A Route Full Of Thorns

As far as the United States was concerned, the late 19^th and early 20th century was a period characterized by seemingly boundless economic expansion and rapid growth of a new nation, which had completed the conquest of its vast western territories and taken the lead among other nations, in industry and trade. During this period of time, the sweeping wave of industrialization and urbanization not only transformed the country from a basically agrarian society into an industrialized urban one, but also brought fundamental changes to the life of its people, especially the life of its women. As the separation of home and workplace was established by the industrial mode of production, the patriarchal division of labor by sex, with the assistance of the domestic ideology which surrounded the core of glorification of motherhood, assigned women to their "natural" sphere—the home. Thus women were supposed to step out of the economic process and devote themselves to turning their home into a haven against the turbulence of the outside world of work, business, and politics.Against such background, quite some women followed the work they formerly performed at home into the labor market. The number of female wage-earners, or working women, witnessed a rapid increase in the late 19th and early 20th century as industry and business expanded and women's underprivileged status gradually got improved. From the perspective of patriarchy, this thesis attempts to offer an analysis of working women in the late 19th and early 20th century and attentively asserts that the patriarchal society of the time, based on the sex-hierarchy of male supremacy and female subordination, marginalized working women on the labor market through two versions of sexual division of labor—the assignment of women to their "natural" sphere, the home, and the sex-segregation of women in unskilled, low-level jobs, and this marginalization sustained working women's suffering from the constant prickling of such thorns as harsh working conditions, discriminatory low pay, and lack of supportive network.On the basis of an overview of industrialization and urbanization and their impact upon American women, the thesis tries to analyze the factors contributing to women's wide-spread participation in the work force and the characteristics of working women from the perspective of patriarchy. Drawing upon historical records and materials, it steps up from the fictional case of Sister Carrie to show working women's predicament and point out that the patriarchal society of the time, with male supremacy and female subordination as its cornerstone, institutionalized working women's marginality through sexual divisionof labor, and the marginality of working women determined that women's entry into the paid labor force would be full of thorns.