What has changed in the last 20-30 years so that it now takes two incomes to maintain a household?
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Those single income households were limited to roughly 1950-1970, in the American middle class and never actually applied to anyone outside that narrow cultural range.
Women have always ‘worked from home’ as well as inside the home to bring in extra money for the household.
My grandmother did the accounting, taxes and payroll for grandpa’s construction company, taught piano, kept up the family’s social contacts in the community, cooked, cleaned and raised four kids as a stay at home middle class mom on call 24/7 in the 1950s-60s.
If she’d been paid at market rates for all that work plus overtime she’d have been making a hell of a lot of money. This was her ‘free labour’ contribution to the family. If I was doing all that for pay today I’d be pulling in six figures a year.
Historically, paid work was usually spinning thread, weaving, sewing and washing from other families with money to pay someone else to do it, they also made and remade their own and their kid’s clothes and did it all without machinery or electricity.
Having space for a veggie garden was also considered an advantage. Food was more expensive back then than we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes. One of my grandfathers was the fourth of thirteen kids, every time his mother got pregnant again they’d add a row of cabbage and potatoes to the veggie garden. Sell or trade the extra to help pay the doctor for the birthing.
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