Postwar Women's History: The “Second Wave” or the End of the Family Wage?

MacLean, Nancy

doi:10.1002/9780470996201.ch13

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…The income of wives supplemented that of their husbands, as unions weakened and corporations were able to resist the pressure for wage increases. Thus, historian Nancy MacLean argues that the most significant feature of the period since the 1970s for women was not so much the rise of feminism as it was the abolition of the family wage, something the working class had fought fiercely to obtain throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (MacLean 2002).…”

Section: In the United States: A Political And Economic Sea Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Feminism Seduced

Eisenstein¹

2010

Australian Feminist Studies

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Section: In the United States: A Political And Economic Sea Changementioning

confidence: 99%

Feminism Seduced

Eisenstein¹

2010

Australian Feminist Studies

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“…She connected anxiety about female economic independence to the decade's vanishing manufacturing jobs. 9 Later studies ignored Ehrenreich's trenchant insight: threats to the family-wage system drove the battle for the ERA.…”

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confidence: 99%

Debating the fate of the homemaker: The ERA and the death of the family wage

Swinth¹

2023

Gender & History

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This article revisits the campaign to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the United States Constitution to argue that amendment adversaries fought over the future of women's economic security. Post‐war US economic growth stalled in the 1970s, bringing the family‐wage ideal of male breadwinning and female homemaking down with it. In these unsettled years, how female economic dependence would be addressed was an open question: would it be by propping up male breadwinning, as ERA opponents wanted, or by combining good jobs with fairly compensated domestic labour and government assistance, as supporters believed the ERA promised? A revisionist interpretation of the ERA battle, this article shifts attention from conflict over gender identity and cultural values to economics and capitalist transformation. It examines arguments presented in pamphlets, the media and to Congress about how homemaking women could achieve security in the face of changing economic reality. The ERA's defeat was a Pyrrhic victory for conservatives. The threat to government‐sanctioned male breadwinning appeared to have been vanquished. But the family‐wage system was truly on the rocks, and supporters’ vision of a working‐family norm, with roles based on function, not gender, won out. Without the ERA, however, working mothers shouldered the consequences.

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“…Women have played a vital role in the global spread and entrenchment of neoliberal restructuring. The end of the long postwar boom and resulting stagnating wages in the United States from the 1970s onward helped destroy the family wage, making it increasingly necessary to have two incomes to sustain a household (MacLean, 2002). As women poured into the workplace out of necessity, the percentage of women employed outside home rose from 34% in 1960 to over 60% in 2005 (Eisenstein, 2005).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Secret of Her Success: Oprah Winfrey and the Seductions of Self-Transformation

Peck

2009

Journal of Communication Inquiry

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This essay considers Oprah Winfrey’s rise from mere TV talk show host to global cultural icon in relationship to the rise in the 1980s and triumph in the 1990s of the neoliberal political-economic project. It argues that the expansion of Winfrey’s media enterprise and her ascent to iconic status are a product of the complex historical relationship between capitalism and the distinctly American fusion of psychology and religion captured by the term “mind cure.” Drawing on Raymond Williams’s sociology of culture approach, which looks for the “indissoluble connections between material production, political and cultural institutions and activity, and consciousness” (1977, 80) and Douglas Kellner’s (2003) method of “diagnostic critique,” the essay argues that situating Winfrey’s enterprise in relation to major currents in American political, economic and cultural history provides a means to critically examine the intersection of American politics and culture over the past quarter century. The essay explores tensions inherent in Oprah Winfrey’s professed mission to “empower” her followers — in which she routinely favors private initiatives and individual self-improvement over public funding and collective responsibility for societal needs, and thereby deflects attention from larger issues of social inequality and distributional politics — and considers the class and gender basis of the appeal of this project for her predominantly white, middle- and upper-middle class female following.

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Postwar Women's History: The “Second Wave” or the End of the Family Wage?

Cited by 5 publications

References 21 publications

Feminism Seduced

Feminism Seduced

Debating the fate of the homemaker: The ERA and the death of the family wage

The Secret of Her Success: Oprah Winfrey and the Seductions of Self-Transformation

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