Mothers are forced to choose between keeping their jobs and children education
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This is one of the biggest tenants of second-wave feminism. The work that has been (and still is) shouldered on women: homemaking, homesteading, cooking, cleaning, laundry, family logistics (sometimes called mental labor), child rearing, is criminally undervalued. This is an everyone problem. Women undervalue the work just as much as men. This becomes really evident when you have "double income" households with kids and start having to pay out of pocket for that work and realize that it's hard to bring in enough income to pay for just the babysitter and you don't get any of the other stuff with it.
The problem is that being a housewife/househusband is career suicide despite the fruits of all that labor being huge and realized directly by the family without uncle sam or the babysitting service taking a cut. Your household in a very literal sense is richer for having a homemaker but it doesn't show up on your paystub. People look down on the work since it's "unskilled" and is saturated in stigma. Plus the value is hard to quantify accurately since it materializes as a lack of expenses and feels like a cost center -- shoutout to my fellow IT and ops friends who can relate.
And it also puts the homemaker in a very vulnerable position because you need dollars to survive which puts far too much power in the hands of the “breadwinner.” The institutions we have don’t do enough to address this imbalance and it’s not an easily solved problem. Right now the answer is that everyone in a household works but as we’re seeing this has actually made households poorer because a day-job’s take home pay wouldn’t pay a housewife’s salary unless you’re quite wealthy.
It doesn't show up on your paystub, but it does show up on your bank account. You were just saying that it's hard to earn enough to pay for all the things a homemaker does, so it should follow that families with a homemaker are wealthier.
> Plus the value is hard to quantify accurately since it materializes as a lack of expenses and feels like a cost center -- shoutout to my fellow IT and ops friends who can relate.
It's hard to put a value on the coordination and any emotional benefit that a homemaker provides, but the physical things like cooking and cleaning can at least be valued by the cost of equivalent services.
The problem with looking at this economically is that homemaking is an illiquid service. It's (generally) tied to marriage; it's not as though your spouse is going to leave to go be a homemaker for someone else and someone else's spouse is going to come to your house. When you get a promotion you don't get a new, better homemaker. It's also the source of some of the problems. You point out:
> it also puts the homemaker in a very vulnerable position because you need dollars to survive which puts far too much power in the hands of the “breadwinner.”
This is exactly because being the homemaker is an illiquid service. If it was something routinely bought and sold, it would provide a career for the homemaker. If the marriage falls apart, you can get your own place and be a homemaker for someone else. I think it's too expensive to be generally viable though. I fear demand would be too low to provide a real safety net.