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and tobacco industry (67.1%). Women were, however, well represented on the
operative level in the important food processing and canning industry (42.6%),
paper and printing industry (48.9%), and the leather industry (33.6%).
Significantly, women operatives were almost absent from the key iron, steel, and
metal producing and fabricating industries (including auto and aircraft
manufacturing, and ship building) whose operatives were 85.1% male, and greatly
underrepresented in the important chemical industry (80.1% male operatives) and
the less important clay, glass, and stone industries (82% male operatives).
Therefore, while women were a real presence on the operative level of
manufacturing industry — a very important level from the point of view of both the
most powerful elements of capitalism and of the labor movement - female
employment was primarily polarized toward the garment industry, and secondarily
toward a series of industries that were labor, rather than capital intensive. Not
surprisingly female employment in these industries fell, in many cases, within
traditional notions of women's work in the home (food preparation, cloth and
clothing production).
One final dramatic example of the gendered polarization in the Baltimore
working class should be noted. In transportation and communications only 6.6% of
the workers employed were women, with almost no women workers in water
transport, railroads, or road and street; ninety-one percent of the women in this
sector were telephone operators, a job category which they overwhelming
dominated (92.6% female). Like clerical and office work, telephone operators
were once mostly male, but in Baltimore this had entirely changed by 1930. And
like clerical and office work, feminization had been accompanied by
mechanization, regimentation, and degradation of status.
Finally, a distinct racial-ethnic division of labor overlay and overdetermined the
gendered economic structure of the Baltimore working class at the end of the
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