I’d add that if the few make great economic gains at the expense of the many, the many get shirty, and they have a tendency to start stealing, and setting fire to stuff. One way and another it doesn’t benefit the few that much.

Imagine if the whole country was predicated on 20 solid hours a week generating a basic, solid living wage. People could live healthily as singles, and if a couple decided to cohabit and raise children they could benefit from the double income and apart from the postnatal physical convalescence period could totally share parenting/household duties while both maintaining a career and independent financial security in case they end up divorcing, as so many do.

There was a time that such a lifestyle for most was the way the Western economy was heading. But somehow a healthy and contented populace was deemed less important than pushing up the stockmarket.

I’m not against economic progress, I just don’t think it’s the only progress worth making.

She had four times more children than the current national average, her husband was inclined to drink his wages on occasion, she ran a small farm and had paid (although badly) work she got called out for. Hardly ‘comfort and security’. I haven’t checked, but I’d bet you anything you like her marriage and death certificates, and her children’s birth certificates list her as having no occupation.

This was a matter of great pride to our whole society, because most of those people knew that their own mothers had had to go out to work to provide a comfortable household when they were growing up – it was a sign of progress and prosperity. It was also expected that technological advances would lead to the breadwinners also working reduced hours and having more leisure time over the next decades.

But that sort of economic abundance wasn’t true before the fifties and has been receding since the seventies, so that we’re back to a situation where unless you’re up in the socioeconomic bracket where most of your income is from investments, then to live in suburban comfort requires two incomes. (And we still don’t have flying cars, either.)

Of course, the MNDers probably blame feminism for the double-income necessity now instead of laying the blame where it belongs:

• * technological advances have downgraded the status (and pay) of most skilled bluecollar work, and instead of having fewer hours for everyone at a living wage we now have longer hours (and high incomes) for a few and the sack for everyone else;
• * and escalating consumerism and a rollback of egalitarian principles according to the ideology of economic rationalism have increased the cost of living.

Wow. So, unpaid domestic labor, vulnerability to domestic violence and sexual assault, and a lack of reproductive rights sure sounds like safety and comfort to me. He’s right. Women have always had it so easy while the menfolk were busting their humps to provide.

Maybe when we’ve all got little e-secretary attachments noting down how every single minute of the day is spent, and everybody can throw up their stats on the screen, maybe then these people will finally believe that women work a significant second unpaid shift.

But yes, as you say, the issue was the lack of pay on the domestic front. A lack of pay that makes it very difficult for women to leave their partners, even if that partner is beating them up, rather than protecting them.