The Lie of the 1900’s: Should American Husbands be Sole Breadwinners?

I grew up watching the TV show “Leave it to Beaver”, the black-and-white sitcom about the Cleavers: the suburban American family where the Father works, the Mother stays at home keeping house, Wally in high school discovers all the 1900’s era had to offer high schoolers and Beaver gets into all sorts of scrapes and dilemmas, capstoning at the end of each episode with some moral lesson that his Father tries to instill in him as he himself remembers the value, often forgotten from his own childhood.  The show did a good job with what it set out to do: show some of the more tender interactions between parents and children, even in the face of impending punishment for wrongdoing.  My own father described it as sometimes “giving away the secrets of parenthood”.  The world of Leave it to Beaver was a happy place, and we who grew up watching it might be forgiven in viewing it as the ideal for our own lives in what I refer to as the “lie of the 1900’s”: one (male) income household, one (female) stay-at-home spouse, with children getting quality education outside the home.  This familial situation is an incredibly new phenomenon on the world stage, and while it might still be a valuable ideal when it can be realized (it does highlight some of the inherent dignity and roles of men and women without any qualifiers needed), coming to terms with its radical newness is a crucial step in combating arguments accusing conservatives, Catholics, and Americans of patriarchal sexists.

We as humans have the amazing ability and task to “subdue the earth and fill it”, the charge put forth to Adam and Eve in the Garden.  Small in stature and far from being the strongest at any time on the earth, we have successfully established ourselves as the dominant species by using our intellect, the “best brain in the animal kingdom”, where we “work stuff out”, creating “weaponry to take down beasts 100 times mightier than” ourselves, wearing “their carcasses through the Ice Age”,  and surviving both “famine and world wars (Ricky Gervais, on the creation of man as a part of his stand up comedy special)”.   Readily available are a multitude of pie charts and timelines which show the progress of human technology throughout history.  As inspiring and revolutionary as these inventions and conquests are, every one of them since the dawn of history has one thing in common: they were small improvements to existing techniques, taking a long time to become widely used.  My personal favorite illustration in the sheer amount of time a culture can take to develop new inventions is the 500 year gap in Irish contributions to the world after they discovered whiskey.  What does this mean, and what relevance has this to the “lie of the 1900’s”?  It means that everyone worked, all the time.  

Since Adam and Eve, man’s primary focus has been on survival.  To say as much is to elicit a bleak picture of his lot in life: “survival” is such a negative word these days, or rugged if you like to “rough” it.  But in reality it is only in the last 100 years or so have technological advances progressed with such a rapid speed that man has thought even if he was not royalty or world conqueror, living without spending most of his time providing for himself was a possibility.  The homesteaders and pioneers in early American history worked together in communities and in their own families to scrape together a living.  Livings were made off your own holding and from the hunt.  To quote Jordan Peterson, throughout history “no one has had a great time of it (interview available on YouTube)”.  You got paid for the little things you could do, and you did not get paid much.  But you know what?  There was not terribly much you had to pay for.  What is true then is more or less true now: what people paid for most was extraneous commodities making life easier or more entertaining, not an overwhelming amount of the necessities in life.  A brief look at today reveals the shocking number of things we consider necessities of life and are willing to pay for which really boil down to conveniences.  This is not to say that real necessities are not way overpriced today: they are (just look at the housing market).  However, two of the largest industries in America today are storage and entertainment.  Storage and entertainment?!  This truly is a first on the world stage.  

The prevailing argument is that women have always worked, but they have only worked non-paying jobs within the home.  This is true, but it was true for everyone: everyone worked, and no one got paid very much.  With the coming of the cotton gin and quickly after the rise of the manufacturing, commodities of life became more and more accessible, consequentially requiring more and more paying jobs to procure them.  America first glimpsed a life free from the tediousness of survival after the First World War, captured by the articulated ideal: “two cars in every garage and a chicken in every pot” (Herbert Hoover campaign, 1928, revitalized in 1932).  Watch commercials for that time period for upcoming commodities like the dishwasher, where the announcer asks the viewer “what will you do with all that time?”  What quickly ensued with this goal as the ideal?  The Great Depression.  Suddenly mere survival was the foremost of everyone’s minds again.  Though minor improvements to the economic landscape were made in the next few years, the single thing that really got us out of the Depression was the Second World War.  Moving from one crisis of survival to the next, even when on the brink of seemingly endless time and leisure America has never been more than one generation away from a focus on mere survival.

Post WWII saw an America who was suddenly positioned to realize all the ideal that we thought we would get before the Depression.  GI Joes, home with a passion for their wives and fresh money in their pockets, inheriting an economy freshly recovered from the horrors of want (an economy by the way kept alive by their wives, so that both spouses were still working towards the survival of their families), families could entertain a variety of jobs which would pay enough that the men could go out and work with their peers outside of the home and allow their wives to be “homemakers”.  Though by this I in no way mean to imply that being a homemaker is a simple or easy task, it does present the first time in history that husbands and wives on a large, near total societal scale are not focused on the same thing (survival), and apart from war, mining, and hunting are not working in the same location.  

In short, the “lie of the 1900’s” is that the norm should (or even could) be a one profession household.  Men and women have equal responsibility towards each other and towards their children.  Only in recent times has this meant the opportunity to work for gadgets and conveniences rather than survival.  Focusing our attention on survival grounds us, reminds us of how fragile and valuable life is.  Commodities improving quality of life and not mere survival are not bad or to be avoided at all costs, they should just be seen for what they really are: improvements and not necessities.  Because of these commodities we have become more of a currency society than every before (and not even physical currency anymore).  Husbands can still find professions that allow their families to be single-income households, but this is a historical first, and becoming less and less possible at that.  What makes it more possible is cutting out that which is not based upon survival, living within your community and making the world bigger again.  The point of emphasis here should not be that we should be more accepting of wives working outside of the home; we should be more focused on bringing the husbands back into the home, returning husbands and wives to the same plane of work: survival, and the family.