Think about the term “women’s work” and images will inevitably come to mind – possibly a grade-school teacher, or a sex worker, or a second world war-era Rosie the Riveter. We all have ideas about just what so-called women’s work is, as it’s a very well-worn concept that comes with its own set of assumptions, stereotypes and fixed ideas.
Hoping to add greater depth, nuance and historical complexity to the received wisdom around female labor, the New-York Historical Society debuts its show Women’s Work on 21 July, running through 18 August 2024. This massive undertaking dives into many thorny questions surrounding its complicated subject matter, finding fresh and insightful ways to help us see with fresh eyes. Based around nearly 50 objects, each with its own unique story to tell about women in the workforce, the exhibition aims to offer museumgoers a free-associative, enthralling experience.
“We wanted to create a nonlinear exhibition, one that was nonhierarchical,” said the New-York Historical Society’s Jeanne Gutierrez, one of several curators who worked to put this show together. “We hope that, when taken together, the objects tell a larger story. We want audiences to be able to walk through the exhibition and make those connections. We want them to be able to ask themselves questions like: what does an NYPD nightstick have to do with a photo of a street vendor?”
The objects incorporated into Women’s Work are indeed multifarious and intriguing. They include items such as a pin-back button from the National Welfare Rights Organization, a lantern slide advertising the 1927 silent movie My Best Girl, an archival photo of perfumer Ann Haviland, a Native American beaded pincushion, the birth certificate of a child born to an enslaved woman, a 1930s condom tin, and a photo of transgender sex workers working along the Stroll, a notable hotspot of sex work in the 1980s Meatpacking District.
“This exhibition was a long time in the works,” said Gutierrez. “There’s no single path through it, no clear chronology. We want viewers to be able to look at these objects from a variety of perspectives. We want people to come away with the understanding that women’s work is inherently political, and it can’t be divided from men’s work. We all depend on women’s work.”
To that point, Women’s Work gives audiences ample space to wonder why some forms of labor have ended up being coded as mostly for women, whereas other forms of labor have been given to men. One of the objects in the show, a typewriter ribbon rolled up in a little pink tin with a woman’s silhouette on it, demonstrates how porous this line can be. As Gutierrez explained, before women had largely entered the workforce, clerical work such as typing was once seen as the first step on a man’s career. But as women achieved greater access to education and literacy and began to hold down jobs of their own, the future potential of a job as a typist began to change.
“As women begin to enter the white-collar market, it then becomes pink-collar work,” said Gutierrez. “At that point, it’s no longer a path to a living wage that you can use to set up your family. There’s this widespread assumption that women are only doing this job until they can get married and have children. Very few women are promoted to the ranks of management. With very few exceptions, we’re not talking in the exhibition about work that men can’t do. We want people to think about why and how did this work, which is not inherently gendered, come to be gendered.”
The show also gives space to think about how intersectionality is important to the question of women’s work. A pin-back button for the little-known National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), a women’s rights group, draws attention to the efforts by women of color to get their childcare labor recognized as real work. As Gutierrez recounted, women – particularly women of color – would often be put into a bind in which they were forced to find others to care for their children so that they could perform other forms of labor, yet that labor wouldn’t afford them the means to pay for childcare. “The women at NWRO made the point that what they were doing was in fact work,” said Gutierrez.
Even as they sought to make Women’s Work as thorough and representational as they could, Gutierrez and her colleagues found that they were challenged by how structural forms of oppression had limited the holdings of the New-York Historical Society (NYHS). “We made a really concerted effort to include women from as many backgrounds as we could, but that was in some ways a bit of a challenge. The NYHS has centuries of collecting practices that privileged elite white families. So to find voices like Indigenous women’s, or Asian American women, or enslaved women – to find those voices can sometimes be a real dig.”
They were, however, able to find at least one piece by an Indigenous woman, a beaded pincushion made by Haudenosaunee women; these handicrafts were in fact ways by which Indigenous women pursued their own liberation in the face of forces that were taking away their traditional way of life. “These beaded pincushions were made by Haudenosaunee workers, and sold around tourist spots in Niagara Falls,” said Gutierrez. “This was happening at a time when their lands where being appropriated, and they needed a new revenue stream. So these bead-makers effectively created a new market, and a new revenue stream. As this demonstrates, in the show we also want to show women’s agency, even for people who were disenfranchised.”
Those disenfranchised groups also include LGBTQ+ women. Gutierrez shared that this was a particularly hard group to document and include in the show, as it can be tricky to talk about women who may not have identified as LGBTQ+, simply because those were not broadly accepted categories in their lifetimes. In addition, Gutierrez brought up the matter of how these women are generally seen by society at large, bemoaning the fact that “the only photos we have in our collection that identify trans women are photos of sex workers”.
She went on to add: “We wanted to make sure we included the perspective of trans women, and sex work was one of the only kinds of work that trans women of color could do in the 1980s. That was a time when New Yorkers were not protected against discrimination in housing and employment. We wanted to really bring that forward and show the limitations that can be placed on certain kinds of women when they’re trying to navigate the workforce.”
In the end, Women’s Work is a gigantic undertaking that successfully captures the immense scale and the intricate complexity of the subject it attempts to examine. Poring over more than 200 years of history, Women’s Work also reminds us that the questions it considers are very much active and alive in our own times. “The legacy of gendered work is so very much still with us,” said Gutierrez. “For instance, the gender wage gap is still a thing, and it’s incredibly stubborn. There are a lot of places in the exhibition where we have history quotes about how great it is that you can pay women less for the same work, and that still happens today. It’s not just history – it’s bleeding into current events.”
Women’s Work is on view at the New-York Historical Society from 21 July to 18 August 2024
