To not understand how housewives of yesteryear could afford to stay home but being a SAHM is a lifestyle choice now?

[PeachyParisian]

Am I missing something really obvious? Or is it just a case of the cost of living rising and our standards of living increasing too? How could everyone manage to get by on just one wage?
I understand that work wasn't really an option for most women but traditionally families got by on one wage didn't they? When did that stop being possible for so many?

I don't understand this SAHM idea in the 1900-2000 years.

Personal experience
My mum / teacher
My mother in law / nurse
My paternal nan / one of first teachers in 1950s
Husbands Nan's/ one did low paid work, other was a Secretary

Before that
My great great nan helped run a co-op exchange
Others - governess, one did cleaning, one a military wife (high level) who ran large events

Etc.
Who are these stay at home mums from the past?? Just a few in the 1970s/1980s?

All my friends mums worked when I was at school, and their step mums if they had them.

After WW2, a lot of women who had been working were pushed back into the home. Bowlby et al came along to guilt-trip women who'd rather be out working into staying at home to be Proper Mothers. It was legal to pay women less than men till the Equal Pay Act of 1970. Few if any rights to maternity leave and pay. Even more expectation than today that women would do all the domestic stuff, whether or not they were in work. All contributory factors.

In other words, a lot of women who would have liked to work outside the home didn't, for a whole range of reasons.

Rox these SAHM from the past were probably the uneducated ones like my grandmothers and their mothers and so on. There is no one female in may family going back who would ever had been able to be a teacher or nurse (i consider that quite upper wc/lower mc and certainly not a luxury anyone in my family would have been able to afford). My grandmothers were in service from 14, before the children came along and then had no one to watch the children once married, so didn't work till the children were much older school age and then it was only pin money. Their husbands didn't earn much so they were not living a lifestyle choice. My mums side was lucky because they had a council house. but my dad's side lived in 2 rooms in slum housing.

I think to some extent it is all about choices within limits.

My grandmother who brought up her children in the 30s and 40s was a stay at home mum because who else would look after the children. There was no birth control so lots of children and no other options. She also worked from home making wedding cakes.

My mum had my sister in 60s and me early 80s and was a sahm while also caring for my grandmother who loved with us till she passed away when I was 8. My mum had a Saturday job when were young. Childcare and care for my grandmother would have been more expensive then my Mum doing the job.

I could probably chose to be a sahm but I don't think I will because I have trained too long to throw it away and I would earn more than the cost of childcare as long as I space out children. We and my friends who work have lots of things that my parents would never have bought dinner and lunch out, coffees, cinema trips, a lot of latest technology, weekends away, newish cars, a lot more clothes ect.

My mum was a sahm but we didn't have foreign holidays in fact many holidays of any type. Money was tight she cooked from scratch. No up to date technology all the furniture was from when they married not ever replaced. Carpets were worn out not replaced on a whim. I am too a sahm at the moment but luckily we are better off than our parents but we have cheap holidays I cook from scratch still only have a small TV our car is ancient depends how you want to live. I think it is harder now. I used to work when children were small now I have a grandchild an look after him while my daughter is at uni I will have to go back to work sometime. I think we expect more these days materially And worry if we don't have it.

My mum worked part-time from when I was 6 - and she was one of the exceptions - I can't think of many of my friends' mums who worked.

Funnily enough when I was growing up we were the only two-car family I knew of (partly because my dad had a company car) and so many women didn't drive and now I am one of the only one-car families I know of! I work from home and dh commutes by train so we only need one car.

I definitely have a smaller house than my parents had but I live fairly close to London and I grew up in Devon so house prices were a factor as my dad was employed by a national company so not on local wages. But it's interesting that when he was earning around £15K a year he was able to buy a large 4 bedroom bungalow for £45K and his previous house had been mortgage-free. That said they'd had hard times as well as my dad was unemployed and ill when I was very small which was one of the reasons my my mum went out to work.

I was having this debate with someone recently and the argument was made that the larger number of women in the workforce has in itself driven down wages, which means more women need to work to meet the costs of living, creating a vicious circle.

I don't know how true that is, and if so when it began - are women to 'blame' for wanting to work outside the home, or have most been driven to out of necessity?

Women in history have always worked and it's always been the norm apart from a brief postwar period.
We have an expectation of a standard of living now which is hard to attain without both parents working, or in some areas both parents must work just to afford the basics such as housing.
We could pay the bills just with my H's salary but we choose for me to work while son is at school for 3 days so we can afford non-essentials such as two cars, holidays, eating out, days out etc.
I like knowing that if either of us lost our jobs then we could manage (along with our income protection cover). I would feel insecure managing on one salary.

people these days get themselves in debt, usually for things they want rather than need

Expectations are higher

Not for us! DH and I earn roughly the same salary. We could not live on one salary long term, even without our car loans, to the same standard as our parents - a family summer holiday for a fortnight, detached house. Part of our reasoning for having an only child is finances.

I think it was the 80s when both partners working when they'd had kids became the norm. This bumped up prices. I expect that this is when women began to earn good salaries too.

This whole thing about women working causing "social problems" (driving up housing costs, driving down wages) reminds me of a child in my class telling me that my mother was "taking a job from a man".

"I like knowing that if either of us lost our jobs then we could manage (along with our income protection cover). I would feel insecure managing on one salary."

Us too - we could just about live off one salary but would have no savings/backup.

A lot more people worked than is assumed for a start. It was only really the middle classes that didn't
Everyone didn't have holidays every year, the latest mobile, clothes, gadget etc.
People didn't eat out loads. People just generally lived a lot more frugally.
Don't agree that housing is a major factor.

Agree that it's a myth about women not working.

Both my GMs worked FT. One had 8 children and worked as a farm labourer. The other was in a profession - my DM went to daycare in the 1940s. My great aunts all worked too, before and after kids.

People who claim women "entering" the workforce drove down wages are historically ignorant. Go to any mill or mining museum - women and children were a major part of the manufacturing workforce until fairly recently. Globalisation and the outsourcing of manufacturing are key factors in low salaries.

It must be housing and expectations on living standards plus commuting costs. Up until the 70s a fair proportion of people worked near to where they lived. A 90 minute commute would have been considered a bit bonkers but is commonplace where I live.

In my case we are getting by ok on a single salary of just 22k (plus about 2k tax credits) living in the southeast with a SAHD and my work being a bike ride away (so no travel costs).

BUT

only because we own our own home outright, thanks to DH buying in the 90s, overpaying his mortgage and then a redundancy payout covering the remainder.

We don't run a car because we live somewhere with good transport links.

We don't eat out or get takeaways or expect holidays (we've not had a holiday since 2011 but will be going away in the UK this year). We cook from a scratch (including that infamous chicken that does 12 meals - a roast dinner, a chicken pie, pie leftovers and a chicken soup for 2 adults and a toddler) because with one parent at home you've got time for that.

Because we're on a low income (especially during my maternity leave!) we cut right back and it amazes me the things shops and supermarkets stock that are unnecessary and expensive for what they are yet popular. A silly example: we only buy bars of soap. It's so cheap compared to shower gel.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with buying shower gel or ready meals or takeaways, but back in ye olden days when you could get by on a single wage these things weren't even in the shops in the first place. The expected standard of living was lower and nobody minded because there wasn't much alternative. I do think TV advertising likes to rub our noses in how lavish other people potentially live (those huuuuge kitchens in tv advertland, for example) and many people seem to think a foreign holiday is a minimum requirement for normal life.

That doesn't mean everyone can just easily drop an income earner. We can only do it because housing costs are taken from us. I would have to earn twice what I do to afford to live here if we rented, say.

It looks even more bleak for those in their twenties now.

"nothing wrong with buying shower gel or ready meals or takeaways, but back in ye olden days when you could get by on a single wage these things weren't even in the shops in the first place"

What, in the 70s? Quite a lot of my peers when I was a kid had single earner families (though both my parents worked). I can assure you that my exciting childhood lifestyle included such lavishness as shower gel, Findus Crispy Pancakes, and the occasional Chinese.

Reduction in union power. The fight for a man to be paid a 'living wage' to actually provide for a whole family, meaning that a woman only did childcare, went on over decades. The idea was to get women and children out of the hard manual labour that they did as well as, in womens' cases, hard domestic labour and childbearing.

The idea that 'wealth creators' should pay a living wage, whatever that means for each generation, has always been a huge struggle. We try to do with Twitter-shaming now what was done by brute threats and hard negotiation in the past. The living wage now seems to mean one that will allow people of any gender to pay housing costs and survive.

SAHM has always been a lifestyle choice of a sort for the very rich - my grandmothers were both SAHMs and though both would doubtless have rejected the thought that they were very rich, they certainly were. They passed on to their children the idea that working OTH if this required using childcare was not really acceptable, leaving a residue of guilt and stress, or smugness, in many cases. They also passed on the idea that women controlling the family money is somehow not OK, that the breadwinner should basically do that. hilarious Disastrous consequences have ensued in only 2/10 cases so I guess that's not a bad hit rate.

One of my GM worked all her life working up from scullery maid to housekeeper. She retired on standard state pension - no house, she had been in a tied cottage all her life.

My other grandmother's job was to throw money around, dress her children in sailor suits and boast how successful her husband was.

Both DH's grandmothers worked on the land.

At the turn of the century 4 million women worked outside the home - all professional laundry, sewing etc was done by women.

Stay at home mums in the lower middle class was an aberration between 1950 and 1975 - which coincided with the rise of TV, so what is our dominant cultural image from then?????

The standard of living was different.
Many working class women worked anyway-care of the children being covered by Aunts and Grandmothers.
Housework was a full time job-no washing machines, fridges, freezers.Coal fires to be cleaned and laid.
Corner shops rather than supermarkets-shopping almost daily.
It all took a lot of time-not exactly a lifestyle choice.

When labour saving devices came in in the 1960s more women started working outside the home., then-in a circular fashion-it started to require two wages to cover housing costs, bills etc.

Government policies now presume two working parents assessed as individuals.
Until recently they assumed a male breadwinner and a female who, if she worked, was a secondary earner.
Assessments treated them as a couple and family unit.

Everything has changed-in some respects better, in other respects worse.

working class women/mothers have always worked.

My mother was a SAHM and later on worked PT. My father's income supported us and we had a large house and garden/private school etc. but daily life wasn't nearly as comfortable as we expect today.

Expectations of standards of living have risen, along with house prices.

When I was growing up in the 70s we had one old-ish car (for which my parents didn't need to buy expensive car seats and which my Dad could fix at home if it went wrong), we mostly wore hand-me-downs, ate home-grown fruit and veg, played outside in the street instead of going on days out, went on camping holidays. My parents house was furnished with random bits of furniture given to them when they got married. They had the same carpets, curtains, wallpaper, etc. for 40 years. They still have the original bathroom suite and some of the original kitchen cupboards - now over 50 years old. On the occasions when they went out (usually to a dinner party at someone's house, not to a restaurant) there was a local baby-sitting circle so childcare was free.

And although my mum was sort-of a SAHM, she taught an evening class when my Dad got home from work, did occasional days/weeks of supply work (teacher), and was an Avon lady until she went back into teaching full-time once us children were all at school.

Cost of housing and different standards. I live in the South Wales Valleys where housing us still relatively cheap but wages are comparatively low. I enjoy a certain standard of living which previous generations of my family could never have .

My grandfather was a coal miner. Wages down the mines were tiny but you were expected to cope. My gp's had 5 children and lived in a three bedroom house. They also rented out the front living room to my aunty, her husband and their son. They were all dirt poor, and my grandmother worked her socks off to make sure each child was spotlessly clean and well fed.

I'd rather be in work given those choices.

I don't think they could afford it .

Both of my grandmothers worked all the way through to retirement age and so has my mum. I'm the first SAHM in my family as far as I can tell. I know my great grandmother was a teacher but I don't know if she worked while her children were young.

The difference between me and my mum is that I got my kids in my late thirties by which time I had been working in a well paid job for almost 20 years so I had money and savings behind me and had owned property since my early 20's.

My mum had me when she was 21 and my dad was 22. They hadn't built up a careers or savings and really struggled financially. So even though property was so much cheaper they still couldn't afford to live on one income.

I definitely have it easier financially and I have choices that my mum and grandparents didn't have.

Isn't sahm another thing the baby boomers got? Mum and mil were sahms but non of the great grandmothers were!