Work of Their Own

Linda Alvarado's mother didn't work--at least that's how she saw it. She didn't count taking in ironing from the big houses up the hill as a job. But ironing was work she never wanted her only daughter to do. "That was her gift to me," says Alvarado. "She did the housework so I could study."

Now, Alvarado jokes she may have learned that lesson too well. These days, her husband, a Colorado fast-food franchiser, oversees domestic duties while she dons a hard hat to prowl the site of Denver's expanding convention center. The project is just one of dozens her commercial contracting firm is building in several states. At 50, Alvarado is not only a self-made mogul in a field notoriously hostile to those of her gender; she's emblematic of a generation of women who have changed the face of the American workplace.

In 1952, the year she was born, barely 30 percent of women held a job. Now, they make up nearly half the U.S. labor force--an estimated 41 million wage earners. Like her, 6.2 million women own companies, contributing nearly $2.4 trillion to the economy. Others have stormed even the most stubborn male bastions, whether trucking or tech. That has transformed everything from the nation's labor laws to its notion of the family. "The speed of the change is astonishing," says Lynn Weiner, a dean at Chicago's Roosevelt University, who has written about the history of the female labor force.

The title of Weiner's study, From Working Girl to Working Mother, underscores the most striking aspect of that shift. Before World War II, working women were mainly single, fresh off the farm or an immigrant freighter, toiling as servants or factory hands. Now they're more likely to be harried supermoms, madly juggling business meetings with kids' day-care schedules.

In 1955, only 18 percent of mothers with children under age 6 worked. By 2001, that number had jumped to 64 percent--with about 2 million mothers of infants less than a year old holding down full-time jobs. As education and housing costs have soared, many women work not only because they want to but to keep their households afloat on the shifting tides of the American dream. By 1989, 80 percent of home buyers were two-income couples. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a family in the 1990s needed two paychecks to maintain the standard of living it had enjoyed two decades earlier. "Today," says Weiner, "most women work because they have to."

Not that the concept of the coprovider family is entirely new. Since the Pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower, women have toiled beside men, tending crops and trading goods under pressures that would make modern home-career conflicts look like a day at the spa. And as an exhibit called Enterprising Women, mounted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, points out, women have run their own businesses at least since Mary Katherine Goddard, proprietor of the Maryland Journal, printed the first signed copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Today, Oprah Winfrey is hailed as one of the few African-American women to have spawned a conglomerate. But in 1906--14 years before women could vote--a former laundress and the daughter of slaves, Sarah Breedlove, aka Madame C. J. Walker, created a hair-care empire so successful she built a Hudson Valley mansion down the road from John D. Rockefeller's.

Labor legacy. Still, much like a current corporate star--Hewlett-Packard's Carly Fiorina, one of only six female CEOs in the Fortune 500 --those pioneers didn't refashion the U.S. workplace. It was the maids and mill girls of the early 20th century who provoked the first labor laws that now affect all U.S. workers, male and female alike.

Thousands toiled in such desperate conditions for so little that many fell into prostitution. When magazines like Harper's Bazaar drew attention to this plight, middle-class housewives joined the crusade, agitating for legislation on hours and wages. In 1912, Massachusetts enacted the first minimum-wage law. By the end of World War I, 17 states had followed suit. But by then, workplace tragedy had struck: In March 1911, a fire broke out at New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory. The owners had locked the sweatshop's doors from the outside, in part to bar union organizers who had led 20,000 female garment workers out on strike two years earlier. Trapped on the upper floors, 146 women died.

The outcry that followed led to the first workplace safety laws. But it wasn't until 1938 that one of the witnesses to that conflagration, Frances Perkins--by then Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor--oversaw the Fair Labor Standards Act, the first employment legislation governing both women and men.

The flood of married women into the labor force began when the nation entered World War II. As men marched off to combat, Roosevelt's dizzying defense production goals required the mass mobilization of women to shipyards and aircraft assembly lines. In a propaganda campaign orchestrated by the government, homemakers morphed overnight into lunch-bucket-toting heroines. Rosie the Riveter became their mythic poster girl on a 1943 Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell.

Between 1940 and 1944, an estimated 5 million women answered her can-do rallying cry. Yet as men returned home, that campaign had to be thrown abruptly into reverse gear. In 1944, a Department of Labor survey reported that 80 percent of U.S. women wanted to keep their jobs after the war. But four years later, their share of the workforce had plummeted from 36 percent to 12 percent. Goodbye Rosie, hello Doris Day.

Still, the '50s presented a paradox. Despite the Ozzie and Harriet image of the decade, women were, in fact, slipping back into the job market at a brisk rate. By the dawn of the '60s, 40 percent of U.S. workers were women--more even than in the war's heyday. In 1963, Betty Friedan warned against the trap of housework in The Feminine Mystique, kick-starting feminism. Half-century-old barriers came tumbling down--propelled in part by an antidiscrimination clause tacked on to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Women's work, long an outlet for the lower classes, suddenly became a middle-class pursuit. By 1991, nearly two thirds of all married women with children were in the labor force. And just as single women had provoked prewar wage labor laws, working mothers drove the postwar social policy debate around variations on a single theme: child care. With the 1993 Family Medical Leave Act, job-preserving legislation aimed at women once again benefited both sexes. By 1999, 40 percent of the 20 million workers who had taken that unpaid leave were men.

The perennial conflict between a woman's career and her kids may have left the most profound mark on the nation's psyche. "I don't know a single female executive with a family who's comfortable making the kind of compromises she has to make in her personal life," says Dana Walden, president of Twentieth Century Fox Television and mother of a 2-year-old daughter. "You have to sacrifice what your male counterparts don't."

Today, corporate America may serve as the best measure of the strides women have made in the workforce. For years, they crashed executive suites with headlines and hoopla. But now, progress seems stalled. Last year, Catalyst, a New York-based nonprofit that tracks female clout in the Fortune 500, reported that the proportion of top female officers since 1995 has nearly doubled from 8.7 percent to 15.7 percent. But that translates to a mere 2,140 female executives out of 13,600.

Stumbling blocks. Even in the loftiest corporate suites, a stubborn gender wage gap persists. In 1900, women earned 50 cents for every dollar a man made. A century later, they earn only 76 cents. Critics blame women for detouring to have children or opting for occupational versions of the mommy track. As women have decamped from corporations in record numbers to start their own businesses over the past decade, capital remains their biggest obstacle: Only 39 percent have landed loans from commercial banks, compared with 52 percent of male business owners. When Linda Alvarado set up her contracting firm, she was rejected by six banks. Her father, by then an Energy Department inspector, remortgaged the family's house to lend her $2,500 in start-up funds. "You can imagine how I felt," she says, "knowing that if I screwed up, they'd lose everything."

Alvarado not only recouped that investment; she has triumphed in a field where women make up scarcely 2.4 percent of skilled workers. For nearly 20 years, Lauren Sugerman, a college dropout, has been training women to invade those blue-collar trades. When she apprenticed as an elevator technician in the 1980s, every hurdle was thrown her way: Male colleagues abandoned her in a public-housing project and groped her breast on a crowded skip-hoist. Now, as president of Chicago Women in Trades, Sugerman is nudging a new crop of women into carpentry or electrical careers. "As long as there's occupational segregation by gender," she says, "women's wages will never be equal to men's."

In the annals of women's work, progress often lies in the eye of the beholder. Alvarado, who watched her mother haul water from a New Mexico drainage ditch to wash her six kids' clothes, now sits in the owner's box at Colorado Rockies games--the first Hispanic to share a stake in a Major League Baseball team. Taking girls' clubs on tours of the stadium or her construction sites, she points out career possibilities. But she likes to conclude by patting her leather-tooled president's chair. "That job you want to aim for," she says, "is mine."