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In January 1914, the Ford Motor Company announced the creation of a profit-sharing system, the five-dollar day plan, which effectively doubled minimum salaries for its workforce. Overnight a five-dollar per day minimum wage was guaranteed, as long as workers abided by the rules and regulations of the system, which revolved around personal values, habits, and living conditions. The profit-sharing system was to be administered by a newly created Sociological Department.
Through its Sociological Department, the Ford Motor Company promoted a particular constellation of social values and norms to its workers that it considered as representative of "middle-class values," including thrift, temperance, diligence, loyalty, Americanism, and family. The institutionalization of these values was achieved through various company policies and practices that extended their relevance and application in time. These values and the practices that maintained their enforcement had important implications for social relations. This article focuses on the implications of the Ford sociological project for gender relations. In particular, this article argues that company policies regarding female employees essentially point to the pioneering role of the company as an agent in establishing and maintaining what we today know as family wages and patriarchal family values (May, 1982); men as providers and women as full-time domestic laborers, mothers, and wives.
The article begins with a discussion of the family as perceived by company management, and its importance to labor relations. This discussion is followed by an examination of company efforts to promote marriage and to strengthen families, an examination of the procedures established by the company to verify marital status, and to arbitrate "wrong" family relations. The article concludes with an examination of the position of women in company discourse and practices.1
Family as the Foundation of Industry
In line with mainstream ideas relating to gender relations of the day, the Ford Motor Company through its Sociological Department employed policies that reinforced what may be called family values of the Progressive era. Indeed, Rev. Samuel Marquis, Henry Ford's personal confessor and Ford Sociological Department's Chair (1916-1921), saw the institution of marriage and family as the foundation of industry. Upon taking charge of his new position as Head of the Sociological Department, Marquis (1916) argued the following:
Much has been said about the home as the foundation of...