Nineteenth-century employers preferred women workers because they could be paid less and exploited more.

Evidence

It is insufficient to say that women have fewer needs than men: that is only a subsequent justification. Rather, women, as we have seen, did not know how to defend themselves against exploitation; they had to compete with prisons that dumped products without labor costs on the market; they competed with each other. Besides, in a society based on the marital community, woman seeks emancipation through work: bound to her father’s or husband’s household, she is most often satisfied just to bring home some extra money; she works outside the family, but for it; and since the working woman does not have to support herself completely, she ends up accepting remuneration far inferior to that of which a man demands. With a significant number of women accepting bargain wages, the whole female salary scale is, of course, set up to the advantage of the employer. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 265 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Low female wages stem from women’s disarmed position, not fewer needs. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 265; Protective labor laws could cost women their jobs rather than help them — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3195

Broader Connections

• Low female wages stem from women’s disarmed position, not fewer needs. #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 265