My parents were that way when I was growing up, but my mother did become a teacher after I graduated.
My wife has been staying at home since our daughter was born in the 80s. I made enough to support us, since we were not extravagant – cheap vacations, didn’t smoke, didn’t take in, etc. – and we had a very low mortgage payment and never moved to a bigger house.
Moderator Note
The OP has expressed a desire to focus on actual statistics and whatever hard data folks can dig up (see the mod note by @Chronos and the OP’s response upthread). If we run out of data and the OP requests a move to IMHO then things will be different, but for now let’s all try to avoid anecdotes.
My Mom sure worked on the farm. I put in 12 hour days before reaching the age of 12.
Table 2 here shows not much different rural vs urban, albeit for a single, recent year. And they don’t break out parents vs non. And the table has a confusing typo.
https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1244&context=carsey
Data from the Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement, which may be worth a look.
I think it is even more difficult because you are finding “rural” populations, which does not equal “farmer” as an occupation. Most rural families in 2000 or 2013 were likely not farmers…but “rural” families in 1920 or even 1940 probably were (just my guess).
I think it’s also the case that race is going to play a factor. Many African American women in the middle of the 20th century - when it was considered typical for a woman to stay home - went to work, often as a hired hand to help that typical stay at home (white) woman.
This was due, in part, to the need for African Americans to have dual incomes within the household, since racism sometimes made the man’s career prospects rather precarious.
(My bold)
The data clearly shows there were more stay-at-home moms in the past. I disagree about the reasons. It wasn’t because it was easier to raise a family on one income in the past, it was because of two factors:
What actually hapoened is that technology and falling birthrates made stay-at-home wives less necessary. They in turn went to work and raised family incomes, which translated into bigger homes, more travel, more eating out, more toys, and in general higher-cost living.
Now you need both incomes to maintain that lifestyle. But if you want to live like people did in the 50’s and 60’s, it’s perfectly possible to do so on one reasonable middle class income. Just move to a smaller town, have one used car, and live in a 1,000 sq ft midcentury bungalow. Cook your own food from scatch, mend your clothes instead of replacing them, vacation by driving to camping spots or visiting relatives, eating out is a few-times-per year luxury, etc.
It’s just that no one wants to live like that anymore.
Anecdotally, my mom worked her entire life. Her sister worked until she was probably 40 when they moved to a farm. Another sister worked stints of full time work, separated by a few years of staying home. Everyone else I knew lived on farms, and the women worked as hard or harder than the men.
I agree rural ≠ farmer. I’m just not sure when farm employment became so insignificant as to not matter much for the aggregate numbers. USDA ERS has data on farm employment. That’s my next stop.
I suspect a much bigger factor was the greater income gap back then. Working has a cost in childcare, wardrobe, transportation, and no doubt more expensive prepared food. When women were more limited in employment opportunities, the gain in net household income from working was a lot less than more women are in higher paying, professional jobs. My cite showed that there is an increase in the number of SAHMs in lower income brackets, which supports this.
Here’s a chart of average number of children per family (pdf)
Here is the distribution of families by size from 1970
It looks to me that much of the decline in average family size is driven not by fewer three child families but more by more one person families. (Which I suspect was even lower in 1960.)
I suspect the increase in takeout and fast food is driven by more single person families and more cases of two working parents, not vice versa.
I don’t want to veer outside the parameters of this thread, but I’m not sure it’s true that a person today could actually live like a person in the 50s or 60s, in light of today’s society.
How far can one interact with the world without any internet access, for example? It’s an expense that didn’t exist half a century ago, but it would be a substantial hardship today if the only way you could go online was to use the public library, or if you didn’t have an email address.
Additionally, there may be other “common expenses” to both eras that are substantially different in cost. Healthcare being an example. As the ability to treat people has increased, due to advances in medicine and technology, healthcare has become more applicable to more conditions, thereby increasing the cost.
(I’d be happy to continue this discussion elsewhere if that’s more appropriate: perhaps in a debate thread: could a person today live like people did in the 50s/60s?)
The relative costs of those imporoved or new services has gone up at the “expense” of basics like food. Food used to be a substantial portion of the household budget. Allowing for inflation, it’s much less today, likely due to the mechanization and scale of industrial farming. In return, those extra services have gobbled up the extra disposable income.
There’s two ways of looking at the OP’s question - in some ways, you need the extra income to maintain that lifestyle. yet i see a lot of stories about, for example , the cost of child care. Many people complain that if they have two (or more) children, even if they can find a child care space, the cost basically eats all the second income. This may be in fact an implement to current SaHM statistic. By contrast, child care was much more rare and more informal (and less regulated) back in the Goode Olde Days. So perhaps women stayed home by choice then and the statistics are meaningful, except for the odd case of a family farm or small business where women also worked but were not counted. Today out of necessity and cost - more would work if child care were easily available, so the number would be higher?
(was there any significant tax advantage back then for a small store owner, say, claiming a salary for his wife?)
Bureau of Labor Statistics has some interesting data about how much women contribute to the family coffers.
Even now, for a couple made up of a man and a woman, the man is typically bringing home 60% of the income. The woman’s income, especially in earlier decades, was supplementary, and was considered pocket money.
The other issue is education. Many women did not get the opportunity to get an education beyond high school or some sort of trade. My own college did not even admit women until the 1970s.
That’s my maternal grandmother, 1940s-1980s. She also sold Avon and vitamins - maybe Herbalife?
And that’s my paternal grandmother 1940s-1980s.
My mother went to community college and I got a 4 year degree. Opportunities means higher salaries for women.
Child care was also easier in an era when people maintained close extended families. Lots of grandparents wound up looking after the kids of their working-age children. When I was little I spent time at my aunt’s house when my Mom worked, and spent my summers on my grandparent’s farm. It made it a lot easier on her as a single mom to have a support network.
Likewise, when people got old they could lean on their children for help. Now, with 0-2 kids per family, that’s a lot more difficult or impossible.
I think Sam_Stone has it. There are places in the city (e.g. Chicago) where a family can live on Dad’s salary while mom stays home. But the expectations and desires of rampant materialism of recent decades obviate doing so, because many of the people would simply not want to live in a neighborhood that one salary would permit. Nor would they want to live without a dishwasher, several tvs, cable, yards to play in, two new cars, etc. Two incomes are not a necessity as much as a burning desire.
Frankly, nowadays if you’re living on one income, you’re probably living amongst people nothing like you. They might have a similar household income, but socially they’re coming from a completely different place. Doubly so if you’re living carefully within your means and they’re stretched to the max getting by on two crappy working class wages.
We’ve had threads and threads about Dopers who started out as well up in the educated middle classes and due to bad luck in life now find themselves among the working poor. But are culturally and attitudinally and intellectually nothing like those folks even though they live in the same crappy apartments and drive the same crappy 15yo cars and work the same low-wage jobs.
I surveyed my college classmates for our reunions, and one of the careers with the highest family income was “stay at home mom”. There are lots of wealthy households with a single earner.
I suspect that it may not count farmers at all. Farming is so utterly unlike most other types of work, in so many ways, that it doesn’t really fit into the cut-and-dried categories that most statistical research tends to use.
You’re missing the point. According to the BLS inflation calculator, $250 in 1955 is equivalent to $2,223 today. You can buy a high-end smartphone or high-end computer, either of which can act as a TV, but has VASTLY more functionality than a TV set, for less than that.
Who had a color TV in the 1950s?? Nobody, that’s who.
Try the mid 1960s.
$250 was for a black and white TV. Not long ago when my old TV broke I bought a new one, color, probably 40 times the area of a 1950s TV, with much better quality for less than a quarter of that price.
The average age of an automobile in the US in 2021 was 12.1 years. (Thanks to the quality being far better than 1950s cars.) Somehow that doesn’t jibe with everyone buying new cars all the time.
And don’t remember the 1950s, but in the early '60s getting a new car every two years was standard for lots of people, and not rich ones. I remember the ads for the new model year, which we don’t see much any more. And cars back then were designed to show their age when the style changed. I remember tail fins. Not to mention planned obsolescence.
My first link showed that this is true in general, not just in your class.