An immigrant friend of mine was surprised to learn that my mother, holder of two degrees from Harvard University, was a stay-at-home mother and that, moreover, we had a full-time housekeeper. “How could you afford it on just your father’s salary?” she asked, not having experienced American life in the 1960s and early 1970s. My father worked as an economist for the federal government (not nearly as lucrative back then as it is now). Neither of my parents had any family money. So how did we do it?
I pointed out that there wasn’t much to buy back then. We couldn’t buy cable TV. We couldn’t buy mobile phones or personal computers. We had just one car, like most other American families. My dad took the bus to work. We took the bus to school. In any case, even if one wanted to splurge on a car, the most expensive cars available (e.g., Cadillac) were not more than twice as expensive as the average car (compare to today when most cities have dealers selling cars that cost 5-10X the average car’s price). Ordinary families did not aspire to live in 5000 square foot houses.
How about the housekeeper? “Her husband didn’t work, so she really had no choice but to work,” I replied. “Though her blood pressure was high and she developed some health problems later.” In thinking about it I realized that she would not have been a member of 2013’s American workforce. Both she and her husband would have qualified for disability benefits. So a big part of the answer for why our middle class household could afford a housekeeper was that we did not have to compete with the federal government for our housekeeper’s labor.
The corporate conspiracy theory of feminism is that feminism was encouraged and proliferated when our corporate masters decided that with women working, they could harvest the labor off the back of men and women, not just men. And indeed, coincidental with two income families were home prices, cars, vacations, that demanded two incomes to pay them off.
Similarly the Last Psychiatrist has a conspiracy theory to explain Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In., which is that she is being heavily promoted now as our corporate masters want women to work even harder, for longer hours, but the same pay. http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because_shes_suc.html
Very good observations about the more frugal lifestyle of your family, compared to today’s. Most likely back then the families such as yours also didn’t spend too much money on vacations, restaurants etc.
I suspect the housekeepers from the ’60s and ’70s also benefited from this – it’s very common for today’s housekeepers, janitors and other people doing this type of jobs to have cable/satellite and internet at home, a big screen tv (purchased from Costco or Walmart, sure, but still …), a smartphone with a data plan, a game console and loads of games for it, a very decent car etc. I still remember being completely amazed as an international graduate student, in the late ’90s, to see how the student dorm’s cleaning lady was driving a 3-4 year old Toyota!
Today’s housekeepers also need to pay the same medical costs as everyone else, so the dentist or pediatrician they go to can pay off their medical school debt, keep a full time staff to deal with insurance and other paperwork, buy malpractice insurance, drive a luxury car, vacation in Europe etc.
Finally, they too need to pay enormous housing costs, thanks to the housing market bubble and the US government’s and the Fed’s utmost efforts to keep the costs at the current level.
I was born and raised in Eastern Europe and it was very common in the 30s and 40s for a family such as Phil’s (single income, above average middle-class) to hire a full time housekeeper. In fact, most middle-class houses built back then, including the one I grew up in, had separate quarters for the housekeeper or other help. During the Communism era (1946-1990) the families could no longer afford that, exactly for the reason Phil mentioned: they could not compete with the government for the labor cost and benefits. The government started giving housing for free or minimal cost to those who got a job in the plants they built, free meals at the plant cafeterias etc. All this worked splendidly for the beneficiaries until the whole thing collapsed in the 80s.
Phil,
The real question here is why a stay at home mom living in a modest home needed a full time housekeeper? Please elaborate.
Seven: Why did our family, with three reasonably normal kids, “need” a full-time housekeeper? I think the idea that the parents would be slaves to the kids and the house wasn’t as prevalent back then as now. By not having to do all of the household tasks my mom had more time to read books, entertain friends, participate in community groups, host parties, plan trips, make art, etc. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that doing the laundry and loading/unloading the dishwasher was something that would have made her a better mom/wife. Which circles back to my original posting about how times have changed in the past 50 years. The houses are much bigger, the possessions much more numerous, but the owners of all of this stuff have a lot less time. (Separately, I think that is why we can’t get wealthy helicopter students at our flight school, which is surrounded by $1 million houses. A pilot certificate costs less than what a lot of these folks are spending on a kitchen range and the guys, at least, nearly all say that they would love to learn to fly. It seems that our rich neighbors spend all of their time maintaining their 6000 square foot houses, their collections of SUVs and sports cars, etc. Our more typical student is a young person who rents.)
100 years ago most families at least at the upper end of the lower class had at least one domestic servant. There was more work to do: washing clothes and dishes was labor intensive. The servant usually lived in the house or apartment and the wage was low. Many things changed this: loss of manpower to the war effort (both WWI and WWII), availability of higher-paying factory jobs, reduced need with labor-saving devices, and especially the income tax which required a higher wage to earn the same amount. Google “The Servant Problem” to find plenty of material on this.
Many more women worked at that time than you might think, if you think the 1950’s picture of a stay-at-home mom was the way it had been for centuries. Women worked in factories, as servants, as clothing manufacturers, as shopkeepers, and in many other fields.
The answer is simpler than the blog entry and comments imply. In 1970, my father earned $40,000/year. In 2013 dollars, that’s equivalent to $239,722.
I think most families outside of the very high cost of living areas could afford a housekeeper at that income.
Phil,
As an ancillary question, why would anyone waste the time, effort and expense for two degrees from Harvard and never use either? I’d say the era when you were a child would lend itself to that sort of action much more than 2013 would.
Can you imagine a woman in today’s world getting two degrees from an Ivy League school then opting to stay at home with her kids in a modest home with a full time housekeeper?? Picture that scenario for a moment…
“It’s impossible to find a good secretary these days”, or so my mother used to complain. Her office assistants made her feel that she needed to vet every document they typed, to pick out spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. twenty years earlier, it was inconceivable that an office assistant could be so careless.
What she didn’t understand, I think, was that the same increasing gender equality and availability of higher education that enabled her career, also enabled the professional careers of the type of intelligent young woman who would’ve become a secretary two decades earlier.
Today’s housekeeper has many more opportunities for employment; some of these may be less physically strenuous, some may pay better, and some may offer better career prospects in the long term. It’s not _just_ the government that’s competing with upper middle class households.
“Why would anyone waste the time, effort and expense for two degrees from Harvard and never use either?”
Well, as the cabdriver told me, that Bachelor’s in Philosophy and Master’s in English Literature both seemed like a good idea at the time ….