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.

HeadDreamer - I've lived in this house for nearly 6 years, and I am yet to clean my front step. Housework was more labour intensive, and there were also higher expectations.

Apologies - i shouldn't have fed those who want to derail the reality of life for todays young families and instead want to harp on about how chicken was a luxury.

Especially as I'd go vegan, sack off the dishwasher and holiday in Margate (no offence to Margate) for the rest of my days for a bloody chance at affordable housing costs and flexible working conditions for everyone.

Salaries have not risen with prices, entire industries have been outsourced overseas (a profitable but deeply cynical move) or become obsolete.

And yet the employment rate is the highest it's been since records began in 1971. You may have noticed that there are quite a few new occupations involving these computer thingies, for example.

flexible working conditions for everyone.

Yeah, because if one thing characterises the 1970s, it was "flexible working conditions for everyone". Maternity leave, paternity leave, a right to part time work, a right to flexible working; all these and more are things that the 1970s didn't have.

Why is it that we always end up back at this being about women in work? Not once in my op did i mention gender - and as many other have said, this is about society valuing a balanced life for all members of the family unit

I had a 1970s childhood, and although my DM and all her friends worked, it was not in high paying jobs, but just small part time jobs and doing peoples sewing etc, so not contributing to mortgage. My DMs salary was never included in mortgage applications.

I don't really agree that we spend more now on gadgets. When I was growing up, although we were not at all wealthy we had a TV, various radios, telephone, cassette players and a hi fi system. These were very expensive relative to what things cost today. And my DPs had a large record collection too, which were expensive.

"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. "
IMO this period was a complete anomaly to the longer view. For working class families, both parents would have been working full-time. And so would the older children.

Strange post. If you look back in most points in history, both partners tended to work. Certainly that was the norm in many industrial working class Victorian families. Surely one partner not working was a very middle class preserve? Even if you look back in post-Roman times, surely most family members, including children, had jobs in agriculture, or looking after animals, etc..

I totally agree with those saying it was never the norm for one parent to be able to stay at home, except in rich families. Certainly my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, every adult in my family I am aware of going back three generations, everyone has worked. During the war most mothers worked. I don't know when this time was, that the OP is referring to, when it was unusual for both parents to work.

Snap WhereYouLeftIt!

I appreciate i mentioned it in the op - but the past is the past. This is about progression and the future. I never said the 70s was a utopia. We know have the tech to improve our lives. So why on earth can't we make better use of it AND have more tine for family.

Or should all the time saved on housework be spent at work? Because it appears that seems to be the opinion of some.

I absolutely agree op, i don't think it's entirely healthy for a household to have to run with 2 full time workers. Something has to give somewhere. It's different when it's done out of love for a career but necessity, no.

Why is it that we always end up back at this being about women in work

Because you'd have to be incredibly naive to think its not about that? How many men are sahd's? And how many would want to be?

If you think there is some kind of magic wand to make everyone want to work part time, or make such a set up remotely practical anyway, you really don't even know what you are arguing about here. Of course its about women going out to work!
Of course women always did work on the whole anyway, it was a shortlived and recent phenomena that so many didn't, for a while.

Because while it's lovely to look back at Thr past wi rose tinted glasses and think how wonderful it must have been in actuality the problems and issues for women were what shaped the choices made in that generation as in each one previous?

At least we have legislation now which makes an attempt to offer balance.

I do get what you're saying. But having th choice to feel aggrieved about not having Thr choice you would like to make is actually something most families coming before you didn't have and in itself a luxury whether you realise that or not.

Yes, it's one of the governments ways to make gdp (this them) look good.

Nothing to do with the Government, at least not much and not the present government.

DinosaursRoar is right: In the early Seventies the mortgage lenders gave way to pressure to take into account both incomes when both of a couple were working. That generation of home owners, who had bought on the strength of one income, saw their equity increase phenomenally; and of course one income couples (and singletons) could not compete. And the rest is history. But it's important to be clear that that change in the early Seventies was seen as an important step in the advance to gender equality.

It's also the case - and I speak from experience - that in the Fifties and Sixties many foods which are now common were an expensive luxury, above all chicken. Containerisation has made imported goods relatively cheaper - and cost jobs in the docks; but every change in technology costs jobs. Twenty years ago there were scores of thousands of people, mostly women, working in photo-processing labs - then along came the digital camera, and you and I bought one, and where are those labs now? That is an extreme case of globalisation: jobs transferred from a labour intensive economy where a wage was paid (even if not a great one) to a capital-intensive no-wage economy - you and me at our computers.

Life is change, isn't it?

And we're back to chicken.

Because I want us to live, not exist. My salary pays for the extras. I also do it as 'future proofing'. If DH and I divorced I could support myself and the DCs quite easily if he chose not to contribute to their upkeep.

If people are content on one wage, good for them. I am not.

There's a difference between "married women have always worked" and "married women have always worked outside the home." Reading a memoir of growing up in London in Edwardian times in a very poor neighbourhood where all the men worked on the docks, the women there weren't working outside the home, for the most part. They did things like take in sewing or washing or piece work of various sorts, or they did part time things like charring, or they didn't work for wages at all. Or they worked in a family business like a shop. Things where they could keep an eye on the children as well. Most unmarried women were employed as domestic servants, and they had to leave when they got married because their employers didn't want married women working for them - because they got pregnant. There was no birth control, and most babies were breastfed, and how was that supposed to fit in around outside work? The key to getting married women working outside the home was access to reasonably reliable birth control.

It's a really difficult issue.

I believe women need to work - I think it's important for women and also for society as a whole. BUT - I think it's very difficult to balance family life with full time work.

I am a lone parent and find it tricky, and it's actually become more difficult since my child started school. I feel very torn - even with good child care and a cleaner, I am really struggling.

This is all hogwash though isn't it. I didn't have a kid til I was 39. So up til then we were a two person working household. Prior to meeting DP I was, like millions of people, a single working household.

Even families with kids won't always need childcare. No adult needs to spend their working life from 18 to retirement providing childcare or household support.

DP and I both work full time. It's absolutely fine. Gets easier each year as our kid gets bigger and requires less wrestling.

You aren't born a mother of small children. You only spend a small chunk if any of your life up to your elbows in nappies and fish fingers. So there's no need to make sure that a single income can support a family long term.

Most people don't have small children, at any given time.

But OP - only a certain type of family could be sustained by only one parent working in the late 60s/early 70s, it was middle class. And that one parent had to be the man if you wanted a mortgage.

The family 'balance' didn't involve dads being particularly 'hands on' with the DCs.

I'm a SAHM, we can afford this as DH has a job that's similar to the sort his Dad had that pays a similar level. We've got a slightly smaller house than they had at this stage, but not massively different.

The sorts of jobs being done by the families who really can't cope on just one wage as the sorts of families where in the 60s/70s, the woman would probably be working as well (albeit possibly not full time or bringing in an equal amount).

YANBU at all. I think about this often.

And please don't compare the middle class, wealthy lifestyles of the 60s/70s with the upper working class lifestyles of now. Compare like with like. If you go into any 'commuter belt' town full of bankers, you'll find an army of SAHMs who have lifestyle rather reminicent of Margo Leadbetter in the Good Life. It is not the case for people like that have to have both parents working now, some choose to, that's a different issue and lovely that it's a choice now.

Staying on the TV theme, look at the early episode of Corronation Street, and they had a high percentage of the woman characters working in some form.

Wading further on, if DH didn't put in the 60hrs plus a week he wouldn't be considered to be doing his job and wouldn't get anything done amongst the meetings and email reading. I somehow manage to do the std 40hr week, well thankfully it was 44/36 biweekly with every 2nd Friday off to catch up with errands. That is quite a good system, although DH never takes his off Friday off.

We have zero help as live away from family and just get on with it as many millions do. Neither of us nor anyone in our industry could do our jobs part time, there are schedules to be met. They'd just get in someone else who'd work the hours needed to deliver the project on time.

In the 1970s, a huge proportion of jobs for women were secretarial. When I started work in the mid 1980s, there were still dictation pools in some businesses, where you picked up the phone, dictated your letter, and it arrived nicely typed a few hours later. There were filing jobs, involving metaphorically feeding and watering vast empires of filing cabinets and, for the sophisticated, microfiche. Those jobs had not been done by men since before the war, and ditto primary and pre-primary school teaching, nursing, cooking, cleaning, large parts of factory work (for unequal money, as the film about the Dagenham strike records), someone's mentioned photo processing and I guess a lot of people here are too young to remember Grunwick, etc, etc. Women worked, and then worked very hard in the house in a world before universal washing machines, fridges and vacuum cleaners.

It's just that there was a small middle-class niche in which, if your husband (and it was a husband) was a teacher (paid more than women), a doctor (paid more than women, and preferentially admitted to medical school) or bank manager (paid more than women), they could afford a house, a car, a mother's help and a holiday once a year.

It is rose tinted hindsight to believe that there was ever a time when a significant proportion of the population spent their children's early years at home dangling their child on their knee and singing The Wheels on the Bus.