When Wives went to Work, The Market just soaked up The Extra Income

Double Income

When men alone went out to work, families just managed to survive. Now women also go out to work, everyone thought families would be better off. But market forces have simply soaked up their extra income and deposited it as extra profit into the laps of the favoured few, leaving families still barely able to make ends meet.

A generation ago it was not the norm for women to go out to work. The whole economy was geared to the single-income family. Market forces kept prices just affordable. Now it is the norm for women to go out to work; to have a job or a career. Families thought they would be better off. But market forces simply drove up prices to soak up their extra spending power. This was perhaps most notoriously manifested in house prices. It is generally impossible nowadays for a young couple to buy a house unless they both stay at work for quite a number of their formative years of marriage.

Financial Gain: Social Loss

There is also strong social and peer pressure for young mothers to get back to work as quickly as possible after having their children. My local Training & Enterprise Council has taken on some sort of self-appointed mission to encourage women back to work as soon as possible after having children. As a result, children are farmed out and bussed around to support this work-style. Parenthood now seems to have been passed, like everything else, into the commercial sector. The material rewards of double income families certainly have a superficial attractiveness, but the family itself has become a sociological non-entity.

The One-Income Losers

However they are not the ones with a problem - at least not an economic one. The losers in this retrograde step in socio-economic development are the families where only one marriage partner is able to work. How are they supposed to fare in a market geared to a double-income norm? If one partner of a double-income marriage loses their job - so what? They have to scale down a bit. But what if the sole capable breadwinner of a family becomes unemployed as in my case? Of course! I should have remembered! You give us state welfare! What on earth are we complaining about? After all, it's almost a sixth of what Mr & Mrs (double-income) Average get and almost a twelfth of what an average professional couple get!

What the double-income norm achieves is even greater economic disparity in society. I think with the current emaciating plague of unemployment in this country, any active attempt to encourage women back to work, who do not need to, and otherwise would not bother, is a criminal act of economic violence against families with no employed breadwinner. Don't get me wrong. I am not being sexist. I do not care whether the main breadwinner is the husband or the wife. What I object to is making it so that some families can have two bread winners while others can have none. In these very austere times I think as an act of emergency, there should be a limit of one breadwinner per family. The economy simply cannot support two!