CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Unmaking the Nineteenth Century

WE ARE BUSILY ENGAGED in unmaking the two proudest social achievements of the nineteenth-century reformer: that married women do not go out to work but stay at home and are free to devote themselves to family and children, and that older people retire.

Historically, the labor-force participation of women was always equal to that of men—both worked from the time they were able to do so until they dropped. Neither farm nor craftsman’s shop can be run alone by either man or woman; both require a couple. And, until recently, all but a minuscule fraction of the human race made its living on the farm or in the craftsman’s shop. As late as the mid-nineteenth century—when Dickens wrote his harrowing novel of industrial England, Hard Times (published in 1854)—it was only Utopian hope that someday in the remote future married women would not have to leave their children to go out to work. By 1914 it had become the mark of the “self-respecting working man” that “his woman” need not work for wages. And by 1950—only thirty years ago—it had become almost axiomatic that women, excepting only a mere handful at either extreme of the economic scale, would stop working with marriage and surely when the first child was about to arrive. In fact, until thirty—or maybe only twenty—years ago, freeing women from the necessity of taking a paid job was the “progressive” demand and very largely what was meant by “female emancipation.” And there was no cause on which liberals, progressives, socialists, and reformers of all stripes agreed as wholeheartedly as the need for laws to protect women by keeping them out of “hazardous” and “demeaning” work and occupations. It was still, for instance, one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s great causes.

Now, needless to say, all this is reactionary and discrimination. And for women under fifty the labor-force participation rate is already equal to that of men, regardless of their marital status and almost regardless of their having or not having children.

Mandatory retirement of older people was similarly the “progressive cause” only thirty years ago, and the great “reform achievement.” In the past, there were no retired people—for the simple reason that old people, ready for retirement, did not exist in any numbers. The first reliable census of modern times—the 1591 population count in the Adriatic port city of Zara—found 365 people over fifty in a population of 13,441—one out of every forty; there was apparently not one inhabitant older than sixty, let alone anyone over sixty-five. Yet Zara was famous for its salubrious climate and for the longevity of its rugged Dalmatian stock (still one of the longest-lived population groups in Europe). Conditions had hardly changed 250 years later. The plot of one of the most popular Victorian novels, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (published in 1851), revolves around the inability of an old-age home in an English Cathedral town to find men older than sixty and thus qualified to become pensioners. When life expectancies began to rise rapidly in the second half of the last century, the support of survivors who were too old to work then became the progressive cause; and retirement became the great social achievement, culminating in the mandatory retirement at sixty-five called for by America’s Social Security enacted in 1935 and of the employer-sponsored pension plans that began to proliferate around 1950. But by now retiring for age is discrimination—it is outlawed altogether in California and for federal government employees, and nationwide for almost anyone else until age seventy; there is little doubt that mandatory retirement at any age will soon be a thing of the past throughout the United States.

But the laws limp well behind reality—a very large number of those officially retired do work—only they know better than to tell Uncle Sam about it. For the effective tax rate on the earnings from work between $5,000 and $20,000 a year for people aged between sixty-five and seventy-two is from 80 to 100 percent (a loss of fifty cents in Social Security benefits for every dollar earned up to $20,000, or an effective 50 percent tax; full charge for Social Security contributions—around 7 percent for the employee alone—up to earnings of $25,000; full income tax averaging around 20 percent for the older married couple earning $15,000 a year; and for those working for larger organizations usually another 8 to 10 percent for compulsory health insurance and another 8 to 10 percent for contributions to a pension plan, neither of which much benefits older people). No wonder that being retired is coming to mean getting paid by a former employer for not working and by a new employer for working—and not telling Social Security or Internal Revenue about it. How much moonlighting goes on, we do not precisely know. But estimates of hours worked but not reported run as high as one in every ten—and the largest number of moonlighting hours are being worked by people who are officially retired.

Some reasons for this startling shift are clear. Age sixty-five, the mandatory retirement age of 1919—when we first established it—and of 1935 and the start of Social Security, has been overtaken by life expectancies, by improved health and by greatly improved ability to function despite impairments, and—equally important—by drastic changes in the physical demands made by jobs, so that what was age sixty-five in 1935 corresponds to age seventy-four or seventy-five today. Economic needs, e.g., the pressure of inflation on the fixed incomes of retired people, also play a large part even though Social Security payments are more fully indexed against inflation than any other income excepting only federal employee salaries. But surely, both in respect to the labor-force participation of women and to that of the older, officially retired people, wanting to work rather than to be idle, wanting company stimulus and independence are as important as economics, and may well be more important. Among the older people in particular, one of the main motives is the desire to be independent and not have to live with one’s children—rather than being afraid of being mal-treated by the young as popular rhetoric has it, the old folks try to escape “togetherness” and “care” and enjoy “benign neglect” as long as they possibly can.

But while we have almost unmade the great social achievements of the last century, we are not returning to the conditions of earlier preindustrial times. Historically, women, while always sharing fully in work, have never done the same tasks as men. On the farm and in the craftsman’s shop the sexes were fully equal, but they performed different tasks and rarely worked together. Spinning has everywhere been woman’s work; a “spinster” is never male. But weaving and dying were always, and exclusively, tasks for men. On the islands of Polynesia men built the ships, manned them, and did the fishing; women tilled the fields and grew the yams. Throughout the Old World only women milk cows; in the New World only men do so—why, no one knows. And except for the mythical Amazons, women never took part in organized warfare—even the female nurse entered the military only in the late nineteenth century. But can there really be much doubt that in the next war women will take part—perhaps even in combat and next to men?

Historically, men have worked together and women have worked together—but in work the sexes stayed apart. What we are doing now in all areas thus represents an unprecedented social experiment—surely one of the most interesting ones in social history. We are committed to it—but how such experiments work out one does not really know for quite some time—generations rather than decades.

Similarly, in history people worked full-time as long as they possibly could—and often well beyond. Now the old line between working and idleness or nonwork is becoming fuzzy. A good many of the working women work part-time; a large number even work full-time for a period and then “take time out,” for a baby, for instance, only to come back into the labor force again, part-time or full-time. There is as little precedent in social history for the working patterns of older people as there is for men and women sharing the same tasks. There is now “control of one’s working life”—early retirement followed by a return to work, full-time or part-time; these are “second careers”—made both possible and necessary by the tremendous lengthening of working-life span from twenty-five years or less a century ago to fifty years now; there is “volunteer work”—for the older person whose financial needs are covered by his or her pension, and so on. For both women and older people of either sex there is increasingly a choice of patterns combining work and nonwork, permanent jobs and casual jobs, paid work and volunteer work. And these two groups together already constitute more than half of all the people in the American labor force, even though in our mind’s eye we still assume that a worker is a male adult under sixty-five working full-time. Not all of the women and the older people want to work even when they do, and not all of them want not to work even when they don’t. But a very large proportion—probably a good majority—want some work; and increasingly, especially among the older people, they want to be able to make the decision for themselves.

Employers, union leaders, politicians—even, mirabile dictu, those slow learners, the economists—are beginning to wake up to the impacts of these shifts in employment, working-life patterns, working hours, and benefits. One no longer shocks executives by telling them that they need to structure full-time jobs to be permanently staffed by part-time people. Ten, even five, years ago, benefit options in the place of uniform benefit plans imposed on all employees regardless of age, sex, marital status, and family situation were unheard of. They are becoming commonplace, though organized labor still frowns on them. Marketers everywhere, whether in business or in the hospital, are beginning to adjust to the fact that these developments in the labor force also cause pronounced shifts in market segmentation, in demand, in consumption, and in buying patterns.

But what are the social and political implications? What does it mean, for instance, that the “progressive causes” of yesterday are today’s “hang-ups of reactionary pigs” and “discrimination”? Can other “sacred causes” of the “progressives” and “reformers” of yesterday—or of today—similarly be expected to become “reactionary hang-ups” and “discrimination” tomorrow—as a result perhaps of the same demographic changes that have made the staying of women at home and out of the work force and the mandatory retirement of the elderly into “symbols of oppression”? It is quite conceivable that we are in for a period of very rapid change in which yesterday’s “liberal heroes” become the “rearguard of reaction” overnight—the way, perhaps, in which yesterday’s “progressive unionist” is rapidly becoming Mr. Reagan’s “hard-hat” core supporter.

What will the impact be on the family and on the role and place of the American child in the American home and the American school? The “bourgeois family” in which Mom stays at home with the kids has been one of the favorite topics of sociologists, philosophers, politicians, and preachers since before the turn of the century. Depending on one’s politics, it was either the “bastion of civilization” or “total alienation which divorces women from reality.” Only ten years ago Herbert Marcuse, the philosophical guru of the student rebellion, still trumpeted this old theme that was first played by Flaubert, Karl Marx, and Ibsen. The kids today are fully as much “alienated from reality,” that is, kept out of the world of adult work as they were in the “bourgeois family.” But Mom—and even Grandma—knows as much about the world of work as Daddy knows, is fully as much a part of it, familiar with it, conversant with it. How much longer will TV comedies feature the little woman who cannot balance her checkbook when more than half of all students in accounting courses are female? And what will the family of tomorrow look like—not only with two incomes but with two parallel and separate careers, that is with “competitive coexistence”? I don’t know whether it will be better or worse than the “bourgeois family”—but it will surely be different.

Finally: What of all that wondrous talk of the “disappearance of the work ethic”? In the very years in which every attitude survey showed that the “work ethic” is gone, both total labor force and the proportion of the population actively in it and at work have risen spectacularly, while the obstacles to labor-force participation of both older men and women have been steadily dynamited out of the way. One lesson of this is an old one: In a good many social matters “attitudes” are secondary and “attitude surveys” a snare and a delusion; what matters is what people do and not what they say they will do, with the correlation anything but predictable. But more important: In retrospect it appears that the last hundred years—the hundred years in which nonworking for married women and older people were the “progressive causes”—were really the years in which the “work ethic” was being undermined. The last twenty years have seen it return with a vengeance.

(1981)