the history of working mothers

[Arete]

I have a friend whose husband could not keep it in his pants. Upon finding out her predicament, her very pious, God-cries-with-divorce 89 year old grandmother told her, and I quote, to "throw his testicles to the curb, you're educated and make your own money!"

It's amazing how deeply practical a lot of the religiously pious turned out to be. Yeah, she took granny's advice and finally dumped the bastard.

[Ave Maria]

Thanks for confirming that you know nothing about farming.

Clearly you didn't understand my post, or why mothers working outside the home is different than working in it. Unless you know about some group of farm wives who send their kids to daycare in droves?

I've never worked on a farm myself, but I grew up in a rural community where many of my classmates (at one school even most) were the children of farmers. I've never worked in a store, either, but I know what it entails because of what others around me have said, etc.

[samurai_sarah]

(snip)Clearly you didn't understand my post, or why mothers working outside the home is different than working in it. Unless you know about some group of farm wives who send their kids to daycare in droves?

I've never worked on a farm myself, but I grew up in a rural community where many of my classmates (at one school even most) were the children of farmers. I've never worked in a store, either, but I know what it entails because of what others around me have said, etc.

Oh dear, so you know nothing about retail either.

[formergothardite]

Well some of my ancestors were farmers/share croppers and no they didn't send their kids to daycare. But it wasn't like they were actually sitting around watching these kids like we would do today. There were some very bad accidents with some of the small children because mom and dad were working and they were pretty much left to do whatever. Once they got old enough to work, they worked. On my grandfather's side two of his siblings left home at 13 and it just wasn't a big deal. The idea that stay at home moms and work at home moms today are like the ones in the past is just ridiculous.

But at the same time, the fathers weren't working outside the home either. So the mother was working just like the father was.

[SamE]

THe kids in my Dad's famil were picking cotton as soon as they were able - age 8 or so. Before they could walk, they were tied to mama while she picked cotton. Once they could walk, they were left alone in the fields.

[formergothardite]

THe kids in my Dad's famil were picking cotton as soon as they were able - age 8 or so. Before they could walk, they were tied to mama while she picked cotton. Once they could walk, they were left alone in the fields.

On of my relatives discovered a box of journals, letters and newspapers articles in the attic dating back to the early 1900's and it has been so interesting to read. There are several really tragic stories of young children dying in accidents where they had been left alone while the parents worked.

[singsingsing]

Women have worked forever. Before the industrial revolution a lot of that work was cottage industry (i.e. inside the home instead of outside - more men did that kind of work, too), but women have always worked outside the home. And wealthier women who didn't have to work often sent their children away to live with their wetnurses for the first couple years of their life, and then sometimes away to school or apprenticeships for extended periods. This fundie ideal never existed on a very large scale.

[Hane]

On of my relatives discovered a box of journals, letters and newspapers articles in the attic dating back to the early 1900's and it has been so interesting to read. There are several really tragic stories of young children dying in accidents where they had been left alone while the parents worked.

The novels of Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens are full of mentions of very young children left home unattended while their impoverished mothers had to leave the home for the day to work. As in six-year-olds left in charge of several even younger children.

[DGayle]

Did you maybe mean they were more dependent on the daylight and had a lot more to get done during daylight hours due to having less advanced forms of artificial light? Otherwise I'm curious how they had less daylight. Even daylight savings doesn't change the number of daylight hours every day, just which end of the day gets more of them.

Yup, I left out a few words. They had less time, limited by daylight. Candles were too expensive to use for housecleaning.

[DGayle]

Agreed.

I also wonder what would happen if you did a similar map for working fathers for the same time periods.

Men leaving the house every day to go to an outside job is also a new thing. The 20th century saw a massive demographic shift of people into cities.

The Leave It To Beaver era was really quite short. It was only in the post-war era that suburbs really got established, and that you had middle-class, and not just upper-class, white women who were able to stay home and not do a huge amount of labor.

Don't forget, by some definitions, someone like Pa Ingalls was not a "working father", because most of the time he didn't have outside paid employment. In cities like New York, the garment industry used families who did piece work sewing out of their tenement apartments. Families that owned stores usually lived in the same building, and took turns serving customers.

Charles Ingalls worked his ass off. I wonder who would say he was a non-working father because he didn't draw a regular paycheck from someone else.

$10 says out fundies would use Caroline as an example of a woman staying home like a good woman should, while Charles worked like a man should, even though it took them both, at home, to feed and raise their family, and this was very normal.

[DGayle]

Oh, and she always said she preferred coffee to tea, because at least she could buy that instead of growing it herself.

This makes me think of Katarina (or something similar) in "I Remember Mama" who always liked to dump her drink. When her mother was asked why that was allowed, her mother replied that it gave her daughter the sense of having enough that she could waste something, even though they were very poor.

I think the similarity is how your grandma got the feeling of someone else doing some of the work for her. She did so much that someone else growing and roasting the beans gave her a sense of having more.

It's so easy to forget these days how easy our lives are.

[DGayle]

Oh dear, so you know nothing about retail either.

I'm somewhat offended by what AM is saying. No, hearing about it for a few minutes doesn't give you an intimate knowledge. Kids of farmers got hurt a lot because they couldn't be supervised as much. Mom may have been at home, but that didn't mean she had all the time in the world to sit there and watch all her kids. Young children would go to work, and have to do it without adult eyes, because there wasn't enough time to watch them all. A lot of children died in farm accidents.

And there's more to working in retail than checking people out who bitch that the sign said $9.98 instead of $9.99, and acting like you are personally responsible for it. You don't hear about having to find stuff, picking up the shit customers leave on the floor, cleaning out the dressing rooms and hoping that white goop is yogurt, the politics of who gets the best shifts and weekends off, being called in to work at 8am because too many people had to call out (in most states this little notice is entirely legal), etc..

I hear a lot about my husband's job, but am not conceited enough to think I know what it entails. I doubt "others" are getting home and calling you up to unload their stresses day after day, and even if they did, like how my husband releases steam every day, it doesn't mean you intimately know.

[2xx1xy1JD]

Yet working on the family farm, helping the hubby with bookkeeping, babysitting for other families, or taking in the washing and mending of other families doesn't tend to keep mothers away from their children the way working outside the home does. So that is a shift, especially where children are concerned.

Even legal divorce did happen in the 1800s and early 20th century. Heck, it happened in my family in the 1930s. But the fact that it has risen so much since then is a bit eye popping and worth taking a look at.

.

Fine, let's take a look, shall we?

Legal divorce happened, but the divorce laws were far more restrictive. No-fault divorce didn't exist, so getting a divorce meant suing your spouse and having to prove that they did something heinous (adultery, cruelty, etc.)

Here is the history of no-fault divorce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce

The divorce rate in the United States peaked around 1980, and has been gradually falling since then.

[Hane]

Legal divorce happened, but the divorce laws were far more restrictive. No-fault divorce didn't exist, so getting a divorce meant suing your spouse and having to prove that they did something heinous (adultery, cruelty, etc.)

Here is the history of no-fault divorce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce

The divorce rate in the United States peaked around 1980, and has been gradually falling since then.

No-fault divorce is a godsend. About 40 years ago, an uncle and aunt of mine split up after about 20 years of marriage. Because no-fault divorce hadn't come to our state yet, the proceedings were messy, with various relatives being begged to show up in court and lie about various things. No-fault would have given the couple the dignity of saying, "We grew apart--no harm, no foul."

People who claim that divorce should be made more difficult have their heads up their @$$es. Life in the wake of a marriage disaster is not like a Lifetime TV movie: bad choices followed by Words of Wisdom from the family sage, followed by happily ever after. And if a divorce was in fact "too easy," what's stopping the couple from getting back together?

[Ave Maria]

I'm somewhat offended by what AM is saying. No, hearing about it for a few minutes doesn't give you an intimate knowledge. Kids of farmers got hurt a lot because they couldn't be supervised as much. Mom may have been at home, but that didn't mean she had all the time in the world to sit there and watch all her kids. Young children would go to work, and have to do it without adult eyes, because there wasn't enough time to watch them all. A lot of children died in farm accidents.

And there's more to working in retail than checking people out who bitch that the sign said $9.98 instead of $9.99, and acting like you are personally responsible for it. You don't hear about having to find stuff, picking up the shit customers leave on the floor, cleaning out the dressing rooms and hoping that white goop is yogurt, the politics of who gets the best shifts and weekends off, being called in to work at 8am because too many people had to call out (in most states this little notice is entirely legal), etc..

I hear a lot about my husband's job, but am not conceited enough to think I know what it entails. I doubt "others" are getting home and calling you up to unload their stresses day after day, and even if they did, like how my husband releases steam every day, it doesn't mean you intimately know.

I've heard all that and more regarding retail. Way more. My own father worked retail for 30+ years, and believe me, he told me all about the various stuff that went down.

Of course, people who actually do a certain kind of work will know more about it than anyone else -- but that doesn't mean that the others know *nothing* -- not even close.

Point remains -- when you go to school with at least 50% farm kids, you know a fair bit about their lives, including their childcare practices, especially if you wound up hanging out at their houses after school.

[Ave Maria]

.

Fine, let's take a look, shall we?

Legal divorce happened, but the divorce laws were far more restrictive. No-fault divorce didn't exist, so getting a divorce meant suing your spouse and having to prove that they did something heinous (adultery, cruelty, etc.)

Here is the history of no-fault divorce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-fault_divorce

The divorce rate in the United States peaked around 1980, and has been gradually falling since then.

And yet, look who created it and why...

[OkToBeTakei]

I've heard all that and more regarding retail. Way more. My own father worked retail for 30+ years, and believe me, he told me all about the various stuff that went down.

Of course, people who actually do a certain kind of work will know more about it than anyone else -- but that doesn't mean that the others know *nothing* -- not even close.

Point remains -- when you go to school with at least 50% farm kids, you know a fair bit about their lives, including their childcare practices, especially if you wound up hanging out at their houses after school.

In that case I'm an expert in the fields of medicine, law and construction project management.

I'm sure you will be quite happy for me to perform your appendectomy, represent you at your murder trial and build your next state of the art hospital.

I spent time after school playing with the children of the house but I suppose as the Mother was a teacher this makes me able to comment on all teaching practices and all teacher's parenting skills and lives........all teachers all over the world uh huh.

[OkToBeTakei]

And yet, look who created it and why...

Please for the love of all things sentient tell me you do not think this is some kind of Bolshevik or Commie conspiracy :pray:

[formergothardite]

Since in her AMA(but not really :lol: ) thread Ave Maria said that she thinks it is not ideal for women with children to work I can see why she is dead set on ignoring the fact that traditionally women weren't watching children like is common for SAHMs to do today. We raised a lot of our own food growing up and my dad worked outside the home but my mom did a majority of the gardening. When we were baby/toddler/preschool age my mom kept us with her when she was out working in the garden, but once we were five and up, when we weren't helping out we were let roam like would not be considered acceptable by todays standards.

My mom's parents both worked, but they were also big gardeners. When my mom was four she was left to watch her two year old brother while her mom was at work and her dad was plowing the field. Well, being four she wasn't great at watching kids and she lost him. Took people hours to find him. He had climbed into an abandoned car in the woods and gotten stuck. My mom was spanked for not watching him close enough and the next day they were back to her being responsible for him even though there was a parent technically working at home. This was not uncommon in her rural community, by the way. No one thought, "Oh my. That mom should be at home watching her children." because a good many women were working in the mills and helping in the farms knew that to keep the farms going the mother needed to be working as hard as the father and not spending most of the supervising children.

My father grew up on a huge farm. His mother used to lock him in his room while she went out and worked on the farm. When he was three he figured out how to climb out of his window, so they nailed it shut. :shock:

I think most of the farm women in the past would have loved to have had the option of putting their children in daycare.

[2xx1xy1JD]

And yet, look who created it and why...

Ronald Reagan signed the US's first no-fault divorce law into effect in California in 1970. New York was the last state to have no-fault divorce, which only came in 2010. I have no idea what conclusions you can draw from that, since New York is hardly seen as fundie (or Traditional Catholic) central.

As for why no-fault divorce came about, this Wall Street Journal article helps to explain it:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 1295531582

[SamE]

I'm somewhat offended by what AM is saying. No, hearing about it for a few minutes doesn't give you an intimate knowledge. Kids of farmers got hurt a lot because they couldn't be supervised as much. Mom may have been at home, but that didn't mean she had all the time in the world to sit there and watch all her kids. Young children would go to work, and have to do it without adult eyes, because there wasn't enough time to watch them all. A lot of children died in farm accidents.

And there's more to working in retail than checking people out who bitch that the sign said $9.98 instead of $9.99, and acting like you are personally responsible for it. You don't hear about having to find stuff, picking up the shit customers leave on the floor, cleaning out the dressing rooms and hoping that white goop is yogurt, the politics of who gets the best shifts and weekends off, being called in to work at 8am because too many people had to call out (in most states this little notice is entirely legal), etc..

I hear a lot about my husband's job, but am not conceited enough to think I know what it entails. I doubt "others" are getting home and calling you up to unload their stresses day after day, and even if they did, like how my husband releases steam every day, it doesn't mean you intimately know.

That's funny about knowing about retail. Until you actually do the grunt work in retail, you have no idea.

DId you realize that people actually sh1t in the floor at big box stores? Well they do and people like me have to clean it up.

What about your store manager getting on to you because your department didn't meet it's sales goals that day? We can't necessarily help that people don't come in our store to buy paint and paint sundries on rainy days.

Ever try selling extended warranties? DId you know many stores require its workers to sell a certain number of extended warranties or they are fired?

Let's talk Secret Shoppers....... Secret shoppers are paid to come in to our stores and rate our customer service. Craziness. If the secret shopper came to our department and can't find any to help them, we get in trouble. uummmm.......our schedules are decided by corporate staffing, not by our local management. One person may be scheduled per department. That person may be busy helping another customer. Doesn't matter.

Working with split days off. CLosing one night and opening the next morning. So, you only function on 4 hours of sleep. But, still having to be perky and helpful to mean people.

Retail is crazy.... but until you actually work it, you have no idea.

[chaotic life]

I question the statistics of working mothers that demographic shows as well. When the Social Security Act was created, domestic workers were not included. It was decided that the vast majority of southern black women were domestic workers, and giving all of them SSA benefits might bankrupt the system and doom it to fail. The informal economy is rarely calculated in statistics like that one, and women have traditionally worked in the informal economy and not the formal economy.

If I look at my own matriarchal linage, it is full of informal economy but working women who all counted themselves as working women/mother.

Great-grandmothers--1. Ran the family's repo business, didn't count as formally working because it was in the family business

2. Ran a boarding house out of her home, didn't count as formally working because it was domestic work in her own home. 3. First legal divorce in my family, on the grounds of adultery and abandonment. She was a seamstress and laundress. She could not afford to work outside the home and support her seven children she raised alone, so she took in work. If anyone EVER referred to this woman as not working, they had better have been able to run fast because all 4'11" of her was FAST and she would hunt you down for insulting her like that. 4. Helped run the family's hotel empire. Typically she was the kitchen manager and the office manager at whatever new start up the family was living in that year, all while raising eight children. No, she did NOT have help with childcare because her husband was a filthy rich Scrooge and waiting for his coal to turn to diamonds. She dragged her kids with her, made them clean room and wait tables, cart luggage for patrons and anything else that the industry required of them. Not in the formal economy but there is no way the empire would have succeeded without her oversight and work.

My grandmothers entered the forma economy in large part because their mothers taught them that they needed to work. So, in the 50s and 60s before the sexual revolution they were in the formal economy because of the generation before them.

My aunt and mother (only two in that generation) are in the formal economy.

Only I and one cousin have had any significant period of time that what classify as not working, and frankly I can't decide if growing pot in her home and collecting welfare as an art form counts as a homemaker or informal economy for my cousin.

[yetanothermeg]

Women have always labored. Prior to the industrial revolution, the family was a unit of production. Every member of the family participated in reproductive labor (unpaid labor in the home that enables life to go on, i.e. food production & preparation, thatching the roof, washing the clothes, etc). Once the family passed subsistence level, the fruits of their labor were traded or later sold in the cash economy. If a child was educated beyond this, it was a sign of prosperity. The apprenticeship system existed for skilled trades, but that was a small segment of society, the labor was still performed at home and the family remained a single unit of production. Once the industrial revolution began (late 18th century in England, starting in the early 19th century in the US), that changed. Mechanization, over the course of two centuries, changed society from one where the entire family labored at home to maintain or advance the family's economic standing, to a society where it doesn't make economic sense to reproduce every aspect of daily living at home (ie build all your own furniture, preserve all your own food, weave your own cloth, etc.) and in most cases it is a better economic choice to sell one's labor in the market.

Mothers have always labored to advance the economic standing of their families unless they had the wealth not to. The biggest shift in society has been in CHILD LABOR. Throughout most of history (and in most of the world today) children labored from the age of 3 or 4. That could be agricultural labor in the family unit or they would sell their labor on the market. Children barely older than toddlers were employed for wages in mills and mines. It was a sign of prosperity to send children to school, not just because school cost money, but because that meant the family did not need the children to make an economic contribution to sustain the family. So even in families where the mother might be engaged in reproductive labor in the home, the children very commonly were engaged in paid labor in the marketplace. Laura Ingalls Wilder comes to mind. There was a period where she sewed 6 days a week and another where she taught school as a young teen, contributing the money she earned to support the entire family. So another way the map is flawed (besides not counting labor in the informal market frequently performed by women), is that it doesn't show how many children were employed in the formal economy.

Oh and speaking of farm families, I know a woman who's mother would tie her to the clothes line with what she described as a "salt lick" to keep her occupied and safe while her mother worked around the farm. And this was in the 50s.

[Ave Maria]

In that case I'm an expert in the fields of medicine, law and construction project management.

I'm sure you will be quite happy for me to perform your appendectomy, represent you at your murder trial and build your next state of the art hospital.

I spent time after school playing with the children of the house but I suppose as the Mother was a teacher this makes me able to comment on all teaching practices and all teacher's parenting skills and lives........all teachers all over the world uh huh.

I never said I knew how to do their jobs, only what their jobs entail and what their lives are like. If you'd hung around doctors and lawyers and their families, I'd bet that you know a lot more about their lives, etc, than someone else who has never been in the home of a doctor, a lawyer, or a construction project manager.

As far as commenting on the jobs teachers do, if you've ever been a student or the parent of on I'd be willing to let you comment. ;)

[Ave Maria]

That's funny about knowing about retail. Until you actually do the grunt work in retail, you have no idea.

DId you realize that people actually sh1t in the floor at big box stores? Well they do and people like me have to clean it up.

What about your store manager getting on to you because your department didn't meet it's sales goals that day? We can't necessarily help that people don't come in our store to buy paint and paint sundries on rainy days.

Ever try selling extended warranties? DId you know many stores require its workers to sell a certain number of extended warranties or they are fired?

Let's talk Secret Shoppers....... Secret shoppers are paid to come in to our stores and rate our customer service. Craziness. If the secret shopper came to our department and can't find any to help them, we get in trouble. uummmm.......our schedules are decided by corporate staffing, not by our local management. One person may be scheduled per department. That person may be busy helping another customer. Doesn't matter.

Working with split days off. CLosing one night and opening the next morning. So, you only function on 4 hours of sleep. But, still having to be perky and helpful to mean people.

Retail is crazy.... but until you actually work it, you have no idea.

And yet, even some who work retail would only know some of that second hand, since not all retail is big box. I've heard all of that from other people who have worked big box stores, though, so it isn't news to me.