Closing out Women’s History Month, we interviewed Phyllis Chapman, who brings sometimes forgotten Americans to life. Chapman has carefully researched 10 women — spending a year on each as she reads from original sources, visits the places they lived and worked, and even replicates their clothes and tools.

One of the women she portrays is Clara Barton. Most of us know of Barton as the founder of the American Red Cross and of her efforts to help Civil War soldiers.

Barton’s life of course was more complex than those few broad strokes. A shy child born in 1821, she was urged by her parents to be a schoolteacher, which she excelled at and which, as Chapman put it, brought her out of her shell.

Barton eventually, in 1852, opened the first free school in New Jersey, which was successful enough that she hired another woman to help teach over 600 students with each woman earning $250 annually. The success of the school led the town to raise $4,000 for a new building for which the school board named a male principal.

Barton then moved to Washington, D.C. to work as the first female clerk at the United States Patent Office. With the start of the Civil War, she went, unbidden, to the rail station there to help the hungry and sometimes wounded men. She and other women read books to them, wrote letters home to their families, and brought food and supplies to them.

After first using her own home as a storehouse, Barton gained support and finally permission to work at the front lines. After the war, she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers to find and identify the men who were killed or missing in action. She also became active in the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements.

Those are still broad strokes but Phyllis Chapman adds the fine brush strokes, the details that make the picture resonate.

Chapman traveled to a museum in Maryland to see the camp bed Barton had slept in on battlefields and thought, “That doesn’t look very comfortable but she was willing to do that for what she felt was important.”

Chapman went on about Barton, “She put aside all propriety that women weren’t supposed to be there and you couldn’t do this …. And that is a constant, I find, with so many of these women … They just decided they were going to do something, it was worth doing, and the constraints that were put on them by society at the time counted for very little.”

Speaking of Barton and her early teaching career, Chapman said, “She was very, very set on working at a job that a man could do and would get the same pay as a man.”

Barton refused a teaching position unless she received equal pay, and said, “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”

That comment, made by Barton more than a century-and-a-half ago, struck us now with particular force. Often, so-called “women’s work” is work we do without pay. It is mostly women who raise children or who care for elder or ailing family members without  pay.

Women often work for free out of love or duty — a huge unheralded part of the United States economy.

But why is it, more than 160 years after Barton’s assertion, that women are doing the same work as men for less pay?

Last September on this page we wrote about a Women’s Equality Day event at the University at Albany campus during which Governor Kathy Hochul announced she had directed the state’s labor department to analyze the impact of the pandemic on women in the workplace and, importantly, explore equitable solutions.

The state’s labor commissioner, Roberta Reardon, who oversaw the study, said at the event, “When women are not part of our workforce, we are literally leaving money on the table. It damages our economy and it bruises our culture.”

In that editorial, we reviewed the 2018 study on closing the gender wage gap in New York State that Hochul and Reardon had co-chaired. In it, they correctly noted, “Any gender pay gap, no matter how small, is an injustice impacting not only working women and their families today, but also generations of women that will enter the workforce in the future.”

We also promised to see what the new report uncovered.

That report, “The Gender Pay Gap in the Pandemic Era,” was released earlier this month — on March 14, which was this year’s Equal Pay Day.

As the report explains, “‘Equal Pay Day’ commemorates the persistent and egregious fact that, because women’s wages are on average lower than men’s, women must work significantly into the new year to earn the same as what men were paid the previous year.”

Women in New York earned 88.2 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2021, the report says, calling it “a significantly smaller gap than the national average of 81.5 cents.”

Here in Albany County, a map in the report shows, females earn 86 to 90 percent of what males earn.

The gender pay gap continues to be substantially larger for women of color compared to non-Hispanic white men in New York and nationally, the report says. Black women in New York were paid 67.8 cents on the dollar while Hispanic and Latina women were paid only 62.9 cents on the dollar.

The pandemic caused the unemployment rate for women to nearly double from 4.2 percent, with 207,000 women unemployed, in 2019 to 8.2 percent, with 405,000 women unemployed in 2021.

“As schools and daycare centers closed, the burden of child care and remote schooling fell primarily on women, forcing many to leave the labor force,” the report states, adding that, in April 2020, nationwide 45 percent of mothers of school-age children were not working for pay.

At the same time, during the depths of the pandemic, “Women were also over-represented in jobs deemed essential and in jobs needing to be done in person, thus denying those women the ability to perform their work remotely and exposing them to a greater likelihood of job loss since many of the face-to-face jobs were also those most prone to layoffs.”

Those same women, working in “essential” jobs, risked their health to keep the economy going and to keep other New Yorkers safe. According to the state’s labor department, women, primarily women of color, made up almost two-thirds of the state’s essential workforce — 1.45 million women out of 2.25 million total frontline essential workers.

These workers, again primarily women, were “rewarded” by earning almost 25 percent less than their non-essential counterparts.

At the same time, what has been termed the “shadow pandemic” was raging as violence against women increased to record levels. Then, too, women’s mental health took an extreme toll — far more than men’s.

Close to 45 percent of women reported symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorders from July 16 to July 21, 2020, compared to 37 percent for men, according to the National Center for Health Statistics’ Household Pulse Survey. Prior to the pandemic, in 2019, that number was 10.8 percent for all American adults aged 18 and over.

“Being forced to leave jobs to care for children and other family members led to increased anxiety, isolation, stress, and other mental health issues,” says the report.

We have often written on this page that defining a problem is an essential step to solving it so we are grateful for even the bleak data in the March 14 report. As next steps, the report details a half-dozen “action items” for the labor department to undertake and nine policy recommendations for the state.

We’re going to focus here on two of the policy recommendations where we believe our readers could make a difference. One of those is to raise awareness about the state’s Equal Rights Amendment.

 The Equal Rights Amendment has already passed the state legislature twice and will go to voters in 2024. Most of the focus, both for and against it, has been on protecting abortion rights. But the amendment would also strengthen our state constitution by adding new protected classes, explicitly prohibiting discrimination based on a person’s age, disability, ethnicity, national origin, or sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression. We need to support these changes.

A second recommendation is that businesses implement policies for remote work. “Remote work can provide more career and earning opportunities for women who must juggle work and family responsibilities, including those who can only work part-time due to child care,” says the state’s March 14 report.

Optimistically citing research from the Harvard Business Review, the report concludes, “And as more research shows the business advantage of reasonable hours, some employers will come to question the wisdom of grueling schedules. If and when those forces gain traction, neither women nor men will feel the need to sacrifice the home or the work domain, demand for change will swell, and women may begin to achieve workplace equality with men.”

While women are now earning postsecondary degrees at a higher rate than men, the March 14 report says, they are still subject to a pay gap upon graduation. In New York, women with a bachelor’s degree earn 18 percent less than their male peers, while women with a graduate or professional degree earn 22 percent less.

Of women being held back from the senior ranks, the Harvard Review authors conclude it was not because of family obligations but rather, “The real culprit was a general culture of overwork that hurt both men and women and locked gender inequality in place.”

Nevertheless, as the state’s report concludes, “Undoubtedly, the child care crisis is the singular issue that dominates current discussions and it is one that demands urgent and decisive action.”

 According to the Economic Policy Institute, New York is ranked sixth out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia for the most expensive infant care. A typical family in New York would have to spend more than a fifth of its income — 22.1 percent — on child care for an infant.

Yet child care workers’ families are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as other workers’ families (11.8 percent are in poverty compared with 5.8 percent). A median child-care worker in New York would have to spend more than half of her earnings — 57.5 percent — to put her own child in infant care.

Money alone won’t solve the problem; it will take a cultural shift. A close-to-home example is found in the Guilderland schools, which have been allocated state funds for pre-kindergarten programming.

But the district, like many across New York, will be returning much of that money because, not having space in its schools, it relies on local child-care providers as partners. There simply aren’t enough.

We, as a society, need to value what has been traditionally called “women’s work” as much as we have “men’s work.” 

To return where we started, with Phyllis Chapman’s intimate exploration of women in our history, she correctly notes that the Industrial Revolution in the United States upended society. One of the women Chapman portrays is Lucy Larcom who wrote of being a “mill girl” in Lowell, Massachusetts.

“Young women left the farm where they worked from dawn to dusk and made no money, and went to the factory where they worked from dawn to dusk, but did make money,” said Chapman. “Some of them helped their families out. Some of them went on to college, became teachers and writers. And yet so many of these stories get lost among the other things that are deemed more historic, more important.

“But I can’t think of anything that transformed American life for everybody in the way that the Industrial Revolution did. This being the idea that people were working for a business, they were earning wages, they were making money, they were putting money in savings.”

Goods became cheaper and people became consumers — “all types of things that we take for granted in our everyday lives were born in that period and it would not have been possible without the efforts of these young women who took a chance and worked in the mill,” said Chapman.

We are now in the midst of another revolution — a technology revolution. Just as the Industrial Revolution ended the agrarian base for our society so that “mill girls” worked machines to provide clothes for the masses rather than spinning and weaving and sewing at home for their families — the current revolution is allowing many workers to function apart from what had been their places of employment.

Let’s use this sea change to help all boats rise, including those holding women. That is the course to a brave new world.