During the interwar years, women, like men, splintered along ethnic and class lines in their gender roles. A number of white, middle-class women were more freedom-minded than religion-focused in California, as in some other parts of the nation. They sought a wider range of gender options and roles than their predecessors had enjoyed. Non-white women, generally having less education and fewer economic resources at hand, confined themselves to more traditionally prescribed family roles until the depression of the 1930s hit. With husbands often out of work, many sought paid labor while keeping their families intact. Single women of the working class and all ethnicities may have had to scramble the most to find jobs with which to support themselves.
Increasingly, white middle-class women entered the professions and philanthropies. Julia Morgan, a UC Berkeley engineering graduate and preeminent Bay Area architect, designed numerous educational institutions, conference centers, Young Women’s Christian Association buildings, churches, and private residences (some of which are discussed later in this chapter). Physician Adelaide Brown was a leader in the movement to advance preventive medicine and birth control in the state. In the 1920s she traveled throughout the Far East, surveying the health of women and children. Women excelled in law and business, as well as in the arts, including photography. Californians comprised nearly 30 percent of America’s female airplane pilots. Estelle Doheny was a major figure in philanthropy and art collecting. In the mid-1920s Ellen Browning Scripps endowed one of the Claremont Colleges for women named in her honor. Gaining elective political office, however, remained elusive. Florence Prag Kahn was California’s only female representative in Congress. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she was instrumental in the establishment of Alameda Naval Base in the Bay Area and advocated for the extension of American citizenship to the China-born wives of Chinese American men.
Both as voters and job holders, women formed an array of business and professional organizations in California, all of which aimed at promoting opportunities for whites of their gender and class. As of May 1922, 21 women’s business and professional associations existed in the state, with a total of 1,964 members. A sampling of these groups includes: the Los Angeles Business Women’s Civic Club; the San Diego Business and Professional Women’s Club; the Woman’s Lawyers’ Club of Los Angeles; the Faculty Club of the University of California, Southern Division (UCLA); the Business Woman’s Forum, Oakland; and the Secretarial Association of Los Angeles. These organizations and others like them assured their members of a growing presence and influence in the business world.
Besides enjoying improved occupational and professional mobility, middle-class white women adopted some aspects of male behavior: they smoked, drove cars, and drank alcohol. Influenced by the relaxed sexual mores of the era, they wore dresses with lowered necklines and raised hemlines, and used birth control. Within marriage, these women enjoyed a measure of equality and independence largely unknown to their mothers’ generation.
Both white and non-white married, working-class women were increasingly forced beyond their traditional maternal and homemaking roles and into the wage-labor market as the depression of the 1930s cost more of their husbands their jobs. Historian Judy Yung, in her book Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (1995), recounts the plight of Wong Shee Chan, Yung’s “Grandaunt,” who lived in San Francisco’s Chinatown where she raised her six children during the depression. “Those were the worst years for us,” recalled Grandaunt. “Life was very hard. I just went from day to day. . . . A quarter was enough for dinner. With that I bought two pieces of fish to steam, three bunches of vegetables (two to stir-fry and the third to put in the soup), and some pork for the soup.” After her formerly laid-off husband found work as a seaman, Yung’s Grandaunt cared for their children while studying for and gaining a hairdresser’s license. She kept the children in a beauty parlor with her while she worked from 7 a. m. to 11 p. m. seven days a week. In this manner, Wong Shee Chan kept her family together while her husband was at sea.
Working-class single women, including widows and divorced mothers, of all ethnicities, struggled mightily during the 1930s to support themselves and sometimes dependent relatives as well. Faced with few job prospects, some of them urged removing married females from the workforce. A mother from Redondo Beach, California, complained about employing wedded women: “It keeps our Boys and Girls from getting work and they are the ones that need it.”
World History
