WHY WOMEN WORK.

American society's emphasis on the role of women as wives and mothers, coupled with the historian's usual focus on organized labor have led to the neglect of women as workers. Female employment outside the home has been viewed as an aberration rather than a cultural pattern. Yet recent sociological findings reveal that a woman's decision to work often results from a favorable life-long attitude toward employment. Women's life cycles influenced their participation in the labor force and it is true that young single women were always the most likely to work despite their ethnicity, but some groups consistently had fewer women encumbered with children and subsequently always had a large proportion of their women working. Women worked because of a need for more income but the perception of what a family needed was relative, reflecting their concept of life style, material possessions, and ambitions for their children. Not only did a woman's ethnic background determine what her own ethnic group expected her to do, but society as a whole had certain expectations of different ethnic groups.