World War II

World War II marks a turning point in the book’s account of women’s work and social position, but not a clean break with older inequalities. Wartime labor needs widened women’s participation in employment, while the everyday burdens of domestic work and social convention continued to limit what that participation could mean. The war also enters a smaller, telling example of women collectively refusing the escalating obligations attached to hospitality.

War and Women’s Employment

The labor crisis of 1914–18 and the world war accelerated a movement already under way: women entered work across agriculture, industry, business, offices, and the professions. In France, 42 percent of women aged eighteen to sixty were working according to one prewar census. The book presents this expansion as a material change, not simply a new idea about women’s capabilities: economic participation gave women grounds on which to claim independence, even as the conditions of employment remained unequal.

That entry into paid work did not dissolve the household’s unequal division of labor. The burdens of pregnancy and childcare, along with housework, remained chiefly women’s responsibility; in France, established convention could make men regard household chores as beneath them. Women were therefore expected to combine family and employment under conditions that made the combination more difficult for them than for their spouses. Wartime change enlarged women’s work without, by itself, redistributing the labor at home.

Unequal Solidarity and Work

Women’s employment also sharpened conflicts within the working class. Employers welcomed women partly because they accepted lower wages, and male workers could consequently see them as cheap competition. The book gives concrete measures of the inequality: a French survey from 1889–93 found that a woman received half a man’s pay for a day of equal work; in America in 1918, women earned half men’s salaries. The wartime labor crisis thus belonged to a longer history in which women’s access to work and their exploitation through low pay were intertwined.

The text argues that solidarity between women and male workers could not simply be assumed. An oppressed group could be used by employers against another group, turning potential allies into opponents. Women’s integration into unions offered a means to defend their own interests while no longer being positioned as a threat to workers as a whole. The parallel the book draws with Black labor in the United States emphasizes both the shared mechanism of exploitation and the need for coalition rather than automatic unity.

War, Collective Refusal, and Social Ritual

The war also appears in an account of hospitality in a small Portuguese city. During the conflict, tea parties became an increasingly costly contest: each hostess was expected to offer a greater number and variety of cakes than the previous one. What might have been a generous social occasion hardened into an obligation, with the possibility of failure measured against other women’s displays.

The women eventually decided together to serve nothing with the tea. Their refusal interrupts the ritual’s escalating demands and exposes the work hidden inside sociability. The party, otherwise liable to become one more chore, could no longer be sustained as an endless contest in which each gathering imposed a higher standard on the next.

Historical Meaning

Across these examples, World War II is not treated as a self-sufficient explanation for women’s liberation. The book places wartime employment within a longer contest over who controls economic resources, who performs repetitive domestic labor, and whose interests are recognized as collective. Women could enter paid work in greater numbers and organize against wage inequality, yet remain bound to expectations of care and household service.

The war’s significance therefore lies in the tension between disruption and continuity. It widened women’s access to work and supplied a setting for collective resistance to social burdens, but it did not automatically undo the structures that made women’s labor cheaper or their time more heavily claimed. The book’s account measures change not by participation alone, but by whether women gain practical freedom to pursue projects and shape their own futures.