The danger of the double income

Yesterday I wrote about our culture's separation of work from the home environment ("The home is the woman's place, and the man's too"). A wife may feel, and rightly so, that there isn't a challenge fully worthy of her dignity in the dusting, the mopping, and the diapering. And a husband may come home after a hard day's work tired out and all too often failing in his obligations to the family other than financial provision. My argument, in short, is that the sharp division of work from the home has the potential to strain family unity by making it harder for both the husband and the wife fully to participate in all aspects of the "making" of the family.

None of this is intended to demean the hard work of men and women in situations where the financially remunerative work is wholly separate from the home environment. There are plenty of households, for example, that require extremely intensive management due to medical issues. There are homeschooling mothers who juggle the education of children on multiple grade levels all the while managing the day-to-day affairs of the home. On the other end, there are plenty of men who put in a full day's work at the office or the construction site only to come home, roll up their sleeves, and pitch in heroically in whatever way they're needed. For better or for worse, work these days most often occurs outside the home. It's simply the culture in which we live.

For all the heroism in the trenches, though, my unfashionable argument is still that shared, financially remunerative labor between husbands and wives is a strong familial "glue" that, though a radical exception in today's culture, has historically been the norm. Arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, the natural candidate for the most valuable contribution to the making of a family is financial provision. Without some sort of remunerative labor--that is, something that brings in the money to pay for the food, the mortgage or rent, the health insurance, the car payment, the utilities--there simply cannot be a family. In the strictest sense, every other contribution is secondary to the making of money. A maid could be hired to clean the house, the children could be sent to school. Only money is sine qua non; everything else is "extra," or a matter of choice or conviction. Note the cultural ennui in the late 40s through the late 50s with the introduction of washing machines and dryers, refrigerators, vacuums, and other time-saving gadgets. No need to wash the dishes when they could simply be put into the dishwasher; no need to grow a garden and preserve food for the winter when these things are readily available in the store. If these things are done, they're a matter of lifestyle choice, not of necessity.

So even if the woman is working heroically at home, and even if it's a matter of conviction that the family educate its own children, raise its own food, etc., etc., there may very naturally be an undercurrent of an idea that the wife's work is secondary to her husband's. This is the point I was trying to make yesterday in saying that women are not meant to be second-class citizens to their husbands. A woman needs work that is equal in dignity and just as necessary as her husband's. Again, I think this is what drives some women to seek employment outside the home. It's not a universal rule, and there are manifold reasons a woman may desire to work outside the home, but surely the underlying fact that the making of money is that without which a family cannot be a family is one of those reasons.

So the family becomes "dual income." At which time it likely becomes clear that all those seemingly secondary roles that the woman played in the home were very important after all. Everybody I know in a dual-income family readily admits that it's a struggle simply to be a family. Yes, a family needs to sit down to meals together. But who prepares those meals, and how do we manage to fit them into competing work schedules? Whose job brings in more income and takes priority when children need to be taken to appointments, school functions, etc.? The problem is not solved but rather intensified by the woman leaving the home. Again, I hasten to add that I am not demeaning those who are heroically living the "dual-income" reality, sometimes out of real necessity. I am simply pointing out the challenges that are likely to face a great many married couples who choose that difficult route.

To reiterate yesterday's point, I firmly believe that history gives us a real solution in shared, financially remunerative labor. I held up the idea of the small family farm--the route that my wife and I chose for ourselves. But obviously not everybody is called to be a farmer, and there are other challenging forms that the shared labor can take. I'm thinking, for example, of the husband and wife of a large homeschooling family I know that a number of years back opened a restaurant. From the sidelines I've watched as they've weathered the financial storms of starting a business from scratch. But they've also testified as to how they've had to weather those storms together, and how they've been brought closer as a family.

Does this mean that every husband who works outside the home needs to quit his job and start a farm or partner with his wife to open a restaurant? No, probably not. My purpose in writing these reflections is mainly to show how the separation of work from the home weakens one of the major bonds that, historically, has held families together. It's something to be aware of, for it's only when we've recognized an issue that we can identify whatever remedies may help, in our many and various family circumstances, to address that issue and strengthen our family situations as best we can.