Week 1 - Historical Perspectives on Family and Work

Historical Perspectives on Family and Work

- Chapters 2 & 3 from From Marriage to the Market, by Susan Thistle

In the second chapter of her book, Thistle examines women’s role in the domestic sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Early in this time period, women had to undertake a large set of domestic tasks in order to insure the survival of their family. These “domestic chores” as she describes them, were given the utmost priority. However, as the twentieth century progressed, women began to turn more to paid employment outside the home, a change that was met with hostility from many men. Thistle spends the rest of the chapter examining the cause of this shift from the perspective of “focusing on the interactions between gender and a developing market society.”She claims that with the rise of the market economy, specifically in the form of the Industrial Revolution, there was a decrease in the old ways of production. This change was not drastic though, and many women worked increasingly hard to sustain their old domestic chores. I think that this hesitation on the part of women is a completely natural response. For years they had provided for their families in a certain fashion, and thus it would difficult to try a new, unproven method. The change toward industrialization also brought differing changes in the lives of white versus African American women. Modernization did little to alter the domestic responsibilities of white women, who consistently remained “steered toward housework.”However, for African American women, they were expected to not only maintain their old duties but also contribute to the burgeoning demands of the new market economy. I found the strong gender roles between the African American families to be very interesting. Even within a family, the men refused to entertain domestic tasks, even choosing whippings instead as punishment. I found myself wondering where that ideal came from, or if it is still strong in the African American community today.

The next phase of the chapter examines what Thistle describes as another challenge to women working in the home, wage work new industrialization. Women wanted to work and be considered valuable in the changing industries, but at the same time did not want to jeopardize their duties in the domestic sphere. Laws were even passed in order to limit the number of hours women could work. Now if that law was passed for the betterment of women or created by men to make sure women still had to maintain some semblance of domestication, I am not sure. Around this time, new appliances that eased housework became available, but it was only a very limited number of families that enjoyed them. Most women were still completing household tasks without technological aid. My favorite quote of the chapter is from a homemaker claiming that “(her) work is never done.” This stood out to me, because it reminded me of my own mother. She is in a sense of the word a typical homemaker, but she is constantly busy, and on more than one occasion between preparing dinner and completing another load of laundry I have heard her mention the same mantra.

Thistle closes this chapter with an effective summary that the process of industrialization was presenting a threat to the gender roles and division of labor that had been established throughout the last century. For many women, especially African Americans it placed an unfair demand on them to complete new tasks on top of their already full domestic work load. This is a fact that I had never considered before. I had always assumed that the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and beyond only eased the lives of people, but as it can be seen, it took a while before the changes enacted could be seen in a positive light.

In Chapter 3, Thistle again takes on a wider perspective of history in looking at women’s domestic economy after World War II. The old ideals and cultural norms regarding gender division of labor began to crumble away, and a paradox of new opportunities yet restrictive laws arose for women. I particularly like the way Thistle sets up the next part of the chapter, stating openly that she will address two prevailing incorrect myths; the first that industrialization did not lessen household chores, and the second that the major thrust of women into industry was in the 1920s. Thistle effectively uses time use studies to show that in fact there was about 20 hours less time spent on housework in the 1970s than the 1920s, a fact that undeniably shows industrialization played a positive role in domestic chores. Thistle makes a good point though, that while time was reduced on these chores, it takes more than just technological advances to change the structure of women’s lives. Social structures, frameworks, and ideologies have to be shifted about the possibility of women doing more than just household chores. This shift began in the 1950s and 1960s, when a large influx of women joined the workplace, and subsequently many Americans were thrust into middle class status. As expected with any major change though, there were challenges to women’s shift into working outside the home. Many husbands disapproved of their wives working, a fact I wonder brought on by feelings of inadequacy at not being to solely provide for their family. Black couples were more open to a married women working than white, but black wives’ actual work brought increased tensions and fights. These facts seem contradictory to me, and left me questioning what caused the greater initial approval and then subsequent fights amongst African American marriages. The chapter than leads into a very well crafted few pages about the progression that changes in the sphere of work led to changes in the family. A shocking fact for me was that in the mid 1970s, 60 percent of men saw marriage as restrictive. It had never dawned on me, but in the same technological advances that aided domestic chores to allow women more freedom, it caused women to lose some of their appeal to men at the time. No longer were men reliant on women for domestic chores and therefore the importance of getting married fell and the divorce rates rose rapidly. The ideology and laws for divorce, contraception, and abortion also changed. These laws once again appeared positively in the favor of women, but were actually in the best interest of those in power; men. It seems to me that in a way, many of the simple technological advances we take for granted these days like a washing machine or even birth control indirectly led to start of the astonishing divorce rates in this country. While these changes in legislation had hidden agendas for men, laws removing barriers to women’s employment and discriminatory practices were long overdue and so effective that laws are still in use today.

- Wives and Work, Kingsley Davis

In this chapter, Kingsley Davis acknowledges that there has been a revolution of sex roles, and attempts to explain it and the consequences. A self admitted difficult task as often “great precision goes into describing a trend, while the explanation is either ignored of treated casually,” but one that Davis does quite well. The chapter begins with a lot of data and charts depicting the consistent rise of married women in the workplace throughout industrialized countries. The relation between how developed a country is and the percentage of women working matches up, with the exception being the Communist countries, which I was unsure of why. This article provides an interesting look as it was written in 1984 and makes predictions about what will occur in our generation considering married women in the workplace. Davis predicts that by 2000 that the married women’s labor force would equal that of men’s. While I could not find the exact data of what the ratio is currently, I know it has to be close.

As discussed in the earlier articles above, with the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, there was a shift of work out of the home for men. This led to the evolution of what Davis describes as the “breadwinner” society in which men are the sole monetary providers for their family while wives maintain the household chores. This is the traditional or nuclear family that was commonplace at the beginning of the twentieth century (think the Cleaver family in the old sitcom “Leave it to Beaver”) and can still be seen to a lesser extent today. The system continued the ideal of male dominance and women’s focus on child rearing and homecare and therefore has persisted for a long time. However, in the last forty years, there has been a gradual shift toward what Davis titles the “egalitarian system.” This was brought in part both by a new ideal of equality but also by the gradual appearance of the flaws of the breadwinner philosophy. In that family dynamic, the father solely controls the family’s economic well being, but yet in attaining it, is forced to limited contact with them. A man’s job may not only take him away from his family but also lead him into contact with a person who may eventually break up his own family. Another factor that I had never considered was that as women began to have less children and less time constraints, a wife might need to seek out other means of subsidence. Also with the new divorce laws, the only way for a women to protect themselves from divorce would be a means to earn her own income outside of her husband. But as women head more into the workplace there are inevitably sacrifices that have to be made other places. The invention of the “latch key” kid is a relatively new by-product of this system. As Davis writes, there are now three major spheres for two people in a marriage, and only one of them is a joint venture. Davis recognizes these potential flaws and puts forth a few solutions like the return of the workplace to the home or a system with a division of labor without the unequal roles in either the work or family realm.

Even though this article was written twenty five years ago, I still found it incredibly insightful and some of the predictions were quite impressive. All three of these articles brought up points that I had never considered in the progression and intertwining between family and work, and also how influential in the entire scheme of American society that these issues reside even to this day.