The Working Wife as Urbanizing Peasant
WOMEN’s move into the economy is the basic social revolution of our time. It embraces the lifetimes of Nancy Holt, Nina Tanagawa, Anita Judson, their mothers and grandmothers. Nancy Holt is a social worker and mother of Joey. Her mother was a Nebraska housewife and mother of four, and her grandmother raised five children on a wheat farm. Nina Tanagawa is an executive and mother of two. Her mother ran the house, raised three children, and helped keep the books in her father’s hardware store. Her grandmother raised chickens and cows on a farm. Anita Judson is a billing clerk and mother of two. Her mother worked two jobs as a domestic and raised four children. Her grandmother worked a farm in Louisiana. Working from the present generation back, there is often this pattern: working mother now, urban housewife thirty years ago, farm woman fifty years ago. Sometimes two generations of urban housewives follow the farm woman, sometimes none. All these women worked. What’s new is that, in taking paid work outside the home, masses of women live a life divided between two competing urgency systems, two clashing rhythms of living, that of family and workplace. What’s new, in scale at least, is child care for pay, the massive spread of the double day, and the struggle within marriage to equalize the load at home. What’s new is the pervasive effect of the struggle on apparently unrelated events—as in “Joey’s Problem.”
This recent change is an extension of an earlier one. Before the industrial revolution in America, most men and women lived out their lives on the private family farm—where crops were grown and craft work done mainly for domestic consumption. With industrialization, more crops and goods were produced and distributed to wider markets for money. But industrialization affected men and women at different times and in different ways. In a sense, there is a “his” and a “hers” to its history in America.
Painting the picture in broad strokes, the growth of factories and trades in early American cities first began to draw substantial numbers of men and women away from farm life around the 1830s. Many single girls worked in the early New England textile mills for four and five years until they married, but mill girls represented a tiny fraction of all women and less than 10 percent of all those who worked for wages.1 In 1860, most industrial workers were men. Only 15 percent of women worked for pay, most of them as domestic servants. As men entered factory work, they gradually changed their basic way of life; they moved from open spaces to closed-in rooms, from loose seasonal time to fixed industrial time, from life among a tight circle of kinfolk and neighbors to a life among more different kinds of people. At first, we might say, men did something like trying to “have it all.” In the early New England rural factories, for example, men would work in these factories during the day and go home in the evenings to work in the fields. Or they moved in and out of factory work depending on the season and the crop ready for harvest. But over time, the farmer became an urban worker.
On the whole, the early effects of industrial employment probably altered the lives of men in a more dramatic and immediate way than it altered the lives of women, most of whom maintained a primary identity at home. To be sure, life changed for women, too. Earlier in the century, a young mother might churn butter and raise chickens and hogs. Later in the century, a young mother might live in the city, buy her butter and eggs at the grocery store, take in boarders, be active in church, and subscribe to what the historian Barbara Welter has called a “cult of true womanhood” based on the special moral sensibility ascribed to women. Through this period, most women who married and raised children based their role and identity at home. “Home” changed. But, as the historian Nancy Cott argues in Bonds of Womanhood, throughout the nineteenth century, compared to men, women maintained an orientation toward life closer to what had been. If we compare the overall change in the lives of women to those in the lives of men, we might conclude that during this period men changed more.
Today, it is women whose lives are changing faster. The expansion of service jobs has opened opportunities for women. Given that women have fewer children now (in 1800 they gave birth to about eight and raised five or six to adulthood; in 2010 they average two) and given that their wage has been increasingly needed at home, it has become “the woman’s turn” to move into the industrial economy. It is now women who are wrenched out of a former domestic way of life.
In the early nineteenth century, it was men who began to replace an older basis of power—land—with a new one—money. It was men who began to identify their “manhood” with having money in a way they had not done before. Through the great value on a man’s purchasing power, the modern worship of goods—or what Karl Marx criticized as a “commodity fetishism”—became associated with “being a man.”
Today, it is women who are establishing a new basis of power and identity. If women previously based their power on attractiveness to men or influence over children and kin, now they base it more on wages or authority on the job. As Anita Judson, the billing clerk married to the forklift driver, observed, “After I started earning money, my husband showed me more respect.” Given the wage gap, and the greater effect of divorce on women, the modern woman may not have a great deal more power than before, but what power she has is based differently.
Paid work has come to seem exciting, life at home dull. Although the most acceptable motive for a woman to work is still “because I have to,” most of the working mothers I talked to didn’t work just for the money. In this way they have begun to participate in a value system once exclusively male and have developed motivations more like those of men. Many women volunteered to me that they would be “bored” or “go bananas just staying home all day,” that they were not, on any permanent basis, the “domestic type.” This feeling held true even among women in low-level clerical jobs. A nationwide Harris poll taken in 1980 asked women: “If you had enough money to live as comfortably as you’d like, would you prefer to work full time, part time, do volunteer-type work, or work at home caring for the family?” Among working women, 28 percent wanted to stay home. Of all the women in the study, including housewives, only 39 percent wanted to stay home—even if they had enough money to live as comfortably as they liked. When asked if each of the following is an important reason for working or not, 87 percent of working women responded “yes” to “providing you with a sense of accomplishment and personal satisfaction,” 84 percent to “helping ends meet,” and 81 percent to “improving your family’s standard of living.”2 Women want paying jobs, part-time jobs, interesting jobs—but they want jobs, I believe, for roughly the same complex set of reasons peasants in modernizing economies move to cities.*
In many ways, the twentieth-century influx of married women into an industrial economy differs from the earlier influx of men. For one thing, through the latter half of the nineteenth century up until the present, women’s tasks at home have been reduced. Store-bought goods gradually replaced homespun cloth, homemade soap and candles, home-cured meats, and home-baked bread. More recently, women have been able to buy an array of preprepared meals, or buy “carry-out,” or, if they can afford it, to eat out. Some send out clothes to a “wash and fold” laundry, and pay for mending and alterations. Day care for children, retirement homes for the elderly, homes for delinquent children, mental hospitals, and psychotherapy are, in a way, commercial substitutes for jobs a mother once did at home.
Products and services in the market often excel over mama’s best efforts at home. A woman’s skills at home are then valued less. One mother remarked: “Sometimes when I get upset and want to make a point, I refuse to cook. But it doesn’t work. My husband just goes and picks up some Colonel Sanders fried chicken; the kids love it.” Another mother said, “When I told my husband I wanted him to share the laundry, he just said, ‘Let’s take it to a laundry.’” The modern industrial versions of many goods and services come to be preferred over the old-fashioned domestic ones, even as colonial cultures came to prevail over old-fashioned “native ways.” Just as the First World has raised its culture over the Third World’s indigenous culture, so too the store-bought goods and services have marginalized the “local crafts” of the housewife.
Not only are many of the products and services of the home available and cheap elsewhere, the status of the full-time housewife has sunk. Wives who “just” stay home have developed the defensiveness of the downwardly mobile. Facing the prospect of becoming a housewife after quitting her job, Ann Myerson said, “If you want to know what shunning feels like, go to a cocktail party. People will ask you what you do. Say ‘I’m a housewife.’” One illustration in the November 1970 issue of True magazine sums up the housewife’s predicament: a commuter train is filled with businessmen reading morning newspapers and office memos. A bewildered middle-aged housewife in bathrobe and furry slippers, hair in curlers, searches the aisles for her husband, his forgotten briefcase in hand. Her husband is hiding behind his seat, embarrassed that his wife looks so ridiculous, so out of place. In their suits, with their memo pads and newspapers, going somewhere, the men of the commuter car determine what is ridiculous. They represent the ways of the city; she is a lost peasant in their midst.
Working mothers often feel poised between the cultures of the housewife and the working man. On one hand, many middle-class women feel severely criticized by relatives or neighbors who stay home. Feeling increasingly threatened and militant about their own declining position, they pose the question, “Do you have to work?” Nina Tanagawa felt the critical eye of the stay-at-home moms of her daughter’s friends. Jessica Stein felt it from affluent neighbors. Nancy Holt and Adrienne Sherman felt scrutinized by their mothers-in-law. Some of these watchful relatives and neighbors cross over the big divide themselves. When Ann Myerson’s mother was a housewife, she criticized Ann for her overzealous careerism, but when her mother got a job herself, she questioned Ann’s decision to quit.
Many working mothers seemed to feel both superior to housewives they knew and envious of them. Having struggled hard for her accounting degree, Carol Alston didn’t want to be confused with “ordinary” women who weren’t productive. But seeing housewives slowly pushing their carts down the aisle at the Safeway at midday, she also came to question her own hectic life.
Women who’ve remained back in the “village” as housewives have often been burdened with extra tasks—collecting delivered parcels, letting in repairmen, or keeping afternoon company with the children of neighborhood mothers who work. One complained that housewives were the only ones who volunteered at Cub Scout meetings. Their working neighbors seldom have time to stop and chat or, sometimes, return favors.
Their traditional source of honor, like the peasant’s, has been threatened. Unpaid work, like that of housewives, came to seem like not “real” work. The housewife became “just a housewife,” her work became “just housework.” In their book For Her Own Good, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English describe how at the turn of the century, the Home Economics Movement struggled against the social decline of the housewife by trying to systematize and upgrade the role into a profession. Women, its leaders claimed, could be dignified “professionals” in their own homes. Ironically, the leaders of the Home Economics Movement thought housework was honorable—not because it was intrinsically valuable—but because it was just as real as paid work, a concession revealing how much moral ground had already been lost.
If working wives are the modern-day urbanizing peasant, then there are important differences between some “peasants” and others. In addition to the split between housewives and working women, this social revolution also widens a split between women who do jobs that pay enough to pay a baby-sitter and women who baby-sit or tend to other home needs. Carmen Delacorte, who sat for the children of two other families I talked to; Consuela Sanchez, the Salvadorian woman who baby-sat for the Livingstons’ daughter and whose mother was raising Consuela’s child back in El Salvador; the Myersons’ Filipino baby-sitter, who had an eight-year-old daughter in the Philippines; the Steins’ housekeeper and assistant housekeeper: all these women are part of a growing number of workers forming an ever-broadening lower tier of women doing bits and pieces of the housewife’s role for pay.
Most likely, three generations back, the grandmothers of all these women—professional women, baby-sitters, housekeepers—were housewives. Since class has a remarkable sticking power, it may be that the granddaughters of working-class housewives moved into the economy mainly as maids, day-care workers, laundry and other service workers—doing low-paid “female” work—while the granddaughters of upper-middle-class and upper-class housewives moved in as lawyers, doctors, professors, and executives. The granddaughters of the middle class may have tended to move into the expanding world of clerical jobs “in between.” Both Carmen Delacorte and Ann Myerson form part of the new “peasantry,” but as in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, some newcomers to the city found it much tougher going than others, and were more tempted to go home.
But women of every social class and in every kind of job face a common problem: how shall I preserve the domestic culture of my mother and grandmother in the age of the nine-to-five or eight-to-six job? In some ways, the experience of Chicana women condenses the experience of all working women. Many Chicanas have experienced the strains of three movements—that from rural to urban life, from Mexican to American life, and from domestic to paid employment. In her research on Chicana working women, the sociologist Beatrice Pesquera discovered that many conceived it to be their job as women to keep alive la cultura, to teach their children Spanish songs, stories, religious rituals; to teach their daughters to cook tortillas and chile verde. This was, she argued, eroded by television and ignored by schools in America. So the Chicana was a cultural bridge between past and present, posing yet another task in her second shift. When they don’t have time to be the bridge themselves, Chicana working mothers often seek a “tortilla grandma” to baby-sit and provide la cultura. Many white working mothers have fought a similar—and often losing—battle to carry forward a domestic culture—a culture of homemade apple pie, home-sewn Halloween costumes, hand-ironed shirts. If she didn’t do it on weekdays, she got to it on Saturday.
Many traditional women feel they should carry on all of the domestic tradition and that only women can carry it on. Having secured a base in the industrial economy, men have relied on women to connect them back to a life outside it. In The Remembered Gate, Barbara Berg argues that as Americans moved off the land, the values of farm life moved into the home. The woman at home became the urban agrarian, the one who preserved the values of a bygone rural way of life while living in the city. By “staying back” in this sense, she eased the difficult transition for the men who moved ahead.
Who is easing the transition for women now? Although traditional women want to preserve a “domestic heritage,” most working mothers I talked to felt ambivalent about it. “Do I really need to cook an elaborate meal every night?” one woman asked. Another mused, “I’m not the type that has to see my face in the kitchen floor. That part of my mother’s cleaning routine I let go of, no problem. But I don’t give my child as much as my mother gave me. That’s why I want my husband involved—to make up for that.”
Some men have responded to the declining domestic culture, much as colonizers responded to the marginalization of traditional peasant life. Secure in their modern world, the colonizers could collect peasant rugs, jewelry, or songs, or cultivate a taste for the indigenous cuisine. Today, some successful professional men, secure in their own modern careers, embrace a few tokens of the traditional female culture. They bake bread or pies on Saturdays, or fix a gourmet meal once a month. But very few men go completely “native”; that would take an extra month a year.
Women’s move into the economy, as a new urban peasantry, is the basic social revolution of our time, and, on the whole, it has increased the power of women. But other realities also lower it. If women’s work outside the home increases their need for male help inside it, two facts—that women earn less and that marriages have become less stable—inhibit many women from pressing men to help more.
Today, while women average eighty cents to the dollar, their wages are more important than ever before to family life, and as half of all workers, they are more important than ever to the national economy. But overall it remains true that, given how things are, women have a greater economic need for marriage than men, and are more likely to fall into poverty outside it.
Meanwhile, what has changed is the extent to which a woman can depend on marriage. The divorce rate has risen steadily through the century and between 1970 and 1980, it doubled. Experts estimate that today 43 percent of all first marriages, 60 percent of all second marriages, and 73 of third ones eventually end in divorce. Whatever causes divorce, as the sociologist Terry Arendell points out in Divorce: Women and Children Last, the effect of it is much harder on women. Divorce usually pushes women down the class ladder—sometimes way down. Most divorced men provide surprisingly little financial support for their children. According to the Bureau of the Census in 1985, 81 percent of divorced fathers and 66 percent of separated fathers have court orders to pay child support. Twenty percent of these fathers fully comply; 15 percent pay irregularly. How much child support a father pays is also not related to his capacity to pay.3
After divorce, fathers have distressingly little emotional contact with their children as well. According to the National Children’s Survey conducted in 1976 and 1981 and analyzed by sociologist Frank Furstenberg, 23 percent of all divorced fathers had no contact with their children during the past five years. Another 20 percent had no contact with their children in the past one year. Only 26 percent had seen their children for a total of three weeks in the last year. Two-thirds of fathers divorced for over ten years had not had any contact with their children in more than a year. In line with this finding, in her study of divorced women, sociologist Terry Arendell found that over half of the children of divorced women had not received a visit or a call from their father in the last year; 35 percent of these children had not seen their fathers in the last five years. Whatever job they took, these women would also have to be the most important person in their children’s lives.
The frightening truth is that once pushed down the class ladder, many divorced women and their children get stuck there. This is because they have difficulty finding jobs with adequate pay and because most of them have primary responsibility for the children. Also, fewer divorced women than men remarry, especially older women with children.
In the nineteenth century, before a woman could own property in her own name, get a higher education, enter a profession, or vote, she might have been trapped in a marriage to an overbearing husband and have nowhere else to go. Now we call that woman “oppressed.” Today, a woman can legally own property, vote, get an education, work at a job, and leave an oppressive marriage to walk into an apparently “free” form of inequality.
Divorce is an undoing of an economic arrangement between men and women. Reduced to its economic bare bones, traditional marriage has been what the economist Heidi Hartmann calls a “mechanism of redistribution.” Through it men supported women to rear their children and tend their homes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unions won a higher “family wage” for male workers, on the grounds that men needed the money more than women to support wives and children. At that time it seemed reasonable that men should get first crack at better-paying jobs, and even earn more than women for the same work because “women didn’t support a family.” Since this arrangement put men and women in vastly unequal financial positions, the way most women got a living wage was to marry. In the job market, the relation between men and women was as the upper to the lower class. Marriage was the equalizer.
But as marriage—this “mechanism of redistribution”—has grown more fragile, divorced men still earn a “family wage” but no longer “redistribute” it to their children or the ex-wife who cares for them. The media stresses how sexes both have the freedom to divorce, and surely this choice is an important advance. At the same time, the more men and women live outside marriage, the more they divide into separate classes. Three factors—the belief that child care is female work, the failure of ex-husbands to support their children, and higher male wages—have taken the economic rug from under that half of married women who divorce.
Patriarchy has not disappeared, it’s changed form. In the old form, women were forced to obey an overbearing husband in the privacy of an unjust marriage. In the new form, women are free with an overall unequal setup. In the old form, women were limited to the home but economically maintained there. In the new form, women earn the bacon and cook it too.
The modern oppression of women outside marriage reduces the power of women inside marriage as well. Married women become cautious, like Nina Tanagawa or Nancy Holt who look at their divorcing friends and say, “The extra month a year or a divorce? I’ll work the extra month.”
In conversation, both men and women expressed sympathy for the emotional pain of divorcing friends. But women told stories with more anxious interest, and more empathy for the plight of the woman. One evening at the dinner table, a mother of two who worked at word processing had this exchange with her husband, a store manager, and her former boss:
A good friend of mine worked as a secretary for six years, putting her husband through dental school. She worked like a dog, did all the housework, and they had a child too. She didn’t really worry about getting ahead at the job because she figured they would rely on his work and she would stop working as soon as he set up practice. Well, he went and fell in love with another woman and divorced his wife. Now she’s still working as a secretary and raising their little boy. Now he’s got two other children by the other woman.
Her husband commented: “That’s true, but she was hard to get along with, and she had a drinking problem. She complained a lot. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for her, but there’s another side to the story.”
Surprised, the wife answered. “Yeah, but she was had! Don’t you think?”
Her husband said, “Oh, I don’t know. They both have a case.”
Earlier in our century, the most important cautionary tale for women was of a woman who “fell” from chastity before marriage and came to a bad end because no man would have her. Among working mothers of small children, and especially the more traditional of them, the modern version of the “fallen woman” became the divorcée. Needless to say, not all women fear divorce. But when life is made to seem so cold “out there,” women such as Nancy Holt and Nina Tanagawa may try to get warm inside unequal marriages.
A cycle is set in motion. Because men put more of their “male” identity in work, their work time is worth more than female work time—to the man and to the family. The greater worth of male work time makes his leisure more valuable, because it is his leisure that enables him to refuel his energy, strengthen his ambition, and move ahead at work. By doing less at home, he can work longer hours, prove his loyalty to his company, and get promoted faster. His aspirations expand. His pay rises. He earns exemption from the second shift.
The female side of the cycle runs parallel. The woman’s identity is less in her job. Since her work comes second, she carries more of the second shift, thus providing backstage support for her husband’s work. Because she supports her husband’s efforts at work more than he supports hers, her personal ambitions contract and her earnings, already lower, rise more slowly. Her extra month a year contributes not only to her husband’s success but to the expanding wage gap between them, and so the cycle spins on.
The inequality in backstage support is hidden from view. One cannot tell from sheer workplace appearance who goes home to be served dinner and who goes home to cook, any more than we can tell rich from poor these days just by how people dress. Both male and female workers come to work looking the same. Yet one is “poorer” in backstage support than the other. One irons a spouse’s uniform, fixes a lunch, washes clothes, types a résumé, edits an office memo, takes phone calls, or entertains clients. The other has a uniform ironed, a lunch fixed, clothes washed, a résumé typed, an office memo edited, phone calls taken, and clients entertained.
There is a curious hierarchy of backstage “wealth.” The richest is the high-level executive with an unemployed wife who entertains his clients and runs his household; and a secretary who handles his appointments, arranges his travel, and orders anniversary flowers for his wife. The poorest in backstage support is the single mother who works full time and rears her children with no help from anyone. Between these two extremes lie the two-job couples.
In a study I did of the family life of workers in a large corporation, I discovered that the higher up the corporate ladder, the more home support a worker had. Top executives were likely to be married to housewives. Middle managers were likely to be married to a working spouse who does some or most of the housework and child care. And the clerical worker, if she is a woman, is likely to be single or a single mother and does the work at home herself.4 At each of these three levels, men and women fared differently. Among the female top executives, 95 percent were married to men who also worked and 5 percent were single or single parents. Among male top executives, 64 percent were married to housewives, 23 percent were married to working wives, and 5 percent were single or single parents. So compared to men, female top executives had less backstage support. As one female manager remarked: “It’s all men at my level and most of them are married to housewives. But even the ones whose wives work seem to have more time at the office than I do.” As women executives so often quipped, “What I really need is a wife.”
In the middle ranks, a quarter of the men were married to housewives, nearly half were married to working wives, and about a third were single. Among women in the middle ranks, half were part of two-job couples and carried most of the second shift. The other half were single or single parents. Among lower-level clerical workers, most were single or single mothers.
Being “rich” or “poor” in backstage support probably influences what traits people develop. Men who have risen to the top with great support come to be seen and to actually be “hard driving,” ambitious, and “committed” to their careers. Women with less support are vulnerable to the charge of being “uncommitted.” Sometimes, they do become less committed. But women such as Nina Tanagawa did not lack ambition or suffer from what the psychologist Matina Horner calls a “fear of success.” Rather, their “backstage poverty” raised the emotional price of success impossibly high.
In an earlier economic era, when men entered industrial life, their wives preserved—through the home—a link to a life they had known before. By “staying back,” such wives eased a difficult transition for the men who were moving into the industrial age. In a sense the Nancy Holts of America are like peasants new to factory life but no one is easing the transition for them.
*In the United States we speak of farmers, not “peasants.” The term “farmer” connotes free ownership of land, and a certain pride, while the term “peasant” suggests the humility of a feudal serf. I draw the analogy between modern American women and the modernizing peasantry because women’s inferior social, legal, educational, and economic position had until recently been like that of peasants.