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Women fought for the right to choose to work. Capitalism saw that as an opportunity to force both parents to work.
Now we have the worst of both worlds: wages are often too low to support a parent dedicated to caregiving, while two working parents are often not rich enough to pay for a full-time nanny.
Domestic labor is still labor and one of the great victories of feminism is maternal leave.
People like this envision a past in which an 18 year old woman marries a loving, dutiful, and hard working man who is always able to earn a good living and who always acts in the best interest of the family. Also that he's smart/humble enough to make reasonable decisions. While this no doubt happened for some people, possibly even most at some times, it was by no means a given.
The young widowed mother is the easiest counterpoint here. Even a magnificent husband and father can just die young for any number of reasons. Or become disabled and unable to work. And speaking of disability, there are mental illnesses that are known to sometimes not be noticeable until adulthood, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. I've known multiple men who are loving and dutiful husbands/fathers who simply are too mentally ill to be reliable as the some income. And yeah not even touching on PTSD here, especially in the era of "man up and shut up" in response to it.
But now let's look at the 1950s, the era that 2nd wave feminism was formed in response to. The decade experienced a conservative backlash to the massive increase in equality found during WW2 at least in the US. Women who had been employed during the war returned to homemaking for their often traumatized husbands, and weren't happy. During this time frame, much as during the interwar period, unmarried women were expected to engage in "women's work", such as secretarial labor or housekeeping, where she may be expected to be the brains behind a man less intelligent than her, while he gets all the credit and higher pay. She may have to manipulate him into listening.
The idea that a woman would have to do no productive labor (work for money) after marriage is extremely post industrial, middle and upper class. And as was one of the major points of the 3rd wave, it was an extremely white experience in the US. Pre industrial households would do small manufacturing for money to supplement agricultural labor. Poor women have always had to find some way to contribute to the family's finances, often as domestic labor (ie working as servants).
And now we get to the fact that not all men are awesome guys doing their best with the hand they drew, and in fact, for a long time, men in European societies (including non indigenous American countries), were worse than today on average. The prohibition movement had a major component of "many men blow too much of their wages on booze and so their family doesn't have enough for food, and they come home drunk anf violent". Men having second families wasn't particularly rare (I've got a direct ancestor in living memory who pulled that shit). Financial abuse as well as physical abuse were common, and it's not like it's easy to leave when you can't get a job able to support a family on. Also your husband may just be noticeably less intelligent than you and keep blowing his money in stupid investments and then laying down the law because your culture has decided he has the decision making genitals, and he's the one allowed to have a bank account and significant income. Hell, many men clearly resented their wives and children for the sole reason of them being culturally mandatory financial drains.
Love your comment
Thanks, I have relatives who've experienced some of these things and it's something I really think a lot of people just don't think about.
Idealistic myths of history are just that, myths. I get that modern work sucks, I don't like having to work 40 hrs a week for wages that aren't enough to get by for uneducated labor, and aren't nearly what they once were for educated labor. But a hundred years ago my foremothers weren't spending all day relaxing, and one I know specifically was supporting her family for very little pay without the ability to open a bank account.
Also we can just apply the sniff test to this myth. Is it really realistic that people who were so poor they had to make their 10 year old get a job are going to leave a full grown adult at home if they can possibly help it? Those are the masses. People lack an understanding of labor history and tend to think that times are the way the well to do experienced them. And by that measure the 30s in the US were a time of cheap movies, new foods, the transatlantic accent, and daring people pushing the limits of aviation, all you have to do is ignore the hungry people traveling far and wide looking for any work they can possibly get.
Women fought for the right to not be dependent on men.
A woman that depends on a man's income to survive is stuck even in DV cases.
We're the women of the union and we sure know how to fight.
We'll fight for women's issues and we'll fight for women's rights.
A woman's work is never done from morning until night.
Women make the union strong!
(Chorus)
It is we who wash the dishes, scrub the floors and clean the dirt,
Feed the kids and send them off to school—and then we go to work,
Where we work for half men's wages for a boss who likes to flirt.
But the union makes us strong!
(Chorus)
Where we work for half men’s wages for a boss who likes to flirt.
damn that hits hard
also the song is smooth af
Now women are dependent on an employer instead.
That just means the struggle isn't over, not that the struggle was pointless.
The first statement (miia) is infuriating. It's the sort of dumb shit MAGA women say. Mostly to infuriate people like me. Mission accomplished, but does that make her less dumb?
I don't care if the 2nd statement isn't 100% accurate, it hits the spot.
We all should have fought for basic income so we could all be paid for homemaking.
We should have fought to split the productive and reproductive labor 50 50. Each spouse working a 20 hour work week and coming home to do half the domestic labor.
Split the reproductive labor? Make the man carry the baby for half the pregnancy, like in that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie?
Reproductive labor as in labor that is necessary but takes place outside the economy. Not being pregnant with the baby, but being on call for the baby at night. Taking the kid to the doctor. Cleaning and cooking. Managing what all the household needs and figuring out how it's going to get done. Shit like that
That seems like a really weird phrase for household labor and parenting, tbh
Yeah but I'm not the one who coined it. It goes back at least as far as Sylvia Federici. The idea is that it's the labor of reproducing society
I have been lucky enough to split child raising labor fairly evenly with my wife (after the pregnancy at least), though it’s been at the expense of retirement savings and lost potential earnings.
There are lifelong divisions of labor that we should all have the freedom to share, but capitalism and its billionaires is always trying to squeeze every penny from most of us and adding needless stress with artificial scarcity and profit taking to fuck all of us, but especially women and those with less political power (at this stage, that’s 95% of us by my estimate).
I feel like both comments are misleading.
100 years ago guys were engaged in paid work and women kept house.
As technology (like gas stoves and water heating) and social conventions (like schooling and now day care) progressed "keeping house" has became less labor intensive and women had more time to find paid work.
As households earned more they could afford more so houses and groceries cost more, but in fairness they also became much more complex and costly to produce. Kids played with a hoop and a stick a hundred years ago.
Now of course both partners in a couple really need to work in order to have any chance of a comfortable retirement.
Women did have to fight for a lot of things. No doubt about that. They had to fight to not be sexualised in the workplace, they had to fight for equal access to jobs, and of course equal pay.
They did not have to "fight to work" nor "fight to get paid" per se.
They had to fight for the right to have money in their own name and to be able to end a marriage without agreement from their spouse.
Bollocks. 100 years ago both my grandmothers had paid jobs, as had many women before them.
100 years ago my grandmother ran a whole train station as 'secretary', while the 'station master' came, smoked, read papers, and pretty much just chilled all day - and getting paid many times her salary.
When they said, "women fought to get paid", they meant, "getting paid commensurate to their work". And in many ways, they are still fighting for it.
So did mine.
you know what they didnt have? A bank account without their husbands name on it.
My grandmother had to marry in secret because married women weren't allowed to work. That was considered taking a job from a man who needed to support his family.
She wore her wedding ring on a chain around her neck, and one day it fell out when she leaned over. She was fired that very day.
That was considered taking a job from a man who needed to support his family.
That's what all this talk of double incomes ruining the family is all about. Men don't want women 'taking their jobs'.
Please take my job, I'm sick of it 😭
You're wrong about pretty much everything.
Poor women worked jobs and kept house in the past. Washer women and spinsters [women who spun cloth] worked from home.
Second, after WW2 and up until the Arab Oil boycott of 1973 most working class/Union jobs in the US paid enough for the wife to stay home. It wasn't until the economy started to crater that large numbers of women started looking for work.
In 1968, when Nixon was elected, 'middle class' was one job supporting a family of four with a stay at home wife. In those days $1 million was a vast fortune. By 1992, 'middle class' was two incomes' and $1 million was what a rich guy spent on a party.
I didn't get that connection to "spinsters" until this comment, so thanks for that.
Second, after WW2 and up until the Arab Oil boycott of 1973 most working class/Union jobs in the US paid enough for the wife to stay home
Note that that's only a 30 year window. Before WWII was the great depression. Before that, working couples couldn't make ends meet without both partners "working". In some cases the women were doing unpaid or informal labour at home rather than working in a factory or something. But, they were definitely doing a lot of labour.
The post-WWII period was an anomaly rather than the norm. The labour protections from the New Deal were still in place, and unions were still strong. Plus, the US manufacturing sector was the only one that had come out of WWII unscathed. Every other country from Germany to France to the UK was having to rebuild their factories after they'd been smashed in the war. So, to get back to a post-WWII economy you wouldn't just need strong labour protections and high marginal tax rates like you had after WWII, you'd also need a devastating world war somewhere else in the world that the US could join halfway through.
Women don't get paid to raise children today either? What a stupid statement.
Sounds impressive and very wise but is it accurate, like, at all?
Everyone laboured, sometimes for money and sometimes for trade and sometimes for self. I don't see a ton of women getting paid to do the kind of labour women were doing when they were demanding jobs. So to say they fought to be paid for the Labour they were already doing, when that labour never actually paid and still doesn't, makes little sense.
Only some labour is paid and women fought for access to the paying kind of labour so they could independently engage with an economy that was moving toward exchange through money and not trade. The labour women get paid for now is the same that men did, labour that paid. Women were being left behind by not having access to the new consumer economy that was emerging, because they didn't do the kind of labour that anyone paid for. They did the kind of labour you trade favours for, builds relationships over and do for personal reasons. The skillset of a pre industrial age, when villages still existed, instead of cities. The women's movement didn't come from rural communities but from urban women because it became a significant disadvantage to not be able to engage with the new consumer economy that worked through the exchange of money, not the agricultural, village trading done through relationships, which was the skillsets developed in most women at the time.
Huh. And here i thought women started working because the men were sent to die off in wars and there was no one left to maintain production.
Women worked, particularly working class and poor women, almost always. Some of that was paid as well. Losing so many men to the war created a circumstance to access different kinds of paid labour that women were generally not selected for, and possibly didn't want, normally. It had a significant impact on employment but wasn't exclusively the cause of women entering the workforce but definitely accelerated the transition.
It's actually pretty complicated. One notable critique of this entire discussion is that racialized and poor women have always worked outside the home at least, during the industrial era (discussing divisions of labor prior to industrialization is just going to devolve into a discussion about how those economies worked at all). But yeah during the world wars, latge numbers of middle class women were called into the workforce to engage in "masculine" labor. But by that point you'd already started seeing women fighting for educational equality and the right to certain careers of passion such as research.
Additionally, certain industrial labor was always "feminine" labor, such as secretarial work, but also plenty of types of working on factory floors. Many textile factories only hired young women for example, even in the early days.
