Employment

"Family Budget, ca. 1959-1960." This cartoon is an excerpt from the State's Mates Yearbook, highlighting the financial burden placed on student couples. 

Along with divorced and unwed mothers, working women jeopardized Parson’s “nuclear family” because they threatened the healthy operation of the family. Female workers breached the man’s role as family providers. However, what Parson took for granted in his model was that women were unemployed, which is an incorrect assumption. Contrary to Parson’s assumption, married women’s rate of employment increased from 20 percent to 48 percent between 1947 and 1978.

Although all members of the State’s Mates found herself in a situation that made her juggle many roles and responsibilities at once, most—not all—added employment to the list. In the year following WWII, many of the living expenses for students with families at NC State were lessened in large part to special housing for veterans, an area called Vetville, not all families were able to live in such accommodating areas. Those living “off campus” paid up to seventy dollars monthly for housing, while Vetville residents paid up to eighteen-dollars monthly. As a way to add some income to the family’s financial needs, many women joined the workforce. However, the frustrations of having so much responsibility added to the problems of student marriage. In the response to Willa Rae Bowen’s inquiry into the problems of college marriages for the panel discussion,  the opinions of the three members of State’s Mates highlighted such grievances. “Due to wife working, her time at night and on week-ends is consumed in housework,” they expressed, “leaving little time except maybe Saturday night for extra curricular activities such as bridge, handicrafts, [and] movies… offered by the college.” Given the situation that these women found themselves in—the struggle between a myriad of responsibilities—it is clear that working was difficult, although necessary. 

The types of employment for students’ wives were rather limited. Like women across the country, members of State’s Mates found themselves working in “pink-collar” and service sector employment, especially clerical, retail, and service jobs. These employment opportunities were relatively low earning and had high turnover rates because the women attracted to these jobs were not college educated and, like the working State’s Mates, were just supplementing income until their husbands attained degrees. In other words, the State’s Mates were looking for “jobs” since they had other responsibilities; they were not pursuing “careers.”

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