Inspired by recent Cecil column comments. We know the trope; families in previous generations had the father going to work and the mother staying at home to care for kids and maintain the household.
Except…granted this is my families experience…This NEVER happened to my family. My fathers family were farmers with 5 girls and 1 boy (1920s-1940’s). All eight of them worked the farm, when they got older, all of my aunts had jobs (1930s-1970s) so the middle class American single income image didn’t apply here.
My mothers family had her mom working in a garment factory. My own family that I grew up in (1960s-1980’s) had both my dad and mom working.
In my own life, my wife and I have always worked.
It gets me wondering…just how common was this idea that families really lived this way? Was it only in the suburbs? It didn’t apply to farm families and doesn’t seem to apply to the midwest middle class that I grew up in.
Thanks, I wonder how this data accounts for farm families? Does a farm family in 1960 only count the father as ‘employed’ when the reality is very likely that the mother was out there doing farm work like my grandmother. I’d also be interested in prior to 1960.
It could be that in 1920 most families were farmers where everyone worked; then there was a blip where people moved to the city and we see this as an increase in single income families. then it drops off again. It might be that the single income family where the father worked and the mom didn’t ‘work’ was the anomaly.
Anecdotal as well, but growing up in the 70s and 80s in England, working Mums were the exception. A lot of Mums worked maybe 1 day a week for extra pocket money
I was born in the 40s and after she married (she was a hairdresser then) my mother did not have paid employment util she divorced my father in the 70s.
My mom was a teacher before staying home to care for me and my older brother in the late 1960s and 1970s. She eventually went back to teaching when we were teens, and did other jobs later, but during our early years we relied on my dad’s income.
My wife worked until we had kids, then became a SAHM. Our kids are in their 20s now and I am still waiting for her to go back to work.
I think the major factor that allowed for many more single income families in the fifties than now was that you could actually live a middle class life in the fifties with just one income but, unless you have a fabulous job, that just can’t happen now.
Another factor to consider is that traditional marriage roles held much more sway back then. Men were expected to go out and work and be the bread winners. Girls were expected to learn how to cook and run a household and become home makers. In the fifties, all high schools had “home economics” elective classes as electives, and pretty much every student was a female. Those classes disappeared long ago, although some high schools offer, “Family & Consumer Sciences”.
It really depends on when exactly and which economic class you are talking about - poor women have always worked. And there’s also what I call the "farmer’s wife " problem , where a woman works in the family business (a farm, a grocery store, a dry-cleaner ) but because she can work around household responsibilities and doesn’t get an actual paycheck , it’s still considered a single-income household. She’s a “farmer’s wife” , not a farmer herself.
One of the things that allowed more single-income families was that it was easier to live a middle-class life on one paycheck - but that was only for some people. My mother and her close-in-age female relatives did not expect to have to work after having their kids in the lates 50s-early 60s. ( and most didn’t) But every last one of their mothers worked while they still had kids at home - maybe not until they were all school age, maybe not until the oldest could take care of the others after school. My grandmother and all of my great-aunts worked for pay - and if they had not, their families never would have moved from apartments to houses.
Where and when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, SAH mothers were common . Not only did schools send kids home for lunch , many schools didn’t even have any provisions for children of working mothers to remain at school for lunch. My school had a small lunchroom supervised by one or two people - but the only kids allowed to stay for lunch were those with a dead parent. ( It was a Catholic school so the only single parents were widowed),
When my kids were in school in the 90s and early 00s, it was almost like we were in some sort of time warp. Nearly all the mothers were SAH but they weren’t really single income because all the fathers either had a second job or worked so much overtime that it might as well have been a second job and as far as I could tell the main reason for that was because the mothers had no skills and would have earned minimum wage and it wasn’t worth it when their husbands could earn much more working extra hours.
Anecdotally - I was helping out in a political party during the 1980’s (until political events disillusioned me). I remember that decade was the transition - in the early 1980’s, the election office in a more backwater constituency would be staffed by someone’s wife who did not have a job - usually elderly, in their 50’s or later. By 1990, there were no such volunteers left and for all parties, hiring an office clerk was the norm.
I remember in the early to mid1960’s when I was in grade school, going home for lunch was the norm. Apparently you had to arrange with the school to allow a student to regularly stay in school for lunch - they didn’t want to have too many teachers on lunch duty, I suppose. I know a few that went to someone else’s house for lunch or similar arrangement.
I seem to recall the trajectory was something like - the wife stayed home to raise the kids, and once they were all in school she could get a job that allowed her to be home when school let out (3:30 to 4:00PM?). Once the eldest was old enough to look after the rest - forced babysitting - then she could get a job too. The better-off could afford a nanny, the less well off might make some sort of child care arrangements like a baby-sitter for after school. I recall having an older lady come in to look after us for the hour or two before my parents were off work.
But I recall, mothers without regular jobs outside the home were not uncommon then. The key, as mentioned above, was that a single industrial wage was able to support a family. But to extend the anecdote about the 1980’s, when I started working car-pooling to work was not uncommon; so that the wife could have the car for errands, pick up the kids, etc. By 1990 this was rare because most were 2-car families, paid for (and a necessity) because the wife was working. Add in all the extra things a lifestyle requires today - cable and cellphones, big screen TV, 2 cars, internet service, streaming services and DVD, home computers, video games - the “stuff” we spend our money on has grown ridiculously. I flew once between 1963 and 1991, except for a very few business trips. In the last 2 decades before COVID, flying somewhere for vacations was an annual event, and often multiple trips. Our expectations have gone up, and the need for income has too.
My mom had to give up her position at work when she got married as a job requirement (airline stewardess - some of the job requirements were to be attractive, young and unmarried). After which she worked a while in another part of the airlines till she could no longer make the requirement of have no children (for women employees).
This was the pattern in my family at around the same time. Mom was a nurse, and stuck with that her whole career, and went back to work much sooner, are the only differences.
My dad was an engineer, and I suspect that’s a factor for the stay at home mom factor. A professional would be more likely to be able to afford a single income family life. If you’re working in low-paying jobs, it makes more sense to have both parents working. My mom contributed maybe 25% of the household income, so losing that would hurt, but not be devastating. If Dad wasn’t making as much though, Mom’s income would have been much more important.
That’s another issue that’s relevant. Companies did not want the hassle of women who could arbitrarily disappear for 9 months or more on a regular basis until the law stopped that. It was not unusual even in simple 9-5 jobs with less demanding and irregular schedules than flight attendant.
I had this discussion with a (female) boss when we were looking to hire back in the late 90’s - she made the same comment about younger women likely to take time off for babies. I had to point out that by then, even a 2-child family was less common; plus the unequal treatment “Bob had a heart attack and was gone for 6 months and the company was aching to welcome him back. How is maternity leave any different that way?” And with a family to support, they would need the dual income and a female employee was very likely coming back and staying working.
One issue is if having support at home increases your earning potential. In thebtrades, OT can be incredibly lucrative, but if you want to routinely work 60 hours a week, you need a pit crew at home. In the same way, if you are an up and coming lawyer or doctor or in sales or any other professional, often grueling hours in the first 10 or 15 years of your career is a wise investment in the future: but still, you need a pit crew.
This is why marital property is a concept: even if one partner “earned” it, it was a partnership.
The “single breadwinner plus housewife” norm existed in the USA for non-farm non-poor folks from just after WW-II into the late 1960s (so 25 years ~= one generation) then began to fall apart shortly after 1970 and was a relative rarity by the 1990s.
Nowadays (and even dating back to the 1980s, but more now than then) lots of high-earner couples both work not because they couldn’t live on his income alone, but because the opportunity cost of doing so is more than they want to give up. And the woman, herself well-educated, values her personal satisfaction from work more than she values the satisfaction available from the SAHM role.