Carey On... Where's the Women's Money?
Who says you can’t learn from TV? While watching a Dick Van Dyke re-run, I noticed something which affects our very lives every day, but I’ve never heard anybody discuss this one.
In the 1950’s and early 60’s, very few married American women worked outside the home. The idea of Laura Petrie’s going to work was worthy of entire episodes of the Dick Van Dyke show. Co-worker Sally Rogers couldn’t wait to marry and quit working.
On the Andy Griffith Show, Sheriff Andy’s girlfriend, school teacher Miss Crump, didn’t want to marry yet because she wasn’t ready to stop teaching. A married woman expected to stop working. Tending a home and family was a respectable avocation. “Home economics” was a valued skill.
In those days, “real men” didn’t marry until they were secure enough to “support the family.” Men who supported their wives and kids were seen as having “made it.”
A single-income house supported quite a few kids in those days, too. Four kids wasn’t unusual, nor was as many as 9, like my Catholic playmates on Brownell Boulevard in Flint. Their dad was half-owner of a small grocery store, adequate to support a big family.
A “successful” man provided a nice home, a car, a TV, a transistor radio, a stereo, good clothing, a vacation every year and a nice Christmas, and could even send his kids to college. By the late 60’s, the TV was color and there were usually two cars. That was the state-of-the-art American family life with the average perks of the time.
Then something changed. In only a decade, vast numbers of women left their babies and entered the work force. That created even more jobs for women who took care of working women’s kids. The overall productivity of the nation virtually doubled.
Or did it?
You would think that when a family goes from one wage-earner to two, that family should be rolling in money. Today’s average dual-income family should be hip-deep in earnings, in savings, should be living in a huge home with no debts, drive two new cars, and should be able to take multiple vacations.
Obviously, that’s not the case for most of us. We haven’t had vast increases in personal wealth. The average two-income family with two or three kids has the same average lifestyle of this era as that single-income family in the 50’s and 60’s with four or six kids, with less savings and more debt.
So what happened? Where’s the extra money? Where’s the fabulous 30-50% increase in wealth created when America’s married women suddenly became productive earners?
There’s only one place it could go, if not into our pockets. That fabulous increase in wealth, my friends, has been mirrored by an equal increase in government spending. That’s right. Since the mid-1960’s, the government has absorbed almost every dollar of wealth created by the industriousness of American women.
If government had expanded this much in the same period without a new source of wealth, it would’ve bankrupted America. It didn’t bankrupt us, but only because American women supported the expansion.
Despite the surge of lady workers, we don’t have a greatly increased lifestyle in America . . . we have a greatly increased government. If a woman is in a two-income household today, virtually her entire income is devoured by the government. Almost all American married women now work just to pay taxes.
What a hardship we’ve placed on ourselves! Women work so our families can have the basics of a modern lifestyle, because we can’t do it on one income anymore. Women who want to stay home with their kids must accept a lot less in lifestyle. If we hadn’t let the government grow wild, either more women could stay home with their kids, or the families in which women work would be getting the huge benefits of that productivity, rather than just getting by.
Working women saved the country during World War II. Now we’ve done it again, but not because the men are at war. It’s because the government gobbles up all the women’s money.