Andrew J. Cherlin - Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America

AMERICAN SOCIETY HAS now experienced the rise and fall of a distinctive kind of home life: the working-class family. It originated in the early 1800s when the industrialization of the American economy began, and it accelerated later in the century as the growing number of manufacturing jobs attracted millions of migrants from Europe and rural America. It centered on marriage and was, as historians and social scientists like to say, a deeply gendered form of family life. Husbands were expected to take factory jobs and to work full-timewhich in the nineteenth century usually meant ten or twelve hours a day, six days a weekthroughout adulthood. Wives were expected to focus on the home, managing a meager budget and meeting the day-to-day needs of husbands and children at a time when family sizes were larger andwith no gas, no electricity, no home appliances, no telephone, and often no running water or indoor plumbinghousework was far more arduous than today. Working-class wives also made important contributions to the family income in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by earning money at home. They took in boardersunrelated individuals who paid to live in their home or just to eat meals with themor did piecework such as assembling hats or shoes. Occasionally, they even worked for wages outside the home. Sons were expected to take jobs at an early agetwelve or fourteen before compulsory school attendance laws raised the age to sixteenand to turn over their wages to their parents. Daughters were expected to either work for wages or help their mothers at home.

The fortunes of the working-class family crested during the thirty-year period that followed World War II, when incomes rose sharply and prosperity spread more broadly than ever before. The average manufacturing wage more than doubled in purchasing power from 1950 to 1970, allowing,

To be sure, the male-breadwinner family was a lesser part of the lives of African American families than it was among whites. The cultural ideal of the homemaker who devoted herself exclusively to household work and child care never really applied to African American women. Rather, they had always been expected to work outside the home: first in the fields as slaves, then as sharecroppers indebted to their landlords, then as domestic servants and washerwomen to white households. Moreover, marriage rates had long been lower for African Americans than for whites, and African American men had not been allowed to share fully in the wage gains that accrued to white men; manufacturing and crafts unions for the most part excluded them. Factory owners hired African American men for the least desirable jobs, if at all. This situation began to change after World War II, when the ranks of African American manufacturing workers rose markedly and African American women started to move out of domestic service and into clerical, sales, and service jobs. In 1960 about 45 percent of African American women with children were both married and not working outside the home. That was less than the 79 percent figure for comparable white women, but still a substantial change. And for both African

At midcentury, social observers thought the good times would last indefinitelythat we had reached the end of history and with it, the highest form of family life. Influential sociologists such as Talcott Parsons argued that the male-breadwinner family was well suited to an industrial society: since only the husband had a job, and since occupational success was his goal, the family could easily move from place to place as the husband followed the needs of the labor market. But after the Arab members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries initiated an oil embargo in 1973, the economy began a prolonged slump and the postwar boom came to an end. In the 1980s and afterward, many of the manufacturing jobs that had sustained the working-class family moved to overseas factories or were computerized, and as the economy was transformed working-class young adults struggled to sustain the male-breadwinner marriage. Increasing numbers of working-class wives entered the labor force, usually part-time while their children were young and full-time when they were older; unlike some of their middle-class counterparts, they worked more for the money than for personal satisfaction.

Yet even had the economy remained strong, it is likely that the working-class version of the male-breadwinner family would have eventually declined. It faced internal contradictions that the prosperity and optimism of the postwar years hid. For one thing, there was much less for the full-time homemaker to do. Even Parsons recognized that the role of the housewife has declined in importance to the point where it scarcely approaches a full-time occupation for a vigorous person. Fertility had fallen from the six or seven children that women bore in the early 1800s to the four-child family in the late 1800s, to the three-child family at the peak of the 1950s baby boom. Births fell further after the 1950s as parents realized that the best family strategy was to have fewer children and to invest more time and resources in each of them. Modern utilities and conveniences such as electrically powered washers, dryers, stoves, refrigerators, and vacuum cleaners all became available on a mass scale for the first time and made keeping house more efficient. Granted, a consumer culture invented more work for the housewifeever-cleaner homes and ever more elaborately prepared mealsbut the long-term trend was to diminish the housewifes role.