'A freer existence for womanhood': Gender, marital status, and wage work in Los Angeles, 1900--1929 (California)

This dissertation examines the implications of wage labor for single women in early twentieth-century Los Angeles. It argues that single, wage-earning women's experiences challenged conventional gender roles and expanded women's participation in urban life. Their unmarried status allowed greater engagement in employment---however restricted and poorly paid---which provided a basis for self-determination. While these gainfully employed women had differential access to "a freer existence," and change was incremental and convoluted rather than progressive, new gender practices developed as well as the way Americans understood women's prerogatives.; This study explores single, wage-earning women's participation in a variety of venues across burgeoning Los Angeles; depicts their domestic arrangements; considers some of the media representations that shaped and reflected gender roles; and analyzes government policies that defined and regulated women workers. Chapter one examines how the requirements of wage work and the practices of unmarried life shaped women's involvement in urban Los Angeles. Chapter two explores the varied domestic arrangements of employed Angelenas who lived independently or with kin and often challenged early twentieth-century ideals about marriage and family. Chapter three focuses on media representations of single women and some of the ways that movies, books, magazines, and newspapers mediated the anxiety and contradictions of a society in flux. Chapter four considers the politics of wage work in Los Angeles, particularly in regard to the contested assumptions about the prototypical male and female wage earner that framed early twentieth-century debates about California protective labor legislation.