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.
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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.
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