What if...

[rivka]

Elsewhere on the net, someone asks "just for fun" what the results would be if the 70% of women who hold full-time jobs all left the work force.

Many respondents inexplicably think it would be awesome. Just think of how their husbands' salaries would rise! Just think of the return to wholesome family values!! Women could spend more time caring for their families, and men could really be proper providers the way they used to be!

Here's a sample:

Mostly, I think that our country is so obsessed with "equality" and "opportunity" and "success," I think there would be a huge number of incentives to get them back into the workforce.

However, if it lasted? I think the country would have a NUMBER of positive benefits, especially as it relates to people learning fulfillment otherwise, the raising of children, the family circumstance, etc. A lot of things that have gone downhill in the past many years would reverse. And yet, I think that people are in a place where it would *mostly* not slip downhill in the ways the past was less desirable. And in time, after the initial uproar, I believe men would gain jobs. I think the economy would recover and life would go on, possibly better than ever.

And here's my attempt at a more realistic assessment:

The GDP would plummet. The US would drop many immigration barriers in a desperate attempt to prop up the economy and fill huge gaps in the workforce. Tax revenues plunge at the same time that there is a massive increase in the need for public assistance. Female-headed families become hungry and homeless in droves, and unfortunately there are very few social workers or professionally-run charities to assist them because the women who dominate those professions have all gone home.

Your husband will almost certainly get a big raise, but he'll also almost certainly be pressured to put in 80-hour weeks as his company tries to function with so many fewer workers. Don't expect to see him much. Don't expect his increased wage to improve your family's standard of living, either - in such a dramatic labor shortage, wages for jobs like supermarket checker and gas station attendant will have to go through the roof if those positions are to be filled, and so the prices of basic goods and services will skyrocket. Lots of US jobs will simply move overseas where there is plenty of cheap labor.

Hospitals are plunged into chaos with virtually no nurses; all elective procedures and routine care will need to be canceled while nursing training programs are hastily set up to train some of the new male immigrants in nursing. The death rate for hospital patients soars. Because things like mammograms, Pap smears, and colonoscopies are halted due to the need to prioritize on emergency medical services, the cancer rate climbs. If you have a relative in the hospital, be prepared to go and stay with that person yourself 24/7 to provide personal care, prepare and serve meals, administer meds according to the doctor's instructions, etc. If you need to go into the hospital and don't have someone able to sit with you, I hope you survive. There are no more midwives. Your options: unassisted childbirth at home or a virtually unattended (no L&D nurses) hospital birth in a criminally understaffed facility. Maternal and neonatal death rates soar.

At first it seems that elementary schools will have to close, but then they triple or quadruple class sizes so that male middle school and high school teachers can be spread out to cover all the grades. Parent volunteers fill in as best they can. Special needs students suffer the most; the vast majority of OTs, speech therapists, etc. are women, and those aren't jobs that can be taken over by volunteers.

By the time everything shakes out and we return to some degree of economic stability, 30% of American workers are permanent residents or new citizens born in a foreign country. The huge influx of immigrants is hard to assimilate; they're so critically needed that they must be welcomed, but U.S. culture returns to the atmosphere of New York City in 1900. Language barriers and lack of experience continue to depress the economy. There are nurses in the hospitals again, but they only speak rudimentary English and most of them are brand new. So the death rate doesn't exactly go back down again.

And, by the way: women who wanted to work and/or needed to work will not universally find joy in being a stay-at-home wife and mother. Especially not given the increased economic stress caused by soaring prices and the increased workload caused by the scarcity of service workers.

"Just for fun?" It would be a social and economic nightmare. An utter nightmare.

That was just off the top of my head, though. Any contributions to this little hypothetical?

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Not to mention surreptitious and exploited homeworking at less rarified cultural levels ('Stitch, stitch, stitch').

I remember, when I was looking through interwar women's mags for an entirely different project, I discovered that the 1930s in particular seemed to develop a significant number of ads, and even articles, about how the little lady could earn the odd shilling or two towards the housekeeping by various means. (As well as how to save money by doing up your clothes to conform with current trends.)

Not to mention, I think there has been quite a bit of work on women and the informal, off the books, economy and casual work in the C19th.

Oh yes, and let us consider those 'wholesome family values' in the days when women had little or no economic alternative to getting married and staying married (domestic violence, marital rape, unspoken syphilis infection)... Or, let's just pretend it was all rosy and golden and like the Cratchits' Christmas, except, of course, within the text rather than the imagined remembrance of it, the Cratchit's Christmas is embedded in their desperate condition.

Yeah, history - one of those luxury subjects in the humanities that no-one needs to do.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

This is an excellent, excellent point. Reports of domestic violence fall, as abused women have to choose between putting up with their abusive provider and starving.

[naomikritzer]

My maternal grandmother ran an in-home day care center (which she called a "nursery school") in Lynchburg, Virginia in the early to mid 1950s. It was how they earned money while my grandfather went to college (plus, he worked nights at the utility company, but they definitely needed the day care income).

My mother says that the mix was pretty much what you'd see in a day care center today. There were a couple of kids from single-parent families. There was one child whose two-parent single-income family had enrolled him because they thought it would improve his social skills. And there were several kids from two-income families, in most cases because the family couldn't make ends meet without having both parents bringing in an income, although there was also a child whose parents were both college professors.

Grammie had a little song about Jesus that they sang while washing their hands each day before lunch. (It's a Jesus-y handwashing song and I would bet money that plenty of day cares still use that exact same song for that exact same purpose. Day care centers thrive on ritualized songs -- the welcome song, the clean-up song, the good-bye song -- and in fact having kids sing while they scrub is a good way to get them to wash their hands effectively.) The college professors were apparently mildly irritated by the Jesus-y handwashing song because one day the kid came in with a song to share, which turned out to be "Jesus Loves Me" but with "Muhammed" swapped in for Jesus (this was pure snark, I would note, and not a correct presentation of Islam, but look, this was Virginia in 1955) after which my grandparents referred to him as the little Mohammedan boy.

I love telling this story because it goes against pretty much every image people have of the 1950s.

My grandmother, despite presenting herself as a very traditional woman, didn't quit working until she hit retirement age. After my grandfather got his teaching degree, they moved to Ohio (he was from Maine, and there was no way any Virginia school district was going to hire a Yankee schoolteacher) where he worked as a high school History teacher and my grandmother worked as a secretary. She finished out her career as a secretary to one of the administrators at Wittenberg University. Grampy was older than she was, so he retired first, and took over the cooking and much of the cleaning -- he had dinner ready for her every day when she came home from work. And yet I'm serious that they presented themselves as a traditional couple; he was the "man of the house" and thus did all the fix-it tasks (not very competently), he "made the decisions," etc.

My point, I guess, is that the world these people are harking back to, of male breadwinners and female housewives, never really existed. It was an ideal found only in upper-income households and only some of the time in those, and the world of the 1950s and 1960s would have been every bit as screwed as us if all the women had suddenly quit. (Imagine a 1950s office with no secretaries. An overcrowded filled-with-Boomers elementary school with no teachers. A hospital with no nurses...)

[rms10.livejournal.com]

My point, I guess, is that the world these people are harking back to, of male breadwinners and female housewives, never really existed. It was an ideal found only in upper-income households and only some of the time in those, and the world of the 1950s and 1960s would have been every bit as screwed as us if all the women had suddenly quit.

Oh, yes, and this is a point worth making over and over again. Both of my grandmothers worked outside the home, in the 1950's and 1960's, because they were working class families. In my dad's family, it meant that my grandmother worked the second shift at a factory, and my grandfather took care of all the evening housework and childcare. In my mom's family, my grandmother worked during the day, and my mom did the grocery shopping during her high school lunch hour.

[sioneva.livejournal.com]

Yes. Both of my grandmothers were technically housewives...but only because both of my grandfathers were self-employed. My paternal grandmother did all the accounting and office work for my grandfather's construction business. My maternal grandmother did the accounting and office work for my grandfather's dairy.

My father's mother's mother worked packing oranges in Southern California for twenty years (if I'm remembering my dates correctly).

[rivka.livejournal.com]

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Among women age 16 and over, the labor force participation rate was 33.9 percent in 1950, compared with 59.8 percent in 1998.

63.3 percent of women age 16 to 24 worked in 1998 versus 43.9 percent in 1950.

76.3 percent of women age 25 to 34 worked in 1998 versus 34.0 percent in 1950.

77.1 percent of women age 35 to 44 worked in 1998 versus 39.1 percent in 1950.

76.2 percent of women age 45 to 54 worked in 1998 versus 37.9 percent in 1950.

51.2 percent of women age 55 to 64 worked in 1998 versus 27 percent in 1950.

8.6 percent of women age 65+ worked in 1998 versus 9.7 percent in 1950.

Those percentages of working women are smaller, but I wouldn't call them small in an absolute sense. Women really have always worked.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

Around 35%, averaged over the age groups? Daaaaaamn. I love numbers.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

My grandparents got married secretly, and then my grandmother went back home to live with her parents. Her family couldn't do without her salary at the time (the Depression), but married women were forbidden to be schoolteachers.

(I have always thought how very sweet that story is. They must have been crazy in love, and also very morally proper, to have a secret marriage seem like the best thing to do.)

[selki.livejournal.com]

That is a great story!

[puzzlement.livejournal.com]

My grandmother, despite presenting herself as a very traditional woman, didn't quit working until she hit retirement age.

My grandmother, who had five children and was as "family values" as they come, worked her whole life. Because that's how farming families did things. There were "women things" (which aren't work only if your analysis is stupid) like cooking huge meals for the shearers, but she also did the farm's bookkeeping. How had she learned bookkeeping? From her father the small business owner in the town she grew up in.

When she died, my father and his brothers had to teach their father how to read bank statements, and what to do with bills.

Before they retired from farming, she was as full-time as her husband was (and there was some child labour too). Because that's how large farms work.