*Edited umpty times. I apologize if it makes no sense now. I had to pull out the quotes, move the link, do all sorts of stuff. Pain in the ass.
Go read it if you're interested. The glass ceiling does indeed begin at home. Homeward Bound
It was an adjustment as I eased back into the work force after the second offspring. My husband had gotten soft with me at home, but he rallied. He'd had me home almost full time for almost 6 years while I finished my degree and did a little part time stuff here and there. It was a shock to his system to have to think about where clean socks came from, but he knew how to make them appear, and soon they appeared without any need for debate over whose job it was. Other couples we knew were going through the same thing. Those capable of working as a team made it work, the others I suspect would have had issues anyway.
I never felt guilty for working, and I don't think too many of my peers did either. But then, we were old enough to have watched what our mothers went through.
I watched my mother's generation - a herd of nice 50s brides, raised to believe that marriage and family were the ultimate fulfillment - go running to the shelter of their Mother's Little Helpers past 40. We actually had a family physician in town whose name was passed around the carpool lane at my school - he'd write a script for Valium at the drop of a hat. We were kids, but we knew what was going on.
Several of the moms became alcoholics, others suffered from depression. Husbands died, husbands left. Women moved back in with their parents after losing the house. I came by my attitude about being able to take care of myself from being an observant teenager in Perfect Suburbia. I knew from an early age that it was not as pretty as it looked from the outside.
The most interesting part of this article, to me, was the number of well-educated (MBA!) brides she interviewed who wanted to quit work BEFORE the babies came, and never intended to go back.
The thing that irritates me about this is the peer pressure, the media pressure, the gazillion stories about how women are "leaving the workforce in droves" (I don't see it happening, but whatever, if a few rich girls make a "drove" I guess that's a drove) causes a societal ripple effect. Women who really can't afford to stay home feel they should be doing it, because if these rich, highly educated women are doing it, the workplace must be a bad place. "If they had all those advantages and they couldn't do it, then nobody can!" Nonsense. They opted out of working because they could. It's the women who opt out when they can't afford to that worry me - the ones I've met who brag about living on a shoestring (no savings, one old car, pinching every penny) to do it that concern me. They're one paycheck, one sick husband, one lost job from disaster.
I think it's human nature to pick a life of ease over a life of busting one's ass (come on, winning Lotto ticket!) but privileged women have the chance to make it a reality. Men don't get that choice. A man who was educated and capable of working but planned to quit work and let his wife support him forever would be berated as a Loser.
Great article. I don't know why quotes won't work with my template. I also apologize to those who already left comments, because when I tried to fix the post the comments disappeared. Heavy Sigh....
I've heard of the book, haven't read it. I can make an observation about the "wife can go back to work to make up lost income" theory - it doesn't work in reality. If he's making $100,000 a year and they are living on his income, and she's been at home for 10+ years, and he gets sick/dies/or, far more commonly, leaves, she's not going to go back into the work force and make up his income. Maybe, if she's lucky and college educated, she'll start out at a third of it. Kiss the house goodbye.
ReplyDeleteMany of the bankruptcies in this country have little to do with over-extending on credit. A breadwinner's serious illness is responsible for many financial disasters.
My own life experience of course colors my opinion on this. It'd be easy to think "Oh, that happened to you so that's why you see everything this way, it'll never happen to me!" but you just never know. A year or so after my husband died, a former co-worker's husband died unexpectedly after "routine" surgery. He was 42. They had 5 year old twins. She'd kept working, though she could have stayed home, and it saved her from having to move in with her parents.
I've worked with enough women who had to come back into the work force after life had dealt them a tough blow, I know how hard they struggled financially. Too many women spend their "golden years" in poverty after the death of a spouse or a divorce.
During my husband's illness it gave him a great deal of comfort to know that I would be okay, that I earned a good enough, though hardly lavish, income, that everything he'd worked so hard for would not be lost due to his cancer. We did spend all our savings, but I kept the house. I kept our daughter in college. That meant a lot to him, believe me.
So, yeah, I'm pretty militant about women's need to think coldly about what they would do and how they would live on their own. The odds are they'll have to at some point in their lives. Fluffy stories about Buffy the MBA's desire to go tend home and hearth distort a lot of women's perspective about what is really best for their own children's security and future.
I work for a company that used to specialize in first time homebuyer homes. We can't afford to do it anymore, the land prices and materials costs have priced entry-level buyers out of the market. Some people will say "move" but you have to live where the jobs are, and even an hour out of Orlando now will run you $200,000, and the schools are mediocre to awful. I can give a lot of reasons why house prices have escalated lately, and working women aren't even in the top 100! I wish I had the answer, it's a mess. We can't turn back the clock to Leave It to Beaverland, even if we actually wanted to.
ReplyDeleteLove this discussion...just thought I would interject that the #1 cause of bankruptcy in the US is MEDICAL EXPENSES! In a country where 45 MILLION go uninsured any illness can cause finacial ruin, it doesn't have to be catastrophic!
ReplyDeleteAlso, did you know that if you become disabled you must wait TWO YEARS before you see one dime of SSI or Medicare...why? cause out illustrious govenment is playing the odds that you'll DIE before you collect any benefits! And in that situation enormous debt because of "simple" (vs. catastrophic) illness is almost a certainty!
You betcha I know that, baby! If I hadn't had a good corporate job when my husband's employer-provided benefits ran out, we'd have run out of money fast and lost the house trying to keep him in COBRA along with the other expenses. I was able to roll him onto my plan without interruption. He was disabled per SSI, he got disability immediately (Stage 4 renal cancer is an instant full disability) but Medicare still has a 2 year wait. The government is playing the odds, it's cheaper to let people die. Even with good insurance the costs eat you up (I had to put one of his MRIs on my Visa card). So yeah, I'm kind of sensitive about this issue, I've seen too many people go under and would have myself if I'd decided to be Holly Homemaker on my hubby's almost six figure income. I could have done it, but damn, everything we'd ever worked for would have been sucked away by his illness, and that would have killed him even faster. You know how it is, I saw on your blog that you're an oncology nurse. Most people haven't a clue until they get hit by the train. I didn't.
ReplyDelete$200,000 sounds like a bargain house, but in the counties with the $200k houses the median household income is less than $35k. The average family can't afford a house. I'm in one of the "expensive" counties by FL standards, with the good schools (the ones that actually know what an AP class is) and our median household income might be $45K, but our median house price is above $250K. My house is 1600 square feet and has a postage stamp yard, but it's well over $250K now. I couldn't afford to buy this house today. It's a proportionate problem nationwide - our houses sound cheap, but that's only because our salaries are so damn low. If the house is a bargain it's because nobody can find work there.
ReplyDeleteThe health insurance issue is just horrendous. I'm lucky, again, that my employer still covers me 100% with a really good PPO plan (UHC), but if I had kids to insure it'd kill me to do it. My daughter is on her own private plan now, it was much cheaper for her to go that route than to be on mine. I don't know how we expect young families to survive - and then, to wrench it back to my original rant, how do we expect them to do it AND inflict this anecdotal "evidence" of "women returning to the home" "in droves?" It creates unrealistic pressure and can actually put women's financial security and futures in jeopardy. The numbers don't add up, so to do it, a lot of women aren't LOOKING at the numbers.
I stand corrected, median household income in my county is a smidge under $50K.
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