Women in the workforce

Jane Galt, over at Asymmetrical Information, quotes Stuart Buck at length, following up with some of her own observations:

Consider that when my grandmother got married, laundry took an entire day, and left her exhausted by the wrenching work of boiling water for washing, wringing the clothes out, and physically hefting wet clothing onto the clothesline. Three hefty meals a day had to be prepared for men doing hard physical labour without any of the modern aids, from food processors to frozen vegetables, that I enjoy, a mound of dishes done after every meal, a house had to be cleaned without the aid of vacuum cleaners, groceries had to be gotten on foot . . . everything was physically more demanding, and more time consuming.

My mother stayed home with us. By the time I was ten, she was going bonkers. There simply wasn't enough to do in the house . . . and my mother, mind you, had gone in for gourmet cooking in a rather large way, producing elaborate dinners that took hours to prepare. She was the mainstay of the PTA, the building's co-op board, and so forth. Nonetheless, there simply wasn't enough to keep an active woman occupied after the children were in school.

And then, the money quote:

This has created a problem, of course: women's work used to be compatible with child care, and now it is not. And the business world is still largely designed for men: it is not structured to accomodate professional women who stay home with young children.

And that, I think is the key to the whole situation — the needs of the economy are changing faster than the structures that have made the economy work so well for the past fifty years (oil shocks and wars notwithstanding). Jane promises more discussion on this point later . . . I expect to be linking to her site regularly.

Posted by Nicholas at May 18, 2004 11:29 AM