Experience is a teacher for many women, as one speaker for Women’s History Month illustrated Friday in a classroom in Schneider Hall.
Marianne Ferber, professor emerita of economics and women’s studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, presented “Women and Work, Paid and Unpaid.”
Ten minutes before the lecture, there was standing room only to hear the speaker. Ferber attributed the full house to the fact that classroom credit was offered to students enrolled in Economics 104 who attended.
The self-proclaimed “dedicated feminist,” originally from what was then Czechoslovakia, became a refugee to Canada and later married into citizenship of the United States. She said she has real world experience with women in the work force and has witnessed things not found in text books.
Ferber began by describing to the audience the life of a farmer’s wife in the early 1900s.
“Ozzy and Harriet were not realistic,” she said. A woman’s duties did not end with cooking from a coal stove and cleaning the entire home, Ferber said. A woman also helped with the harvest, farm animals and cared for children.
“One of the most significant, fundamental and radical changes in America was women being introduced into the labor market,” she said, adding there were drastic changes in women’s lifestyles during World War II.
“World War II is what got women into the labor force,” Ferber said, adding she does not advocate war to liberate women.
“(After the war) there was big pressure for the women to go home and have lots of children, hence the baby boom,” she said.
Ferber said the situation most women faced during those times was to follow strict orders and to return to the woman’s role, but once women saw themselves as capable of working, it was hard for some to turn back.
“My husband agreed with having two paychecks,” she said, so she continued working.
Many women did the same, but the jobs they took were once again “female roles.”
“You could be a household worker or a secretary,” she said, illustrating the limited options women had, but at the same time showed how men also were stereotyped against.
Her speech was ended by Ed Young, professor of economics, who presented Ferber with a T-shirt with a picture of a flying pig to represent that when pigs fly is when the skepticism of a woman’s role in the labor force probably will end.
“We’ve come a long way, baby,” she said. “But you still have a long way to go.”