A Good Man Is Hard to Find
—So They Hire Women
When the Fuller Brush Man rings once, looktwice—he may well be a woman. After relying almost entirely on men for60 years, Connecticut’s Fuller Brush Co.—taking a tip from AvonProducts—has hired 17,500 women this year, plans eventually to field50,000, mostly part time. Throughout the country employers are turningmore and more to women to fill jobs that they have never held before,or at least not since the World War II heyday of Rosie the Riveter.
In the past several months, women have gone to work producing steel andrebuilding auto parts in Chicago, loading post-office vans anddelivering the mail in Atlanta, welding and operating metal-stampingmachines in Fort Worth, driving cabs in Seattle, running power cranesin Los Angeles, and pumping gas at service stations along the IllinoisToll Road. Elsewhere, women have been engaged as draftsmen,meatcutters, warehouse laborers, helicopter pilots and company guards.
The reason for this upswing in female employment is the shortage ofskilled and semiskilled labor, which has become so acute that FederalManpower Expert Howard Stambler says: “There are almost no men left.”Unemployment is down to 3.8%—mostly unskilled—and job openings fortrained people are increasing. The number of adult women at work rosein the past year by 2.3 million to 25.5 million, most of whom aremarried. Today, one out of every three married women has a job outsidethe home, and almost one in three adult U.S. workers is a woman.
Effects of the Pill. In greatest demand are women office workers. Forthe first time, women have been hired as clerks on the floor of theAmerican Stock Exchange. John Fanning of Manhattan’s Fanning PersonnelAgency says that the shortage of secretaries “is the tightest we’veever seen”; a competent young secretary in New York can get $110 aweek. Like many training and placement agencies, the Katharine GibbsSecretarial School offers refresher courses for older graduates whohave been busy raising children, but now want to get back to work.
Mature women with older children are rapidly returning to the office.Since 1955, the number of working women aged 35 to 64 has risen from11.4 million to 15 million. Employers often prefer middle-aged womenbecause they are less likely than younger married women to be kept awayby a child with the mumps or some other domestic crisis. At the sametime, much of the old prejudice against hiring younger women—for fearthat they will marry, become pregnant and quit—has eased with the risein use of the birth-control pill. “We never would have done this beforethe pill,” says a Midwestern publisher who now hires mostly women.
Sexual Discrimination. Women still tend to get the lower-paying, lessinteresting jobs. Their representation in management remainsnegligible, and such professions as law and medicine are stilldifficult to crack. Less than 1 % of working women earn $10,000 ormore, their median income is $3,145—not much above the Government’sofficial poverty line—compared with $5,308 for men. But with the helpof the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based onsex as well as race, many women are being treated almost as equals.Boston Local 34 of the Bartenders and Dining Room Employees Union hasfinally admitted women, with the result that they now can serve aswaitresses in places previously closed to them.
For many years ahead, women will constitute the fastest-rising supply ofnew workers. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that in the decadeending in 1975, the total of working women will increase by 25%, whilethe gain for men will be 17%. No wonder that when the venerable churchbell rings out every evening at Ipswich, Mass., the bell ringer is awoman—for the first time in 333 years.