As early as the 1960’s, says writer Marvin Harris, “parents were finding it increasingly harder to achieve or hold on to middle-class status.” To illustrate: In 1965 the average sale price of a new one-family home in the United States was $20,000. By the second quarter of 1984, the price had ballooned to about $100,000! The cost of food and clothing similarly went out of control. Wives thus began streaming to the job market in record numbers.

‘We Needed More Money’

Richard and Carol (mentioned at the outset) own a comfortable yet, by U.S. standards, modest home. But like many other couples they found themselves caught in the grip of inflation. Says Carol: “We simply needed more money if we were to pay our bills. I realized that Richard couldn’t make much more than he was already making. So I really had no choice but to get a full-time job.” No, the philosophy of the Women’s Liberation Movement has not been the main force propelling women into the job market. Asked why they both work, most couples will reply: ‘Because we need the money!’ (See page 5.)

Some women resent being uprooted from the home. “Working outside the home is killing me by inches,” lamented one woman. Yet there are many who welcome their jobs. “I love to work,” says another woman who manages a furniture showroom. “I just am not a housewife.” Skyrocketing divorce rates and the specter of widowhood have also had a share in luring women to jobs. “I would be very frightened not to work,” says one woman. “I lost my first husband when I was twenty-two . . . Now I always have in the back of my mind the thought that if Stephen died or ran off with some young thing I would be in a terrible predicament if I didn’t have a job.”

Still, for most couples, it is a desire to stay afloat financially that has made them two-income families.

[Box on page 5]

Why Both Work

United States: In one survey of 41,000 women, 82 percent of the women who held jobs said they did so because they needed money to cover their current expenses.

France: There, “more women work outside the home than in any other Western European country.” Some 84 percent do so “solely out of economic necessity.”

Canada: A study done by the University of Toronto revealed that “husbands of women who work full-time typically earn less than do other men. The median income among the men in families where the women work full-time was $18,240, compared to . . . $22,273 where the husbands are the sole breadwinners.”

India: Sociologist Zarina Bhatty says: “Women work because they have to, and not because they find in it the means for greater freedom, economic independence or self-expression.”