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Some historians and other netables are in Atlanta for the Association of American Law Schools conference. Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds likes the hotel's universal WI-FI capability, but complains of its cold temperatures. Get outside, Glenn, where it is 70 degrees and the pink camellias are already in bloom. I missed this gathering of bloggers, but Jim Lindgren gave me a report on it at brunch yesterday. Speaking of Lindgren, the revised second edition of Michael Bellesiles's Arming America has been published. The only major surprise is that it does not include a new introduction by R. B. Bernstein, which we had been led to expect. He appears to offer whatever clues there are, by way of explanation, here.
"GMT's assumptions about my being either anti-feminist or wishing to turn back a clock are, apparently, a function of being unwilling to think about complicated issues in challenging ways."
I dunno, Ralph. I think this convoluted formulation of GMT's is pretty challenging for any American who actually lived through and remembered the time period described:
"I would like to see an analysis of how the wage and price controls of the New Deal and WWII/post-war period made possible not only the artificial inflation of the middle class, but also this transitory, single wage-earner model."
I never knew that "post-war" wage and price controls could reach ahead for 20 years after they were over and cause our middle class's real income to be "inflated" for all that time. And it wasn't just the middle class but the working class did better during the 50s and 60s as well. GMT writes with a contempt for the fortunes of ordinary Americans that one would expect from an elitist economist or a Reaganite political insider. Given the viciousness of poverty for so many single mothers now, I'm hoping GMT someday can feel enough humanity to realize that the America that Reagan and his supporters created is no feminist utopia.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/12/2004
GMT's assumptions about my being either anti-feminist or wishing to turn back a clock are, apparently, a function of being unwilling to think about complicated issues in challenging ways.
Josh Greenland -
1/12/2004
My Jan 11, 9:33pm post is in reply to GMT.
Josh Greenland -
1/12/2004
I'm sorry, but you sound like a feminist supporter of Reaganite economics.
Josh Greenland -
1/11/2004
"When American corporations can have two full-time workers for the effective cost of one full-time worker 30 years ago, I'd say that employers have been the real beneficiary and American families have lost the option of making real choices. Fire away at me, ladies.
Actually, I'd worry about whithering fire from economists for such a bizarre summary, but maybe that's why historians should stick to what they know."
Sorry, Ralph's right about our drop in our real standard of living, and you're wrong. I know all too well, because I lived through the change.
"As it is, I doubt many feminists will apologize for thinking that women should no longer be the breeder cows, household appliances, and punching bags of society (unrepentant radicals that they are)."
Oh, so anyone who doesn't like our drop in standard of living over the last 30 years is anti-feminist? Ralph can speak for himself, but you ain't tarring me with that brush! The declines in average standard of living over the past few decades should not have been necessary to bring about the gains in women's equality that we've had in that time.
Josh Greenland -
1/11/2004
Ralph, thanks for bringing up the fact that most middle class families for a number of decades at least up to the 1960s could exist comfortably with only one member working fulltime. Despite the way the federal government chooses to spin cost of living and real income figures, and despite fancy lies about people developing fancier, more expensive tastes, we've had a big real income drop since then. Housing, food, fuel and education have gone up a great deal since those times. I can remember when it was normal for wives to work part time if at all. My significant other's place of worship had an intergenerational conversation recently where the older people asked why the middle aged and young adult people were getting so much less social activism and charity work done. The two younger cohorts said, "We don't have time! We all have to work!" It was quickly determined that a few decades ago most of the activism and charitable work at this place of worship were done by women who had time off because their husbands' incomes wholely supported the family.
I'm not saying there was anything good about the rigid gender roles of those times, or the contempt lasting to the present for housework or childcare, but the fact that fewer people in an average family had to work to sustain it economically was a better thing for most people.
Josh Greenland -
1/11/2004
Whoops, looks like I missed Ralph's URL to Godwin's Law and that page's clear distinction between the law itself and the Usenet tradition of harassing and shouting down anyone who mentions Hitler or the Nazis in most discussions and declaring them the "losers" in the debate.
Pardon me if I don't have a worshipful attitude toward all aspects of "Netiquette." Any form of etiquette that for instance allows extremely hostile one-time emails in response to social offenses which don't justify the extreme level of hostility in the response (aka "flaming") does not have my unthinking allegiance. I've seen attempts to enforce "Godwin's Law" (really the associated Usenet tradition ignorantly or lyingly confused with the Law itself) misused by people who were more wrong-headed and malicious than any of the people supposedly violating the "Law" (tradition).
Josh Greenland -
1/11/2004
I've seen a bunch of bogus references to Godwin's Law on the Internet. A lot of small-time frustrated powerfreaks claim that it allows them to shout down anyone who brings up Hitler, the Nazis or the Holocaust in any discussion where it isn't super-directly related to the main topic. However, the most seemly believable version of Godwin's Law that I've found merely asserts that in any Usenet discussion, given enough time, the probability that Hitler or the Nazis is brought up approaches 1. Since this version of Godwin's Law isn't good for beating other people up, I tend to suspect that it is close to accurate. To anyone: if you are more informed on this than I, please post the real Godwin's Law or Limit, or a URL to it.
Ralph E. Luker -
1/7/2004
What a grand thing it is to fling insults under cover of anonymity -- as you have done so thoroughly on the HNN mainpage! Why should I think Cliopatria might be exempt from your romps through history?
We do, in fact, understand that some women were gainfully employed ca 1960; and we do, in fact, understand that housewives then received food, clothing and shelter in exchange for services as housewife and mother. We understand that slaves also received such compensation in goods for their services. But thanks for telling me all those things again. Just, please don't pretend that you know these things and I do not because you are au currant in the latest feminist scholarship and I am not. Do bother yourself to read the comments by Ophelia Benson and Invisible Adjunct here ...
GMT -
1/7/2004
We should be enforcing it on HNN!
While I agree with you in principle, after "axis of evil," and its metastasis in "axis of weasels," etc., I think we're wrong to stick to Godwin's Law, unless we're intent on NOT participating in the present, larger discussion.
GMT -
1/7/2004
That was a common theme of articles in women's magazines, written by men, a generation or two ago.
I would like to see an analysis of how the wage and price controls of the New Deal and WWII/post-war period made possible not only the artificial inflation of the middle class, but also this transitory, single wage-earner model.
GMT -
1/7/2004
Pre-feminism women's labor was not exclusively non-compensated, and the further back you go the more complicated and varied systems of compensation appear. Women were wage earners even in the Middle Ages, and even belonged to, and ran, guilds. Most of this goes down the Memory Hole with the mid-20c. fantasy that seems to have informed your challenge.
The first thing you might learn from feminist scholarship on this issue is that there is no "back to" or "away from" an arrangement that never existed, save perhaps in the mind of the odd blogger or two...
How does an academic come to think that he's issued a challenge by flaunting how much he doesn't know?
GMT -
1/7/2004
When American corporations can have two full-time workers for the effective cost of one full-time worker 30 years ago, I'd say that employers have been the real beneficiary and American families have lost the option of making real choices. Fire away at me, ladies. Actually, I'd worry about whithering fire from economists for such a bizarre summary, but maybe that's why historians should stick to what they know.
As it is, I doubt many feminists will apologize for thinking that women should no longer be the breeder cows, household appliances, and punching bags of society (unrepentant radicals that they are).
Oscar Chamberlain -
1/6/2004
Feminism in the late 60s and 1970s had strong ties to leftist critiques of the economy. As many fomerly radical feminist goals became mainstream realities (or pieties at least), that link to radicalism became strained.
Maybe we should go back and look at those critiques more carefully. It strikes me as likely that some radical feminists anticipated this problem early on.
Jonathan Dresner -
1/6/2004
Yes, I forgot to thank Ralph for his citation of Godwin's Limit. I'd heard of it before, but most of the Usenet discussion groups I was in either never reached it (like rec.music.folk and alt.food.chocolate) or violated it with impunity (soc.culture.jewish). We should be enforcing it on HNN!
Ophelia Benson -
1/6/2004
There was an interesting, mocking article on this subject in the Spectator a month or two ago - saying that work is horrible and women have begun to notice that and stop doing it, and lucky them. Of course, being in the Spectator, it was designed to irritate, but there was a lot of truth in it.
But there are plenty of feminists who have always realized that a Job or Career is not automatically Utopia. But then neither is being forbidden to have one.
Invisible Adjunct -
1/6/2004
I'm not going to fire away at you, Ralph, because I think you raise a very real issue. I don't know what the answer is, but I do think there's a problem.
I'm currently reading Shirley Burggraff's The Feminine Economy and Economic Man: Reviving the Role of Family in a Post Industrial Age. At this point (still readuing and thinking about it) I suspect her practical proposals are unworkable (eg, she calls for a major overhaul of social security that sounds very unrealistic -- but then, I worry that she's right when she argues that we're all in massive denial about its continued viability). But I think she does a really good job of stating the problem: prior to second wave feminism, there was a "gender caste" system that ensured that important, valuable work was done by women for scant recognition and little to no pay. Now that we've (thankfully!) abolished that system, and now that the enormous opportunity costs of caregiving have been exposed, women are simply less and less inclined to take on the roles that were once taken for granted. Why should they, when they now have other options and when they are not only not rewarded (speaking in economic terms) but even punished for doing it? Problem is, as Burggraff points out, though they didn't get paid and suffered all kinds of legal, economic, social penalities, our mothers and grandmothers weren't sitting around eating bons bons: they were performing valuable, indeed, essential work in the production of human capital. And no society can survive without getting that work done. Burggraff suggests that feminism has been too reluctant to confront this as an actual problem. But at the same time, the conservative "solution" (women should just go back home) is morally untenable and completely unrealistic (it's not going to happen).
Anyway, it's an interesting read, in part because it challenges some of the guiding assumptions of those on both sides of the work/family/feminism divide.
Quick note about social security: she argues that people misunderstand it as a savings program, when it's actually an insurance scheme predicated on the assumption of a continued supply of wage-earners who will pay for the older generation. When you pay into social security, you're not putting aside money for your retirement but rather paying for today's retirees in the expectation that today's/tomorrow's children will then pay for you. What happens when the supply of children/future workers shrinks as the number of retirees increases?
Oscar Chamberlain -
1/6/2004
For the latest in truly absurd Holocaust analogies, consider Republican ideologue Grover Norquist, who compared the estate tax to the Holocaust.
Of course, I agree with all of your observations, including the last sentence. I originally asked the question 10 years ago in hopes of provoking some critical thinking about what has really happened. It isn't a call for women to return to non-compensated labor in households. Even so, if we simply celebrate women's compensated labor outside the household, it seems to me that we are missing a very large part, perhaps even the essence, of what has in fact happened.
Jonathan Dresner -
1/6/2004
Ralph,
Thanks for your kind comments about my review. At least something good came out of an otherwise misspent $5.50....
But I think the feminist and capitalist issues need to be separated somewhat. It could be that the reversion to full-family employment (and there are places where younger members' part-time work is also considered a necessary part of the family income) would have happened regardless of the success or failure of workplace feminism.
There was a time that a women who needed to work was effectively limited to agriculture, domestic service or retail (or prostitution, of course), with educated women opting for primary education and nursing. Greater access to education and removal of gender-based barriers to employment has meant a much wider range of opportunities available to women who want or need to work.
Ironically, the cutting edge of feminist theory (as I understand it) has moved directly to the contradiction you note, adding critiques of capitalism (and racism, political power, evironmental issues, etc) to the already powerful gender analysis. Ralph, you're a feminist!
