The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [33]
One of us [Elizabeth] lived this story back in the 1960s in Oklahoma. I was thirteen when my father had a heart attack. Daddy had been working on our car, lying on the driveway on a cold November weekend, when his chest began to hurt. He put off going to the doctor until the next morning, when he was immediately hospitalized. Forty years later, the snatches of conversation I overheard remain as vivid as if someone had just spoken the words: “the possibility of more attacks,” “not sure if he can ever work again,” “have you made arrangements?” Daddy came home, gray and shaking, and he sat around the house for weeks. My mother had been at home for more than thirty years bringing up my three older brothers and me. She looked for a job for the first time since she was a nineteen-year-old girl with a part-time job singing the latest hits at a Tulsa radio station. After a few weeks of searching, she took a job in the catalog order department at Sears.
Eventually, Daddy went back to work, but to a job that paid about half what he had been earning. We lost the car, and there was more talk about what groceries cost and how expensive winter coats and dental visits had become, but no one went hungry and we stayed in our home. My mother continued with her job, and life settled back down. When I was a senior in high school, she talked about quitting, but she decided to keep working so that she and my father could help with the cost of my college tuition. When I left for college, they sold the house and moved into an apartment. The year I graduated, Mother quit her job.
Not only did stay-at-home wives like my mother function as backup workers, insuring against their husbands’ loss of income, they were also available when the family had unexpected expenses. If there was an illness in the family, a stay-at-home mother could go to work to cover the deductibles, copayments, and other medical expenses not covered by insurance. If the family was uninsured, a stay-at-home mother could join the estimated 4 to 5 million women who now stay in full-time jobs just so that they can provide health insurance for their families.9
Divorce, which we will discuss in depth in chapter 5, is the single most common trigger for stay-at-home wives to enter the workforce. During the 1970s, when fewer than half of all married women were in the labor force, 83 percent of divorced women were working within two years of separation from their husbands.10 A sudden need for cash can arise from all sorts of causes, encompassing both good news (“Cynthia got into Yale”) and bad news (“Termites have eaten away the foundation of your house”). Either way, the key point remains the same: Families with a stay-at-home mother have a backup earner, someone who can add a jolt of income to the household—a jolt that can make the difference between covering the kids’ tuition and keeping up with the doctors’ bills rather than giving up health insurance or taking on a second mortgage.
In addition to playing the role of backup earner, the stay-at-home mother plays another critical economic role: backup caregiver. The full-time homemaker does more than change diapers and check homework; she is available to provide extra care for anyone—child or adult—who needs it. She is on hand to care for an elderly relative who can no longer take care of himself. Three out of four caregivers to the disabled elderly (excluding husbands and wives) are daughters, daughters-in-law, or other female relatives and friends (such as nieces or granddaughters). A generation ago the majority of these women did not work outside the home.11 If Granddad has become too frail to manage on his own, the stay-at-home mother is available for the myriad tasks not covered by Medicare.