The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [160]
Sound familiar?
Many social conservatives suggest that this flood of women out of the home and into the workplace is a direct consequence of feminist ideology, and hence can be reversed if women will just come to their senses and return to their traditional homemaking roles. It’s true that ideas about equality for women have played a critical role in the transformation of the workplace; in the minds of most Americans, the opportunity for women to pursue careers, achieve economic independence, and realize their talents on an equal footing with men has been one of the great achievements of modern life.
But for the average American woman, the decision to work isn’t simply a matter of changing attitudes. It’s a matter of making ends meet.
Consider the facts. Over the last thirty years, the average earnings of American men have grown less than 1 percent after being adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, the cost of everything, from housing to health care to education, has steadily risen. What has kept a large swath of American families from falling out of the middle class has been Mom’s paycheck. In their book The Two-Income Trap, Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi point out that the additional income mothers bring home isn’t going to luxury items. Instead, almost all of it goes to purchase what families believe to be investments in their children’s future—preschool education, college tuition, and most of all, homes in safe neighborhoods with good public schools. In fact, between these fixed costs and the added expenses of a working mother (particularly day care and a second car), the average two-income family has less discretionary income—and is less financially secure—than its single-earner counterpart thirty years ago.
So is it possible for the average family to return to life on a single income? Not when every other family on the block is earning two incomes and bidding up the prices of homes, schools, and college tuition. Warren and Tyagi show that an average single-earner family today that tried to maintain a middle-class lifestyle would have 60 percent less discretionary income than its 1970s counterpart. In other words, for most families, having Mom stay at home means living in a less-safe neighborhood and enrolling their children in a less-competitive school.
That’s not a choice most Americans are willing to make. Instead they do the best they can under the circumstances, knowing that the type of household they grew up in—the type of household in which Frasier and Marian Robinson raised their kids—has become much, much harder to sustain.
BOTH MEN AND women have had to adjust to these new realities. But it’s hard to argue with Michelle when she insists that the burdens of the modern family fall more heavily on the woman.
For the first few years of our marriage, Michelle and I went through the usual adjustments all couples go through: learning to read each other’s moods, accepting the quirks and habits of a stranger underfoot. Michelle liked to wake up early and could barely keep her eyes open after ten o’clock. I was a night owl and could be a bit grumpy (mean, Michelle would say) within the first half hour or so of getting out of bed. Partly because I was still working on my first book, and perhaps because I had lived much of my life as an only child, I would often spend the evening holed up in my office in the back of our railroad apartment; what I considered normal often left Michelle feeling lonely. I invariably left the butter out after breakfast and forgot to twist the little tie around the bread bag; Michelle could rack up parking tickets like nobody’s business.