Please read the course materials for week 4 and then participate in this discussion. Please add to the readings the materials in “Course Resources” under the topic: “The Great Depression and WWII.”
Please read the course materials for week 4 and then participate in this discussion. Please add to the readings the materials in “Course Resources” under the topic: “The Great Depression and WWII.” Especially the first section of the “Commentary” has suggestive details for interpreting and understanding the three major articles in the week’s readings. All focus on the experience of working women in the 1930s, a time that, in may ways, set the stage for massive involvement of women in the work force from then on. Also to notice is the work of Alice Kessler Harris, “Women Have Always Worked.” As a professor at Rutgers, and former President of the Association for Women’s Studies nationally, her work documents the work of women, especially in what we now call the “blue collar” fields rather than “elite women” whose education and economic assets created a different sort of “work.” A later study of hers about the Class Action by those women fired by Sears, is noteworthy in its analysis of the reality of women at work in the industrial and commercial areas of American life.
