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Howards End Historians of the modem United States began to examine workplace sex discrimination and affirmative action struggles. More attention is in order. Discrimination and low-paying jobs moved large numbers of working women to aggressive action in the last quarter-century. These struggles produced an powerful impact not just on previously patterns of occupational sex segregation and the economic inequality but also on the gender system that sustained men's power and women's disadvantage.
The old view marked some women as more appropriate for certain types of work than others. The struggle for the equality began in sixties. This is an example about womens struggle for these rights in New York. Four hundred women dared to take the Firefighter Exam. They changed the rules on the physical agility section when the women passed the written portion of the test. Five years and a victorious class-action suit for sex discrimination later.
Forty-two women passed the new, court-supervised tests and training and went on to become the first female firefighters in New York's history. 1 Women fought for freedom of choice, for their right to build life the way they wanted. It was not about doing hard work, but it was rather about proving the ability and right to execute the right of choice. They wanted to prove that nobody could tell them what they should do and what kind of work they were appropriate for. Those women wanted to prove that they were the same people as men, with the same rights for having well payoff jobs, the same risk taking rights, the same rights for life and death. The Schlegal women believe in equality between classes and the sexes. The main characters of the novel, Margaret and Helen devoted most of their energy to conversation and culture.
They were wealthy and unmarried. Superficially, Margaret and Helen Schlegel are similar, both being liberal, cultivated, and intelligent. Themes of the novel include the conflict between materialism and idealism, practicality and imagination, reason and passion, city life and country life. The Schlegels are idealistic and intellectual, while the Wilcoxes are more materialistic and motivated by the desire to maintain their wealth and property. The Schlegels are liberal and cosmopolitan in outlook.
It looks like the novel makes enormous effort to hang on to middle or upper class status. The money and class were very important at that time. The struggle dramatizes many elements in the larger story of women and affirmative action, which involved remaking "women's jobs." What women encountered when they crossed those undisputed gender boundaries was not simply skepticism from people who doubted the ability of newcomers to do the job. What they met was elemental anger that they would even dare to try.
Hostile male coworkers used many tactics to try to drive the women out. It often included hate mail, telephoned death threats, sexual harassment, refusing to speak to them for months and organizing public demonstrations against them. It is also a fact that, sometimes, the men resorted to violence. Interestingly, however, the first big challenges to sex discrimination in the 1960 s did not come from either of these poles on the spectrum of gender employment. Rather, the challenges came from wage-earning women in factory jobs, who discovered a new resource in legislation won by the civil rights movement in 1964. "Although rarely discussed in class terms, " the Civil Rights Act's prohibition on race and sex discrimination in employment. Some 2, 500 women in the initial year alone, overwhelmingly working-class and often trade union members, challenged unequal wages, unequal health and pension coverage, male-biased job recruitment and promotion policies-among other things. 2 Schlegal women do recognize the power of money and the differences caused by different upbringings.
Margaret says the following to her sister: If Wilcoxes hadn't worked and died in England for thousands of years, you and I couldn't sit here without having our throats cut. There would be no trains, no ships to carry us literary people about in, no fields even. Just savagery. No -- perhaps not even that. Without their spirit, life might never have moved out of protoplasm. More and more do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it.
Women were becoming more and more equal with men, ending with the Reform Act of 1928, giving all women over 21 the right of vote. The movement towards women's suffrage was a very long and a hard battle, where many women wanted the vote while others did not. From early childhood girls are persuaded to follow "their" traditions and to serve the "all powerful" male leaders who make all decisions including over life and death. Genital mutilation, polygamy, selling of girl children into marriage and the ruthless exploitation of women's labor continues in rural areas where women are excluded from land ownership - the basic resource in agricultural societies. The economic exploitation and subservience of women continues today in all rural areas where all economic decisions are made by men. The power of money is difficult not to be recognized. 3 At the Mid-Decade Conference in Copenhagen in 1980, these facts were summarized with: "Women are half of the worlds population, they do two thirds of the world's work for which they earn one tenth of the world's wages and own less than 1 % of world property. " Another important argument is that breaking out of the female job prejudice was unthinkable.
Hardly anyone recognized it as a problem. "We never questioned it when they posted female and male jobs, " recalled one such activist years later, "we didn't realize it was discrimination. " For women at that time, it was simply a "way of life. " Perhaps, it is because the labor history literature tends to take the sexual and of labor for granted, it-like some work in women's history and political history-also tends to dismiss affirmative action as of value only or mainly to professional women. 4 The situation is changing very rapidly at the present time. It happens primarily because of two reasons. Women have already won their place at the labor market and at the society. They become equal in all aspects of the civilized world. The other important factor is that generations are raised by women. The attitude to women will be passed throughout the new generations.
These were women with a theory, who held that reticence about money matters is absurd. The upper middle class consisted of untitled independently wealthy persons (the Schlegels) and wealthy business owners (the Wilcoxes). The middle and lower middle classes were made up of insurance agents, teachers, lawyers, clergy and clerks (Leonard Blast). Money is a tool to accomplish almost all the life goals.
It is love, power, happiness, security, control, dependency, independence, freedom and more. As a result, money matters are a perfect vehicle for awareness and growth. Women realize that it is a perfect tool to win their place at the society. Nowadays, it is well understood when a woman is active in business. Money solve all the issues and must be protection for women. It is security which will help in difficult situations.
Most people relate to money much as they relate to a person -- in an ongoing and complex way that touches deep emotions. Other money differences exist between the genders. First, men and women have differences of personal boundaries because they are both raised largely by women. Men have to psychologically separate more rigidly from women because of the sex difference; women do not have to separate so rigidly, and therefore can afford less distinct boundaries. Wage-earning women in 1965, for example, could not expect that the jobs available to them would pay enough to live in modest comfort, certainly not with children; they could expect to have to provide personal services to the men in their work places, to clean up after them, and to endure demeaning familiarities from them as a condition of employment.
In some Western countries a few women have managed to dramatically change their own lives by economic success, gaining political influence and recognition. But women's international economic and political power is somewhat limited to make the fundamental economic changes especially in accounting and reward systems to recognize women's real economic contributions and thus give women the decision making power they have earned and deserve. 5 The respective roles of men and women are still undergoing profound change, in the process of transforming the nature of the family, society, culture and politics along with economics and the world of work. Women have entered paid employment in enormous numbers since 1900. The last century saw many economies move from being dependent on agriculture to industry and then to a predominance of services. But the more important story concerns the dramatic change in women's status, notwithstanding the inequalities that remain. That change has helped to provoke a wide-ranging discussion on the appropriate roles of men and women.
It also caused deep reflection on basic human values, including the place of work in life as a whole. 6 Bibliography: Bradley Soule. Womens Perspective. New York: Basic Books, 1986 Forster. E. M.
Howards End. London: Cleaning Press, 1980. Kay Stanley. Perceptions of Sex Discrimination in Law. American Bar Association Journal, October 1973. R.
Bergmann. The Economic Emergence of Women. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979 Robert F. Wagner.
Labor Archives. New York: Historians gen. Press, 1979. Scott, John. Womens Work. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc. , 1973. "The Best Jobs for Women in the Eighties, " Woman's Day, 15 Jan. 1980.
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