Wage Earning Women Chapter Summary

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Recommended: Family life into the industrial revolution

Wage Earning Women: Industrial Work and Family Life in the United States, 1900-1930, was written by Leslie Woodcock Tentler in 1982. In this book she researches the employment of women, specifically non-black women in factory jobs, from the years 1900 to 1930. More importantly, her research focused on the wages women received, the work environment, and its community. Tentler’s argument is that the employment of women during this time was an important part of women’s socialization. Everything about the jobs women had, from their wages to their environment, reinforced gender roles and a woman’s dependency on men (Tentler 9). Because of this, despite what some may believe, employment was not necessarily a huge freedom or a separation from their normal roles in the community for women.
Tentler organized this book into three parts: Women’s Wages, “Women’s Work” and Work Environments, and The Work Community. The first part, Women’s Wages, brilliantly discusses how the wages of working women during this time period literally forced dependency on …show more content…

Tentler found that “75% of female factory workers” were under 25 years old and most of them were between sixteen and nineteen (59). Work life caused many young women to want more social and sexual freedom due to the employment of men being mostly middle aged. Because of this, more and more of these girls wanted an early marriage right out of school in order to be free from their parents. Overall, Tentler was great at making her writing very easy to understand. It was clear and very well organized, I had very few problems with trying to understand her argument and her supporting details. Some parts that were a bit confusing are the direct quotes that she included but she still was good at explaining the quotes and connecting them to her

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