Beyond creating a climate where harassment could thrive, capitalism reaped the benefits of this dynamic, since many women left male-dominated fields with higher-paying jobs for lower-paying positions in teaching, nursing, or social work where they would be less likely to have to deal with a harasser. As AASC put it in an article in Radical America in 1981: “Sexual harassment is possible because sexism is an integral part of capitalism … Occupational segregation … props up the system of depressed wages for women workers.”
That is not why women were pushed out of male-dominated jobs. They never were in those fields to begin with, except during the Second World War. That passage is such a screwed-up thesis I don't even know where to begin. I don't know WHERE this idea comes from. Women who try to enter male-dominated jobs are often sexually harassed where previously they were BARRED from entering for the most part and they are often harassed in FEMALE-DOMINATED workplaces (I have seen this happen quite often, and does this idiot of an author understand sexual harassment is rife in nursing and in teaching, for example), but that has NOTHING to do with women going into female-dominated work, which appears to be denigrated by this author. The denigration of female-dominated work just angers me, and shame on this author for worshiping male-dominated fields. I am sick and tired of reading bullshit about skilled careers like teaching, nursing, and social work as if they are crap jobs. Furthermore, I wish people would be accurate. During WWII, women went into the factories and did so-called "men's work" because the men were off to war. They did the jobs well without any problem. However, the war ended, and women had to be coerced out of those jobs, even fired, to make room for the returning servicemen. That is well-established fact. The passage also completely and totally ignores the concepts of the family wage, primary and secondary earners, and male "sex-right," which is the reason sex discrimination, the wage gap, and the denigration of female-dominated work exist. I have said it repeatedly: the reason women are denigrated in the labor force is because men want it that way to coerce them into marriage and men get sexual access and free domestic labor in return. Not complicated.
This woman needs to read The Feminine Mystique.
She could have written an article without making shit up out of whole cloth.
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