Brought to you by Booju

[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.