Going Public: Historical Perspectives on Working Women

In the course of attending conferences over the past several years, I have noticed that over lunch or drinks in the evening, women participants will often break off into small groups; inevitably one will turn to the other and ask, “How do you manage?” The conversation that follows, women's locker room talk, if you will, is devoted to comparing arrangements for child care or the logistics involved in working weekends-a candid sharing of strategies for coping. The intensity of the discussion sometimes suggests that ours is the first generation to face this situation in quite this way. Those of us who came to age in the 1950s and 1960s may suffer from a historical amnesia: our collective memory goes back through our parents’ generation only to the 1920s, to the time when women defined themselves primarily as wife-companions to their husbands. And given this shortened view, we see our predicaments as unique.

One benefit of the recent scholarship in women's history is to cure this amnesia. The writings have revealed that through most of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, large numbers of middle-class women “went public”—albeit in a very special way. They were able to leave their homes in the name of bringing maternal and domestic virtue to the larger society.

One of the best ways to explore how this dynamic operated, and at the same time to appreciate a driving force in the new feminist scholarship, is to examine the fourth and most recent volume of The Dictionary of Notable American Women. The volume covers women who died between 1950 and 1970, and the editors frankly wanted the entries to aid in a search for “roots and role models” and to direct “strategies for the future.” Accordingly, contributors were instructed to “indicate the reasons why a woman chose a particular way of life, the major stages in the evolution of her career, and the relationship between her public and personal life.” The