Historical Perspectives

Chapter 4 of Feminism, Children, and the New Families begins by stating a well-known fact: married American women under the age of 60 are entering the workforce at higher and higher rates and will likely match the rates of working husbands soon. The author attributes this shift in part to the physical separation of the home and work spheres that occurred during the Industrial Revolution, breaking down the true division of labor between husband and wife. In its place, the “breadwinner” system emerged, where the husband goes out to earn money and the wife tends to domestic chores and childrearing. This system became deeply embedded in our culture and laws, until recently, when women began to leave the home to take outside employment. Postponed marriage (to avoid financial burden of supporting a stay-at-home wife), couples having less children (women had time to work), and people living longer (women had many years after their kids left home to work) all contributed to the disintegration of the breadwinner. The article then goes on to predict that law and morality will change to facilitate a greater connection between work and family, counter-acting the jarring separation that exists between the two today.
Chapter 2 of From Marriage to the Market addresses many of the same topics as the previous article, though it discusses African-American women’s experiences as well as whites’. Susan Thistle talks about the gradual disappearance of support for women’s domestic labor. During the late 19th century and early 20th, women were kept at home to do all the chores, which were very time consuming, while men went out of the home to earn wages. As women entered the workforce, employers used the excuse that they had to do all the chores in addition to work (which would prevent them from giving their full attention to the job) to avoid paying them full wages. Many white women avoided having to enter the workforce, but countless black women became responsible for both paid and domestic work. Though the breadwinner system persisted, the fundamental gender roles and tasks that kept it together were starting to fall apart.
Having set the stage, Thistle then goes on in Chapter 3 to talk about why married women entered the workforce in droves in the second half of the 20th century. Basically, she attributes it to the fact that domestic chores became easier, thanks to new technologies and the fact that women lives many years after their children left the house. Since women didn’t have to be working at chores all day, their husbands (and the state) did not want to have to support them sitting at home. Coupled with a growing sense of dissatisfaction with domestic life, since many of them were now educated, women got outside work. This shift had major implications for marriage and family life, as well as family law and the economy.
Though I found the Feminism article informative (I especially like how the authors pointed out that the breadwinner is not actually “traditional” as it is usually considered), I preferred the Thistle chapters. The Feminism article did a great job of discussing how the egalitarian system both reflected and influenced the changes in family/work patterns in the 20th century, but Thistle got a little more in-depth in her analysis. She approached a commonly-discussed issue from a different perspective: usually women’s entering the workforce is attributed simply to their desire for equality. But Thistle talked about the practical reasons for getting jobs. It just didn’t make sense for women to stay home all day anymore. I also think it was helpful that she tied in women’s new economic independence into the changes in sex and birth control, as well as gender roles. Our generation is dealing right now with confusions over gender roles (for example, who pays on a date?), and these two articles did a good job of explaining the factors that led to these ambiguities. I am very interested to hear what experts are predicting for the future of the work-family connection and how gender roles will play into it.