Once a social ideal for many Americans—progressive reformers, labor leaders, enlightened businessmen like Henry Ford, and some New Dealers—”the family wage” has fallen into disrepute in recent decades. Under the spell of egalitarian feminists, America’s political and cultural leaders now reject as hopelessly “sexist” the notion that a man should earn enough to support his wife and children. Yet not everyone has forgotten the family wage, nor is everyone blind to the social costs of repudiating the concept. This valuable little book brings together four papers presented at a conference held in the spring of 1988 that examine the historical and contemporary significance of the family wage. Although uneven, the papers combine to tell an important part of the story of the unraveling of American family life.

In the first essay, Allan Carlson investigates the historical roots of the family wage. He points out that in preindustrial Europe, “family life found a relatively natural setting” on farms and in villages. But the emergence of market capitalism created new economic pressures that threatened family life. Not only did wage competition between the sexes erode the complementarity of gender roles, but the new labor market failed to compensate for the unusual burdens borne by fathers and bachelors. Laissez-faire theorists such as Smith and Ricardo still trusted that the market would in time sort things out equitably and provide wages sufficiently high for family life. Marx and Engels predicted that wage competition would so undermine family life that it would lead to social chaos, revolution, and eventually communism. Many social reformers, however, rejected both laissez-faire optimism and communist determinism. They held that conscious intervention into the wage market could protect the family and forestall social chaos. Such was the guiding logic of Catholic philosophers. Progressives, and early 20th-century labor leaders who demanded an end to the employment of children and married women, while calling for male wages high enough to support a family.

If the other three papers seem to lack clarity and rigor, the reason may in part be that their authors are looking not at the coherent ideals of the past, but at the untidy realities of the present. “Nineteenth-century Americans had a very definite sense of the ideal family,” stresses historian Maris Vinovskis. In contrast, Vinovskis finds that “this ideal of family life [appears] increasingly obsolete” in contemporary America, as fertility and marriage rates have fallen, while rates for divorce, illegitimacy, and female employment have climbed. Friends of the family will not be heartened by his survey of demographic trends.

The feminist attitude toward the family wage receives attention from Jean Bethke Elshtain. In Elshtain’s assessment, the family wage divides the “hard-line equal rights feminists,” who repudiate it as “little more than a conspiracy between and among patriarchs . . . to keep women down,” from social feminists, who regard it more favorably as “a form of resistance to the worst vagaries of capitalism on the part of men and women of the working classes.” Elshtain’s own position is clear: “Those feminists who persist in picturing a world of coequal individualist male and female careerists, avidly exercising their free choices as their children are tended to in modern and spacious day-care centers, endorse a social myth that is more fantastic by far than any ever embodied in the family wage.” Yet Elshtain’s depiction of a feminist tug-of-war on this issue is misleading. In fact, equal-rights feminists totally dominate the contemporary movement, allowing the few remaining social feminists no more than token influence on their agenda.

Largely because of the triumph of feminist doctrine, economist Richard Vedder faces an almost insuperable task in trying to envision the “reconstruction of the family wage.” Still, he manages an intelligent discussion of how inflationary policies drive up divorce rates, recommending a number of fiscal reforms to bring federal spending under control. Vedder also offers sensible recommendations for reducing the anti-family effects of the welfare system.

Fortunately, the book does not conclude with “the dismal science” of economics. In an appended “Summary of a Discussion,” editor Bryce Christensen provides an account of the lively discussions of the 19 people attending the conference. A diverse group—scholars from several different disciplines, a labor leader, a business executive, a homemaker, a journalist, and a foundation executive—the participants ranged widely in their discussion of the cultural and economic trends affecting family life. Naturally, the discussion comments are suggestive rather than definitive, but on some topics, including the limitations of economics, the proper role of government, and Catholic social thought, the exchanges are heated enough to strike sparks.

Review

[The Family Wage: Work, Gender, and Children in the Modern Economy, edited by Bryce J. Christensen (Rockford, IL: The Rockford Institute) 138 pp., $9.95]