In 1850, Victoria recorded 2668 marriages. Within two years, that number had nearly trebled. But then something odd happened. The marriage rate plateaued.13
‘Although it was a seller’s market, women were choosing not to put up their wares,’ records Wright. ‘There’s no doubt that women in Victoria felt a power in the marriage stakes that they had never experienced before.’14 The high demand for domestic servants meant even the poorest of arriving women had choices; they could earn a good wage by themselves, and did not have to depend on a man.
Starved of actual brides, a certain cohort of men pioneered a bohemian new craze – the ‘Digger’s Wedding’. ‘A newly cashed-up digger would pay a woman to act as a model bride,’ explains Wright. ‘He would deck her out in the finest wedding couture a nugget could buy, hire carriages and coachmen in gaudy livery, and purchase half the stock of the nearest pub. A crowd of intoxicated digger mates would march alongside the carriage all the way to the bayside suburb of St Kilda, where there would be a champagne dinner for all.’15
Wright also records that during those scant years of wife rush, there was a short-lived spike in the registration of illegitimate children. ‘Registering the birth of a legally illegitimate child was an extraordinary public disclosure and suggests that women were less eager to cover the tracks of ex-nuptial conception, and less likely to see another man’s child as an impediment to future marriage prospects, at a time when it was a seller’s market.’16
The wife rush, like the gold rush, didn’t last. But this awkward question surrounding the usefulness or otherwise of wives, and of how – if at all – their work should be recognised or recompensed, is one that remains stubbornly unresolved.
Lots of external events have influenced the way women work, and the sort of work we expect them to do. World War I introduced women to nursing and low-level political activism. The Great Depression taught them to be responsible for the whole household, and to make rudimentary furniture out of fruit crates that would – eighty years later – sell for vast amounts in inner-city antique stores. World War II entitled them to work in factories, and to wear trousers. Recessions, world wars, and waves of feminism have changed and sculpted the shape of women’s enterprise. But accurately valuing the work that women do in the home? It’s still a pretty sticky area.
Housework doesn’t count towards the best-known measure of national productivity, the gross domestic product, even though women spend an average thirty-three hours a week doing it.17
And it’s not paid, unless you count the slightly tangential efforts from the federal government, like the weekly five shillings per child that Robert Menzies introduced for mothers in 1941, which grew and mutated across the decades since, periodically augmented by one-off gobs of money like the Baby Bonus, star of John Howard’s 2004 campaign launch.
The first and most commonly invoked method used when attempting to value housework is the ‘replacement model’. This is the one where you calculate how much it would cost to hire someone else to do all the jobs that housewives do.
This is fairly easy for the big stuff, like cleaning and child care, where standard rates of underpay are clearly ascertain-able from the formal economy. (These areas also most clearly demonstrate the brain-snapping weirdness of domestic labour’s elastic relationship to the economy: when I vacuum my house, it’s worth nothing at all, but when somebody else does it, it’s suddenly worth twenty bucks an hour.) Things get a bit more ticklish, however, the further you go. When calculating how much it would cost to hire a cook, what kind of cook are we talking about? Some sausage-fingered graduate fresh from a two-day hospitality course, or Heston Blumenthal?
In 1967 the Chase Manhattan Bank established that a housewife was worth $8300 annually (about $60,000 in today’s terms), based on her twelve distinct jobs: nurse-maid, cook, housekeeper, dietitian, food buyer, dish washer, laundress, seamstress, practical nurse, maintenance man, gardener, and chauffeur. ‘It’s an awesome thing for her to keep in mind when she asks for a new fur coat!’ twinkled the Gettysburg Times, reporting the findings.18
Nearly fifty years later, we haven’t really messed with the replacement model too much. The US website www.salary.com offers a dinky online calculator which computes that, in 2013, an American stay-at-home mom’s ninety-four-hour work week is worth an annual pay packet of $113,568 – which seems perfectly reasonable (apart from being imaginary).19 The website’s calculation includes three ‘CEO’ hours and seven ‘psychologist’ hours, which bump up the pay-grade, but is dropping Steve Jobs or Sigmund Freud into a home a persuasive analogy, or just profoundly awkward for all involved?
Like most assessors in this economically tricky terrain, neither Chase in 1967 nor salary.com in 2013 venture into the full range of amenities a substitute wife might need to offer in the interests of completeness. Let me put that more bluntly. ‘Prostitute’ is not on the list.
The other main way in which the work of wives has in the past been valued is called the ‘opportunity cost’ method. This method was pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker, who reasoned that the value of a wife’s unpaid work in the home can be calculated by establishing what she might have earned out in the world if she didn’t have to ice thirty-six cupcakes, devise a wire hook device to get a LEGO fireman out of the bathroom drain, and convey four profoundly ungrateful nine-year-olds to footy practice.
This has a certain rudimentary appeal, if you overlook Becker’s persistent habit of referring to children as ‘non-market household commodities’. If a woman is, for example, a qualified lawyer able to command $200 an hour in professional fees, then the hour she spends cleaning the awkward bit behind the bath with Exit Mould and a toothbrush gaffer-taped to a wooden spoon should also be worth $200, because that’s what her time is valued at by the market, and it’s not like the market is paying so much attention to what women do with their time that we can afford to pass up a straightforward valuation when one presents itself.
Another advantage of this method is that it begins to offer some kind of unsophisticated tracking-system of women’s professional skills, some of which are reactivated after a stint in the home and some of which aren’t. At present the national resources that go into educating and training millions of women who don’t go on to attain comparable seniority with men seem to be lost to the system; they simply blink out, like the radar signal of a light plane entering the Bermuda Triangle. At least the opportunity cost method delivers some kind of accountability: ‘Don’t be silly. That lawyer has not dropped out of the system. She still has all that learning stuff in her head; it’s just that right now she is making a viking helmet out of papier-mâché and aluminium foil.’
To be honest, though, there are cracks in the opportunity cost method you could drive a truck through. Firstly, and most obviously: the cost of an hour of housework isn’t necessarily its value. As any cab driver who used to be a banker will tell you – and in my experience most of them will indeed tell you – they don’t get paid like bankers any more. Why would we perform this switcheroo especially for housewives, and for no one else?
Secondly, there are no market constraints in place governing the quantity of hours worked. Our lady lawyer could easily put a load of washing on, then fanny about on Facebook for ninety minutes. No one is going to hold her accountable for inflating her own hours, which introduces a rather unsatisfactory degree of elasticity into the whole shebang.
And neither of the above-mentioned models really does anything at all about assessing the quality of work in the home. This is quite a difficult – not to mention emotionally charged – area. Is one hour of seriously ramshackle household work undertaken by a slatternly bungler worth the same as an hour of multi-tasking perfection wrought by some Martha Stewart-style domestic goddess in an orderly home that always smells of freshly baked bread?
When I deliver my daughter to school, and compare her general turnout (hat mauled but vaguely present, hair at nape forming the discreet but unmistak
eable beginnings of a dreadlock, dress hem still stapled up in what was, last week, initially conceived as a temporary measure) with those of her friend (intricate braid, shiny shoes, lunchbox tenderly crammed with nourishing treats), it is something of a bulging question.
The replacement model would put the same value on my work and that of the friend’s mum, roughly speaking, though if you were going to be fussy you would probably budget for a hair stylist and a personal groomer for her kid a pay-grade or two above the one for my kid. On the opportunity cost model though, my morning’s cursory attentions would be worth far more, as I am better paid than the other mum is. And that doesn’t seem right.
This is a hard area to discuss, not least because we have a lasting societal taboo that prevents us from calling some mothers good and some mothers bad. It’s one of those things that’s okay to think but not really okay to say out loud, and really quite scorchingly not okay to incorporate into any kind of work-valuation model, no matter how many PhDs in economics you might have.
Competence or otherwise is at the very heart of our modern employment economy; if you’re especially good at something, you’ll probably end up getting paid more to do it than your workmate who is only so-so. But your worth as a mother is a far more nuanced affair, delicate and robust at the same time. If we’re honest, casual valuations of motherhood are often more about just being there than they are about competence.
Maybe it’s a bit harsh to be introducing a whole bunch of key performance indicators in this field anyway. We should keep in mind that no matter how intricate our economic model for determining how much a wife’s work is worth, it’s still only imaginary pay at the end of the day, so getting fussy about standards could seem a bit unreasonable.
While wives are productive, busy and in good health, the valuations of their work remain strictly theoretical; thesis-ballast for special-interest economists, column-fodder for feminists, pub talk for tight-lipped couples on date night. You can argue till the cows come home about what wives should be paid, but let’s not pretend that under any of these models, stay-at-home spouses actually will be paid. It’s all Monopoly money, in the end, which should rather lessen the angst about whether you end up on Mayfair or Old Kent Road.
It’s not until they die, or get divorced, or horribly maimed, that wives, and the work they do, experience the acrid yet compelling tang of real money; for that intriguing set of ex-post-facto calculations, we now turn to the court system.
As Joni Mitchell reminded us, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. And in legal terms, one of the surest ways of working out what something is worth is to lose it in an accident that was someone else’s fault.
Tort law has a special history here. When a working person is injured or killed, there is a calculus – framed loosely by legislation, and honed into precision by generations of plaintiffs and defendants, inhabiting archaeological layers of loss and grief – that instructs us as to what those accidents are worth; what that loss is worth, what is properly claimable. Pages and pages of tables, regulated under workers’ compensation schemes, exist in most states to tell us how much a finger is worth, how much for an eye, how much for a broken neck. How much income is foregone? What can the injured person now expect, by way of future employment? How can the gap most fairly be compensated?
When a person who works at home is injured, however, things work rather differently. Loss of ability to work in the home after an accident is viewed as a ‘non-economic loss’, which is legal-speak for ‘not very much money’. It is an acknowledgement, rather than a formal compensation. In tort law, a housewife rendered incapable of vacuuming is treated in the same way as a man who can no longer go kayaking, or run in the City to Surf. Her inability to do housework is often cited, in such cases, as damaging to her general happiness; Justice Reynolds in a 1982 case called Burnicle v Cutelli, for instance, found that an injured housewife had ‘lost part of a capacity, the exercise of which can give to her pride and satisfaction and the receipt of gratitude, and the loss of which can lead to frustration and feelings of inadequacy’.20 Because housework is unpaid, it is grouped with recreation.
The other kind of compensation historically available when a housewife is injured is compensation to her husband, under a doctrine called ‘loss of consortium’.
Loss of consortium is adapted from a Latin phrase and refers to circumstances in which a man loses the society and services of his wife. I do not blush to use the gender-specific pronouns here, as inherited British law always intended this term to refer to wives, and indeed in many jurisdictions these damages were, for a long time, only claimable by men in relation to awful accidents befalling the women to whom they were married. In the 1970s, the states of Queensland and South Australia amended their legislation to make loss of consortium claimable by wives, too. New South Wales abolished the legislation entirely in 1984.
The good news is that loss of consortium tots up all the stuff that both the replacement-value model and the opportunity-cost model were too shy to canvass; whereas practitioners of the dismal science pull a discreet curtain around the marital bed, the courts wade right in there, in order to compensate for loss-of-nooky when something happens to a man’s wife. (It also covers stuff like not having anyone around to do the ironing any more; this element is called ‘loss of servitium’, and yes, it does mean exactly what it sounds like it means.)
The bad news is that loss of consortium is payable to the chap. And the prospect of a man not being able to have sex any more does seem to have excited slightly more empathy on the bench, historically, than the premature expiry of a woman’s capacity to scrub things.
The feminist barrister and academic Reg Graycar has made rather a study of the courts’ special solicitude for men whom circumstances have deprived of sex. She notes that damage to women’s sexual organs tends to attract rather cursory judicial attention; if an injury makes sexual intercourse painful, it is interpreted as unfortunate but not necessarily compensable.
A damaged penis, on the other hand, is more compelling; Graycar cites a half-million-dollar initial award to a man whose penis was damaged in a botched circumcision as a baby but could still have sex, and $535,045 in 1997 for a man who lost his libido after being attacked by a crazed pig.21
But we digress. The relevant and interesting thing about tort law for our purposes is that the valuation of a housewife’s work is very much calculated in terms of her usefulness to the people around her, whether that is as a sexual partner or servant.
The other point at which the legal community gathers to consider the worth of a homemaker is another of life’s grimmer way stations: divorce.
Divorce, while unfortunate, is a marvellous clarifier. It enables husbands and wives to conduct – in court, and before a professionally indifferent arbiter – all the arguments they might secretly have rehearsed in ostensibly happier times.
‘You had nothing when I married you!’
‘Think of what I put up with, you cheating couch potato!’
‘You’ve spent a small fortune on shoes. How dare you!’
‘What sort of grown man can’t pick up his own pants?’
There is a deep psychological reckoning in divorce. All of a sudden, the emotional discounts people afford to each other when they are in loving relationships (He’s a good dad, so I don’t mind that it’s always me who gets up with the children. She works hard; what does it matter if she is addicted to Gray’s Anatomy?) are summarily cancelled. Instead of the emotional division of labour implicit in most relationships, couples move to a mandated division of labour, by agreement or by order of the court.
All of a sudden, matters of care, custody and maintenance are written down on a piece of paper, the way they hardly ever are when things are still going okay.
In some cases, divorced women find that their husbands become more domestically productive than they were before. Which would be great, if it wasn’t for the loneliness and heartbreak and so on.
But there is also – importantly – an economic reckoning in divorce. It is one of the only circumstances in which a woman’s domestic contribution to a household is calculated and the result is that actual money changes hands, rather than just citation credits or Nobel Prizes.
Western divorce law is a fabulously serpentine affair. In England, until the year 1857, divorces were only awarded with the direct approval of Parliament. Obviously, they weren’t very easy to get, given that you had to summon a simple majority on the House of Commons just to get shot of your spouse; unsurprisingly, it was only the rich and influential who managed it.
And even if you were rich and influential, it helped to be male, as the rules about what constituted a divorceable offence varied for men and women. A single act of adultery committed by a wife, for instance, was grounds for her husband to divorce her – no questions asked. But in order for adultery to be a divorcing matter for a woman, her husband needed to be a serial, irrepressible and shame-less pants man, preferably with goats, before Parliament would even think of getting involved.
The reasoning behind this imbalance was summarised rather fragrantly by the estimable Dr Samuel Johnson: ‘Between a man and his wife, a husband’s infidelity is nothing. Wise married women do not trouble themselves about the infidelity of their husbands. The difference between the two cases is boundless. The man imposes no bastards upon his wife. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of God, but he does not do his wife a very material injury if he does not insult her; if, for instance, he steals privately to her chambermaid; Sir, a wife ought not greatly to resent this.’
The Wife Drought Page 15