The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [42]
Vestiges of these institutions remain with us today. Until the 1970s, family law in the United States obligated men to support their wives up to their own standard of living. Today, alimony payments to the spouse with lower earnings are still a standard feature of divorce. But the terms of the marital transaction have changed, and the main driver of the transformation has been the transition of women into paid work.
In The Theory of Economic Growth, published in 1955, the development economist W. Arthur Lewis of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia wrote, “It is open to men to debate whether economic progress is good for men or not, but for women to debate the desirability of economic growth is to debate whether women should have a chance to cease to be beasts of burden and to join the human race.” The raw Darwinian marketplace values women as wombs, selling reproductive services and household service in exchange for men’s sperm and economic resources. But development changed the terms of the transaction. It gave women another function, as producers in the market. It thus increased their value, both in the household and in society at large.
THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH century, economic growth offered women in industrializing societies new opportunities to produce outside the home, which transformed their contribution to the household and improved their bargaining status. Work changed women’s perspectives—offering new careers and lives. Lewis argued that “woman gains freedom from drudgery, is emancipated from the seclusion of the household, and gains at last the chance to be a full human being, exercising her mind and her talents in the same way as men.”
But if development opened a new set of options for women, the addition of women to the workforce contributed to shape the path of development. Women brought to the workforce a different set of skills that eased the shift from heavy industry to service-based economies in the rich nations of the West. Of equal importance, as women increased their clout over decisions about household investments and expenditures, they helped usher in vast social and economic changes that profoundly altered Western civilization.
The economic historian Claudia Goldin argues that women’s labor supply follows a sort of U-shape as countries develop. In preindustrial societies, such as colonial America, women worked a lot, from caring for children to making soap and candles, while the men tilled the family plot. Families were little production units. The family economy wasn’t productive enough to allow anybody not to contribute. But as economies grew, rising family incomes took pressure off women to contribute to household production, leading them to retreat from the workforce and focus more on child care. Facing a strong cultural bias against taking the dirty “guy jobs” that are typical of early stages of development, women reemerged into the labor force only after countries became rich enough to provide secondary education for women and white-collar clerical jobs that they could do without incurring social stigma.
In West Bengal, India, the first leg of this dynamic occurred during the green revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when the introduction of high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and other crops ushered in a burst of farm productivity that raised household incomes and changed the type of work needed in the fields. Herbicides reduced the demand for weeding, traditionally a female occupation. The increased use of tractors and other farm machinery provided exclusively guy jobs. As