"Stratifying by Sex" Response

In her essay “Stratifying by Sex,” Alice Kessler-Harris examines the sexual division of labor and the role of female workers in the labor market throughout the scope of America’s history from the Massachusetts Bay Colony era to contemporary times. She thoroughly delineates the economic, social, and moral factors that influenced the development of women’s roles in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Next, she focuses on the twentieth century, tracing out how and why “the tension between the need for labor and the need for stable families” (106) is broken. By the end of the 1920’s there was a “compromise” between women and employers: some women would be trained professionally as necessitated by their job, but others such as married and poor women would stay at home. The advent of the Great Depression, and then World War II dissolved this compromise and opened the doors for women in the labor market. However, Kessler-Harris states that even to this day, many women still earn less than their male counterparts, and “the percentage of women holding prestige jobs has not increased” (115). She points out that the progress women have made in breaking down the sexual stratification in the labor market could inspire other groups to do so for their respective stratifications.

As the author stated in her essay, her goal was to show how sexual stratification has occurred over time in the United States and how working women were discriminated against. For the most part she succeeds, but I felt that her coverage of the twenty first century was sparse. More evidence of how the importance of women’s roles in the family declined would have strengthened her argument.