to think dual person 'full time' worker family households should never have become the norm?

[workingdilemma]

Was thinking about the other thread talking about tax credits etc.

Around 40 years ago, as a society we'd reached a point where one person working in a household was enough to support a young family.

Now we've ended up where it's pretty much required to have both working full time to be able to afford the same lifestyle - mainly due to the insane 'cost' of housing.

It would have been far better to have had both people in a couple working perhaps part time to allow engagement with the world of work, and also a healthier work/life balance.

Why did we end up like this? Was it all an orchestrated plan to keep the debt cycle going - after all, you can lend on two incomes now for a mortgage. Lovely jubbly for the debt pushers. Is that why the banks and governments encourage this?

I dunno, but I do yearn for a better way to deal with the problems we're having now then everyone demonising each other.

I think, namechange, you need to decide whether you think SAHP are working or not - one minute you say it's hard work to look after children, the next you start talking about the modern phenomenon of not working!

Maybe you have to earn enough to pay tax to count as a WOHP? In which case, there are probably an awful lot of people who think they are working very hard running their own business from home and earning money for the family and thus not having time to play much with the kids, but who are actually SAHP.

Or if anything that involves being paid money, however little, counts as work, then maybe we've never had so few SAHP.

Also: for centuries, if not millennia, human beings have been looking for ways to make their lives easier, so that they can have more leisure time to do what they want. Yet it seems that our desire to make a profit out of each other is resulting in us all working really hard to try and convince each other to buy each others' tat.

And what's more, there is little or no connection between the utility of something and its monetary value. The more frivolous, often, the more valuable. You could say the same about paid work - there's very little connection between the utility of what someone does and the amount they get paid for it. The less useful you are, often, the more you can earn. You can't get more man-made than that!

The only time that I ever had a cleaner was when I was a SAHM with very small children. I didn't need it when I was back at work and the children were older.

I think that a lot of men are coming around to the idea that you don't want to live to work. I know several. One who does a job share so that he can do a lot of walking and climbing, one who can earn enough by working a few evening shifts, one who works 4 days so he can have a day to devote to writing and one who takes on contracts and then has some weeks off. Those are just off the top of my head- I could come up with more. They are all graduates.
Not everyone wants to work all hours and get to the top of the ladder.

I am still rather intrigued as to why all the good points can be put forward for a man being a postman and yet you would be derided on here if you were a woman and chose to be a TA, or similar job (post woman) even when it gives you all the plus points put forward for being a postman.

I haven't said women shouldn't be post men. In fact it was brave women taking "male" jobs and women who brought all those local council equal pay cases who paved the way for ensuring the lower paid female and male jobs for local councils and the like were paid the same for equivalent work. It was a huge thing for equality for lots of women (most women and men don't earn much so it tends to be moves like that that affect the low paid which are important). (And let us not forget the male and female lawyers who made that happen too - credit where credit is due and those people who bravely brought in the equal pay laws in 1970). Women have come a long way but they do throw it away so often and make things hard for other women when in couple after couple it is the woman at home and not the man. if it were equal I would have no complaints.

It is your political duty to earn more than your husband.

It is not your political duty to earn more than your husband. Just imagine refusing to marry/have children with someone you love because they earn more than you; or choosing a career solely on the basis of how much it pays, however much you loathe it, just so as to ensure you can have the widest possible choice of future mates.

So far as I'm concerned, it is my duty to do the best by myself and my family that I can in my personal circumstances. One of my dbs was a SAHP for the first 6 years of his ds's life, while his dw worked full time. Currently, she is working part time and he is working full time, so the "main breadwinner" has swapped over, because that just happened to be the way it worked best in their particular circumstances. At some point she may want or need to work full time again, or he might want or need to work part time - whatever suits their needs. Artificial arrangements contrary to the actual facts of the situation, just for the sake of politics, are ridiculous.

rabbit

I don't need to decide whether I think SAHP is work or not - you have missed what I meant by leisure.

I was referring to the 1970s "housewife" who had a "daily" and whos life consisted of Tupperware parties and valium- a kind of enforced leisure which made my mother very unhappy.

Looking after small children is hard work, who ever does it .
Its up to individual families/parents to decide who does what and what one family needs is different to another.

namechange - were there really that many 1970s housewives who had lives like that?? I don't remember them from my childhood. Surely they were very wealthy, as well as bored? And bored, wealthy women have existed for millennia, because they were a status symbol for their husbands.

Lotus

Some of us couldn't give a stuff about political duty and when finding a partner or long term husband happiness is the key.
Very unromantic and back in the dark ages to look for a partner in terms of social status, earning power,etc.

I can only go on the experience of my mothers social group(MC) but it is well documented elsewhere.
These women had "help" in the form of either alcohol or valium.
I only discovered this age 13 when my mother begged me to help her get off the valium and she told me about her friends and aquaintances who had recommended their "lovely GP" who prescribed it for "nerves"

I do get the argument that too many men in positions of power means they can oppress women. However, fighting this by telling women they must adopt the same unpleasant attitudes to work formerly done by women as the most sexist of men, and therefore behave like abusers obsessed with power and control themselves, doesn't seem healthy to me and doesn't sound as though it will improve peoples' lives one iota - it just means different abusers doing the abuse, and different people being abused. Women are every bit as capable of being unpleasant, judgemental and abusive as men. A greater respect for and understanding of different roles would be more useful. It might also make more men interested in trying out different roles! It's not as if women have done a very good job of encouraging men to be more involved - it tends to be prefaced in a really sulky way, complaining that men aren't helping much, or aren't helping effectively, or are creating more rather than less work with their clumsy attempts at "helping", rather than in a way that might make them think they are missing out on something.

namechange - alcoholism in women is going through the roof - it was much lower in the 1970s, not just because women didn't seek help, as there is more cirrhosis around these days to prove it. As for Valium - doctors only don't prescribe that to women now because they know how addictive it is. They prescribe Prozac quite happily to working and non-working women, though, who can't cope with their nerves. Going out to paid work is not a universal panacea to all our problems.

I think the difference is that women didn't have the choice to work. There were probably very many women who were very happy with their lot in the 70's, but clearly plenty weren't.

Well, exactly - why would replacing one type of lack of choice with another be an improvement? A fair bit of the lack of choice in the 1970s was inflicted by women on women, though, as they felt the need to "keep up appearances." This wasn't always inflicted on them by men not letting them get jobs - some women considered some jobs to be beneath them if they were from a certain social class, even if those jobs might have brought them some enjoyment or sense of purpose. It was prior to the 1970s that women, for example, had to stop working once they married or had children. I don't think it was still the case that teachers or nurses had to give up their careers the minute they married or had children, was it?

It was my grandmother who had to give up teaching when she had children... long before the 1970s and Valium.

I don't think equal opportunities legislation came in till 1978.

Equal Opportunities legislation and having to give up teaching when you have children are two different things - they don't have to overlap...

Nope 1975.

1975 for EO legislation, or 1975 before there were any women teachers in the profession who had children?

1975 when it became illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex or marital status. I think it was also pretty normal to expect a woman to leave her job on marriage - they could still work but there was nothing to stop you sacking them.

1975 is actually longer ago than I thought would have been the case re. Equal Opportunities legislation. It seems to me, therefore, that it isn't at all accurate to pinpoint the 1970s as the brief era of women being expected to stay at home, as clearly that was the end of the era! Women being expected to stay in the home and not work for money outside it had been going on for middle class and upper class women for centuries before that, surely?

I don't think people are bringing up the 1970's because it was the only time that women were expected to stay at home - it is just an era that is in living memory for people posting/their parents.

Whatever era is being discussed, not being able to get a job on the basis of your sex rather than your skills is not a good thing.

Also, it wasnt as though the sex discrimination act happened and suddenly sexism and discrimination was abolished.

I think the relevance of the 70's is that equal opportunities hadn't really kicked in, but the growth of supermarkets, car ownership and possession of washing machines and fridges meant that being a housewife (as opposed to looking after children) was no longer a full time job.

Fair enough, although actually I think some people have been referring to the recent past on the basis that they don't believe that it was the norm for women to stay in the home and "not work" until the recent past, whereas I think it was the norm for a great many middle and upper class women in the longer ago past to have more leisure inflicted upon them than they actually desired! These days, the pendulum appears to be swinging towards those who think they are having more work inflicted upon them than they desire!! So the complaint is still about lack of choice and lack of freedom.