I am not talking about who is cooking dinner between two adults, I am talking about the production of functioning, healthy, stable, happy people, which is no small task.
Except - we are talking about that. When a woman with children is in the home, she is doing the cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping, etc. etc.,
for herself and for the adult male person in the household. She is childrearing during that time, but all of the household tasks that an adult would otherwise have to do for themself is being done for the male partner by the female partner. My question is why anyone else should be contributing to paying for those services, and how the personal services performed by a person for themself and for another non-dependent adult could ever be separated out from the activities involved in the "profession of mother".
And frankly, the childrearing services are also performed for the person themself and the other adult. They're their children. Do they not expect to perform/pay for the services their children need?
Obviously, I'm completely behind publicly provided medical care for children as for everyone else, public education, and all the other public services that everyone, including adults with children, benefit from or should have the benefit of. And as I've repeatedly said, I'm not opposed to providing benefits in some form (it's employment insurance where I'm from) for parents to take time out from the labour market for the initial early period of a child's life (as I've said, it's close to a year total in Canada). That isn't paying for the household services performed by the parent(s); that's recognizing the heavy demands on a working person that come with a very young child, and the need for contact between parent and child during that early period. (A very young child sleeps a lot of the time, and third-party childcare while parents work severely limits time available for parents and child to spend together.)
The rest of it, beyond those benefits and time periods, I'm looking at personal choice of the kind that people generally bear the expenses of themselves.
Up until perhaps 60 years ago in the western world for most women, marriage meant that a woman was entering the profession of motherhood and the economics of running a home.
No, it really did not. And I've kind of kept saying this and being ignored. For starters, you really have it totally backwards.
You are completely disregarding the masses of women who have always worked at something other than the "profession of motherhood", whether in the home or outside, and including in the 20th century. This "profession of motherhood" business is a middle-class, mid-20th century invention, largely associated with the post-war need to force women back into the home so that the men whose jobs they had been doing could find employment -- and the need for consumption to become a "profession", as the economy began turning out things that people had to need in order for profits to be made. Refrigerators, washing machines, cleaning products, personal care products -- all beyond the reach of most people before the war, all the things we are now amused by the advertising for from five or six decades ago.
A century ago and for centuries before that, women in agrarian households worked on the land, and many women in working-class/urban households have always done outside work, whether by taking in laundry, working in domestic service in others' households or working in the mills, and more recently in various industrial and service industry occupations.
In the past, even when women did not do outside work, whether at home or elsewhere, what they were doing was not "the economics of running a home" (I'm sorry, whatever that is, and however it differs from what single adults / adults without children do). They were doing labour. They were producing goods and services for the household, and not just of the childrearing variety. In fact, very little of it was of the childrearing variety. They didn't run errands to WalMart; they baked and sewed, and before that they cultivated and spun and wove, and so on. Just to have the bare minimum of stuff that was what a household needed and had in those times.
Beyond the very early childhood period, children were self-rearing. Really. The very young accompanied their mothers in the mothers' work in the household or on the land, and those women did not spend their time stimulating their infants' cognitive development. Really. And the older ones worked. I can show you censuses of England from 150 years ago where 10-yr-olds are identified as "female servant" or "cotton piecer". The children of the wealthy had servants; again, I can show you census households with two nurses and a governess for the children, on top of all the domestic servants to perform the rest of the household labour. No "profession of motherhood" being practised there either.
A taste of life 200 years ago or less (it refers to the beginning of the 18th century, but this is how some of my own ancestors were living until well into the 19th century):
http://users.chariot.net.au/~ramacs/lab1.htm
Let us take a look at a typical family at the beginning of the 18th century in England. In most households it was necessary for the whole family to contribute to the production of an adequate subsistence and not simply rely on the efforts of a single breadwinner. The labourer's wife was usually a working woman, and children too were put to work at an early age. The children would be plaiting straw for several hours in the early morning, scaring crows, or weeding and picking stones from the fields. The girls were expected to work alongside their mother in a variety of handicrafts and household chores, including sewing, weaving and feeding hens. The boys, from about the age of seven, as they became stronger, would be working beside their father 10 or 12 hours a day, doing a full day's hard work contributing to the family budget.
Most households. All but the wealthy and the nascent middle class -- tradespeople like shoemakers, storekeepers in urban areas. And in the trades, children were often bound into apprenticeship as early as age seven. Children too were not just consumers of goods and services; they were producers.
So forgive me, but
Men produced material goods and services that could be bought and sold and women were in charge of producing the future generation and the culture.
is really just nonsense. Women were in charge of producing most of the goods and services the household itself required, as well as doing non-household labour, and very little of the household labour involved "culture" or had much to do with the future generation apart from producing what it needed to cover its basic needs.
I am not talking about who is cooking dinner between two adults, I am talking about the production of functioning, healthy, stable, happy people, which is no small task.
The fifties sure did a number on women ...
Unfortunately, we have a general culture that does do its best to prevent children from becoming functioning, healthy, stable, happy people. The values conveyed in our cultures are largely inimical to that, and the goal is more along the lines of producing greedy, self-absorbed, empty-headed consumers.
And the damned thing is that this is the same culture that needed women to stay home and consume the very same stuff that this culture works so hard to turn children into consumers of. Part and parcel. The household as unit of consumption, and women and children as the engines of that consumption. Dressed up as the "profession of motherhood".
Masses of women around the world, and in our own societies, continue to perform productive labour of all kinds, sometimes hard labour, to meet their families' needs, and I find this glorification of the "profession of motherhood" insulting to them, myself.
I'm not the only one saying all these things, you know. The social/economic history is just fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_economy (broken up for readability)
The term Family Economy can be used to describe the family as an economic unit. The early stages of development in many economies are characterized by family based production. In the early, pre-industrial stage, technology was limited and unchanging. Most economic activity took place within the household, and production and distribution were organized by custom and tradition. High mortality rates and low productivity meant that on the farms and in the towns life was short and living conditions were harsh - an existence which was accepted fatalistically.
In this society the family played a central role, since economic and social status was defined by birth, family ties, and local custom. Most importantly, the family was a productive unit, and physical strength - typically a male attribute - was an essential element in survival.
The family economic unit has always been dependent on specialized labor done by family members. The family was a multigenerational producer with capital and land provided by older generations and labor provided by younger generations. Goods were produced not only for home consumption but to sell and trade in the market as well. Family production was not only limited to agricultural products but they also produced manufacturing goods and provided services.
In order to sustain a viable family economy during the pre-industrial era labor was needed. The labor needed to operate the farm and provide old-age support came from family members, fertility was high. High fertility and guaranteed employment on the family farm made education, beyond the basic literacy needed to read the bible, expensive and unnecessary.
During the post industrial stage the family as an economic unit changed. The family transformed from being a unit of production to being a unit of consumption.
This new era of industralization brought changes where farming can be done with less persons, therefore children were no longer to be viewed as economic assets but rather as liabilities. Industralization further contributed to the demise of the family economy where the capitalist market encouraged production in large scale factories, farms and mines. Wage labor became common and family members no longer worked together but rather used the wages they had earned to buy goods which they consumed as a family unit.
The industrial revolution, starting in the nineteenth and going into the twentieth century, is seen as the force that changed the economic family and is basically responsible for the "modern family."
And the post-war period in the western industrialized world cemented that process.
http://www.amazon.com/More-Work-For-Mother-Technology/dp/0465047327
More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave
Why is it that "a man works from sun to sun but a woman's work is never done?" It hasn't always been this way, and Ruth Cowan's meticulously researched and engagingly readable book shows the transformation. More Work for Mother describes the change not as a capitalist or patriarchal conspiracy, but rather as a series of small steps away from the traditional farming family, with its gender-specific but equally time-consuming tasks, toward completely "separate spheres" for the sexes and households as units of consumption rather than production. Inventions such as washing machines, cotton cloth, and even white flour acted as catalysts by giving the less well-off a chance at the comforts the prosperous already possessed, but in general it was men and children whose chores were relieved by these innovations.
Needing money to buy the things they could not produce, men left farming to become wage-earners, while children went to school, leaving Mother at home alone with "labor-saving" devices, no help, and raised expectations for yeast bread and clean clothes. Unfortunately, women's roles did not change as dramatically as the inventions, and our current housework rules and habits have their basis in issues of personal control more appropriate to times long gone. Even today, despite a grand array of high-tech gizmos, women still spend as much time on home maintenance as they did eighty years ago. We can't go back to our agricultural past, even if we'd like to, but historian Ruth Cowan shows us new ways to envision and direct our future.
By the same author, and well worth reading --
and really I think this gets to the very heart of what we are talking about here, starting from redqueen's OP:
http://www.soc.washington.edu/users/bpettit/soc352/cowan.pdf
Women's Work, Housework, and History: The Historical Roots of Inequality in Work-Force Participation
... Something there is which has persisted through political and economic upheaval, through the cataclysm of industrialization, through inflation and depression, through war and peace--something which has led (or pushed, or pulled) women’s work down a very different historical path from men’s.
Speaking socially, that “something" is the nuclear family; speaking demographically, it is the household; speaking technologically, it is the house. Some scholars and feminists believe that in this scenario the true culprits are capitalism and patriarchy. Perhaps so, but currently the methods of the social sciences provide us with no way to know for sure. On the other hand, as a result of nearly two decades of work on the part of social historians, historical demographers, and architectural historians, we now know a good deal more about the history of the family, the household, and the house than we once did. And what we now know suggests that the family, the household, and the house have been proximate causes of both social change and social stability in such a way as to implicate them heavily in the history of women’s work-force inequality.
Prior to industrialization—which for the United States means roughly prior to I840—most Americans worked “at home,” and most homes were rural; the word “housework,” which distinguishes work done “at home” from work done in other places, was not even part of the language until the middle of the nineteenth century. The fuel supplied to most of these preindustrial homes was wood; water had to be carried into the house from wells and streams; food was by and large abundant, but the diet lacked variety and most foodstuffs were prepared, from start to finish, by members of the household. Clothing, linens (such as they were), and many household utensils were made at home, at least in some form: not all households spun and wove, but most sewed; not all households stripped and tanned leather, but shoes were made and repaired by many; not all households made cider or beer or bread, but most ground their own meal (or carried it to mill to be ground). The maintenance and sustenance of a family under such conditions was, to put it mildly, labor-intensive.
... A few imaginary scenarios can clarify how the demands of modern housework and the pattern of socialization that trains women to meet those demands lead inexorably to gender inequality in the labor force. Imagine a stereotypic couple who graduate from high school, go to work, marry, have children, and buy a house. Most likely the house is convenient to his place of work because he earned more than she did and she, in any event, stopped working for a few years when the children came. But then the children grew up, or her husband left, or his plant closed, and she had to find a job, In her immediate vicinity there turned out to be few opportunities for employment in the field in which she was trained, so she starts again at something else, but starts at the bottom, and her lifetime earnings will never catch up with his. Or suppose that she does find something in her line of work, and then a promotion looms, but with it comes a transfer, and the transfer means that they will have to move (which is impossible without terminating his employment), or she will have to commute (which means that he will have to fix dinner) or she will have more demanding responsibilities. So she forgoes the promotion and remains stationary on a career ladder along which her male contemporaries
are advancing. Or suppose that they meet in graduate school and decide that neither will stop working when the babies come; so they hire a servant (or rather several servants, since the turnover rate is high), but he feels free to travel to sales conferences across the continent or to professional meetings in Europe, or to stay in his laboratory until all hours of the night, or to attend breakfast meetings-and she does not. Shortly she will decide to take a less demanding or less prestigious job than he, so that one of them will be free to prevent the centrifugal disintegration of their family; and before they know it, her career history has diverged considerably from his.
Each one of these scenarios, or something like it, is being played out in households across the land every day. Household technologies have developed in a pattern very different from market technologies, and housework has, consequently, developed a labor process that is very different from market work. Women have been assigned principal responsibility for this labor process since the earliest stages of industrialization, and consequently they have been socialized very differently from men. Had our households been communalized, for example, had housework been industrialized in exactly the same manner that market work was, then our housewives would not be trained to anticipate work that is essentially feudal--without paychecks and time clocks, without supervisors and job descriptions, without specialization and managerial control. If the care of the young and the ill had not been stereotypically assigned to women two hundred years ago, then we might have developed a socio-technical system that contained individual smithies in every backyard and communal kitchens in every neighborhood, or allowed for the manufacture of custom-made shoes in every kitchen and the laundering of all clothing by commercial agencies. Had we developed such a system, then we might see more equality in the labor force, since men as well as women would be at pains to “get home," and both would be responsible for the essential work that converts wages into sustenance. Thus, the fact that housework and household technologies developed in the unique way that they did becomes the single most salient fact in explaining not only why unequal pay and sexual segregation persist in the labor force, but also why women continue to have so much difficulty defining themselves as workers in the same sense as men.
That last paragraph provides a lot of food for thought, I think.
The more radical second-wave feminists weren't all about the "profession of motherhood"; they were more likely to be about that communal stuff, precisely to combat women's inequality.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Kids have their own job these days: getting an education, which is what they need in order to get jobs and enjoy other kinds of success in modern society.