So, back in the fifties and sixties and even seventies, the typical model (which had way more exceptions than anyone admitted, but leaving that alone for now) was that you had a husband and a wife, and the husband worked for money and the wife stayed at home and took care of kids, laundry, cooking, and general household maintenance. This was sexist and left women with ridiculously limited lives. OK, and now the model is both spouses and maybe a kid or three work for money and the kids, laundry, cooking and general household maintenance get taken care of (still mostly by the wife, which still ain't fair) in the gaps in between wage labour, commuting and sleeping. During all this, household income remains pretty much stagnant in real terms.
OK, so what happened? Well, a lot of reactionaries claim it's all the women's fault for being feminists and entering the workforce. So in this case, what's wrong with patriarchy on top of all the rest is it acts as a smokescreen for class struggle.
Because what's really going on is that capital has appropriated yet more of our time for the privilege of surviving. If there hadn't been sexism to start with, it would have been flaming obvious—in the fifties and sixties we would have had two spouses each working a two-and-a-half day week as the basic model, gradually increasing to the point where now we have two spouses working a five day week (while at the same time the society's productivity and wealth continued to increase, and the rich got megaricher). Would people have sat still for that? Well, there's some people you can fool all of the time, but I'm betting a lot fewer would have sat still for it than did for what actually happened.
There's an insult-to-injury thing happening too. We have less and less time that isn't working for wages, so what happens? Corporations generously sell us back some of the time they stole from us, with such things as prepackaged, pre-cooked food and fast food restaurants and microwave ovens and energy bars, for-profit day care, cell phones to allow us to do communication at the same time as we do other things like commute. And again, if everyone had been sharing tasks to start with, the arrival of these services as we lost the time to do them properly ourselves would be a ltitle more obvious. Patriarchy helps camouflage it by having the time squeeze happen primarily to one gender and putting anyone who complains in a box and setting them aside—oh, just feminists. It's not just a women's issue, it's a class issue too; take us as households, and we're all getting screwed collectively. Like with racism, sexist discrimination creates a wedge; keeping the women down has operated just like keeping the darkies down, distracting people with fights among ourselves so we'll ignore and be weaker against the oligarchs who keep all the loot. Making the boys think as long as we get to control the women in “our own house”,
we can forget all the buttheads controlling us from higher up. I've always hated that willingness people have to respond to crap from above by dumping crap below, often without realizing or admitting to themselves that that's what they're doing. Even if it weren't craven and morally indefensible, it also is the loser's reaction. No matter what the division, divided we fall. The division of genders is perhaps the worst of all because the tension created is so ubiquitous, the injustice so all-pervasive. Any social justice movement that ignores the justice needed for women is like a sprinter tying up one leg—and, indeed, pausing to re-tie it during the race any time it threatens to come loose.
All quite obvious, no doubt. But it seems these days as if the obvious needs to be restated frequently. I'm not knowledgeable or sophisticated when it comes to feminism, but I don't think I should let that stop me. It seems there are few enough carrying the torch (thank you, skdadl!) that even clumsy efforts are needed.
I remember very well the late 60s and early 70s when women started to enter the work force in larger numbers. In those days, the woman's income was usually a bonus used to pay down the mortgage faster or get a new car, furniture or a vacation.
It only took a generation to get to the point where the woman's income wasn't a bonus anymore. It was necessary to even get a mortgage or pay for the other everyday expenses. A two income family is no longer a luxury. That's why the lack of low cost day care spaces is so vital. Without them, many women can't work and too often that keeps entire families stuck in poverty.
During all this, household income remains pretty much stagnant in real terms.
Do you have a reference? Since 1961 (where StatsCan's main data starts), real wage income per capita has increased by a factor of 2.8.
Thanks for this. Well said. I too have raised this issue as one of class as well as feminism, so its nice to see another blogger on the left address this. It's the core issue around the debate on daycare, work, income splitting, abortion, etc. As you point out the nature work changed in the eighties after the last boom busted. Now folks HAVE to work twice as long, two incomes, and two jobs just to get by.
All good points, PLG. It's getting to the point that, as a single woman, I'm starting to think that no matter how long I save toward my goal, I will never ever be able to own my own home.
And I'm trying. I've been saving, and saving... and saving. For (I think) at least four years now. I keep thinking, "Next summer, I'll have enough saved for a downpayment." And then next summer rolls around, and I do the math again, and I usually tack another year or two of savings on before I'll reach my goal.
It's that darn thing called 'hope' that gets me every time. I like to believe I'll be able to save enough, but on my salary with my fixed expenses, I don't know if 'hope' will cut it. I'll let you all know in another three to five years, I guess. Definitely not by summer '07.
All good points, PLG. It's getting to the point that, as a single woman, I'm starting to think that no matter how long I save toward my goal, I will never ever be able to own my own home.
And I'm trying. I've been saving, and saving... and saving. For (I think) at least four years now. I keep thinking, "Next summer, I'll have enough saved for a downpayment." And then next summer rolls around, and I do the math again, and I usually tack another year or two of savings on before I'll reach my goal.
It's that darn thing called 'hope' that gets me every time. I like to believe I'll be able to save enough, but on my salary with my fixed expenses, I don't know if 'hope' will cut it. I'll let you all know in another three to five years, I guess. Definitely not by summer '07.
Women's unpaid labour was essential for propping up early capitalism. Not that many women didn't also have to work for money (in factories, as laundresses etc.) even then, of course, but overall women performed most of the unpaid work that maintained the family - child care, food preparation, and other household duties. Without that, workers wouldn't have survived!
Now, as you mentioned, a lot of that labour has become monetized, for good or ill, with "time-saving" appliances, nannies, precooked foods filling the gap. The turning of all that non-measurable economic activity into dollars has, I think, driven a lot of the economic growth in the last half-century.
SG, "real wage income per capita" isn't a good marker. Real median family income would be better. Also, inflation doesn't really take into account the true increase in costs to things like housing and education, for example.
PLG, that wasn't clumsy at all. Women's liberation has always meant socialism to me and still does. I agree with you that capitalism runs a long distance on distraction and that many of the hot-button debates that rage over values or "morals" are tossed out on purpose to keep citizens fighting with one another irrelevantly.
I'll return to that topic in a moment, but I just wanted to make a localized reply to Red Jenny: Jenny, capitalism is still propped up by a lot of unpaid labour, much (by no means all) of it performed by women. I speak from experience as my husband's primary caregiver for several years, which took me out of the workforce at a late date and also took the stuffing out of my own CPP. The masters of the universe in the Finance Department in Ottawa snicker up their sleeves at people like me, even as they rip me off. They know they can force people like me to impoverish ourselves to their benefit (because we still care about other human beings), and so they do it. Because they can.
PLG, I wanted to say something about how deep the ideology of patriarchy has seeped into our culture. I mean, the problem is that the whole scam wouldn't work unless the majority of people co-operated with it, as they -- we -- do.
For instance, I often feel some sympathy with those lower-income women who react against their (to me mistaken) understanding of feminism and begin to romanticize the role of the stay-at-home mother, join in neo-con resistance to programs like universal daycare, eg.
To their credit, they are perceiving the first part of what you perceive, PLG -- that if they took on paid labour outside the home, it would be mind-numbing, soul-destroying, probably physically costly and deeply boring at the same time, and the money would not be worth it -- in other words, at some level they recognize that workers are exploited. Understandably, they look at women who have acquired the skills to get into better-paid and slightly more digestible jobs, and their fear rises. They overestimate the distance between those others and themselves, and they conclude with some degree of logic that a woman's traditional dependence on a higher-earning male is a better deal for any "normal" woman -- anyone but those other bitches. Which in many cases -- maybe most cases -- it still bloody well is, as long as you don't care about your own mental health.
At the other extreme, we have significant numbers -- not a lot, but enough -- of women who now qualify as upper-middle-class earners on their own. They think that being them or aspiring to be them is what feminism was all about, which I think is seriously wrong. However, they are now free to be as miserable as most upper-middle-class men are, vaguely aware that they are working too much but terrified of what not being an alpha over-producer might mean.
In this culture, that disparity has become an opportunity to set up a cockfight, or in this case a kitten-fight, I guess -- set beleaguered groups of women against one another, watch them fight one another to their mutual sorrow, and sigh with relief that they haven't noticed the set-up.
In a different kind of culture, we would all be smart enough to keep our eyes on the prize, on the set-ups and the jerks who are busy meanwhile (while we're too busy fighting to watch them) squandering the riches we produce and the benefits that should flow to us all.
That different kind of culture would not be a patriarchy -- thinking about how we are not that is how I narrow down my definition of what the present patriarchy is.
That is what I think is happening to women, and I am sorry to see so many men either feeding the fights or pretending that they are superior to "women's issues," which are, as you say, PLG, at the heart of continuing class oppression.
An old friend of mine wrote her doctoral dissertation on the topic "vertical violence leads to horizontal hostility." As a long time labor organizer, I can ratify this phenomenon.
During all this, household income remains pretty much stagnant in real terms.
Do you have a reference? Since 1961 (where StatsCan's main data starts), real wage income per capita has increased by a factor of 2.8.
Check out Fig.5 at:
http://dsp-psd.communication.gc.ca/Collection-R/LoPBdP/BP/prb015-e.htm#FIGURES
Skdadl, point taken. I was hasty in my writing. I do think that unpaid labour was far more invisible then compared to now, though, before the women's liberation struggles helped bring some awareness. Sadly, we are sliding backwards.
This is a very interesting discussion.
So if real wage income per capita has increased by a factor of 2.8, let's see . . .
If a guy with a decent union job then could have a house, a car, typical appliances and a pension fund, if I'm in a household today with two decent full-time union jobs, I should have five houses, five cars, an incredible array of appliances, and five pension funds. Not to mention enough food to feed five of me, five times as much eating out, moviegoing and whatnot, and five times as luxurious vacations.
And that's leaving an extra .6 for miscellaneous newfangled stuff like cellphones and computers, which I could have included in the "incredible array of appliances" if I wanted to be petty.
In actual fact, I've got one car, moderate appliances, basic food, very limited moviegoing and eating out, generally fairly frugal vacations, and instead of a house I've got a townhouse. And I'm lucky that unlike many I'm not brimming with consumer debt.
So, how real is this "real income" again? Oh, wait--it's real, it's just that some billionaire has it.