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I feel very confused by the way this is often talked about.
Women need jobs for the same reason men need jobs. Hardly anyone marries a well-off man at 18. It's not really an available choice for that many women, even in very conservative communities where it's theoretically ideal. Someone might say that they can go be a waitress or barista or something at 18, and sure, that's not that bad. But then unless both partners have really bought into the homeschooling lifestyle, most couples aren't all that happy about a woman who's just at home by herself or spending her husband's money with her friends 8 hrs a day. That was the issue in the 50s -- taking nicer and nicer jello casseroles and sewing unusually pretty aprons is not any more fulfilling than even quite a dull job, and husbands are not impressed by their wives chilling with their friends all day while they're at work. And then their kids grow up enough to take care of themselves, so what are they going to do? Running a non-profit for fun is for the rich, and costs money. and it's not great to be a waitress at 50. Maybe some women can take 10 years off to raise young kids, but there's another 30 years or so there where most of them will have to work, or face resentment and very tight finances. And for what? Lots of leisure is only enjoyable if you have money or similarly situated friends and neighbors.
This is a post in itself but a substantial reason why so many work outside the home today, and why women working outside the home is correlated with wealth and technological development, is because having access to labor saving devices heavily shifts the economic calculus in favor of women working outside the home. It requires far fewer hours today to achieve what would have been a full time job providing goods for a household historically. One of the few areas where this is not true is child rearing and i s part of why daycare is so expensive and why people sometimes quit work to care for children. Otherwise we have largely automated the tasks of homemaking, freeing people's labor up for other productive uses. Related to this is the idea of a "gold digger." A woman interested in a man for his wealth but who does not proportionally contribute. It's much harder to proportionally contribute without a job when technology can automate most of the things you're supposed to be contributing!
There is no way that daycare costs aren't artificially inflated. If you're already taking care of a kid full-time, you can throw in a couple more, and barely see the difference (it's the whole reason it's even possible for daycare to work). The reason your SATHM neighbor can't offer daycare as a service is that she's not allowed to, not that it wouldn't be cost effective.
I was formerly the board chair of a local non-profit daycare. Even with free facilities, only a couple of full-time staff, a bunch of part-time high school and college students making barely above minimum wage (this was pre-Covid), and zero excess funds most years, we still were barely cheaper than many of the other local daycares. At least where I live, childcare is a highly competitive field. Any conspiracy to artificially inflate costs would need to include every daycare run by a non-profit, university, church, stay-at-home mom, large employer, etc., including every new entrant into the business, of which there are many. A sinister cabal is just not possible.
A little-discussed phenomenon is that since 2011 or so, low-wage pay has skyrocketed in major urban areas. People who were making $8 an hour in 2008 make $30 an hour today. Meanwhile, white collar workers who made $50 an hour (converted to hourly pay) in 2008 may make $75 an hour today, a much smaller increase.
The cost of childcare, fast food, hotel rooms etc for white collar professionals (ie. the upper middle class) has therefore increased much faster than their own incomes.
Oh, you’re absolutely right. I remember raising the minimum wage for the part-timers to $8/hour ten or twelve years ago. The last I heard, the new starting wage at the same daycare was something like $15–$17/hour, and this isn’t even in an urban area, let alone a major one. I don’t know of any white collar jobs that saw a 100% increase in salary over the same time period.
"Good news everyone! Income inequality has really decreased in the past few years. Bad news: everything is now really expensive relative to your inflation-adjusted wage."
The fact that people don't realize those are two sides of the same coin is another black pill.
I mentioned this to someone at work the other day and they looked at me as if I were crazy. The idea that the two were in anyway related (I even specifically limited it to fast food/take out costs) was inconceivable to him, he had a whole bunch of alternative theories.
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