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Bill BrysonA Walk in the Woodsp. 353 |
The two-income family
Harper´s magazine in December struck a sombre economic note with an article by Nancy B. Mavity on an unsettling new phenomenon, the two-income family, in which husband and wife both went out to work to pay for a more ambitious lifestyle. Mavity´s worry was not how women would cope with the demands of employment on top of child-rearing and houswork, but rather what this would do to the man´s traditional standing as breadwinner. ´I´d be ashadmed to let my wife work,´ one man told Mavity tardly, and it was clear from her tone that Mavity expected most readers to agree. Remarkably, until the war many women in America had been unable to work whether they wanted to or not. Up until Pearl Harbor, half of the forty-eight states had laws makin it illegal to employ a married woman.