Gendered Examples of Social Networks
The independence of the young people in planning their future occupation was always partial and relative. Their aspirations were closely linked to what they had experienced and knew.
Next, I examine the power of social networks in the young people’s decision-making. The parents and other family members could set an example both occupation-wise and also more widely in terms of what kind of an adult one could become.The curriculum of the elementary school emphasised practical skills, and the pupils had already received some preliminary vocational training according to their choice. As the emphasis for the last two years of elementary school, the boys choose from mechanical work, generic technical work, and commercial subjects, while the girls could choose from commercial subjects, handicrafts, or home economics. Vocational guidance lessons aimed at widening the pupils’ knowledge of occupations, but both the personal and the general guidance was standardising and straightforward. Based on the notes the counsellors took, the young people were dealt with as a group rather than as individuals. According to the vocational counsellors, the elementary school pupils needed more direct guidance compared to the secondary school pupils, for whom the aim of counselling was to offer information and a conversational aid (strategy paper 1967–1968). Jan Mannberg (2003, 231–232) has noted similar characteristics in Swedish vocational guidance textbooks. For example, material aimed at elementary and secondary school students differed in the way the labour market was described.
Family members had the greatest influence on the young people’s understanding. Those with more experience offered the young people direct examples of what ‘a person like me’ could become, and they served as informants about working life. The significance of relatives and acquaintances depended on closeness and similarities; they were people to whom the boys and girls could relate.
The family members’ examples offered the young people clear goals in the vast and ambiguous world of occupations. The vocational guidance counsellors also acknowledged the importance of role models, and the guidance forms encouraged the young people to consider whether someone they knew had an interesting occupation. Parental control and influence had a greater influence the younger the person was when the transition from school to the labour market took place (Tolsma and Wolbers 2014).Another important and even more direct manner in which the family members influenced the decision-making of the young people was their ability to help the young find a job. Social networks were crucial—especially for boys—in finding a suitable place to learn a trade (cf. Strathdee 2001). At the end of the term, a family member—usually a parent, an older sibling, an aunt, or an uncle—had arranged a job for a quarter of the boys. For girls, this share was a tenth. This difference between girls and boys was most likely related to labour market opportunities. As mentioned earlier, there were more jobs available for young boys that offered them the possibility of advancing and gradually becoming skilled workers. The labour of young girls was desired as well, but their typical jobs did not offer them the opportunity to develop vocational skills.
The significance and the several functions of the social networks are demonstrated in the following example. One boy’s first intention was to become a mechanic like his cousin, and his secondary plan was to find a trainee position in the printing industry. The boy’s biological father had died the year he was born, but he got along well with his stepfather, who worked as a mason. Going straight to work was a self-evident choice, although the family could have financed his education. The boy disliked school and did not want to apply to vocational school. The stepfather’s role was central in paving the young man’s way to the labour market. He had arranged a job for the boy at a construction site the previous summer, and he was able to help the boy this time as well.
As soon as school was finished, the boy began working at a large printing house (elementary schoolboy, number 1).The importance of social networks and the way they channelled decision-making is obvious in the following case as well. One boy was certain he would become an elevator mechanic like his father. The boy’s brother, who was three years older, had decided on the same path and worked as their father’s helper. The fifteen-year-old had not even considered any other occupation, and the boy’s father promised to ‘fix up’ a place for him at his employer’s vocational school, as he knew all the teachers. Before that, however, the boy needed to attend the communal vocational school to get a basic vocational education (elementary schoolboy, number 46).
The parents’ occupation influenced their opportunities to arrange work for their children. Some of the parents were entrepreneurs who could offer their children work in their own small family business. One girl’s mother wanted her to come to work at her canteen, and although the girl was reluctant first, she obeyed her mother at least temporarily. Her own wish was to become a cosmetologist, which demanded a lower secondary school certificate (elementary schoolgirl, number 77). In another case, the parents’ plan suited the child perfectly. The boy’s father had applied for a taxi permit, and the boy was eager to learn to repair and drive cars (elementary schoolboy, number 105).
The importance and usefulness of social relations had a downside: young people without suitable connections could face difficulties in finding employment in their desired trade. For example, one father agreed with his son’s aspirations to work with motor vehicles. The father mentioned, however, that the plan was impossible because the family lacked connections to arrange an apprenticeship for the boy. Originally, the boy had planned to apply to vocational school, but he changed his mind after failing a mathematics exam. He was afraid he would not get a place at vocational school, so he wanted to begin working (elementary schoolboy, number 24).
As stated earlier, most of the parents’ wishes and recommendations were based on their children’s interests and aspirations. Six out of ten parents referred to this reasoning. In explaining their plans, parents also referred to external features of the work and their children’s health problems, which they used to explain why their children could not do hard manual work. Referring to the external features of the work was more usual regarding sons, and references to health problems were more typical concerning daughters. A fifth of the boys’ parents directly mentioned good employment prospects, fair pay, or both in their reasoning, whereas only four parents mentioned these aspects in relation to their daughters’ future occupation. Some boys’ parents described their plan as seeking ‘an occupation of the future’. The accelerating technological development brought about new opportunities, which the families duly noted.17
The emphasis of the boys’ parents on the stability of employment and income reflected the strict gender roles. The post-war family ideal of the male breadwinner and female homemaker, which was at the time considered to signal the maturity of modernisation, resulted in strong expectations for young boys and girls (Esping-Andersen 2009, 29–30). For boys, the ability to support oneself and others was not only a sign of majority; it was also connected to masculinity. Work provided the route to manhood. This characteristic made employment and vocational skills ever more important for boys and their parents. For the girls, on the other hand, becoming an adult was connected to marrying and starting a family. The presumption was that during her adulthood, a woman would be employed only occasionally, whereas a man would be employed continuously for forty or even fifty years (cf. Willis 1979, 39, 103–104; Connell et al. 1989, 75, 96–97, 114; Mickwitz 2008, 15–16; Siltala 2013, 376, 414–415).
It was not exceptional for working-class girls to marry young and stay at home to take care of the household and the children.
Two of the elementary schoolgirls noted that their seventeen- and eighteen-year-old sisters were already married, and another girl’s favourite ‘occupation’ was housewife (elementary schoolgirls, numbers 82, 91, and 100). Although the cultural ideal of the female citizen as a homemaker was strong (Marander-Eklund 2014, 221–225), over half of the married women in Helsinki were economically active in 1960. Their proportion had risen from forty-three to fifty-four percent during the 1950s, and in 1970 almost two-thirds of married women in Helsinki were employed (SVT 1956a, 1956b, 1963a, 1963b; HT 1974b, 1974c.). Although the cultural ideal still questioned women’s ability to combine work and family, the young girls had numerous contrary examples around them.Poor health or a frail frame, which one-tenth of the young people’s parents mentioned, was used to justify why daughters were not fit for manual labour (elementary schoolgirls, numbers 1, 14, 25, 30, 35, 66, 70, 78, 79, and 94). The severity of the health issues is impossible to estimate, but the fact that the parents applied this reasoning reveals what was considered unwanted, especially for girls. In the case of the girls, the characteristics of the work were more important than the income prospects or stability of employment. Overall, female factory workers were better paid than female clerks (KM 1968, B 57, 20–21.). The image of light, neat, and peaceful work in an office differed greatly from the heavy work and the noisy and dirty environment found in the factories. For the parents, the prospect of their daughter having a non-manual job symbolised a better future. Even though the vocational guidance handbooks tried to refute the division of manual and non-manual work by, for example, explaining that typewriting demanded more muscular strength than sewing (Hiisio et al. 1958, 45–46), the division and the resulting desirability of occupations were persistent in the families’ reasoning.18
Being a working-class man with good vocational skills was a respected position, whereas being a woman with a working-class occupation did not offer a positive source of identity (Skeggs 1997, 74–75). Instead of aiming for industrial occupations like most of the boys did, the girls and their parents took notice of the growing service sector. The modernising economic structure needed employees for commerce and clerical work, which created new opportunities, especially for women. This difference in boys’ and girls’ employment prospects has been used to explain why girls constituted the majority of secondary school pupils in Finland in the 1920s and why working-class families favoured their daughters in formal schooling (Saaritsa and Kaihovaara 2016). Even if elementary schoolgirls did not have as many opportunities in the labour market as the lower secondary school graduates had, they could aim for a non-manual occupation.