I think its actually still pretty common to have a SAHP among non-farm non-poor folk when there are young children. Whst seems to be different now is more people re-entering the workforce when children are school age. My son is 11 and we have gobe to pretty middle-class schools, and especially in the younger grades, there have been tons of SAHP, thpugh as he’s grown, many of them have taken on part time or full time work.
My mother was a stewardess, too, and she had to leave her job when she got married in 1963. She was a stay-at-home mom for about 9 years, until my sister went into first grade; she then went back into the work force.
My recollection from my 1970s childhood is that most of my friends and classmates had moms who stayed at home; working moms weren’t unusual, but they weren’t the norm, either, and those who did work often had part-time jobs that allowed them to be home when the kids got home from school.
As a middle class catholic white kid growing up in a middle class catholic white neighborhood in Detroit (60s - early 70s) dad working, stay-at-home mom that was all I saw. Moms only worked if dad died or was otherwise out of the picture.
I think whether it seems common or uncommon now depends a lot on your specific circle - as I said earlier, when my kids were young, most of the mothers did not have paying jobs but plenty of my female co-workers had young children and still worked full-time even when there was another income in the household. . And part of the reason for that is that the classmates’ mothers couldn’t earn much more than minimum wage while my coworkers were well-paid and had good benefits ( health insurance and pension). In fact, it was more common among my co-workers for a household to have a SAH dad than for one of my female coworkers to leave the workforce when she had children.
Interestingly enough, that chart pretty much pegs what I was going to say.
Growing up (1970s, early 1980s, suburban Houston), more than half of kids had a stay-at-home mom when we were very small. Only some had to go to daycare after elementary school.
But as we got older, many kids’ mothers went back to work. Until relatively recently, I had just assumed that when we kids got old enough to be more self-sufficient, they chose to work for whatever reasons they wanted to. I didn’t necessarily assume it would have been economic pressure causing that. By the time we hit high school (1987), it had shifted the other direction- most classmates had both parents working, although it was about 60/40 in my experience.
What actually hit home for me as a kid was the number of my classmates whose families had either just undergone or underwent a divorce somewhere between kindergarten and about fourth grade. I don’t know if the timing of that has anything to do with the number of two income households, or if divorce laws changed, or what. But it was pretty damned prevalent in that time frame, and interestingly enough, does NOT seem to be quite as prevalent in parents of my children’s age cohort.
My mother was born in 1951, at the height of the stereotype of the single-parent family. It wasn’t the case for her and her sister, though, as both their mother and their father (my grandmother and my grandfather) had jobs.
I cannot find it now (of course), but I remember reading a paper in a academic history journal that argued that this was one of the reasons Tupperware became such a huge thing in the 50’s and 60’s: it wasn’t that Tupperware was itself the Next Best Thing but rather Tupperware parties gave housewives, who were by and large expected to stay home and manage the household and decidedly not work outside the home something to do, make some money, and in general give them a sense of agency over their lives that were otherwise by and large controlled by men and patriarchal social expectations.
ETA: I think this is it. From the abstract:
“[Tupperware]promised women a way to balance society’s expectations of them as wives, mothers, and homemakers with their desire for economic autonomy and self-realization. Although Tupperware promoted female domesticity and affirmed traditional gender roles, it also gave millions of women the opportunity to be successful entrepreneurs outside the conventional work place, where men still dominated.”
More anecdotes: My mom was a SAHM (I grew up in the 60s and early 70s outside Philly). She only had an eighth grade education, so any job she could have gotten would have been pretty menial. She also had rotten health (TB survivor with one lung, 78 lbs dripping wet). She volunteered in the office at my grade school, but that’s about it.
Mrs. Martian, on the other hand, grew up a latchkey kid in Western Massachusetts. Her mother was widowed so working was pretty much a necessity. She had gone to secretarial school after high school and could type like crazy.
I’ve always found Tupperware to be far superior to any similar product. I still have pieces from the early 80s that still are going strong.
Another anecdote, my mother was a SAHM raising kids from 1953 to 1997, when the last one of us finally left for college. And by then my dad was approaching retirement age anyway.
And our (parochial) school also sent kids home for lunch while I was a student in the 70s-80s. But by the time my sister went in the 80s-90s, they did have a cafeteria available for kids who didn’t have a parent at home.
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree. These are best containers I have yet found for pasta. These, besides being cute, are perfect for a myriad of things: holding a day’s worth of medication when on vacation, taking some spices to work for your lunch, or simply as small salt/pepper containers, especially with these lids. Speaking of salt and pepper, this is ridiculously convenient for those of us that sometimes have to take a sack lunch to work. Take two: one for salt & pepper, the other for Mrs. Dash & cayenne. The list of useful items Tupperware has produced, of course, goes on.
But the author of the paper I linked to was arguing that Tupperware’s popularity had more to do with the business model than the product itself because the business was built around empowering women in a way that hadn’t been done before. I have no opinion on accuracy of that hypothesis but it certainly seems plausible.
I was a few years earlier than you but a similar story.
My Mom had a high-wage skilled occupation, as did Dad. She quit working when I, the eldest, was born in 1958. She went back part time in 1965 when her youngest was 3. At that era, part-time working Moms were rare in the upper-middle / lower-upper income strata in suburban SoCal.
She switched to full-time in 1968 when her youngest was 5. By then there were a few more part-timers amongst the neighbor Moms, but she was about the only married Mom working full time that we knew of. And in that era, even in avant garde SoCal, divorces were pretty rare. I’d bet in our demographic there were more widowed single Moms than divorced single Moms.
By the time her youngest graduated high school in 1981, full-time working Moms and divorced Moms were utterly unremarkable. Still plenty of married couples with a SAHM, or occasionally SAHD. But nobody spoke in hushed sympathetic or outraged tones of the poor kids whose parents had divorced or Mom was working to make ends meet. It was just part of the landscape of normal life. Which it totally was not in 1963.
I agree. Avon, Sarah Coventry, Amway, Pampered Chef a bit later - they all had similar business models (although only Amway pushed the idea of getting rich and were a notorious pyramid corporation). But they all sold things that one could buy elsewhere. I don’t remember any brand besides Tupperware in the plastic storage business - Rubbermaid came a lot later.
Wow - this was our family’s exact trajectory through the 80s. Mom was with us while dad worked at Ford, then she got a job as a lunch lady during the school year (home with us every day and in the summer), eventually she moved up to an office job at the school so I had to go to a neighbor’s house in the morning and in the summer we went to the YMCA until we were old enough to stay home alone.
It just occurred to me that mom’s work schedule had to work around us kids’ life schedules and not dad’s. He needed to be able to work any shift, mom needed to be able to be home when we were.
Nailed it!
Assuming the poll responses haven’t frightened off the OP, I found the census tables:
Looks like the percentage of families with two or more earners rose until the mid-1960s, and has been relatively flat since then. Actually lower now than then. But that will capture working teenagers and multigenerational households along with two working parents. So given that household makeup has changed, be wary of data that don’t account for that.
Yeah - our Chicago grade school didn’t even have a cafeteria. I woulda suspected that some of the suburbs around here had larger districts, with kids taking the bus. EVERYONE walked to our grade school.
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’m not sure that’s quite as true as it seems intuitively. That is, the stuff has undoubtedly grown, but I’m not sure the cost grew nearly as much. In 1955 a black-and-white television cost $250 and a color television cost almost $1300. Not in inflation-adjusted terms, in 1955 dollars. And in 1950, a daytime long-distance call was $3.70 for the first three minutes, while the minimum wage was $0.75/hour.
But the 50’s was the transition from the time where “Bob’s family has a TV” to almost every household having one. (Remember the giant console to house a record player and TV?)
There was a big thread a while ago about the propensity of management types being expected to host certain business functions or guests for parties and dinner in their homes. Thus the wife (always wife) was essentially an assistant for the up-and-coming manager. You see this sort of thing in earlier sitcoms - in Bewitched for example, Darrel was always hosting his boss and guests at home dinner parties (where the mother-in-law turned them into chimps or something).
Nowadays this sort of function happens in expensive restaurants. The wife of a management type is as likely to be in a time-demanding career herself.
I remember my dad remarking that they had promoted the first man to department head who was not married. That was late 60’s.
To be fair, in 1955, color TV was still in its infancy; in the U.S., it wasn’t until the 1960s when (a) TV programming in color was common, and (b) large numbers of households had color TVs.
But doesn’t each family have some choice as to the extent to which they feel 2 cars, big TV, big house, air travel, etc are NECESSARY, and to consider what they may be giving up to attain those?
I imagine back in the 50s and 60s, people coulda found all manner of things to piss their money away on if they wanted to.
I don’t think the hostess function is/was nearly as important as the daily cooking, cleaning, laundry, packing, and child-rearing. Not to mention shopping, bill paying, household organizing, kid-activity planning and coordinating, and extended-family communicating.