The Steinem Revolution

Commentary

Gloria Steinem, who recently died, has been the subject of a stream of tributes in all the best journalistic venues. I’ve read a few but they are all the same. She was the voice of Second Wave feminism who forged a new path for adult women to leave the home and root themselves in professional life alongside men, thus becoming their equals. They say she led this movement and made her mark in history.

Get a paying job. This was her mantra. She pitched it as liberation. Any man in the workplace could have explained otherwise. For most men working in an office, it is what we do to make money to support the household. There is nothing glamorous and thrilling about the commute, office politics, long days and high pressure, meetings with peacocking colleagues, and dealing with the boss. We do it because the bills have to be paid.

Then comes the paycheck. A third of it is lost in taxes, fees, insurance, and forward payments on programs in which no living person asked to participate. You work harder and cultivate ambition to get ahead but learn quickly that it’s a dog-eat-dog world. You observe nepotism, brown-nosing, injustice, poor hiring choices, and shabby management all around. When HR came along, everything terrible about the workplace was entrenched and worsened.

Whatever you want to call this, it is not liberation. Now, to be sure, there is virtue, satisfaction, fulfillment, and a sense of purpose that comes with all work, and that is true whether you are punching buttons at an office, scrubbing stains from laundry, or weeding a garden. My point is simply that there is nothing about office culture or the paycheck as such that confers on work a unique valor. That is available to you in everything you do.

Steinem, however, was there to argue that women only achieve their highest potential by replicating the professional path that men take with offices and remuneration—a strangely materialist argument that reduces life purpose to pay stubs. Women, she said, should welcome conscription into office culture as a path out from the drudgery of motherhood and homemaking.

The government certainly benefited from this spin. They drafted millions into the role of taxpayer while Steinem played the role of the philosophers and priests of old, a voice to provide the rationale, a pitch of something obviously regrettable as actually something wonderful.

How significant was the change in American culture that she shepherded? It was massive. It was a turning point, not so much in the role of women (who could always take a job; nothing ever stopped this) but in the status of what sustains the household itself. One income stream was a great achievement of American prosperity. It was secure and a point of national pride coming out of the Second World War.

Over the subsequent decades, this model fell apart. When it became more common than not for a household with young or school-age children to have two income streams rather than one was only in 1985. This followed the great inflation of the late 1970s that gutted U.S. capital stock, reduced the real value of salaries and savings, and conscripted women into the workforce to make up the difference.

In 1950, the workforce participation rate of women from households with school-age children was 12 percent. A decade later, it was 19 percent, a significant but not huge change. But by 1970, it had grown to 30 percent. The dramatic shift came in the 1980s such that by 1990, fully 58 percent of households with school-age children had put the wife to work just to keep up.

The difference is more extreme if we isolate data reporting for mothers with children aged 6–17 only, so in school most of the time. In 1950, only 28 percent of women in this category held jobs outside the home. By 1990, this number was 70 percent.

This shift changed everything. Children began to occupy a much lower realm of priority for the household while hiring out professional childcare became the norm. Household tasks from cleaning to laundry to entertaining were relegated to nights and weekends at best, which further cut into family time. The divorce rate soared, of course, and the domestic arts languished and became nearly a relic.

Frenzy and anxiety replaced domestic bliss. Economically, households with two incomes were better off than they might otherwise have been but the cost was gigantic. As time went on, the two incomes and the loss of household-centered life brought about the same standard of living that a single income purchased decades earlier.

This was the biggest change in the economics of the American household on record and a giant shift in the place of children, family, and community stability. After all, with women now drafted into work, there was less time for volunteering, cultivation of civic societies, and the fostering of community feeling. Suddenly everything and everybody was slaving away for wages and salaries.

You would think that economists would sound the alarm. But the methodologies of their models did not capture the change. Instead of looking at the number of household hours it took to create a unified income stream, they looked mostly at per capita income and overall household income, both of which were rising. In reality and beneath this superficial reporting, we could see that the two-income trap was eating away at the American dream.

The shift from one pattern to the other created grave disappointment, the rise of emotional damage, vast disgruntlement among both men and women, and enormous cultural decay and mental fatigue. Again, government was not unhappy with having recruited millions of new taxpayers who were told that their new plight was a form of freedom heretofore unavailable to women.

The current state of the household has about two-thirds with two income streams. Those who refused this rat race tend toward a divergence: either the very rich or the poor who refused to comply with the new norms.

To be sure, remote work has helped this problem somewhat by allowing many women and men to work out of the home whenever possible. That said, the pattern had been broken. You can see the relics of the past at estate sales, thrift stores, and junk shops which are overflowing with china, crystals, and elegant accoutrements of a decorous domestic life available at bargain prices.

This change has even affected the kind of furnishing that exists in households. The heavy, multigenerational cabinetry and shelving of the past has been replaced by cheap and throw-away utility items that are easily moved from one place to another or simply thrown out as one or another spouse is called to a new city for work.

In short, this shift amounted to an economic and cultural disaster. There are two great myths associated with this change. Number one, it was never a choice for most people. It was a necessity to keep climbing the ladder for rising income and social ascendency. Number two, it was never liberation; it was a new form of entrapment that made the old pattern feel like a luxury.

Gloria Steinem, who spoke affectionately of her time working with the Central Intelligence Agency (“The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent, and honorable”), was the person tagged to put the feminist gloss on the shift. Based on the tsunami of hagiographic obituaries, the scheme clearly worked. But at least now, you know the truth.

I’m looking at the new trends in work demographics and find plenty of evidence that a rollback is occurring. The Steinem Revolution did not turn out as promised and married couples today are working toward alternatives. Just one data point: in 1970, there were 13,000 homeschooled children whereas there are 3.4 million or 6.3 percent of the school-age population.

Here we find what is surely the most rewarding and wonderful line of work one can ever have in a well-lived life: raising and teaching the next generation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.