In the old days, every member of a family had to work (unless aristocratic). The man, women, and their children.
With increases in productivity you should see the number of people required to work drop off. Perhaps the children first, and then typically the female next. For a time, that’s how it was. Children went to school and women stayed at home.
However, things began to change. Women became reintroduced into the work force.
Why?
Either (1) wealth is being redistributed so that it requires more members of a family to earn a wage in order to maintain a good lifestyle, or (2) value scales have changed and families just want more so the marginal utility of leisure has decreased.
Considering how many people were forced off their farmlands prior to the Industrial Revolution and considering that Britain was never a “clean” capitalist society, I’d have to say a mixture of both.
Well, if you mean that it wasn’t seen as proper for women to work and then it came to be that it was seen as proper, yes, that could account for why women began to work, but it doesn’t account for why men continued to work. If women enter the workplace, you should see men starting to drop out at at least an equal amount which hasn’t occurred.
Unless, my number (2) scenario is true and people’s value scales have adjusted such that they see leisure among the adults of a family as having less utility.
Yes, we do see men now staying at home, but not anywhere near the level that women were.
If anyone is wondering what the point of my question is, I just want to make sure that more people working isn’t due to the actions of government redistributing wealth, and is really due to change in value scales.
I think while point two is certainly a big factor, point one is also a necessary condition . You can’t forget the big increase of the state sind 1945 and especially since 1900. Many extra hours are for feeding the parasite.
I think it is mostly (1), but with a bit of (2). I’m of the belief that second-wave feminism succeeded in large part due to economic troubles of the 70s and 80s.
I thought the most obvious answer was that inflation had eroded the standard of living and so people needed two incomes to have a standard of living comparable to say the 1950’s with one income.
I’d start with the imposition of higher income taxes over the last 40 or 50 years, coupled with rampant inflation. These two factors contribute to the sad fact that it now requires two incomes for most families to make ends meet, let alone to get at all ahead in life. A generation or two ago, this was not the case.
Now, all that said, there’s no economic/policy reason as to why men have traditionally been the primary breadwinners for a family. This certainly doesn’t need to be the case. I’d offer that any perceived disparity in men/women working is the product of A) societal norms and B) biology.
I think it was because of the female empowerment movement as well as that people of both genders are marrying later and are more independent of one another.
The importance of the family is also in decline. You don’t need to have children to be taken care of in your old age when you have the Social Security Administration to rob other people’s children.
Oooh, what’s the term for this again?..ummmmmmmmm…aaaaaagh!-- oh yeah!-- division of labor! Men hunt and gather because they specialize in that and women nurture because they specialize in that. That’s the market working.
I think, for those that may remember that far back, the original was because of WWII…Rosie the Riveter, etc. Having had a taste of working, many wanted to continue. Through time scenario 2 took place. Then government, like it does with anything it touches, managed to interfer and scenario 1 is now the case.
You are looking at this from a class perspective. If you look at the middle class your observations are correct. However, for lower class families the whole family has always worked, except when labor laws prevented their children from entering the work force.
In the cases where children were prevented from entering the workforce children could no longer work(lower class) or ever had to work (middle to upper) especially in the ages from 12-16. Sociologists began to see see a new developmental stage arise from this and it is now called adolescense.
The industrial revolution created a huge surplus of labor and caused the youngest, most inexperienced workers of families that could afford it (from 12-18) to drop out of the work force. The “teens” are something relatively new in the world. Never before was there a stage between adulthood and childhood with all the confused messages such as being treated as more than a child but less than an adult. Eventually it was seen as cruel (for the middle-upper class) for a child (including teens) to have to work.. especially those below 16. With the lower class children no longer being allowed to work this caused a further reduction in work force which now created a gap that women would then have to fill.
Since then it has become more common for women to enter the work force and has become acceptable, once again, to the middle class. What began as a privilege of the industrial revolution for the middle class eventually became the requirement of it and now it is once again a privilege for one of the adults to be able to stay home (it has now become acceptable for an adult, man or woman, to stay home).
So in response to your question… value changes (normally) are in response to the demands of the work force, not a cause of it. Government intervention does cause changes in work force demands which in turn leads to changes in values (scary eh?). I would also say that wealth distribution is the “band-aid” to the problem of not allowing poor families to support themselves. The government excuse of wealth distribution to help the poor (aka helping the poor out since their children can’t work) may sound good to the values of the middle class; but we all know that the government pilfers this money and uses it inefficiently.
Edit : This also means that the middle class has to work more to support the lower class and the government, which is a lot more so then if the lower class was allowed to work due to the inefficiencies of government pilfering.