The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [17]
In 1975 Congress passed an important law with far-reaching consequences for families’ housing choices. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act stipulated, among other things, that lenders could no longer ignore a wife’s income when judging whether a family earned enough to qualify for a mortgage.51 By the early 1980s, women’s participation in the labor force had become a significant factor in whether a married couple could buy a home.52 Both families and banks had started down the path of counting Mom’s income as an essential part of the monthly budget.
This change may not sound revolutionary today, but it represents a seismic shift in family economics. No longer were families constrained by Dad’s earning capacity. When Mom wanted a bigger yard or Dad wanted a better school for the kids, families had a new answer: Send Mom to work and use her paycheck to buy that nice house in the suburbs.
The women’s movement contributed to this trend, opening up new employment possibilities and calling on mothers to reconsider their lifetime goals. For some women, the decision to head into the workplace meant personal fulfillment and expanded opportunities to engage in interesting, challenging occupations. For many more, the sense of independence that accompanied a job and a paycheck provided a powerful incentive. But for most middle-class women, the decision to get up early, drop the children off at day care, and head to the office or factory was driven, at least in part, by more prosaic reasons. Millions of women went to work in a calculated attempt to give their families an economic edge.53
The transformation happened gradually, as hundreds of thousands of mothers marched into the workforce year after year. But over the course of a few decades, the change has been nothing short of revolutionary. As recently as 1976 a married mother was more than twice as likely to stay home with her children as to work full-time. By 2000, those figures had almost reversed: The modern married mother is now nearly twice as likely to have a full-time job as to stay home.54 The transformation can be felt in other ways. In 1965 only 21 percent of working women were back at their jobs within 6 months of giving birth to their first child. Today, that figure is higher than 70 percent. Similarly, a modern mother with a three-month-old infant is more likely to be working outside the home than was a 1960s woman with a five-year-old child.55 As a claims adjuster with two children told us, “It never even occurred to me not to work, even after Zachary was born. All the women I know have a job.”
Even these statistics understate the magnitude of change among middle-class mothers. Before the 1970s, large numbers of older women, lower-income women, and childless women were in the workforce.56 But middle-class mothers were far more likely to stay behind, holding on to the more traditional role of full-time homemaker long after many of their sisters had given it up. Over the past generation, middle-class mothers flooded into offices, shops, and factories, undergoing a greater increase in workforce participation than either their poor or their well-to-do sisters.57 Attitudes changed as well. In 1970, when the women’s revolution was well under way, 78 percent of younger married women thought that it was “better for wives to be homemakers and husbands to do the breadwinning.”58 Today, only 38 percent of