Condemned to Liberation: The Woman as Breadwinner
Tucker, William
William Tucker CONDEMNED TO LIBERATION: THE WOMAN AS BREADWINNER There were once very good reasons to discriminate against women. What went wrong? Why have women made less than men for doing...
...It is clear now, however, that this promise was probably only half-intended...
...Otherwise, we will be very little prepared for any new injustices that we may be creating in undoing the old system...
...The "family wage," or "living wage," as it was called, was based on the theory that wages should not be tied to production alone, but that every breadwinner in society had a right to make enough money to support a Ehrenreich notes in her recent book, The Hearts of Men, we created a "family wage system," whereby the great majority o f jobs in society paid one person enough to support a normal family consisting of a man, a woman, and their children...
...But such is life...
...family...
...Now somebody is probably already saying, "There's no comparison-children shouldn't be allowed to work, while women should...
...The Leadership Institute's Internship's Program is placing high-quality conservatives as interns in public policy...
...A simple answer might be, "the reformers," who wanted to rescue women and children from the harrowing conditions of working life...
...The question is, why did they do it...
...Children's wages represented income--just as women's wages did--and poor working families were the last people willing to give them up (just as the children of the poor today are the least likely people to stay in school, even though they would benefit the most...
...Consider again, for example, the commonly cited statistic that, until very recently, women with college degrees were earning less than men with less than three years of high school...
...The family was made the fundamental unit of society...
...Why are incompetent men often given preference over obviously more competent women...
...So how did it come about that women and children were finally removed--or at least "segregated"-into separate sectors of working society...
...Women obviously have enormous talents to contribute to the system...
...This is undoubtedly the reason why "women's liberation" continues to gain its strongest support among affluent women and men--while it is still most stubbornly resisted by people near the bottom of the economic ladder...
...There is a whole book of scholarship waiting to be written, I believe, explaining all the peculiar customs of the early part of this century in terms of this model...
...Was it because men felt that work was one of life's great pleasures, and wanted to keep all its satisfaction for themselves...
...Age limits of between 18 and 25 were usually enforced...
...Employers often required young women to leave their jobs when they married, whether they wanted to leave or n o t . . . All this might just be interpreted as "prejudice against women' ' - - o r , more accurately, "prejudice against marriage," since one o f the most important distinctions was between married and single women...
...Yet, basically, I think it is impossible...
...Instead of making it easier for men or women to live independently, women's liberation has made it more important than ever to have two people around to help pay the bills...
...If you don't believe this, then let's try putting children back in the labor force, and see what happens then...
...There is a great irony in all this...
...It's not that I'm against women's liberation...
...The point, then, is not to turn back the clock and try to revive the old stereotypes...
...Capitalism is as capitalism does," is the standard formula, and whatever is wrong with society, ipso facto, is the fault of capitalism...
...The whole idea of trying to recreate a rough justice by restricting anyone's "rights" would never make it through the courts...
...Employers usually referred to these efforts to regulate women and children's working conditions as "socialism...
...The "one-paycheck-perfamily" system was a socially conscious effort to achieve a downward redistribution of income...
...Once again, these jobs paid low, and were performed under adverse conditions...
...In 1970, for example, Gloria Steinem argued that all the women's movement wanted to do was share the responsibilities of supporting a family...
...All we are doing is trading an arrangement that was socially conscious in trying to distribute wealth equitably among families, for another that is based more on atomism, individualism, and personal efforts and abilities, without as much regard for social consequence...
...Now let's face it...
...I think our society is probably better off having women adding their talent to the local production of society, and that we gain more than we lose by their participation...
...For example, a short time ago a writer to the New York Times letters page submitted the terms of a public schoolteacher's contract as agreed to in Sullivan County, N.Y...
...In a market flooded with single men, single women, working husbands~ and working wives, the big losers are the "single-parent families," where only one potential wage-earner is available...
...But this argument d o e s n ' t really c a r r y . Reformers are always crusading for something or other...
...Recent statistics have shown--to everyone's surprise--that married women are now participating in the work force at almost twice the rate of single women--60 percent, as opposed to about 35 percent...
...I had a friend a couple of years ago who married one of those "old-fashioned" women who hated work, and spent all her time shopping for clothes and trying to look glamorous...
...What impresses me most, though, is the degree to which our success as a society still depends almost irreversibly on how well men and women get along with each other...
...We have become a "twopaycheck society" (or probably, more accurately, a "one-and-a-half paycheck society...
...By building machines that required little or no skills to operate, capitalism vastly expanded the size of the work force...
...designated as employment for single women...
...Teachers were allowed to stay on their jobs if they married, but had to take a pay cut if they wanted to remain...
...Women as a group are paid less than men...
...Feminist writers also note this phenomenon--but do not seem to understand its origin...
...It probably takes away some upward mobility from people on the lower rungs of the ladder, but that is something some future generation of reformers will have to solve...
...It came to me while I was reading Scott's article...
...The logic is easy to follow...
...Obviously, economic necessity, and not the desire for a career, is driving a great many of these people...
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...I find this argument very convincing...
...I am confident that anyone willing enough to accept the logic of one of these arguments will be gracious enough to accept the irrefutable good sense of the other...
...In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith describes similar practices in New York City schools...
...But did they do it because they didn't like women, or thought them inferior...
...Far more important than what the reformers are preaching is how these ideas match the interests of the great mass of people...
...Was it because men didn't believe women to be competent to do the work of an industrial society...
...Many upper-education women obviously thought that by breaking into the job market, they would be able to pull down salaries that would allow them to live independently of men...
...Ehrenreich, for example, sees the outcome as another plot hatched by "corporate America...
...As John A. Ryan, an American Catholic reformer, wrote in his book, A Living Wage, published in 1906, "The welfare of the whole family, and that of society likewise, renders it imperative that the wife and mother should not engage in any labor except in the household...
...But in another sense, it is a very fair situation, in that the man with only a high-school education does not have to compete against both the husband and the wife of a better-educated couple in trying to support hi~ own family...
...The Supreme Court upheld this argument many times...
...When typewriters were invented, however, women were substituted...
...The absent are always wrong," is a French proverb, and this is particularly true with our forebears, who are never around to defend themselves...
...in 1910...
...This is the reason that ours and other societies have "discriminated" against women...
...American society--pointed out that the original meaning of the word "discriminate" was to "choose intelligently...
...All this is not a surprising outcome, and could have easily been predicted by anyone taking the trouble to understand the old formula...
...It is already clear that those days are gone...
...The same was generally true for reform movements, charitable efforts, and other types of volunteer activity...
...The products they turned out were replacing goods already being made by skilled craftsmen--who were almost exclusiv,ely male, and were paid a much higher wage...
...As they produced the desired results, these informal agreements gradually became a very rigid set of accepted social customs...
...As Friedan herself expressed it, she wanted to "do battle with the world...
...In a book with even more impact, Barbara Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men, the a u t h o r - - a long-time socialist--is quite aware of the history of the "family wage...
...Literary salons and literary tastes were female provinces--a tradition that lives on even today in those 700-page romantic best-sellers that only women ever seem to have the time to read...
...You won't find it written down anywhere--the whole thing was accomplished at an almost subliminal level...
...When early factories were put up, she noted, they were manned almost exclusively by single girls between the ages of 16 and 25...
...But already I think you can sense this argument is on shaky ground...
...It might even be said that we have abandoned some of its fairness and created a few injustices of our own in ambitiously tearing the whole thing apart...
...Was it because they didn't like women, or thought them inferior...
...These men, in turn, finding their opportunities more constricted, suffered a diminution in income...
...Why did this pattern of "women's work" evolve...
...For more information: Jeff Walter The Leadership Institute DIRECTOR OF DEVELOPMENT Conservative education foundation with established programs at colleges and universities seeks Director of Development...
...I used to hear this all the time as a suburban reporter...
...But in the long run, both practices should create a more productive society, which will eventually benefit everyone...
...The question is, who...
...I don't know what we'd do without my wife's $20,000 a year salary, but we certainly wouldn't live as well as we do...
...But that was the purpose of almost every one of the "absurd" restrictions that were put on women's participation in the job market, plus the successful exclusion of children from the labor force altogether...
...There is a whole industry in academia today that makes a living by saying that whatever is wrong with society is the fault of "capitalism...
...This, of course, is what so appalled the reformers of the era--a vast number of them women...
...Clerks" were originally men, training in the hopes of moving up the ladder into positions of responsibility...
...2 2 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVFMqER 1984 The same thing happened in offices...
...Men, Brooks complained, were so preoccupied with the business of making money that they had little time or interest to contribute to arts and leisure...
...Among the provisions were ones that female teachers (all teachers were assumed to be female) couldn't marry during the terms of their contract and couldn't leave town without the school board's permission...
...The poor, on the other hand, never really had enough a r t i c u l a t e d understanding, or "access to the media," in order to mount a defense of the old system...
...Where do we go from here...
...In her Scientific American article, Joan Wallach Scott reports that: Just as jobs in the mill had been, so the jobs of secretary and telephone operator were 'Doubleday, $13.95/$5.95 paper...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 51...
...while the breadwinner in another family was left unemployed...
...It wasn't because it had an immediate appeal to everyone...
...Men will have to give up their ruling class privileges," she told Time magazine, "but in return they will no longer be the only ones to support the family . . . . All you have to lose is your coronaries...
...She expresses great fear that women are about to "give up our hard-won freedoms" and rush back to giving men the breadwinning role...
...Why have women been discriminated against in hiring...
...Many literary critics of the era--Van Wyck Brooks, f o r instance--complained that American arts and letters were hopelessly unrepresentative of the culture because these activities were totally dominated by women...
...This made it possible to pay everyone a lower wage, because of the increased competition among laborers...
...The point probably doesn't need too much emphasizing, but let me drive it home a bit more, just to be sure what ground we are standing on...
...There is a basic economic efficiency in the nuclear family that is essentially impossible to replace--not to mention the emotional and personal satisfactions it offers most people...
...It was willing to throw grown men out of work and replace them with their wives and daughters...
...Ironically, it lies in the realm of supply-side economics...
...The answer as to why we discriminated against women came to me after reading Scientific American's special issue on "The Mechanization of Work" a year ago...
...The consequences are simply this: Once a few women started working, all women had to start working...
...Writing in 1835, he noted that "the constant aim and tendency of every improvement in machinery [is] to supersede human labor altogether or to diminish its cost, by substituting the industry of women and children for that of men . . . . The effect of substituting a self-acting mule (i.e., a machine) for the common mule (i.e., a man) is to discharge the great part of men spinners and to retain adolescents and children...
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...There are estimates that the entire housing shortage on Manhattan's East Side--in addition to being the result of rent control--is due to the number of divorced men and women seeking separate but equal apartments...
...When Massachusetts adopted the nation's first minimum wage law in 1912, it applied only to women and children...
...I'm a little leery of all this...
...The man was designated as the "breadwinner," and was given special considerations in job placement--not to victimize women and children, but to prevent the principal wage earner in each family from having to compete against Our forebears obviously did "discriminate" in giving men preference over women in the job market...
...They labored heroically in agriculture, and in the home, long before industrialization came on the scene...
...The answer is very simple...
...They want to ban alcohol, adopt the children of the poor, educate the masses, establish world government, disband nationstates, or do away with nuclear weapons...
...In fact, it had some very fair, intelligent, and admirable aspects...
...Later, when men began to move into these jobs, women were often segregated on the same factory floor, doing work labeled "women's jobs" for distinctly lower wages...
...In turn, their wives had to go out and work in order to maintain the same standard of living, and so on down the line...
...The main purpose, of course, was to protect less-skilled people nearer the bottom of the economic ladder...
...The evidence nonetheless indicates that economic pressure and not free time propels most women into the labor force...
...Now a bill mandating "comparable worth" pay-scales has sailed through the House of Representatives by a vote of 413-to-6...
...You can say what you want about capitalism--how obsessed it is with money, or indifferent it may or may not be to the personal lives, health, or working conditions of its employees...
...It is so expensive to have a culture riddled by divorce and "one-parent" children...
...They were obviously the most vulnerable...
...It was, indeed, a form of benign "socialism"--not in the sense of "national planning" or a government-directed economy, as socialism later came to mean, but only an informal and unstructured set of agreements meant to override the market...
...The original title for these new clerks was "female typewriter...
...It should be noted here that these women were not exactly idle during this period...
...Since everyone's salaries are now lower, women have to work in order to help their husbands support their families...
...That is precisely what nineteenth-century reformers found so shameless about capitalists--that they made absolutely no social distinctions between men, women, and children, Mexican peons, or Chinese coolies, in the labor force...
...If one woman did" it, everyone would want to do it, and the whole system would quickly fall apart...
...In the end, there is probably nothing wrong with a system in which men and women rearrange their child-care and homemaking tasks so that they can compete equally on the job market...
...26-27 in Washington, ~ H volves research, proofreading, [~ _9 DC...
...This doesn't seem to be exactly what feminists intended...
...Moreover, it was very important to avoid exceptions--to make sure that no woman could make a "living wage" while being supported by her husband...
...What the family wage reformers were grasping for was the idea that if the size of the labor force could be artificially limited, then the laws o f supply and demand would dictate that employers would have to pay the family breadwinner a higher, "family" wage...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, IN 47402, (812)334-2715...
...I n order to understand why we eventually discriminated against women in jobs, I think we have to go back and look at the Industrial Revolution from its original perspective...
...As Scott pointed out, women have always worked...
...Betty Friedan's second book, The Second Stage (1981), was written in response to a growing backlash she was getting from "superwomen" who are trying to hold down demanding jobs, maintain homes, and care for families--and finding it almost impossible to jump off this economic treadmill...
...After a few months of running after her charge accounts, he divorced her as quickly as possible and married a woman who was studying to become a lawyer...
...If it was simply malice or misapprehension that caused us to discriminate against women, then we certainly owe women a great debt...
...Friedan's response is to blame it all on " i n f l a t i o n " and "the energy crisis," and suggested that once the economy improved, women would no longer have to work so much to support their families...
...Back pay" settlements and "comparative worth" will probably soon be invading the federal civil service, and Congress already has its eyes on the private sector...
...I think it is wonderful that women can work...
...Phyllis Shlafly arid George Gilder have both recommended it, and there are probably millions of beleaguered women who wouldn't mind easing back into the old mode...
...They may have discriminated, but that doesn't mean they didn't know what they were doing...
...Hundreds of job open- o ~ editing, and odd jobs...
...There is a strong a~-gument, however, that everyone does benefit from the new system...
...They perceived--rightly--that their talents and training were restricted, in that they could easily outperform many men in the system--except for the informal rule o f " o n e - breadwinner-per-family...
...That way we could have a better distribution of income without practicing "sex discrimination...
...The revolution of women is yet to come," she concludes...
...We're working just to pay the bills...
...Scott tells us they haven't...
...Have things changed much in the last few decades...
...But one thing you cannot say about capitalists is that it makes any difference to them who they employ...
...From one perspective this seems very unfair--higl~ly capable women being "discriminated against" in the job market...
...Why doesn't some 12-year-old hire an attorney and sue U.S...
...In the end, I'm afraid we're stuck with what we have today--a free-for-all of "every man and woman for him/her/self...
...Scott provided it--albeit unwittingly-when she quoted a nineteenthcentury Scottish reformer, Andrew Ure, who spent time observing the work patterns that were emerging in the new knitting mills...
...Women and children were brought in to replace men--not because the capitalists were so fond of women and children, and wanted to give them equal opportunity--but because they were unskilled, and could therefore be paid a much lower wage...
...Implicit in this argument was the principle that a man should not have to put his wife and children out to work...
...Too many people have already adjusted to the new situation, and we are in a society that has become obsessed with eliminating all forms of "discrimination," intelligent or not...
...The decisive campaign was probably the "family wage" movement promoted during the first decade o f the twentieth century by a broad coalition of reformersmincluding t h e Catholic Church, the labor unions, the social welfare movement, and even American socialist parties...
...Perhaps getting a little tendentious, she argues that improvements in home-cleaning technology--vacuum cleaners, washing machines--have simply "replaced servants," and only made it easier for women to work outside the home while still keeping house...
...Now I ask you to think about this a minute...
...As early as 1852, for example, Ohio had adopted a law limiting women and children's working conditions to ten hours a day...
...U if you're not a bonehead, and II Contact" _9 ~ have no plans to become one, _9 " " _9 Jl send your resume to: The Leadership Institute ~ U Patrick Shanahan II 8001 Braddock Road #402 ~ ~ The American Spectator U Springfield, VA 22151 ~ 11 P.O...
...She reports getting angry phone calls in the middle of the night from women blaming her for their predicament...
...It was indeed a form of "discrimination," in the sense of making intelligent choices...
...The old system of one-breadwinner-per-family probably functioned precisely because it was so informal and uncodified--and because we didn't have armies of lawyers trying to make money by discovering new forms of "discrimination" within the system...
...The new formulation was simply this: "Only one principal wage earner per family...
...Position in. Nov...
...They also probably understood, instinctively at least, that breaking up the system would not hurt them, but would tend to concentrate most of the disadvantages at the bottom end of the scale...
...A few months ago, someone wrote a letter to the editor pointing out that married women who are holding down good jobs are taking work away from other families in which no one is employed...
...But I think it should be made very clear what the consequences of breaking this informal social c o n t r a c t o f " o n e - p r i n c i p a l - w a g e - e a r n e r - p e r - family" have been...
...In her recent book The Second Stage, Betty Friedan complains continuously of "archaic" social customs that forced women to leave their jobs when they got married...
...Women often had to do piecework at home, keep house, and take care of the children, all at the same time, They labored as hard as anybody in society...
...Thus, the best defense for women competing in the work force is-ironically--the same argument we have used for reducing confiscatory taxation and freeing up the productive sector through supply-side economics...
...If trying to give men preferential treatment over women in jobs is nothing more than a malehatched plot to reserve all the best jobs for adult men, why doesn't the same argument apply for children...
...In truth, it is pretty obvious that a number of upper-educated women who have been spearheading the women's movement have basically been trying to design a system that will allow them to get along independently of men...
...A few years ago I taught a writing class in which a young woman--obviously out of touch with the mainstream of William Tucker is a contributing editor o f Harper's...
...Modem feminists will probably look at these arguments as an incipient form of "discrimination," but the real intent was quite different...
...I think there is a very simple explanation...
...Or perhaps we could just consider these rules the odd, incomprehensible folkways of some inscrutable primitive tribe...
...They were willing to send any or all of them into the most dangerous and menial jobs, as long as they got the work done...
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...Among the articles about robots and computers was a treatise calle~l "The Mechanization of Women's Work," [gy Joan Wallach Scott, a professor of history at Brandeis...
...One of the most striking things about the 1970s was how women went almost overnight from a position of being artificially excluded from the labor force to a position of almost having to work...
...Somebody else was responsible for this social alignment...
...But Ehrenreich argues this is the result of a malicious conspiracy by "the men who run corporate America," and says i f we stopped building nuclear weapons, wages would go back up again...
...That was intelligent, affluent, highly educated women...
...Steel or Continental Coal Company for eight-zillion dollars in back wages denied to him and all other 12-year-olds for the "age discrimination" of not allowing them to go down into the mines anymore...
...Since World War I I . . . there has been a dramatic increase in the number of married women who work, in both the middle class and the working class...
...Once again, I must disagree...
...There have been some suggestions that we simply go back to the old onepaycheck society, with men in the work force anti,women in the home...
...Women are now condemned to liberation...
...II The American Spectator is Iookgooeeoooooooeoeeoooooooooo X ing for a person with a liberal II _9 CAPITAL HILL _9 ~ arts background, an appreciation STAFF TRAINING ~ 1[ for public policy, and asense of : SEMINAR : 51 humor to fill the position of II ]i Editorial Intern...
...By having some women enter the labor force on an equal basis with men, we have simply broken down the restrictions that artificially limited the labor pool...
...Occupations are still frequently segregated according to sex...
...TUCKER (continued from page 25) A second alternative was suggested to me on the pates of the New York Daily News...
...Many of Scott's points have been made before, but I would like to repeat them here, because they are what got me thinking on these matters...
...Limiting children's, and later women's, participation in the work force was an idea that did catch on...
...Improved technology has placed some higher values on skilled labor, but even today businesses remain the major exponents of illegal immigrants--often filling whole factories with these renegade workers, to the great consternation of Organized labor...
...We are doing no such thing...
...As one widely quoted statistic has indicated, until recently college-educated women were making less money than men with one to three years of high school...
...But this has proved to be an economic optical illusion--like trying to pull the moon out of the water...
...But it was not a system that we have to feel embarrassed about...
...Please send resume (no telephone calls) t o : President USIC Educational Fnd...
...Statistics from Mark Clements Research Readership b;ur~c~ 1983...
...By helping society make a bigger pie, women are ensuring that everyone will get a bigger piece--even if some o f the old redistributional equities are lost in the process...
...Some of these ideas catch on and others don't...
...Why are there "pink-collar ghettoes...
...continued on page 51) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 25 THE LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE Take the first step into the public policy process...
...Inflation has slowed down, and the economy improved, but we are no closer to returning to a "family wage" system than we were in 1980...
...Only last year, Washington State was ordered to pay $861 million in "back wages" to women because the state casually admitted that it always thought it made sense to pay a higher salary to married men than single women...
...It is also a matter of how big a pie we make...
...To beck with all this women's lib stuff," women would say...
...If nineteenth-century capitalism didn't produce enough wealth, that was the fault of capitalism...
...All it means is that women, by flooding into the labor market, have driven down everybody's wages...
...Most of the early reform movements for reducing working hours and improving working conditions were made on behalf of women and children simultaneously...
...As reformers of the period usually discovered--much to their dismay--the people who were often most anxious to put their children into the work force were their own parents...
...What was happening when the first factories went up...
...I n certain essential respects," she argued, "the work that women do has changed little since before the Industrial Revolution...
...In the end, the only thing we can really say about the new system is that it bears an awfully strong resemblance to capitalism itself...
...Presumably the figure was about double this twenty years ago...
...Although it was never adopted as an official "national policy," the family wage, I believe, was implicitly accepted in America and other countries as a new social contract...
...But if there were other motives involved, then it is imperative that we find out what they were...
...It is important to find out these answers, since they will bear heavily on the world we create as we go about diligently dismantling the system handed down to us from the past...
...As feminist Barbara his own and other people's wives and children in the labor market...
...This is a II _~ ings for conservatives...
...Why have women made less than men for doing the same jobs...
...The family is a most durable institution that will survive all kinds of social change...
...How did this informal social contract break up...
...Instead, in the new, more atomistic society, it has become even more necessary for people to combine incomes in order to create a "family" wage...
...Strangely enough, I think it happened because it was finally realized that, although it wasn't to anybody's individual advantage to pull several family members out of the work force, it could be to everybody's advantage if everybody did...
...If anything, the capitalists of the era ,were only too eager to discriminate in favor of women and children, since it enabled them to bypass more skilled men and tap an almost unlimited pool of unskilled labor...
...But I don't really think it could work either...
...Capitalists have often been known to pick up their machines and move entire factories across the ocean just to give these poor, benighted people an opportunity to exercise their labor...
...They seem prima facie evidence of a society that is "biased against women" and practices "sexual discrimination...
...In light of this, it is almost inconceivable that anyone can argue-as many feminists do today--that it was a conspiracy among "the men who control corporate wealth" that drove women out of the labor force and segregated them into marginal areas o f "women's work...
...Yet, in a classic vindication of Emerson's "Law of Compensation," they have actually ended up creating a system in which marriage is even more necessary...
...Aren't our child-labor laws--those reforms of a forgotten era--also a form of "discrimination...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 As we have proved in the last ten years, making a few exceptions would quickly ensure that the whole carefully construtted system would come crashing down...
...Women have to work in order to help their families...
...It is financially devastating to the people involved, and even more expensive for a society that has to gerrymander public institutions to substitute for the basic efficiencies of the nuclear family...
...There was one group in society that felt particularly disadvantaged by the arrangement...
...The only thing that is aggravating is having to listen to pompous feminists and ambitious attorneys argue that we have to pass huge amounts of money their way to undo the "past injustices of the system...
...The solution to these long-standing practices, we are told, is to implement affirmative action, give 'preferential hiring to women, and occasionally loot corporate or municipal treasuries for vast "back wages" settlements that are awarded to whatever women can be symbolically rounded up at the moment in order to represent the victims of the past...
...The "unfairness" that society was trying to avoid was a situation where both the husband and wife of one family would be earning full salaries...
...Using the black welfare matriarchy as a positive role model, she calls for a "planned economy," featuring "an adequate program of government income support--something far more generous and dignified than our present system of welfaremto ease the transition into " a world without a father...
...They don't care if you are a man, woman, or child, an illegal immigrant, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Puerto Rican, Hong Kong Chinese, Samoan or Australian Bushman...
...If the effort to distinguish between men, women, and children in the work force was nothing more than a conspiracy among men to "push women out of the workplace," it certainly escaped the notice of the crusaders of that era...
...They argued that women and children ought to be left free to contract their labor with employers just like everybody else...
...In it, Scott presented thestandard arguments for society's "oppression of women...
...On the contrary, capitalists were the major exponents for bringing women and children into the labor force on an equal basis...
...So, Prepare yourself to work m *. .* a congressional office...
...This wasn't fair, they said, Married women shouldn't be allowed to work if their husbands already have an income_9 Somebody wrote in immediately to say that this suggestion "discriminated against women_9 But then a third person came up with a novel solution...
...It may seem unfair for the rich to have their tax rates lowered, just as it may seem unfair that both the husband and wife in an affluent marriage should be able to make high salaries, while some poor high-school drop-out makes less than each...
...Nor do I feel I am alone in this judgment...
...ii unique opportunity which will O _9 " _9 11 provide valuable experience...
...Thus, when feminists like Joan Wallach Scott tell us that "social planners [should now] consider whether the nticlear family is the best form of organization of biological reproduction and child care," we can be assured that--whoever these bizarre people may be--they will eventually discover--if they are honest--that the nuclear family is still by far the most efficient way to organize a society...
...As the position of "secretary" evolved, it once again became a dead-end job reserved almost exclusively for low-paid, single women...
...It's not a bad idea--a brilliant compromise, really...
...But the society eventually did produce a particular type of woman-Betty Friedan is probably the prototype--who was no longer satisfied with either being a housewife, or with being an all-purpose, volunteer soldier for charity or the arts...
...In the end, she argues, women are not much freer from "repression" and "control" than they ever were--even though they are training to become doctors and lawyers...
...Wealth distribution, so this argument goes, is not simply a matter of dividing up a fixed pie...
...As a result, we have created a more competitive situation in which everyone makes slightly less money...
...If twentieth-century capitalism produces too much wealth, and thus engenders a "culture of narcissism," then that is also the fault of capitalism (or "late capitalism" as it is usually designated...
...The question is how far we have to go in "undoing the injustices of the past...
...Box 1969 (703) 321-8580 ~ l| Bloomington, IN 47402 I I _9 ooooooooooooooo_9149149149149149 n~ "~.~ ~ n~t...
...These women knew that, given equal access, they could do better in the job market than a great many men...
...These are questions that raise a great deal of anxiety among Americans...
...Once a few upperincome, highly educated women moved into the work force, they necessarily replaced a few men...
...All this is being done as a way of eliminating "discrimination...
...Even when they didn't leave the home, as Scott points out, women often took in piece-work--laundry or sewing jobs from factory contractors...
...Duties include communications with foundations, corporations, and individual contributors...
...She showed how women had been segregated in the work force, assigned to specific tasks designated as "women's work," underpaid, and usually forced to leave jobs entirely when they got married...
...Her solution is to have the federal government become a new Sugar Daddy...
...But I think it makes much more sense if we realize that what society was trying to do was make an informal allotment of jobs and income among families, so that everybody got a reasonable share...
...Why not limit each family to one breadwinner, they said, either male or female...
...She notes that only 40 percent of all jobs now pay enough for one person to support a family on...
...Capitalism was horrifying to them because it was completely indifferent to distinctions of age and sex (or race and national origin, for that matter...
...Although few feminists would probably be willing to accept the argument today, the truth is that early capitalists were the real "equal opportunity employers...
...Our forebears obviously did " d i s c r i m i n a t e " in giving men preference over women in the job market...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
