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[velvetpage]

In a thread about the need for paid maternity leave in the States:

"How about instead, we go back to the nuclear family? The husband worked and the wife stayed home and raised the family. If this was to become the norm again, worrying about paid maternity leave or pumping milk in the toilet stall of a factory would be non-existent.
I am not saying this is or is not a better way. I am saying this would keep me from having to pay(via taxes or increase in cost of products)for somebody else's paid maternity leave."

My answer:

You talk as though that used to be normal. That's a cultural myth that was never as true as conservatives would like to believe it was.

There have certainly always been families where the wife stayed home to raise the family while the husband worked, but they were never in the majority until the 1950's anywhere, and only in certain privileged nations then. The majority of families for the two centuries of the Industrial Revolution have had both parents earning some sort of income. I know for a fact that my grandmothers and great-grandmothers all worked outside the home - as secretaries, as cleaning ladies, as seamstresses, as whatever they could find, because their husbands' incomes weren't enough to support their families on. Not only were they not the exception, they were the norm - but it was a hidden, shameful norm. The men in the halls of power used to wax eloquent about putting laws in place to allow women to stay home with their children where they so clearly belonged - and the laws were often laws that would permit factory owners to pay women such a tiny wage or forbid them from working more lucrative jobs, so that they would give it up as a bad deal and stay home and let their husbands take care of them. of course, this meant that the woman supporting her drunken husband had to work sixteen hours a day at her lower-paying, less-safe job than she had before.

You're peddling a fairy tale that has never been true, doesn't apply to women now even if it had once been true, and in the long run, serves to put women back into a subservient role in society. It's misogyny dressed up in Sunday best and bad scholarship.

Not in the comment, but I'll add it if necessary:

We spent a long time on this idea in the one women's studies course I took in university - a look at women in history from Roman times to the present. Before the industrial revolution, this nuclear family model wasn't the norm, either, because work wasn't usually divorced from the household. Businesses were generally centered around a home, and the husband would take care of the parts of the business that involved the trade itself while the wife ran the parts of the business that had more to do with the people - so, he was the floor manager and she was HR, responsible for feeding and clothing everyone, making sure all the apprentices washed and ate and went to church, and not incidentally, raising those children who were too young to work in the family business or whose sphere of influence after marriage would be similar to hers - her daughters were her apprentices in how to be HR managers. In that respect, "Miller's wife" was not just a designation of marital status - it was a job description.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that the majority of men began to work off the land that was owned by their lord or by themselves, which is to say, out of the immediate sphere of their own home. The rising mercantile class began to transform into what we call the "middle class," and the role of women changed with it. For lower-class women, it remained much the same as it had always been, except that it was often done in the city while the husband worked in a factory. For middle-class women, an entire industry grew up to teach this new class of woman how to be a housewife, in a house that had no other job on the main floor. This is the basis for our ideals of what housewifely life should be like - managing servants, cooking, raising children, entertaining business partners and their wives, and proving that their husband was well-enough-off that they didn't have to work outside the home. If they DID have to work outside the home, they did it secretly and shamefully, knowing it would affect their husband's business interests to be caught at it.

The fact is, the ideal of a wife who can afford to devote herself entirely to her own children and household has always been something of a pipe dream for the vast majority of people. Yes, there were people who attained it. No, they were not in the majority, nor anywhere near it. Because it seemed to be the ideal that best fit Christian morality, it was the ideal that was touted in governments all over the West, and it was the one which led to repressive laws designed to keep women in this artificial, recently-created, "traditional" role. There was nothing traditional about it - it was created out of whole cloth in the nineteenth century during a time of massive social upheaval.

EDIT: Yes, I did end up posting the above as another comment. I love it when I know I'm right.

Comments

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

Pah. *waves dismissive hand* Industrial Revolution, Schmindustrial Revolution. I know "Leave It To Beaver" was a documentary. =P

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I think it was hexkitten who brought up June Cleaver - and how, even in the fifties, it was a pipe dream for a lot of people.

[merlyn4401.livejournal.com]

HAY! JUNE CLEAVER IS MY IDOL! I ALMOST HAVE VACUUMING IN PEARLS AND HEELS PERFECTED!!!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I tried my very best, throughout that thread, to support the women for whom staying at home really is their first, best choice. I believe it should be a choice, and I respect you greatly for your ability to do it so well. The problem with this person is that they're advocating a return to this ideal as though it's an ideal that most people share - and that's just not true now, if it ever was.

[merlyn4401.livejournal.com]

I know. I was just being silly. :)

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

Have you ever vacuumed in heels in your life?

Dude, I don't even OWN heels.

[merlyn4401.livejournal.com]

I suppose it depends on how you define heels. Wedges? Yes. Stilettos? No.

[xx-kitty-kat-xx.livejournal.com]

Since when does "nuclear family" mean only one income? I was taught that a nuclear family was simply mother, father (usually married) and their children, all living together in a home. Incomes/jobs never entered into the definition.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I'm confused about where this person thinks the word "nuclear" comes from, if this family has been the traditional model since time immemorial that we need to return to. I mean, surely this person realizes that it was called the nuclear family because it became the norm during the nuclear age - that is, the fifties?

And of course, you're absolutely right - they're extending the definition.

[archai.livejournal.com]

Wait, is that sarcasm? I'm American, I can't do subtlety so well.

Didn't the term "nuclear family" arise simply out of...well, being that? The more traditional immediate-versus-extended terminology implies that the immediate family is after all a nucleus of sorts, and that's how I'd always taken it.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I believe it's both, actually. I'll have to look it up. In any case, it was never the norm before the 1950's.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all this information :).

Interesting, "he was the floor manager and she was HR" corresponds a lot more closely to the Biblical "Proverbs 31 woman" than the conservative ideal for women's role in life does. The Proverbs 31 woman explicitly earns her own money and buys property herself, contrary to what a lot of people probably intend when they use the phrase "Proverbs 31 woman".

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

This is very true, and I've brought it up in discussions in the past. I believe I mentioned it in that Godlygals forum a few years back, but they weren't listening, surprisingly enough. :P

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

What a surprise! :P

[catarzyna.livejournal.com]

Coming from a non-traditional family, I find their comment laughable. It isn't taking into account all those fathers who leave and women who are forced to be single parents (and vice versa). Nor does it take into account the multiple reasons that the concept of the traditional nuclear family needs serious revision. Who are they to define what constitutes a family? What right do they have to render women to the 'barefoot & pregnant' scenario. You might as well take away our right to vote in the process. Women are as driven and capable as men. I find it offensive that they didn't suggest that the man stay home too. I've worked to hard on my degrees and career for anyone to have the balls to tell me I have to stay home. It is and should be a matter of choice.

My great-grandmother certainly worked she upheld her end of the work on the farm and her daughter, my gram, worked longer than my Pap. He decided he wanted to retire and he did, which left her to work for many years and shoulder most of the burden on her own. My understanding is that gram had the most consistent work and was the stable bread-winner.

I could go on but I'm sleepy.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

In the next comment, the person did say that the ideal was that either the mother or the father would stay home - which I took as a sop to liberal views rather than what they really believe, because of the earlier comment.

I find it an insulting view as well, partly because it's so very myopic. It assumes that middle-class suburban life is the ideal life for most people. Not only is that misogynistic, it's so very elitist.

[redeem147.livejournal.com]

My grandmother raised my mother after her husband left. That meant working. That was in the 1930s. Knowing her, she probably would have worked anyway.

My mom worked while I was growing up, part-time when I was young and full-time when I was in high school. That was in the 70s.

I'm the one who can't handle a full-time job, stayed home with the kids but worked part-time.

But that really isn't the person's issue, is it? They don't want to pay taxes that goes to anyone but themself. The issue is selfishness and a non-community outlook.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Yes, I pointed that out further down the thread. The thing is, I was advocating a paid maternity leave option, which means that the two of us had a not-dissimilar goal: to allow parents to stay home for at least some of the time when their kids were small. The difference was that I was proposing a government program to help them do it, while this person was expecting each individual family to make amorphous sacrifices to make it happen. Which is to say, of the two of us, I was the one putting my (tax) money where my mouth is.

[amazonvera.livejournal.com]

I appreciate you standing up for the fact that it's not a universal truth that having a parent at home is best for the family. Having the person who invests the most time in the home and family be depressed and miserable isn't best for anyone.

Our agreement for when we have kids is to make it possible for me to stay home with the kids for as long as I want to. If that ends up being until everyone is in full-day school or longer? Great. But I can't possibly know for sure in advance if that will be okay for me. Attitudes like those of the commenter you responded to only serve to keep unhappy women and families feeling trapped in bad situations.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I think it's extremely valuable for one parent - usually the mother because of the rigours of birth and breastfeeding, but not always - to stay home for the first year or so of a child's life. In fact, I think that's important enough to be worth a bit of social engineering, affirmative-action investment on the part of governments in the form of a paid parental leave. Beyond that, and even up to that point if reasonable alternative arrangements are available? It's nobody's business how a family decides to divvy up the work and get things done.

I'm having trouble imagining why people would see a paid maternity leave as a bad idea. The way Canada does it, it can only go to new parents who have been in paid work at nearly full-time levels for at least the last six months, so it cuts out the lazy, live-off-government types (whether or not those actually exist is a completely separate argument.) It has a time limit that allows for a parent to be home during the most crucial months before re-entering that paid workforce or making other arrangements; it prevents upheavals in families suffering financial loss due to loss of an income; it pays people to stay home and spend the money on items in their own community, thereby supporting the local economy and ensuring that some of that money comes back into government coffers; all in all, I have trouble thinking of a system less likely to be abused and more likely to result in net good for all concerned, than a paid parental leave.