Gender traditions conscribe women's work
After briefly noting some of the relatively minor injuries at his glove-making factory, Little remembers that despite the traditional belief that women belong in the home, women did most of the glove production. So-called tradition did interfere with his wife's career, however, when she was forced out of her teaching job after getting married.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Arthur Little, December 14, 1979. Interview H-0132. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
What about accidents? Is it dangerous, the cutting and
- ARTHUR LITTLE:
-
Well, no. We've had some boys… Now this fellow that
said he'd worked for us fourteen years got his hand mangled
up in a press out here.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
In a cutting press?
- ARTHUR LITTLE:
-
Yes, he wasn't watching hisself and joking and going on. But
that's the only bad injury we've had in the
thirty-four years we've been in business.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
It looked like you could easily get a needle in your finger on the sewing
machine.
- ARTHUR LITTLE:
-
Well, they do run the needles into their finger, but we've got
guards on there. It's pretty hard to get them through there.
We have had people to run a needle in their finger, but that
don't amount to nothing. It scares them to death. It would
me, too, .
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
Back, not in the forties when you started this mill, but when you
were just watching the industry in the earlier
years in the thirties, was there any feeling about it not being right
for women to work? It always has been mostly women that were sewing the
gloves.
- ARTHUR LITTLE:
-
Oh, no.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
There wasn't any feeling among people that women
shouldn't …
- ARTHUR LITTLE:
-
No. We've had people to say that a woman's place is
in the home, but all the gloves that have been made in this country have
been made by women. Oh, yes. Of course, they didn't have no
labor laws back when I was a young boy, but I had a lot of girlfriends
that I went to school with and all. They went to work at fourteen and
fifteen years old. And some of them walked two and three miles to the
factory, too. And they worked ten hours a day, some of them did,
especially in the wintertime. No, there's never been no hard
feelings.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
Did your wife quit teaching school after she got married?
- ARTHUR LITTLE:
-
No. Well, she had to.
- JACQUELYN HALL:
-
They wouldn't let married women teach?
- ARTHUR LITTLE:
-
They wouldn't let married women teach. Then they come back on
their knees begging her to teach. So she went back to teach the first
year we started the glove factory. And she taught a total of thirty
years, and she's retired now.
