Absent the Ruinous "Family Wage" System, No Return of the 1950s Is Possible

This is what the antiabortion people cannot understand, and they never will understand it.  The whole "debate" over abortion has never been about fetuses; it is all about whether people see women as human beings or as merely fuck toys and incubators for a man through marriage.  It is really that simple.  Lots of suggestions of restriction of abortion access denigrates the humanity of women saying they are merely "hosts" for "babies."  That is rendering women subhuman, good only for sexual or reproductive exploitation.

The antiabortion crowd romanticizes the 1950s, an era long since dead, and in fact was an era where women increasingly participated in the labor force despite all the nonsense about "homemaking" being a "career," which of course it is not.  It is labor, but it is not a "job," much less a "career."  Men would never lower themselves to this "career" without extreme ridicule on the part of society, but they never hesitate to push women into cooking, taking sole care of kids, cleaning, and "emotional labor," whatever the fuck the last thing is because men don't want to do it.

Besides, it is not possible for a return to the 1950s nuclear family anyway.  It existed, when families could afford a SAHM, only through the poisonous "family wage" idea.  It was poisonous because it provided the foundation for sex discrimination against women in the workplace.  Unions and the Catholic Church pushed for it early in the twentieth century because they thought women didn't belong in the labor force but instead should be at home raising the future labor force participants.  Through around the 1970s, more and more male-dominated jobs were paid a SAHM subsidy through inflation of their salaries and wages while women were shut out of those fields.  The fields they did dominate were denigrated in pay and prestige not because they were "helping" fields or anything of the sort but simply because women did them.  Employers felt women simply didn't need the money the way men did because they were primarily dependent on the man's income and were working merely to "supplement" the household.  This was economically ruinous, and continues to be economically ruinous, for women who find themselves alone or having to support children alone on their income.  However, for white males especially, it was great for them since all they had to do was point to a job upon high school graduation and make damned good money whether or not the job had skills, education, and experience required.

This idea of man as provider, woman as dependent not only forms the attitude of the antiabortion crowd, but it also underlies the MRA and alt.right crowd.  Never mind the fact neoliberal economic ideas beginning in the 1980s virtually destroyed private sector unions, forced millions of jobs overseas, and provided ruinous trade agreements making it rarer men could in fact "support a family" on one income.  These same right-wing idiots continue to vote for people who continue to hollow out our economy and listen to propaganda pushed by the likes of Charles Koch.

It doesn't matter if abortion is outlawed or not.  Marriage rates are not going to climb back up, let alone early marriages returning to 1950s level, men are not going to make family wages, and all restricting abortion is going to do is encourage more and more women to reject men, marriage, and children.  Count on it.  Women aren't going back to the kitchen.

The Continued Poisonous Effect of the "Family Wage" Concept

This 

article about young women being "concerned" about outearning their partners is from a year ago, but it shows one just how poisonous the "family wage" concept remains in our society. Since the mid-1970s, with the massive influx of women into the labor force, especially married mothers, the "family wage" has been increasingly rare, as companies discovered they could hire two workers for the price of one. The fact is men are not naturally providers and women dependents. That mentality forms the basis of every single pernicious thing that affects women, chiefly poverty. Women should not have to rely on men at all in order to survive, but the "family wage" idea had the effect of forcing women into the marriage racket. Male-dominated jobs have been overpaid because of the "family wage" subsidy, not because the jobs are more skilled, harder, require more education, and so on. It is only because men do it. They are still considered by employers to need the extra money more than women do because in their eyes, women are supported by husbands. We know this because when women dominate a field, the pay immediately goes down. Entire occupations dominated by women are underpaid because of the poisonous "family wage" idea.

Amazing any millennials have 1950s-style attitudes about earnings. Jobs should not be paid because of the sex or family status of an individual.

The "Family Wage" Was Always Bullshit

This article is older, but everybody needs to read this to understand why women are denigrated in the labor force.

This is a more recent article, but it is obvious after reading the first link why women are denigrated all across the board.

The "family wage" system of men are providers and women are dependents is still alive and well despite the fact fewer and fewer occupations pay a "family wage."

Snip:

To make matters worse, when women increasingly enter a field, the average pay in that field tends to decline, relative to other fields. Levanon, England, and Allison (2009) found that when more women entered an industry, the relative pay of that industry 10 years later was lower. Specifically, they found evidence of devaluation—meaning the proportion of women in an occupation impacts the pay for that industry because work done by women is devalued.

Computer programming is an example of a field that has shifted from being a very mixed profession, often associated with secretarial work in the past, to being a lucrative, male-dominated profession (Miller 2016; Oldenziel 1999). While computer programming has evolved into a more technically demanding occupation in recent decades, there is no skills-based reason why the field needed to become such a male-dominated profession. When men flooded the field, pay went up. In contrast, when women became park rangers, pay in that field went down (Miller 2016).

Further compounding this problem is that many professions where pay is set too low by market forces, but which clearly provide enormous social benefits when done well, are female-dominated. Key examples range from home health workers who care for seniors, to teachers and child care workers who educate today’s children. If closing gender pay differences can help boost pay and professionalism in these key sectors, it would be a huge win for the economy and society.

The Jordan Petersons of the world cannot explain this.  The notion of the "family wage" explains it all.  All of it. 

Female-dominated professions should never be denigrated in terms of pay.

From "The Sexual Contract,"

one of the books I have been reading, and, because it is a typically dry academic work, I am taking my time reading it. Author Carole Pateman, who wrote this book back in around 1987 or 1988, stated what has long been known about the labor force:

However, the family wage has always been as much an ideal as a reality. Many, perhaps most, working-class families have been unable to survive on the husband's wage alone, and, as feminists pointed out many years ago, not all male workers have families, while many women have had to support dependents, including aged parents. But precisely because the wage has been seen as a family wage, women's earnings have been regarded as a 'supplement' to a husband's wage. Women are assumed to be wives, and wives are assumed to be economically dependent on their husbands, obtaining their subsistence in return for domestic service. Therefore, wages have been sexually differentiated. Women workers are paid less than men--and so an economic incentive for women to become wives is maintained. The conviction that a 'wage' is what is due to a male breadwinner, was nicely illustrated as recently as 1985 in the United States, in the claim that 'women have generally been paid less [than men] because they would work for lower wages, since they had no urgent need for more money Either they are married, or single and living at home, or doubling up with friends.'

(page 138)

That in a nutshell is why women fare horribly in old age. Unless they can prostitute themselves into marriage, they are going to be starved for jettisoning that mandate.

Life Can Be Shit Economically For Women Living Alone

It's all part of a rigged economic system, something I have written about for years on this blog and elsewhere. It has been fodder of feminist writing since the 1960s, but it bears repeating:

Most women do NOT take time off from the labor force in any significant way these days. Who can afford "caregiving" unless you are well-to-do? Any policy proposal talking about giving "credit" to people who do not need it is missing the point, to say nothing of the fact we women who have worked all our lives are being required to subsidize people who can afford to drop out of the labor force to "care" for relatives. The real reason women, especially never-married women, fare so poorly in middle and old age has to do with the concept of the "family wage." It is the notion that men are breadwinners and women are dependents. Men are seen as needing the higher pay because they have families to support, while women are seen as not needing the money as much as men because they have a man to support them. Women's pay is denigrated regardless of occupation, with women-dominated occupations poorly paid as compared to male-dominated jobs of the same education and skills. When women begin to dominate a male field, the pay and prestige go down immediately. That is because women are seen as "secondary" wage earners, and employers feel they in good conscience can underpay women because the difference is supposedly made up by a husband's salary (never mind the reality of millions of women there is no man in the picture). Furthermore, underpaying women helps "encourage" them to jettison independent living in favor of marriage. It reeks of prostitution rather than real choice. Our economic system is heavily rigged against women, especially women alone. If anything happens in terms of a job, everything they have worked for is gone overnight. There is no buffer of a man's income to cushion that blow.

More women are falling through the cracks, especially if they are past 55, which is considered past their expiration date in terms of being in the labor force.

A book I have started reading is a book I overlooked when it came out. It is called The Sexual Contract, published in 1988 and written by a now-retired UCLA academic, Carole Pateman. She was born in Britain in 1940. She is less well-known than other writers or feminists who have covered much of the same ground. In this book she wrote about this concept of the "family wage." Of course, it forms the basis of sex discrimination in the workplace. It cannot be denied. Despite gains by women over the decades, women are still heavily disadvantaged in the labor market. In fact, they are perhaps more dependent on men than ever (and vice versa) for a decent lifestyle thanks to outsourcing and destroying of well-paid, unionized jobs as pushed by the poisonous neoliberal ideology.

Anyway, I started reading Pateman's book. The book is a little bit dry, as are most academic works, but she makes a lot of good points.

Nothing has changed in the 30 years since it was published.

On a similar note, I went to a retirement planning seminar the school district's investment outfit put on, and the presenters were talking about all of the various things people need in order to have a decent retirement. Of course, I started Oregon public employment, part-time regular employment, when I was 59, so I will not be vested in Oregon PERS until 2019, when I am 64 years old. Maybe some district will hire me on a part-time certificated basis, as I do not want to work full-time anymore, but those jobs are extremely hard to come by. My pension would be much higher and I would not have to work as many years to get the monthly payout. Under NO circumstances do I want to ever have a cash payout. I have a monthly pension through Nevada PERS that I started taking five years ago. It isn't much--$318 a month and subject to WEP when I get Social Security next year--but after the third year of getting it I got annual COLA increases. By the time I hit 71, the small amount will start to snowball significantly when the 5 percent annual increase kicks in, assuming I don't kick off first. Similarly Oregon's would increase, but since I am on the Tier 3 program, it won't be quite as good as those who got on Oregon public employment and qualified for Tier 1 and 2 (people are designated a "tier" depending on when they were hired).

Anyway, there wasn't a whole lot that was relevant to my case. At one point the presenters talked about how 33 percent of the average retiree's income comes from work. In other words, those who are "retired" on the average cannot ever retire. I don't believe that many people are so lacking in interests and hobbies they are masochistic enough they want to remain in the labor force in some way.

Most of these people work because they have to.

Just like me, and I will likely have to until I can't physically do the work anymore.