Being female and over fifty, i think i look at this from a different perspective. My senior year of college (1975) was a sort of doldrums for newly-minted teachers to get jobs. I was an Education major, and got one of two positions that opened in my county of origin.
People recall this as the Nixon price control era, and forget that it was a wage control one, too.... We have had that discussion before.
I was caught up in the idea of women's liberation, which budded adn blossoned in the years of my high school and college careers; but, I was somehwat confused as to what was supposedly holding most women back. Having grown up as the oldest of three daughters of a farmer with a very diversified tobacco/peanut/hogs/grain family farmgin operation, I had worked just like my male cousins.
There was no glass ceiling in the tobacco barn or hog house. One reason I ahev alwasy been happiest farming.
The society we inhabit took a hard turn in the seventies, in many ways. One of those was that women thougth they would be happier working away from home than in it. As a gender, there was a wholesale shift to the notion that one could "have it all."
This led to troops of women vacating the household, bringing in a second salary, which was in large part the genesis of the consumer boom that has echoed in waves ever since. Much of what a family buys now either didn't exist in 1969, ofr existed in a very different form or format.
Having given birth to three children in less than five years, I finally figured out that I could have it all, just not all at once. Mike and I agreed that one of us needed to be at home with them, and Nature, plus his better employment opportunities as a male (women earned on average 57 cnets on every dollar a man earned), favored me.
We figured out ways to live and save on his wages alone, and farmed a little on the side. In 1995, he severed form his railroad position, and became a fulltiem farmer, too. I have been, to the eyes of the world at least, "unemployed" for most of my adult life, even though I worked virtually everyday in our livestock and crop operation.
I worked at home and reared our children, much as my grandmother and generations of women before us had done. My mother got sucked into the workforce when I was in my mid-teens, adn from there one, I really missed her.
In choosing a one-job lifestyle, Mike and I were anomalies in our generation. I think a lot of what's happening now is a correction to more "normal" employment standards, across the overall economic realities of the human race and this society.
We are returning to a more one-job family model. Unemployment will be redefined in a way by this movement, as people cease seejing outside jobs. the percentage of "unemployed" will decrease. Right now, a lot of the fall in numbers is not so much new jobs and moving them to public assistance, according to the people I know in social service agencies.
There is a whole different discussion to be had, on the paradigm shifts that cause certain jobs to simply cease to exist,. or to exist only as vestiges - farriers and typewriter manufacturers come immediately to mind. Of course, the usual pattern is for new jobs to step into the void, making new technological devices and engineering them...but, this go-round, a lot of that opportunity is going to workers on other continents.
Very complex subject. Building new houses pulled a lot of products through the pipeline. Until that dynamic is restored or replaced, we are in the pits, economically speaking.
threecollie says:
