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

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

you forgot to start with "i'm sorry, are you just stupid?"

oh-- welfare departments, at least twenty years ago (when i was doing file room stuff in one in college) primarily staffed by women. i don't know if the county i worked in was exactly representative, but it was about 90% women.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

An enormous number of struggling working-class families become outright poor and poor families starve, as all the women doing minimum-wage cleaning and child care and LPN-level patient care leave work. It is impossible to find nursing-home care.

Wealthier families and large businesses have surreptitious, illegal female workers, just as they have illegal alien employees now. These employees are almost always exploited because they have no legal recourse, just as happens to illegal aliens now.

There's a rise in literary works written by upper-middle-class women, as these women retire from the workplace, continue to have a comfortable household income, and have the leisure to write. There may well be an accompanying baby boom at this income level.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

Four contributions: the first needs more research, the second and third are provable, and the third anecdotal.

First, I'd need the demographics of (just as a off-the-top-of-my-head list) rape counselors, pregnancy counselors, and obstetricians. I'd want breakdown by gender and client evaluation.

In short, would the quality of care go down?

Second, I'd point out that this would pull some of the women that have been critical to the war in Afghanistan out. Some of the women in Afghanistan (possibly most of them, I'm not sure) will not talk to a male soldier. It's hard to win somebody's heart and mind if she won't listen to anything.

Third, there's the assumption that women are holding jobs that men are qualified for. A fair chunk of the jobs that went down are housing industry jobs. While some of that is real-estate sales, mortagages, and the like, most of it is construction, which is male-dominated work, and reasonably so; it's based on upper-body strength. So we have job openings that some portion of the unemployed can't apply for, because they don't have the requirements.

Fourth, my place of work would lose a lot of people; it's more women than men. I've never asked, but I suspect that a lot of them are taking lower pay for the satisfaction of making the world better. When a job becomes a single-breadwinner position, jobs like that become less preferable. I'm not sure everybody could be replaced, and if they were, it would probably be replacement by single males who would move out as they got married and wanted better pay.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

I think that was a deliberate omission; it's a lot easier to convince somebody before insulting them than the other way around.

[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.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

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.

Wow. You guys really have let your immigrant-coping skills go since the early 1900s. Not that there's anything wrong with that: every person who moves to the US is like two Canadians dying so I frown on any and all immigration to the US.

Your Monster Chiller Horror Theater scenario is where Canada is expected to be in about 20 years; at the moment about 40% of the country is either an immigrant or the kids of immigrants.

40% of the country is either an immigrant or the kids of immigrants.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Including me.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

There's "immigration" and then there's "desperately needed huge influx of immigration all at once in a big hurry, and only involving people who are so conservative or so limited in their options that they don't mind moving to a backward country where the women won't be allowed to work."

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

I think you left out "Real estate prices plunge like a rock, reversing the upswing they took in double-income days, and foreclosures go through the roof, to a degree which makes the current forclosures crisis look like a walk in the park".

[jinian.livejournal.com]

The police forces of the U.S. are abruptly cut by nearly 15%.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

Women can't leave their father's home unless they are married or otherwise supported, and can't leave their husbands either. (Would nuns still teach and nurse?) Local food might become a necessity, as women who were working in grocery stores, as truckers and dispatchers, on big farms with machinery, in food processing plants, in restaurants, etc are now stuck trying to raise chickens and tomatoes at home ... and all the other women are too, whether or not they have any interest or aptitude or enough space to do it in.

And speaking of enough space, forget about moving to the suburbs and commuting, because there aren't enough bus drivers.

Men whose career trajectory would have depended on financial support from their parents and then their wives (doctors, for example) would be out of luck. The shortage of doctors and other medical personnel would rapidly become horrifying, especially after the old white men in white coats die off (having been prevented from retiring).

[juthwara.livejournal.com]

There would be mass closings of libraries. 80 percent of librarians are women, and that just the degreed professionals - I'm sure the percentage of women among support staff is even higher.

Most elderly or disabled people in a care facility who don't have family to take them in would be on the streets because of the lack of caregivers. Anyone needing home nursing care without family to take care of them would probably starve for the same reason.

[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...)

[saoba.livejournal.com]

Well, for starters- I had a doctor appointment on Monday for an annual physical.

Every single person I interacted with during that appointment was a woman.

Receptionist, physician's assistant, doctor, lab receptionist, lab technician, pharmacist- all women. Person who took my call later that day to schedule my mammogram -well, actually the entire staff at the mammo clinic- women. The doctor who will read those results-
odds are it will be a woman too given what I know of staffing for this hospital system.

And the kicker is- I didn't take any particular note of it because it simply isn't that big a deal. Just like until your entry made me think of it it didn't register on me that of 6 phone calls I made on Friday for household matters or upcoming travel I spoke to only one man.

Also- sons will have to go to work earlier in order to help support their families. Meanwhile, daughters will NOT be leaving for school or jobs and so will remain at home until marriage- which means Poppa can likely kiss the idea of retiring goodbye.

I'd expect the rates of both birth control usage and abortion to go through the roof no matter the legalities. Prostitution, too.

What planet do these people live on?

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap. I forgot about that in my list.

Without female police officers, I have no idea whether there will be an effect on rape victims and traumatized children who have to deal with the police. My gut instinct says there will be a change for the worse, but I don't trust it.

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

"What planet do these people live on?"

I suspect they want to live on Planet Television, circa 1950, and they haven't checked to see if that was the way life really should be, or an aberration born of post-WW2 economics.

For that matter, I imagine they don't know if that's the way life really was or not.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I think you've got the big picture covered. Looking around me and asking what would happen if 70% of the women I work with were to quit, I see a disaster for every NASA project. The most obvious one is that nobody would be keeping track of the "conjunction analysis" program which lets the various projects know if they're in danger of being hit by a piece of orbital debris. There would also be a sudden and acute shortage of orbit analysts in flight dynamics, a place with a decidedly female majority currently.

Several missions would lose their chief scientists, their observatory managers, their heads of systems engineering, and the core of their IT groups. Operations teams would lose Ops Directors, critical sub-system engineers, satellite controllers, and enterprise system managers.

The space communications network and the ground network of antennas would be desperately understaffed, with key scheduling and coordination positions left un-staffed with nobody able to take over on short notice.

It would be a disaster.

[rms10.livejournal.com]

What the flustering fuck?

I just . . . wow. I don't know how it's not a basic matter of numbers. We have 10% unemployment. 70% of half the population is 35% of the population. That leaves a total of 25% of all current jobs unstaffed. (Approximately.) Obviously some sectors -- like health and education -- will be hit much harder than others. But who thinks that we suddenly won't need all these goods and services if no women work?

I hope you share any responses you get to your post. But I suspect the people you're arguing with wouldn't recognize sanity and reason if it hit them over the head.

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

It's amazing how women have been so trained to hate other women's decisions when they're different from their own. Anti-women sentiment has proven to be quite adaptable.

Your response is great. For myself, I would note that the feelings of complete fufillment ×must× be why so many women start home-based businesses, though it doesn't really fit in with your particular argument.

[geekymary.livejournal.com]

My company would lose millions, since Wall Street would freak out when our very successful CEO suddenly left, taking the VPs of HR and Research and Development, and Chief Marketing Officer, along with many high-ranking executives in Manufacturing, Finance, and Information Systems.

you missed a few side effects

[laurent-atl.livejournal.com]

i wonder for instance what would happen with the wives and children of the roughly 2 million incarcerated men, as well as the millions of single parent families in which the parent happens to be female.

on the amusing side, if the waitresses all quit and were replaced by guys in the same outfit hooters would suddenly go from pathetic to hilarious.

[(Anonymous)]

I think its safe to say that w/o women on medical and police staff, a number of women will not bother dealing with either one... Under any circumstances.

That would be a serious turn for the worse on both counts.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

All interesting, but but it feels fundamentally wrong. It doesn't matter what the economic effects -- pro or con -- are of this scenario; what matters is that it's morally and ethically wrong.

B

[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.