Neither Mothers nor Breadwinners: African-American Women's Exclusion from US Minimum Wage Policies, 1912-38

We examine two key US labor market policies: state-level minimum wages for women, 1912-1923, & the federal minimum wage established under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Each of these regulations implicitly defined which groups were & were not expected to conform to the hegemonic male breadwinner/female homemaker model of gender relations. In fact, social reformers & labor leaders advocated these policy measures as a means of extending the male-breadwinner family to recent European immigrants & white southerners. The male-breadwinner family & public policies designed to foster it became one means of defining a commonality of whiteness among different ethnic groups during a period of assimilation. Through the inclusion & exclusion of particular occupations & industries, African-American women were assigned a subordinated gender identity as neither full-time mothers nor legitimate breadwinners. They responded by forging their own gender identity as co-breadwinners. 1 Table, 61 References. Adapted from the source document.