How love devalued women's work
As people began seeing spouses as soul mates, the definition of "work" narrowed — leaving out much of what women were doing
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Last week, I wrote about how over the last few centuries relationships shifted to have love at their center. This was supposed to improve relationships, but in practice it has also meant that a lot of people are alone, lonely, or have less access to conventional milestones like having kids.
But here’s something else it did: Shifting to a love-focused, soul mate relationship paradigm appears to have redefined gender roles so that economically productive “work” was solely the domain of men. Meanwhile, the tasks women were doing gradually came to be seen as non-economic “homemaking” rather than work.
To understand this shift, it’s worth reviewing some terminology I brought up last week. For a long time, spouses were described as “help meets,” “yoke mates” and “work mates.” Sometimes married couples were in love, sometimes they weren’t. But this terminology gets at the idea that in the pre-modern West, marriage was more of a joint venture than (initially) a romantic pairing. And because economic activity was oriented around the household — think of a family farm or a small shop in town — both men and women were seen as making valuable economic contributions to a family’s survival.
However, religious and economic changes began shifting attitudes about relationships (I’ve written more about this here, here and here) and by the late 1700s people were looking for love matches in their marriages. The idea of “work mates” gave way to “soul mates.”
This economic and social transformation helped create the idea of a male breadwinner household. And Stephanie Coontz, in Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage, charts how this concept created an entirely new gender theory; men worked and existed in the economic world, while women were pushed into a domestic sphere that was divorced from economic activity.
Ironically, the amount of work women were doing in some cases increased during this time; because men spent more time out working for wages, women were left to manage more household affairs on their own. But those affairs were homemaking, which Coontz says “came to be seen as an act of love rather than a contribution to survival.”
Women’s traditional tasks — growing food for the family table, tending animals, dairying, cooking, repairing household implements, and making clothes — though no less burdensome, were no longer viewed as economic activities1.
Coontz has argued that this transition actually made women more dependent on men because they now needed cash, which only men were earning. And she notes that women’s diaries from the early 1800s “reflect a new self-doubt about the worth of their contributions to the household economy.”
Ultimately this also “stripped many women of their identities as economic producers and family co-providers.”
So, that doesn’t sound too great.
To be clear, the western world before the late 1700s wasn’t some sort of gender equality utopia. For the most part, it was explicitly patriarchal. But it strikes me as as a step backwards to ask women to do the same work (and often more of it) while simultaneously saying those activities now don’t have the same economic value.
In any case, the practical outcome to this situation was for women to follow men into the wage labor economy in the twentieth century. Though women largely entered the workforce due to economic necessity, Coontz notes that many also ended up liking work.
By 1976, more than three-quarters of employed women said they would keep working even if they didn’t need the money. Many wives who had only gone to work to help out their husbands in the economic downturn now reported that their jobs gave them a sense of importance they had never gotten from full-time homemaking2.
If that were the end of this story, I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. Men and women would live in harmony, working at jobs they love for fair wages.
But unfortunately, that isn’t what happened.
One problem is that wages have declined consistently over the last generation, meaning that families are under growing economic stress even with two incomes3.
More relevantly to the topic at hand, however, is that the old homemaker paradigm is still with us, shaping behaviors and policies in ways that are not necessarily making anyone happy.
For example, as has been widely reported, the coronavirus pandemic has disproportionately impacted women’s employment, with mothers taking on more childcare responsibilities and either cutting back on their work hours or dropping out of the workforce entirely. According to the Brookings Institute, one reason this happened is because women tend to work lower-earning jobs. And of course because women earn less relative to men4 5.
Which is to say, for better or worse homemakers in the US still tend to be (or, are expected to be) women.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a homemaker. And in fact a majority of Americans have indicated that they think kids with two parents are better off when one of those parents stays home. Even among working mothers, a majority would prefer to not work full time.
Homemaking, in other words is still a popular component of American households.
But despite it’s popularity, we’re still treating homemaking and household management like they’re purely acts of love, divorced from economics. Put another way, the problem is not homemaking, but rather that homemaking itself is devalued. It’s not considered a “job” — even though historically in a “work mate” society running a household would have been.
This raises all sorts of problems.
For instance, I suspect it makes it more difficult to recruit men into the role of homemaker. If it’s a role that (to paraphrase Coontz) strips practitioners of their identities, there’s always going to be a strong incentive to dump it on the lower earning member of a relationship. In practice, that often means it gets foisted on women whether they like it or not.
I have a theory that this is also one reason it has been so hard for the U.S. to solve its problems with childcare6. With issues like unemployment, there’s an obvious economic component, and so there are a variety of concrete economic remedies. But raising kids is an act of love, the thinking goes, so why would we need any sort of policy to deal with love?
I don’t know what the best policy solution would be for childcare. Prescriptive solutions are really beyond the scope of what I’m writing here today.
What I’m saying instead is that our inaction on the topic hints at how we still mentally divide the world up into the professional-economic sphere and the domestic sphere. It’s a rather arbitrary division, and it means that tasks like running a household and raising kids — no matter who is doing them — don’t really get their due.
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This week’s headlines:
Give Power to the Parents!
“The crucial question is this: In a society with such a diverse array of family forms, which kind of family structure should the government favor? My answer is, “None.” The role of government is to help people build the kind of family they prefer, not tell them what kind of family they should prefer. Government should be neutral about what kind of family is best.”
"I’m giving myself permission to want a thing that I’m apparently not supposed to want."
“What I’ve come to understand is that “coming of age” is something that happens in conjunction with your community, your environment, and your sense of self—it’s not going to happen solely on a backpacking trip involving a significant epiphany by a waterfall. That’s not to say that knowing how you want to live and who you are aren’t important. Of course they are. So is knowing that a location is not the single defining factor in your worth or experience.”
Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 155
Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 259
By 1973, wages for American men had peaked. Then, from that point until 2013, they declined 26 percent. Women’s wages peaked in 2004, but by 2013 they too were making less than they had been in 1973 when adjusted for inflation. Source: Patriarchy, Power, and Pay: The Transformation of American Families, 1800–2015. Steven Ruggles. 2015. Page 1809
From “Women Can’t Win,” a 2018 report from Georgetown University: The gender wage gap, the disparity in pay between men and women, has narrowed to 81 cents in 2016 from 57 cents on the dollar in 1975. Nevertheless, the gap persists. Over the course of a career, the gender wage gap results in women earning $1 million less than men do.
My wife and I grappled with this situation in 2018 when our daughter was born; we looked at our finances and concluded that since I made more money I’d continue working. Meanwhile, my wife took a year of unpaid leave from her job. She eventually went back to work, but we made the same decision in 2020 when our son was born.
This week has actually seen a flurry of policy work done on this very issue. Though we’re still in the proposal stage, there does appear to be surging interest in addressing the issue.