THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM OF THE FAMILY WAGE: THE FORD MOTOR COMPANY AND THE FIVE DOLLAR DAY

Abstract

For feminists, the concept of the family as a social relationship presents particularly important challenges in theoretical and historical investigation. One aspect of working-class family life that has been examined by theorists and historians in the past decade may be especially useful in analyzing the processes of reproduction and gender divisions within the family: the family wage. The ideology of the male-earned family wage, many suggest, became a powerful argument for women's domestic role and position as secondary wage earner in the labor force. At first glance, the notion of the family wage seems like little more than a nasty example of patriarchy, a simplistic argument for women's subordination. Careful examination by feminist scholars has revealed it may be something more complex. The wage operates as an inferface, or mediating agent, between production and the reproduction of labor power. The family wage focuses our attention on the relationships among women, men, and children as they struggle to secure the means to survive. By analyzing the ideology of the family wage, its actual achievement by segments of the working class, and its impact on gender roles, we can begin to demystify the hidden relationships between sex, gender, and class. Domestic labor and waged labor are something more than a mystical meeting of paycheck and use values, or of women's household labor versus male waged labor. The family wage allows us a vehicle to investigate what Elizabeth Pleck called the two worlds in one: the relationship between production and social reproduction, and the role that sex distinctions have played historically in the creation and recreation of these processes.