“One of the most striking effects of the coronavirus,” British writer Helen Lewis laments in the Atlantic, “will be to send many couples back to the 1950s. Across the world, women’s independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic.”
Imagine that — the stay-at-home mother may have to return!
Schools and day cares have closed. Suddenly, it’s impossible to sustain an economy built around two-income households that outsource parenting to professionals. This is true in the United States and the United Kingdom.
This sudden transition is clearly going to be painful. Couples who have built a life around two incomes may have to give up one of them while adapting to new and thus stressful rhythms.
But for feminists on the Left, the harm is much worse. They see parents, and mothers more than fathers, leaving the workplace for the home as a return to the bad old days.
“No one should be nostalgic for the ‘1950s ideal’ of Dad returning to a freshly baked dinner and freshly washed children,” Lewis writes.
But maybe now is the time to ask whether we made the right cultural decision over the past 50 years when we decided to prioritize mothers’ wage-labor outside the home over their work inside the home.
And this was a decision. It wasn’t merely a bunch of individuals deciding to live their lives differently. The dominance of the two-income family also wasn’t merely the natural consequence of a society in which women are free to choose as they wish. For instance, universal preschool, a costly undertaking that doesn’t seem to provide lasting educational gains, is partly justified as a way to get mothers back to work.
“Since the 1970s,” one economist wrote, “many countries have established free or highly subsidized education for all preschool children in the hope of improving children’s learning and socio-economic life chances and encouraging mothers to join the labor force.” They found that subsidized universal preschool may increase mothers’ “attachment to the workforce.”
In general, mothers were actively encouraged to work. Welfare reform in the 1990s advanced the idea that single mothers should work, and in turn, have subsidized ways to outsource parenting duties.
The U.S. tax code provides special breaks for parents who spend money on commercial child care in order to work. Child care isn’t deductible for mothers who need a babysitter in order to homeschool, volunteer, drive older children to school, or even just get a break.
Some states have even second-earner deductions from state income taxes.
On top of all of this, policy folks Left and Right push for further policies explicitly intended to get more mothers away from their children and in the paid workplace.
The Harvard Business School will tell you that it’s very important for mothers to work (implicitly: even if they don’t really want to) because working mothers’ daughters make more money. And the gross domestic product demands it!
“As a country,” with nearly 30% of married mothers at home raising children instead of out of the home working and spending more, “we are clearly leaving GDP points on the table,” Slate’s Jordan Weissmann fretted.
Weissman said we should be “reserving more child care for professional centers that can do it a bit more efficiently.” By his calculations, “Even if you factor in rent and other overhead, it’s probably more cost-effective for one caretaker to watch over four infants than it is to have every parent looking after their own.”
The Obama White House in 2014 praised the rise of two-earner households. “Without the increase in employment and hours worked among women, our overall economy would be $2 trillion smaller.” They worried that “after rising dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, women’s labor force participation has stagnated.”
Obama’s White House teamed up with the Center for American Progress to shape policies aimed at getting more mothers out of the home and into the cubicles. “Only by fielding our full team will we be able to compete in a global economy in the 21st century.”
Because mothers raising children are … sitting on the sidelines? Doing less important things than the uber-meaningful Dilbert existence we’ve heard so much about?
Maybe you think these policies are good and worth their costs because the economic and social benefits of more working women are very valuable.
But we need to acknowledge that there is a trade-off here. We have policies deliberately aimed at increasing the number of two-income homes and decreasing the number of children raised full-time by their parents. Is this subsidization of double-income families a good idea? We ought to weigh costs against benefits. The benefits are plentiful and constantly touted by economists, Slate columnists, Harvard Business School, and Democratic White Houses.
But the costs of our pro-working-mothers policies get a lot less airtime. It’s hard even to discuss because it can sound like you’re telling women to get back into the home. But without saying all mothers should stay at home, you can say, our policies are too tilted against mothers who do stay at home.
Maybe, as our society scrambles to keep family finances afloat while one parent works, our policies should be less tilted toward the two-income model.
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*CORRECTION: The first version of this piece described single-earner penalty in IRAs that does not exist. There was a single-earner penalty for IRA deductions in the 1990s but not anymore.
