Career opportunities for women circa 1922

by philg

“U.S. Soccer and Top Players Agree to Guarantee Equal Pay” (NYT, May 18):

That reality arrived Wednesday in landmark contracts with the U.S. Soccer Federation that will guarantee, for the first time, that soccer players representing the United States men’s and women’s national teams will receive the same pay when competing in international matches and competitions.

In addition to equal rates of pay for individual matches, the deals include a provision, believed to be the first of its kind, through which the teams will pool the unequal prize money payments U.S. Soccer receives from FIFA, world soccer’s governing body, for their participation in the quadrennial World Cup. Starting with the 2022 men’s tournament and the 2023 Women’s World Cup, that money will be shared equally among the members of both teams.

It sounds as though those who identify as “women” are better players than “men”:

The difference in compensation for men and women has been one of the most contentious issues in soccer in recent years, particularly after the American women won consecutive World Cup championships, in 2015 and 2019, and the men failed to qualify for the 2018 tournament. Over the years, the women’s team, which includes some of the world’s most recognizable athletes, had escalated and amplified its fight in court filings, news media interviews and on the sport’s grandest stages.

The men are literal failures while the women are winners. But the NYT doesn’t mention that this national team of winners (not failures like the men) has been beaten by a city team of 14-year-olds who identify as “boys”. “THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT World Cup-winning US Women’s team suffer shock 5-2 defeat to FC Dallas’ U-15 boys academy side” (The Sun, 2017):

THEY are currently the best women’s football team in the world.

But not even the likes of legendary midfielder Carli Lloyd could prevent the US women’s national team from crashing to a shock defeat against the FC Dallas U-15 boys academy side on Sunday.

What happens when different gender IDs compete off the soccer pitch? From H.L. Mencken’s 1922 book, In Defense of Women (Ketanji’s panel of biologists was not required back then to define the term “women”):

One seldom, if ever, hears of [women] succeeding in the occupations which bring out such expertness most lavishly—for example, tuning pianos, repairing clocks, practising law, (ie., matching petty tricks with some other lawyer), painting portraits, keeping books, or managing factories—despite the circumstance that the great majority of such occupations are well within their physical powers, and that few of them offer any very formidable social barriers to female entrance. There is no external reason why women shouldn’t succeed as operative surgeons; the way is wide open, the rewards are large, and there is a special demand for them on grounds of modesty. Nevertheless, not many women graduates in medicine undertake surgery and it is rare for one of them to make a success of it. There is, again, no external reason why women should not prosper at the bar, or as editors of newspapers, or as managers of the lesser sort of factories, or in the wholesale trade, or as hotel-keepers. The taboos that stand in the way are of very small force; various adventurous women have defied them with impunity; once the door is entered there remains no special handicap within. But, as every one knows, the number of women actually practising these trades and professions is very small, and few of them have attained to any distinction in competition with men.

And the employer’s perspective:

The economic and social advantage that women thus seek in marriage—and the seeking is visible no less in the kitchen wench who aspires to the heart of a policeman than in the fashionable flapper who looks for a husband with a Rolls-Royce—is, by a curious twist of fate, one of the underlying causes of their precarious economic condition before marriage rescues them. In a civilization which lays its greatest stress upon an uninspired and almost automatic expertness, and offers its highest rewards to the more intricate forms thereof, they suffer the disadvantage of being less capable of it than men. Part of this disadvantage, as we have seen, is congenital; their very intellectual enterprise makes it difficult for them to become the efficient machines that men are. But part of it is also due to the fact that, with marriage always before them, coloring their every vision of the future, and holding out a steady promise of swift and complete relief, they are under no such implacable pressure as men are to acquire the sordid arts they revolt against. The time is too short and the incentive too feeble. Before the woman employee of twenty-one can master a tenth of the idiotic “knowledge” in the head of the male clerk of thirty, or even convince herself that it is worth mastering, she has married the head of the establishment or maybe the clerk himself, and so abandons the business. It is, indeed, not until a woman has definitely put away the hope of marriage, or, at all events, admitted the possibility that she, may have to do so soon or late, that she buckles down in earnest to whatever craft she practises, and makes a genuine effort to develop competence. No sane man, seeking a woman for a post requiring laborious training and unremitting diligence, would select a woman still definitely young and marriageable. To the contrary, he would choose either a woman so unattractive sexually as to be palpably incapable of snaring a man, or one so embittered by some catastrophe of amour as to be pathologically emptied of the normal aspirations of her sex.

Full text at Project Gutenberg.

Related:

  • From 2013, “Women with elite education opting out of full-time careers” (Vanderbilt)
  • “This Woman’s Viral Argument For Marriage As A Career Has The Internet All Riled Up” (HuffPost): As for tips on how to find an employer-husband, the Kansas housewife suggests women actually work for the “high value” men they want to pursue: “You want a lawyer, right? So then you should be a paralegal. Or if you want a dentist, then you should be a dental hygienist.” … [the author] took issue with women who criticize other women who marry their bosses: “Women will bully the woman who’s the secretary who married the doctor, but who has the last laugh?” she asked on camera. “Her in her McMansion with her husband and her baby.” … “The message I try to get across to women is there’s a third economic option outside of serving in the military or receiving an education: You can marry an established man,” Drummond told us via email. “Once you are married, his wealth is your wealth, if he succeeds, you succeed.”
  • Speaking of serving in the military (above), folks of all gender IDs can join the US Air Force:

21 thoughts on “Career opportunities for women circa 1922”

  1. In 2015 women already controlled 51% of American personal wealth:

    https://www.businessinsider.com/women-now-control-more-than-half-of-us-personal-wealth-2015-4

    The divorce racket is no longer sufficient: Marital standards (men subsidize women) are now applied at a societal level. Male athletes subsidize female athletes, money is printed to create useless social justice jobs and director posts for women etc. Let’s get the quota up to 75%!

    It would be instructive if all American men went on a general strike for half a year.

    • Not gonna happen. Modern American men are pussy whipped. As are the majority of men in so called civilized societies including the non-savage parts of the generally savage Russia.

      The male Lysistrata project is doomed.

  2. I’ve once read an interesting academic paper (I could look it up) that said that we carry the genes of 80% of women who lived a number of generations ago (maybe 400 years ago, I do not remember exactly, it was 15 years ago that I’ve read it) and the genes of only 40% of the men that lived in the same time (I do not remember the exact number, but it was significantly less than that of women). The suggestion was that no matter how untalented a woman was, there still was a man willing to have children with her, while untalented men struggled to get sexual acceptance and spread their genes. (I think that in sea-lion colonies one male in 50 copulates and spreads his genes. Still the sex ratio is 50-50, something that puzzles biologists, as the other 49 males seem a waste of nature.)

    The consequence on social behaviour is that men are forced to take more risks to have a chance to affirm themselves socially. The authors claimed that the men were well aware that leaving with Magellan meant a slim chance to come back alive, but if one did make it then he was set for life. (As far as I remember only 14 came back out of a fleet of more than 200.)

    A consequence of this risk-taking behaviour is that men are overrepresented at both ends of the success scale. There are more outstanding male composers or scientists than women but also more male criminals, delinquents, or substance abusers. As the selective pressure is lighter on women, they bask somewhere in the middle. An example was piano playing. Apparently more girls than boys received piano playing lessons (probably they were talking about bourgeois families of the 19th century). But while girls remained acceptable players, meant to entertain domestic audiences and shine in polite society, it was the boys who strived for becoming virtuosi.

  3. I honestly don’t know who to believe sometimes. The Dean of the law school I used to work for told me that as one of just seven female law school Deans in the US, she had to fight what she perceived as all kinds of institutional and cultural barriers to get there. In a candid conversation one night, I asked her why she decided to do it, considering all the work involved and how much stress the job and the “glass shattering” inflicted on her. She said: “When I grew up, the only jobs available for women who wanted to enter a profession were Nurse, Schoolteacher [meaning K-12], Housewife, Prostitute, Writer, or perhaps an Actress. I didn’t want any of those.”

    So whom am I to believe? H.L. Mencken or my former boss? I don’t know how much Mencken she read, but she did have a degree in English Literature as I recall. Regardless, I decided to be her secretary in part because I was a Male Feminist of a high order. I thought it was Social Justice.

    • Addendum: I grew up in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s (at least partially) and what she told me that night did strike me as a little slanted – since the majority of my prior work experience had been with bosses who were female. First there was a computer store run and owned by a woman, but there were three other jobs (out of five total) in which – completely unknown to me before I applied for them – my immediate “boss” turned out to be a woman. I never thought that was odd, and I didn’t deliberately seek them out because of that, it just happened. I got along with all of them very well. Never made any sense to me why people made a big deal out of it one way or the other.

    • Alex: “I decided to be her secretary in part because I was a Male Feminist of a high order”

      Did you ever regret your choice or the grounds for it ?

    • No. I don’t regret taking the job itself because I learned a lot about the higher administration of universities and law schools, a little like the way a duck is prepped to become foie gras. If I had to do it over again, I probably would – the pay was very good (it was the highest-paid nonexempt position at the University) and although she was very demanding and troubling in many ways, she was a supportive boss to work for. It’s a tough situation to adequately describe in a short space here.

      The “male feminist” part I definitely would dispense with, but that came from somewhere else, and I do very deeply regret that part. I would never – ever, not the timespan of the Universe – ever do that again.

      I think looking back on it I still would have taken the job and gotten along just fine without that, because I never had any problem with a woman running a company or being in an executive position. I wouldn’t discourage any young man from becoming a DeanSec if they were in the position to take the job, regardless of whether the Boss is male or female – because you learn a lot about how academia in America actually functions. That was worth it.

      But no: “Fuck that!” to the male feminist thing. I didn’t need it in the first place. I’m a thoughtful person and I just wanted to do the best job I could.

    • @Ivan: What bothered me most, in fact, especially in the late ’90s and early ’00s, was the pervasive atmosphere of political correctness. Everyone was always looking over their shoulders and trying to grow extra eyes to avoid whatever politically incorrect tripwires they might trigger. Trying to avoid the tripwires can give people PTSD, and I think a lot of folks in academe suffer from it. Of course now it’s 10x worse.

      It’s not about how well you do the job, in other words. It’s about which triggers you don’t set off. That’s enough to make people sick, and it does.

    • @Ivan: Also, one inestimable lesson you learn whenever you take a job like that is the importance of responsibility. When you have 75 or so faculty members and a couple thousand students who are depending on you to get things right (at least at a distance) if you have any kind of compass at all, you wake up one morning early and think: “I’m not just working for myself. I’m important to the institution. I can’t screw this up.” That moment is almost like tempering steel. Your internal microstructure changes unless you just don’t care. It makes you more mature. So that part was worth it as well.

      https://www.sst.net/tempering-steel/

    • Anon
      “A;lex, get on of these”
      Those should only be available in XX-L and up, and only in the Harley-Davidson store.

    • Two years ago, my employer hired a superb male administrative assistant (for a department of about 50 employees). He was a 20-year retired USMC enlistee, also with a 100% non-observable disability. He told me his military pension was $30K and his disability pension was $30K tax exempt. He recently resigned as his wife is a partner in a Big 4 accounting firm and was ordered back to the Seattle office.

  4. I don’t know why we discuss any of this anyway, because absolutely none of it matters. The people who matter are all going to Bilderberg and they are the only people who matter in the world about anything important.

    All we do is shit ourselves up while fulminating and commenting about things they’ve either already decided or are going to decide soon. All the rest is Peanut Gallery garbaggio.

    https://bilderbergmeetings.org/press/press-release/participants

    • Take Yann LeCun, for instance. He’s an atheist socialist who is a VP and Chief AI Scientist for Facebook. What the fuck are we going to learn that he doesn’t already know? He talks to God every day, like Dave Mustaine used to do.

      Does Facebook track what’s going on inside the Bilderberg conference as well as it tracks every single user in the world on websites that are not a part of Facebook?

      LeCun knows what kinds of opportunities are available for women in the workplace because his company tracks almost every one of them in the world!

      http://yann.lecun.com/

  6. Anon
    “A;lex, get on of these”
    Those should only be available in XX-L and up, and only in the Harley-Davidson store.

  7. Ancecdotal, but it seems to me that there is a high number of female police chiefs, particularly black female police chiefs.

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