What has changed in the last 20-30 years so that it now takes two incomes to maintain a household?
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Post WW2, the rest of the world was busy trying to rebuild their countries and many of them had to pay America back (see: lend lease program) for the military equipment America sent to Europe during WW2. So we got to double-dip, we were undamaged so we had the only industry in the world, we got to profit by helping Europe rebuild their cities, and we got paid back for billions of dollars of equipment we sent to Europe. For a 5 year old, America was the only country going to school for an education while earning money – everyone else was at home sick.
All of this combined to make an almost perfect situation for America’s economy to explode, which resulted in the value of the American dollar being worth a lot more than it is now.
America also became “suburbanized” and started to spread out from city centers, due to the ubiquitousness of the car. This allowed homes to be built much more cheaply and very rapidly, on land that cost a whole lot less too.
There are many more factors, but those two were the big contributors to creating a situation where we only needed one wage earner to support a typical family.
There is a perception today that this is no longer the case, which is not true. You can still support a traditional family on a single income, you just can’t do it with the wide variety of jobs like you could back in post-WW2 era.
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