Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007
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Home/Work

What Happened to Children and Women When Work Left Home

By Daveena Tauber

As a child my favorite chapters of the Little House on the Prairie books were the ones that dealt with baking, butchering, and sewing. The work Laura Ingalls Wilder described inspired much of my childhood play. My friends and I gathered plants that looked like wheat and pounded them to make flour. We shook cream in a jar for what seemed like hours to make butter. There was a kind of primal satisfaction in the "storing up for winter" games we played.

I think now that we were attracted to traditional women's work because it was strong, physical, and, most of all, clearly necessary. As an adult I am more ambivalent about what I laughingly call the "hippie domestique"--the urge to grow it, sew it, cook it, can it, pack it down in root cellars, and collect it in rain barrels--to say nothing of home-birthing and home-schooling. I'm acutely aware that I owe what time I have for intellectual and artistic pursuits to the products of the industrial age--what people used to call store-bought clothes and cans of food. Not only is traditional women's work no longer considered necessary in an industrial age, it is no longer even considered work.

I am certainly not alone in hearing the call of the domestic. Judith Warner is onto something when she argues in Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety that we are witnessing the rise of a new Cult of Domesticity. It is amplified through rafts of homemaking magazines, D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) workshops, websites and 'zines, and the proliferation of knitting cafes and fabric stores. There's even a little shop in my neighborhood called Preserve that teaches canning and pickling. Liberated from their role in subsistence, the domestic labors of sewing, knitting, and cooking are available to be taken up as hobbies. It's as if, having become so industrialized that we are losing even our manufacturing sector, Americans desperately long to have a hand--literally--in producing the things that surround us. If my friends in the Peak Oil movement are right, we may get to indulge our longing for necessity sooner than we expect. Once global oil production peaks, they say, prices will skyrocket, sending our economy into a tailspin. Secretly, I think that they can't wait for Peak Oil to plummet so we can get back to a regionally self-sufficient, small-scale bartering economy.

It is difficult to remember that for much of human history, work was done primarily in the home. In the pre-industrial United States, the family was the primary unit of economic production and sustained itself through production, bartering, and small-scale work for pay. Children and young adults all contributed to family subsistence. So assumed was the participation of youth in family labor that our public educational system was structured around an agricultural rhythm that is now totally out of sync with the schedules of working parents.

Only with the rise of industrial production did "work" come to be understood as the exchange of labor for cash, and home, as Warner writes, as "a refuge from the world of commerce." At first the whole family participated in this new economy, with children working in factories and helping their parents with piecework at home. The 1938 passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act effectively banned children from the workplace in order to protect them from the exploitation of the industrialized labor market. Work then became something done primarily by men in the public sphere, while home became the realm of women and children. What one did at home was, by definition, not work.

Women and young people still seem to be reeling from the implications of work leaving home. It was, of course, necessary to protect youth from the maw of industrial labor and, as industrial revolutions play out around the world, child labor laws remain important. But in banishing youth from the sphere of work, children lost--and continue to lose, as the length of adolescence extends--a sense of useful belonging, of feeling needed by and responsible for the well-being of their families and their communities. We have enjoined upon teens a leisure that makes them suspicious of and alien in a culture that, as Ray Oldenburg points out in The Great Good Place, has turned to the domestic rather than the public sphere for its social needs.

Obviously, I am not suggesting that we send our young people back to the mills and the mines, but I am suggesting that we should realize that we need the labor and the energy of young people. Instead of trying to get teens "off the streets," we need to get adults back on the streets with them. Perhaps young people could help to fill what Arlie Hochschild describes in The Commercialization of Intimate Life as a domestic deficit in this country--a lack of available adults to care for our young, our old, and our needy. Young people can serve their country by serving meals on wheels or tutoring younger students, all of which tie them to their communities. Certainly the idea of a domestic Peace Corps has been enacted through programs like Americorps and Teach for America. Perhaps we need to broaden these programs to encompass most, if not all, young people.

The fact that we don't develop the potential contributions of our young adults has to do with our changing vision of what we are raising children to do. As Ann Crittenden argues in The Price of Motherhood, our current parenting methods are the logical extension of the shift in the central function of family--from ensuring group subsistence to producing children who will be competitive in the labor market. She writes that "the increasing weight given to the job of caring for children was far more than a strategy to distract women from participating in public life. It was also necessary to the development of a vibrant capitalist economy." Crittenden notes that the advent of affective parenting was necessary to "produce the kind of human capital that the modern industrial economy needed." Warner suggests that this turn toward intensive parenting moved further into the mainstream in the twentieth century thanks to the rise of psychologically based theories of child development.

The legacy of both the economic and affective theories of parenting are visible in our current emphasis on shuttling children to music, art, and sports lessons in hopes of producing well-rounded candidates for life. These lessons are somehow elegiac: they point to the loss of a culture in which the average person was expected to have a "party piece"--a poem or song or declamation--because providing group entertainment was crucial to family and civic life. The problem with enrichment is not the art or music per se, but the fact that, as with women's work and adolescents', these activities have ceased to have a clearly necessary function in our culture. This idea that our job is to enrich our children rather than to include them in a rich life is symptomatic of the long, slow shift from seeing the child as a coproducer of family subsistence to seeing the child as both the consumer of family services and the family's ultimate product.

What women lost when work left home is also complex. Even the idea that women either join the workforce or stay home points to the problem with our culture's ideas of what work is and where it happens. Much of second-wave feminism was organized around helping women follow the work. Equal pay for equal work and access to traditionally male career areas were important rallying cries. On one hand, women's professional successes are impressive, especially considering the challenges that they face if they become parents. As Crittenden points out, compared to other industrialized nations, work policies in the United States discourage mothers from working outside the home by offering relatively little time off, refusing benefits to most part-time workers, and privatizing child care. Yet there are also drawbacks for mothers who stay at home--primarily that they receive no social security contributions, subsidized health insurance, or company-based retirement benefits, which, according to Crittenden, makes motherhood a primary risk factor for poverty in elderly women. The irony, she suggests, is that despite the lack of government support, mothers produce the government's most important source of revenue: future taxpayers.

Feminists have long held an ambivalent view of women's labor, at times trying to bring the professional respect and efficiency of the marketplace into the home, as in Christine Frederick's home-efficiency movement in the early twentieth century. In the 1970s, liberation was associated with getting women out of the house and into the workplace. If Arlie Hochschild is right in The Second Shift and The Time Bind, middle- and upper-middle-class heterosexual women have been far less successful in shifting domestic responsibility to their male partners than they have been in outsourcing domestic work to poorer women.

Hochschild coined the term "the second shift" to describe the panoply of household tasks that tend to be done even by women who work outside the home. Hochschild found that it was not just respective amounts of labor that caused friction in heterosexual families, but the types of labor as well. She writes, "Even when couples share more equitably in the work at home, women do two-thirds of the daily jobs, like cooking and cleaning up--jobs that fix them into a routine." And as Susan Maushart notes in the Mask of Motherhood, "Men's work, by contrast--repairs, yard work, auto- mobile maintenance--rarely needs to be done right now. ... In the vast majority of American households, these daily 'stress out' jobs remain overwhelmingly (and often exclusively) allocated to women."

Despite crucial, if incomplete, female successes in the workplace, women have not succeeded in revaluing the home sphere as one whose work is understood as everyone's responsibility. There is no doubt that both men and women have broken through the gendered work patterns that typified pre-industrial family labor, with women entering traditionally male fields like science and engineering and men entering fields like nursing and teaching. But since so many women, feminist ideals notwithstanding, continue to do the primary work of domestic labor and child-rearing, they find themselves in the odd position of having lost not only the cultural status, shared labor, and company that exist in a gender-segregated culture, but also the very idea that what they do is, in fact, work.

Trying to place a value on women's work is similar to the problem that environmentalists face in trying to value seemingly free services such as water filtration by wetlands or oxygen production by trees. The heart of the problem is that it is the overvaluation of economic production that leads to the undervaluation of both nurture and nature. Arguing that forests and wetlands provide ecological services with economic value, as do Paul Hawkin and Amory and Hunter Lovins in Natural Capitalism, provides a financial rationale to avoid destroying these places, but it does little to help us value the intrinsic or non-monetary values that such places may hold.

In a culture that so closely identifies work with wages, the most obvious solution would be to pay people for domestic labor. But while monetary arguments have gained more traction than intrinsic-value arguments in environmental battles, similar attempts to monetize the home front--from the home economics movement of the early 1900s to the wages for housework campaigns of the 1970s--have failed precisely because we still understand the value of domestic labor primarily in emotional terms. Resistance to the idea of wages for housework or even tax-based support for working parents is rooted in our discomfort with the idea of assigning monetary value to what we see as an essentially private and emotional labor--a labor of love. We have been told that child-rearing and homemaking are intrinsically rewarding; in this culture they have to be, because no other reward is offered.

We are left with a situation in which the social and economic devaluation of women's work become mutually reinforcing. This principle is illustrated most graphically in our undervaluation of people who do the work of caretaking, whether parents or caregivers. Full-time parents give up wages, pensions, and social security contributions, as well as the status of adult work. As with the bumper sticker that asked, "Are you an environmentalist or do you work for a living?" mothers find themselves frequently faced with a similar question. Nurturing or conserving activity is not immediately readable as work.

It can be difficult for full-time parents to feel respected for labor that, were they paid for it, would put them in the lowest bracket of wage earners. But for professional caregivers, the problems go beyond lack of respect. According to a paper posted by the Center for the Childcare Workforce, "care providers--including child care workers, personal and home care aides, and home health aides--make up another major segment of the low-wage workforce. Half of the 557,000 workers who provide child care earn less than $8.20 an hour." To paraphrase certified nursing assistant Jean Reynolds in the documentary Waging a Living, caregivers are told they're doing God's work, but God isn't paying enough.

But if assigning monetary value to women's work has gained little ground, the other strategy--reclaiming women's work--is problematic too. Reviving female domesticity may be an honorable way to make do with what, according to many studies, we are doing anyway, but it doesn't take the more difficult step of revaluing the domestic sphere such that its rewards--whether intrinsic or financial--are deemed worth shouldering by men as a cultural norm rather than as an exception. Revaluing female domesticity comes with a number of dangers. Among these is the risk of playing into the hands of those who believe the domestic sphere is the only one appropriate to women. More important, if we want men to take ownership of the daily work of family life, then it is counterproductive to associate the home sphere in any essential way with femaleness.

A true revaluing of domestic work cannot succeed without recognizing both its emotional and economic importance. Unpaid domestic labor is still one of the primary foundations of our economy. Hochschild's idea of an "economy of caring" is useful in making domestic work visible, both economically and emotionally. If we are going to get our "other halves" to do their half, we are going to have to raise the cultural and economic status of care-giving. Until then, we need to work on making it possible for families who want to engage in nontraditional arrangements to do so. Sadly, the old canard about equal pay is still important. Until more women earn family wage salaries with benefits, few men will have the option of working part-time or becoming full-time parents. In a culture that no longer expects children to support aging parents, we need a social security system that acknowledges the financial contributions of full-time parents. Or maybe we are going to have to figure out some kind of Tom Sawyer scheme for making it clear that whitewashing the fence is where the real action is.

As a parent and a scholar, I often feel forced to choose between devoting time to the products of the hands and the product of the mind. I hope my Peak Oil friends are right that pre-industrial--and hopefully post-industrial--people actually have more leisure time to socialize and make art. But I still worry that in the post-Peak world, it will be the women who are stuck in the kitchen all summer preserving food for winter. For now I appreciate that I can choose to can or not to can. At the moment, although my trees are bursting, I am resisting my inner hippie hausfrau by writing this instead of putting up the fruit against the coming cold.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities