Post–Family Wage, Postindustrial Society: Reframing the Gender and Family Order through Working Mothers in Reagan's America

Abstract

“We are as much a society dependent on female labor, and thus in need of a child-care system, as we are a society dependent on the automobile, and thus in need of roads.” In the 1980s business leaders, social scientists, women's rights advocates, and policy makers agreed on a startling new fact: working mothers had moved to the center of the nation's economic life. Foot soldiers of the new service economy, their labor shaped the nation's work force and future competitiveness. As Working Woman magazine told its readers in November 1986, “women's incomes—women's own incomes—and our new life-styles are at the heart of a restructuring of this country's economy, not only changing employment patterns but deciding the fates of whole business sectors and redistributing the nation's wealth.” By boosting “slumping family incomes,” the magazine crowed, these female workers stimulated billions in new child care and “homey chore” businesses. Americans faced a new reality—working mothers had become a pillar of the economy.2