Families were larger, but people also use to move more. A lot more. Why we don’t now (or at least until 2020 when everything got weird) is on my list for GD threads. But I don’t know if people were moving in extended family blocks.
I did see when searching earlier that rural families that use outside-the-home childcare are more likely to use family. But I didn’t save that link.
Of course. And it’s not just because the spouse of a very rich person doesn’t need to work for pay. It’s also because it’s hard to get very rich without devoting yourself to your job, and to do that, you need someone you trust to get the oil changed and put meals on the table and make sure you have a clean shirt every morning, and make sure the taxes are filed on time. Well, maybe you don’t absolutely need to, but it helps a lot.
I had a cousin who moved the Cambridge with his new wife. She was new faculty at MIT: he worked for a major tech company. They were divorced in less than 2 years. Afterwards, he said people came out of the woodwork to tell them both that no marriage survives the MIT tenure process if the other spouse also has a demanding job: they either need a spouse that is full time pit crew, or they need to live in a studio with a hot plate. They can’t really be a partner.
In this case, the met as Ph.d candidates at another T5, so this wasn’t their first rodeo in academia. But they were not at all prepared.
No, I’m really not.
Because the above is the point. In 1955, color television was an emerging technology, sets were only being produced in low quantities, and it was absolutely a luxury good.
That issue (the value of a stay-at-home spouse) was the subject of the divorce between Gary and Lorna Wendt. She argued that what she did at home and with him on the road and at business dinners was partly responsible for his success and wealth, and therefore she was entitled to more than he was offering. See this article from Fortune Magazine on the CNN website for more details.
Ok. Suppose I came to you, and offered you a small, black-and-white TV that only receives 3 channels and does nothing else–no recording, no skipping ads, etc. It will cost you only $2200. Will you rush to accept that offer, in the way that so many people rushed to buy a TV in the 1950s?
If your answer is “No,” then that proves that you did indeed miss the point. You see, the point was not about the scarcity of color TV, but rather about the extreme cost of so little functionality.
I wasn’t trying – at all – to make a point about black and white TVs in 1955. I was only talking about color TVs in 1955. We’re talking past each other.
The part you missed, I think, is that the reference to $2200 televisions (in today’s dollars) was referring to the black and white models.
I didn’t miss it; I wasn’t commenting on it. As I said, @Bootb and I seem to be making different points.
[Moderating]
The factual portion of this thread seems to have run its course. If anyone wants to share further anecdotes, you’re welcome to start an IMHO thread.
Re-opened by request. Remember to keep all posts factual.
Reading through this thread, I find it very U.S. centric. Not surprising with an American board where the majority of posters are American. What I do find a bit surprising is the almost unanimous view the anecdata shows.
I grew up in Sweden as middle class and from my American friends I know that the financial gap between the countries weren’t that wide in the 60’s. And yet, my mother went back to work when I was three months old. My grandma, who had just retired after working her whole life, took care of me. My other grandma also worked, with breaks for kids, all her life.
But since this is FQ, I decided to do a little digging. Not only for this thread, but it’s a widespread truism here as well that families could survive on one income. It’s my experience and most of my friends, on both side of the Atlantic, that our moms worked as much as they could, not for ‘pocket money.’ I’ll keep this to U.S. data.
While no one here has claimed that all American families could survive on one income in the 50’s, I do think it was less prevalent than many think:
By the 1930s, women had been slowly entering the workforce in greater numbers for decades. But the Great Depression drove women to find work with a renewed sense of urgency as thousands of men who were once family breadwinners lost their jobs. A 22 percent decline in marriage rates between 1929 and 1939 also meant more single women had to support themselves.
The rapid expansion of the government under the New Deal increased demand for secretarial roles that women rushed to fill and created other employment opportunities, albeit limited ones, for women.
Cite.
while 8 percent of employed women in 1890 were married, that figure rose to 26 percent in 1930 and 47 percent by 1950. These increases were the result of the rise of offices requiring clerical workers and new information technologies, along with tremendous growth in the number of women attending high school in the early 20th century.
One more data point: In the U.S. the percentage of women in the chart below rose from 28.6 to 40.4 between 1950 and 1960.
Another thing to remember is that for many women being a SAHM wasn’t a choice.
The fact that many women left work upon marriage reflected cultural norms, the nature of the work available to them, and legal strictures. The occupational choices of those young women who did work were severely circumscribed.
Despite the widespread sentiment against women, particularly married women, working outside the home and with the limited opportunities available to them, women did enter the labor force in greater numbers over this period, with participation rates reaching nearly 50 percent for single women by 1930 and nearly 12 percent for married women.
Between the 1930s and mid-1970s, women’s participation in the economy continued to rise, with the gains primarily owing to an increase in work among married women. By 1970, 50 percent of single women and 40 percent of married women were participating in the labor force. Several factors contributed to this rise. First, with the advent of mass high school education, graduation rates rose substantially. At the same time, new technologies contributed to an increased demand for clerical workers, and these jobs were increasingly taken on by women. Moreover, because these jobs tended to be cleaner and safer, the stigma attached to work for a married woman diminished. And while there were still marriage bars that forced women out of the labor force, these formal barriers were gradually removed over the period following World War II.
Cite for the previous three paragraphs.
This might also shed some light
For instance, it used to be commonplace to fire an employee if she became pregnant
Pregnancy and Parenting Discrimination | American Civil Liberties Union (aclu.org)
Firing women because they are pregnant, or treating pregnant workers worse than other workers who are also temporarily unable to perform some aspects of a job, has been illegal since 1978, when Congress enacted the Pregnancy Discrimination Act.
Most of the article is about how pregnant workers are still forced out, despite it being illegal. But it’s important to understand that it used to be not only legal but commonplace and expected. An older woman of my acquantance said that when she got pregnant, her husband’s employer gave him a raise, and hers fired her.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1542&context=greatplainsquarterly
This PDF has tables on “hours reported as spent by farm women on farm and household tasks” for different kinds of farms. It also discusses how lots of uncompensated work at home doesn’t get counted as part of other economic data series. This includes general household tasks as well as farm work.
Note the OP asked about families, and this doesn’t break out women with children at home. And it doesn’t show changes over time.
While I spend a lot of paid time digging through .gov datasets, I’m less familiar with what USDA has to offer. Here are a few links that may interest the OP:
And “Sources and Levels of Operator Household Income”
These both focus on income, not uncompensated work. And they’re just single year data. It looks like USDA has collected these over time, but I didn’t look for where they have them aggregated.
The OP included a number of date ranges. The farmer one that I’ve been focusing on is 20s to 40s. I don’t have data on hand on the number of households prior to 1940. But 1940–49, the number of households increased from 35M to 42M. The number of farms dropped from maybe ~6M to 5.5M*
So if every farm had a woman whose work wasn’t getting counted in the labor force statistics, that would skew the data only somewhat in the 40s and barely at all by the mid-70s when there were 71M households and just over 2M farms.
*I don’t have a table, just a chart:
I haven’t been / won’t be able to keep up with the board this week so that’s probably the last I have to say on the matter.