Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Two earner families

Fake stats vs. real bruises
Mary Anne — (archived)

Whatever. If it really had been the Good Old Days, women in the workplace would have continued to be a rarity.

Women started going to work out of the home in greater numbers in the early '60s, and it was not for the money. That came later, when, as you say, the manufacturing jobs started going away. At first, it was for independence. And why would we need that?

As for the babies thrown out with the bathwater, this happened because looking after children had been, up to that time, "women's work", in other words, "unpaid labor". It remains undervalued and underpaid today. The mommy track is a career dead-end in a world in which enormous amounts of overtime are considered the norm.

Also, before we became a "mobile society", stable communities with resident grandparents and other older relatives provided some infrastructure for the children. No more. The family moves with the job, and not usually the mother's.

They say that every successful man needs a wife. How true. Who else is going to do all the unpaid labor?

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