vaughn and Katherine Johnson, who were two of the better known and more influential computers at Langley, were usually the only women in the room, which frequently resulted in ignorantly sexist comments, as their colleagues effectively forgot their existence. Johnson was refused access to valuable technology lectures that were imperative to her work just because she was a “girl”, as female employees were diminutively called, and “girls [didn’t] go to meetings” (Shetterly 179). Vaughn worked in the West Area Computing Group for eight years before being promoted to supervisor, and even then, she was not considered an official supervisor, and was denied the pay raise and benefits guaranteed to that position (Shetterly 92). Dorothy Lee and Ivy Hooks, two more Langley computers, also faced many problems. They too were outnumbered by male colleagues, ten to one (I. Hooks, transcript, March 5, 2009) which again resulted in discrimination, both intentional and unintentional, such as the male employees cavalier attitudes that if “you’re not an engineer [a job from which women were barred], you don’t count” (I. Hooks, transcript, March 5, 2009). In an interview with the Johnson Space Center, where she later worked, Lee recalled an incident early in her career, in which a man walked into her office and began “doing something with [her] phone” (D. Lee, transcript, November 10, 1999). When he was finished, he said “Now you will be able to answer so many phones,” (D. Lee, transcript, November 10, 1999); he had assumed she was the secretary. In her interview, Hooks recounts a story of not just discrimination but harassment from male colleagues, in which they placed a dead garter snake on top of her drafting board to scare her (I. Hooks, transcript, March 5, 2009). Additionally, Lee was refused raises during throughout her career because of her gender and says that the men she worked with “liked [her], they just didn't really want [her] to be their equal” (D. Lee, transcript, November 10, 1999). She also remembers having her supervisor tell her, “Dottie, if you were a man, you would have been a boss,” (D. Lee, transcript, November 10, 1999). Finally, in a succinct summation of the difficulties of working women in the era, Lee recalls being interviewed for the Daily Press by reporter Virginia Biggins, who asked her “Do you believe that women working with men have to think like a man, work like a dog, and act like a lady?” (D. Lee, transcript, November 10, 1999). Lee replied that yes, she agreed.
Conclusion:
As shown by these two examples and the stories of some of the many human computers working at NASA in the 1950’s and 60’s, the social constructs of housewife culture did significantly harm working women. In general, all women were harmed by the norms that told them they needed to become housewives and that their only worth was in cooking, cleaning and raising children. However, working women specifically were harmed even more by these beliefs, as their choices to pursue careers meant they were viewed as sick and criminal. And though they were pushing social constructs simply by working, women were still relegated to certain jobs, those seen as “proper” or “feminine”, such as a secretary, teacher or typist. Women who obtained jobs in the fields of science or technology faced other problems as well. Because of their highly unfeminine profession, these women were looked down upon even more than other working women. Moreover, they were constantly and severely outnumbered in their field by men. These women had far fewer opportunities to move up in the workplace than their male counterparts, though they were usually just as capable. Like Dorothy Lee, they were denied raises and promotions. In some cases, this stemmed from the fact that they were barred from receiving the education and information needed to elevate themselves; most engineering schools of the era didn't take women. These working women in were also frequently disrespected, as many of their male co-workers did not consider them competent employees. This resulted in callous disrespect, such as calling female employees “girls” or parading them in beauty pageants, as well as outright harassment, such as Ivy Hooks story of a snake on her drafting board. And though they worked just as hard as the men in their field, women in science and technology were often not credited on papers or studies they contributed to. Ultimately, both women working in science and technology as well as those in more traditional professions were harmed in many different ways by the social constructs prevalent at the time, which allowed them little freedom and gave them little respect, and eventually, it was these struggles that inspired a younger generation of women in the following decade to fight back for their right to be given equal societal treatment as their male counterparts.