The industrial roots of the destruction of families
A reply to Isa Ryan's comment, "I have long entertained the notion that it was not originally feminism, but rather industrialization, that broke apart the family unit and paved the way for feminism."
Isa Ryan, in a chat comment from her excellent substack, “A Homemaker’s Manifesto: Classical Christian femininity in a post-truth world,” made the excellent observation quoted above, and re-quoted here:
“I have long entertained the notion that it was not originally feminism, but rather industrialization, that broke apart the family unit and paved the way for feminism.”
I have made this argument on a number of occasions, and in a number of fora – including this one. It has rightly been noted, by those of us on the conservative and traditional end of the social spectrum, that in the majority of cases, the woman ought to “stay home with the kids” – to be wife, mother, and keeper-at-home (Titus 2:5), looking after the needs of the household, husband, and children. What is less-often stated, or perhaps even realized, is that the true ideal is for both parents to be home with the kids, or at least in relatively close proximity to them.
This is the way it was for untold millennia, for the vast majority of families. Whether the husband and father worked in the fields, or at his shop or workshop in town (likely located on the lower floor, with the family living above), he was nearby, to be consulted or appealed to for help at need, and likely shared the midday meal with the family (if he worked in the fields, it was probably brought to him by his wife, kids in tow). His “commute” was literally a matter of minutes.
He was not some absentee figure who disappeared in the early morning and returned in the evening, just in time for dinner, and maybe an hour of play or reading before bed. The family was a cohesive unit, which lived, worked, played, ate, and prayed together, nearly all the time. For most families in the pre-industrial era, the only time that changed was if the father had to make a journey for trading purposes, or got called up for war.
(And homeschooling was not a lifestyle choice, it was simply how children learned: by listening to and imitating their parents, with whom they lived and worked, all day, every day.)
Industrialization changed all that. It altered the locus of work, and therefore – symbolically as well as economically – of value, away from the home, sometimes quite far away: commutes of an hour or more were and are far from unusual. It broke apart, as Isa suggests, the family unit. And also, because of the shift of economic value from in-kind labor to “cold, hard cash,” it also made the work the father did appear to be of greater value than that performed by his wife.
The reality – that both cooperate and contribute, in complementary, equally-essential, and mutually-nourishing ways, to the household economy and the well-being of family and household (as I used to teach our sixth-graders, during the “Martin Cabin” class at the Outdoor School) – was diminished and obscured by the economics of a monetary economy. And with the value being ascribed primarily if not exclusively to the wage-earner, it was perhaps inevitable, even understandable, that women began to “want a piece of the pie.”
The problem is, it was a devil’s bargain, all around. Prior to “women’s lib,” and the migration of women to the work-force as a “normal” thing, rather than a wartime expediency (as it had been with the “Rosie the Riveters” of WW II), employers paid a family-supporting wage, because they knew the man was supporting his family.
With women joining the work-force electively, rather than as a necessary evil during wartime, and demanding “equal pay for equal work,” what you got was the individual – not the family – becoming the basic economic unit: a fact which actually reduced the relative pay of men, considerably, relative to the cost of living, because the assumption was no longer that he was supporting his family alone. And you ended up with the situation you have now, where for most people, most of the time, it is necessary for both husband and wife to work, to support their family – unless either the husband is fortunate enough to have a very well-paying job, or the family is willing to make serious sacrifices in terms of their economic standard of living.
It was not so in my family, growing up: by the time I came along in 1965, Pa was well-established in his job, and making a decent salary. But even ten or more years before (mid-1950s), when he and Ma were newlyweds with two kids (my older brothers) and Pa was relatively new and junior-grade at work, they were able to have a nice house, two cars, take decent vacations, and so on. True, they budgeted carefully, shopped sales, and didn’t indulge in many luxuries! But we were always comfortable. Now, that’s much harder, and for many, may be impossible without the wife working.
Which, of course, further degrades the family unit, forces the kids into child care or, when they’re in school, after-care or coming home to an empty house because mom’s working – leaving them lonely, turning to electronic devices, or getting into trouble – and leaves both parents tired and irritable when they get home (and are still faced with the domestic chores which didn’t get done, because both parents are working)… which, again, degrades the family unit, as home and parents are no longer “safe spaces” for themselves or their children.
Which is a long (!) way of saying that, yes, absolutely, it was “industrialization that broke apart the family unit and paved the way for feminism to take erroneous root.” 100%! And ironically, the industrial and economic miracle that was WW II in the U.S., made possible in part by the aforementioned “Rosie the Riveter,” and also the post-war economic boom that created the possibility of the almost (but not quite, because my folks were participants) mythical “1950s household” – which was not, in many ways, really all that traditional, due to the aforementioned commuting husband and father – led directly to the rise of feminism…
But of course, analyzing the problem doesn’t necessarily get us any closer to the solution, as businesses continue to pay individual, rather than family, wages, and the social cost of the fractured family unit continue to rise. Sigh…
So true! The fundamental concept here is this: What is the most basic "unit" - the individual or the family? I contend that it is the family, and that should be the case across the board. If it were my decision to make, voting would be done as one vote per family. That vote would be cast by the husband as representative of the family over which he has been assigned the leadership role - just as our elected representatives are supposed to cast their votes to represent us. The family would be defined in the traditional sense of the word - a man and a woman, united in marriage. It is the family that has the incentive to look long term, and that is the key to it. As long as we are voting in a democracy (another topic for another time, but I am no fan of democracy, preferring, instead, some form of monarchy) we must have voters who have a very real, tangible stake in the future. Single? Sorry, you don't get to vote. I'll point out here that this was my position long before I was married.