The Price of Everything

by Eduardo Porter

  Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski documented that in the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea, husbands had the right to kill their wives if they committed adultery, while wives were entitled only to leave their adulterous husbands. Sumerian law established that while a willingly adulterous wife should be killed, a philandering male merited death only if he deflowered the virgin wife of another man. If a wife was accused of adultery, she had to prove her innocence by jumping in the Euphrates. If she drowned, she was guilty. If she survived, her accuser had to pay her husband twenty shekels of silver, or about seven ounces.

  Vestiges of these institutions remain with us today. Until the 1970s, family law in the United States obligated men to support their wives up to their own standard of living. Today, alimony payments to the spouse with lower earnings are still a standard feature of divorce. But the terms of the marital transaction have changed, and the main driver of the transformation has been the transition of women into paid work.

  In The Theory of Economic Growth, published in 1955, the development economist W. Arthur Lewis of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia wrote, “It is open to men to debate whether economic progress is good for men or not, but for women to debate the desirability of economic growth is to debate whether women should have a chance to cease to be beasts of burden and to join the human race.” The raw Darwinian marketplace values women as wombs, selling reproductive services and household service in exchange for men’s sperm and economic resources. But development changed the terms of the transaction. It gave women another function, as producers in the market. It thus increased their value, both in the household and in society at large.

  THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH century, economic growth offered women in industrializing societies new opportunities to produce outside the home, which transformed their contribution to the household and improved their bargaining status. Work changed women’s perspectives—offering new careers and lives. Lewis argued that “woman gains freedom from drudgery, is emancipated from the seclusion of the household, and gains at last the chance to be a full human being, exercising her mind and her talents in the same way as men.”

  But if development opened a new set of options for women, the addition of women to the workforce contributed to shape the path of development. Women brought to the workforce a different set of skills that eased the shift from heavy industry to service-based economies in the rich nations of the West. Of equal importance, as women increased their clout over decisions about household investments and expenditures, they helped usher in vast social and economic changes that profoundly altered Western civilization.

  The economic historian Claudia Goldin argues that women’s labor supply follows a sort of U-shape as countries develop. In preindustrial societies, such as colonial America, women worked a lot, from caring for children to making soap and candles, while the men tilled the family plot. Families were little production units. The family economy wasn’t productive enough to allow anybody not to contribute. But as economies grew, rising family incomes took pressure off women to contribute to household production, leading them to retreat from the workforce and focus more on child care. Facing a strong cultural bias against taking the dirty “guy jobs” that are typical of early stages of development, women reemerged into the labor force only after countries became rich enough to provide secondary education for women and white-collar clerical jobs that they could do without incurring social stigma.

  In West Bengal, India, the first leg of this dynamic occurred during the green revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when the introduction of high-yielding varieties of wheat, rice, and other crops ushered in a burst of farm productivity that raised household incomes and changed the type of work needed in the fields. Herbicides reduced the demand for weeding, traditionally a female occupation. The increased use of tractors and other farm machinery provided exclusively guy jobs. As a result, households became more specialized. While the men remained in the fields, women moved into the home to take care of the household. Unsurprisingly, West Bengali fertility increased.

  The pattern also showed up in the United States of the late eighteenth century. Textile mills offered jobs to unmarried girls, who used their pay to supplement the family income and accumulate a dowry to make them more attractive partners in marriage. But as soon as they married, they left the workforce to care for their families.

  American women remained in the home for a long time. By the end of the nineteenth century, only 5 percent of married women in the United States worked outside the home. Indeed, until the late nineteenth century, husbands had legal claims to their wives’ earnings and property. States started passing laws granting women property rights only in the final few years of the nineteenth century. Economists suggest this is because women had very few chances to get a paid job or accumulate assets. But as industrialization opened more opportunities for women in the workplace, this arrangement started getting in the way of development, inhibiting women’s incentives to work.

  The pattern described by Goldin fits the curve of economic development in the world today. In extremely poor countries like Rwanda and Tanzania, nine out of ten women of ages forty-five to fifty-nine work. Women’s labor supply declines as countries progress, reaching a low point around the stage of development of Mexico and Brazil, and then bounces back as countries reach the stage of Sweden, Australia, or the United States.

  SOCIAL DYNAMICS BEYOND the workplace have evidently contributed to shape the evolving role of women around the world. Between the early 1900s and the 1970s American women gained the right to vote and to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy as part of broad egalitarian movements. Technology helped. From the washing machine to the frozen dinner and the microwave oven, new inventions made it easier for women to seek opportunities outside the home. The mass distribution of the birth-control pill made it cheaper for men to have sex, reducing their incentive to marry. But it also allowed women to take control of their own fertility, delay marriage, and start a career. Women lost a traditional source of material support but gained economic autonomy.

  The linchpin of these changes, however, was work. Work increased women’s leverage and impelled them to push for gender equality in the workplace, the home, and beyond, driving broader legal and political changes. Institutional changes then encouraged more women to work, producing a positive feedback loop. For instance, women’s growing clout contributed to the spread of the no-fault, unilateral divorce in the 1970s. The change, which lowered the cost of ending a marriage, increased women’s incentive to work as a form of economic insurance in case it ended.

  Women’s labor supply grew sharply throughout the twentieth century. In 1920 less than 10 percent of married women aged thirty-five to forty-four were in the workforce. By 1945 the share was around 20 percent. Women’s educational attainment also grew by leaps and bounds. Outside the American South, high school graduation rates for women jumped fivefold from 1910 to 1938, to 56 percent. This produced a stream of qualified workers prepared for the new clerical jobs opening up across the economy.

  Still, educated women faced an uphill battle to find better jobs. By 1950 a quarter of married women in their prime were in the job market, but the census reported that the top women’s jobs were teacher, secretary, and nurse. Former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor had a hard time getting a job interview with a law firm after graduating from Stanford Law School in 1952 near the top of her class. When she did, it was for a job as legal secretary. “I was shocked,” she reminisced in 2008, two years after retiring from the Court. “It never entered my mind that I would not be able to get a job.” She ultimately took one in the public sector: deputy county attorney in San Mateo County, California.

  Women’s attitudes toward work changed. In 1929 the labor supply of wives typically fell as their husbands’ wages grew—suggesting they worked only to supplement the family income. By the early 1960s, however, economist Jacob Mincer found that women were making the decision on whether to work based on t
heir own wages, rather than those of their husbands.

  Work even transformed women’s bodies. Men tend to like women with big hips and breasts for reproductive reasons. Female hourglass shapes are associated with the onset of fertility—girls have similar shapes to boys, but begin accumulating fat around breasts and bottoms at puberty, when their estrogen levels rise. But these aren’t the only determinants of success. As women’s opportunities in the job market improved, they embraced a different, slimmer archetype of beauty. The architecture designed for success in the mating game—big breasts and waspish waists—lost ground to a more slender body ideal that was better suited for a workplace still ruled by men who tended to see curvaceous women exclusively as mating opportunities.

  Around 1900, the chests of models depicted in Vogue magazine were twice as big around as their waists. But as more women took professional jobs, busts in Vogue slimmed down until by 1925 they were only about 10 percent bigger. Women’s body shape became more curvaceous again in the 1930s and 1940s, perhaps as a consequence of the relative scarcity of men during World War II, and the marriage surge after the end of the war that took many women out of work. But they would slim down again. As a wave of women joined the professional ranks over the next three decades, breast sizes declined progressively relative to waists until by the late 1980s, the breast-to-waist ratio in Vogue was back near its trough of 1925.

  The dynamic fits patterns found in other cultures. One study across dozens of primitive societies found that plump women are less desirable in societies that value women’s labor, suggesting that body fat associated with higher energy storage and reproductive fitness also makes it more difficult to succeed at work.

  Education, coupled with increasing demand for women in the labor force, ultimately changed women’s expectations for good. In 1960 there were 1.84 men for every woman graduating from a four-year college in the United States. By 2008, the graduation ratio had flipped to 1.34 women for each man. And most of these highly educated women worked. In 2000, women accounted for some 40 percent of first-year graduate students in business, and about half of those in medicine and the law. About 60 percent of American women of working age are in the formal workforce, either holding a job or looking for one. This is still about 11 percentage points below men’s labor participation. But it is 15 percentage points above women’s share forty years ago.

  Differences remain in men’s and women’s positions in the workplace. In 2009, women’s median income had risen to about 80 percent of that of men. But the pay gap has remained stuck there for years. Women’s wages are still penalized because they take more time off and are more likely to work part-time than men, mainly because of motherhood. A study of MBA graduates from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found that the gender wage gap rose from $15,000 a year on average, right after graduation, to $150,000 nine years out. It also found that nine years after graduation only 69 percent of female graduates were working full-time all year, compared with 93 percent of males. Yet, despite the persistent wage gap, for most women work has become the norm, irrespective of their earnings. It is what they do, just like men. This has changed American society in fundamental ways.

  RENEGOTIATING THE MARRIAGE BARGAIN

  One cannot overstate how completely the traditional marriage bargain was overturned by the new dynamic. The standard family deal, in which women exchanged the service of their uterus, child care, and household chores for their husband’s wage, was rendered obsolete the moment women arrived home with a paycheck of their own. Women devoted about forty-seven hours a week to household chores at the turn of the twentieth century. By 2005, they had cut back to twenty-nine. Men’s work at home quadrupled to seventeen hours a week. Polls in the late 1970s found that a little more than a third of women disagreed with the statement that “it is more important for a wife to help her husband’s career than to have one herself.” By the late 1990s, four out of five disagreed.

  At the same time, men and women discovered that the things family had been designed to provide—dinner, laundry, sex, and kids—could be had without it. By 2007, about 40 percent of births in the United States occurred out of wedlock. In the early 1970s there were eleven marriages for every one thousand Americans. By 2006 there were seven, the lowest in history. Divorce rates shot up. And having lots of kids, the principal purpose of the archetypal family unit, became less popular. The share of women who had four or more children dropped from 36 percent in 1976 to 11 percent in 2006. Over a fifth of women are now childless.

  Both men and women had trouble adjusting to the new deal. A few years ago, I wrote an article about a slowdown in the labor supply of women that was showing up in American employment statistics. After four decades of growth, it seemed that women’s rate of entry into the workforce had stalled sometime in the mid-1990s. I remember talking to Cathy Watson-Short, a thirty-seven-year-old former executive from Silicon Valley, who pined to go back to work but couldn’t figure out how to mesh the job and caring for three young daughters. Most interesting was her shock at not being able to do it all: “Most of us thought we would work and have kids, at least that was what we were brought up thinking we would do—no problem.” But her bottom line was that despite all the revolutionary changes unleashed by women’s march to work, the relations between the sexes hadn’t changed enough. “We got equality at work,” she told me. “We really didn’t get equality at home.”

  Surveys in the United States about the use of time confirm that women spend more than twice as much time as men tending the kids; men spend 50 percent more time working outside the home. But men too had a tough time navigating changes in the balance of power between the sexes. Over the past five decades the share of prime-aged women, aged twenty-five to fifty-four, who had jobs rose from under 40 to around 70 percent. Over the same period, the share of men in their prime who were employed dropped from 93 to 81 percent. When unemployment peaked in 2009, the share of men in their prime who lacked a job was at its highest since the end of World War II. That proved devastating in the marriage market too. Having lost their edge in the financial contribution to the household, many men were left with little to offer.

  RESEARCHING AN ARTICLE about the decline in marriage rates among American men, I came upon a relatively new market taking shape on the Internet: online marriage brokerages to help frustrated American men find a wife in countries like Colombia and the Ukraine. The men I met were mostly middle-aged; some were well educated and financially successful. Some just wanted quick sex with exotic women abroad. But others were legitimately searching for a lifelong mate. They wanted one who would play by older rules, closer to the 1950s Doris Day template. Sam Smith, a former insurance salesman in Houston who set up the service I Love Latins, told me: “It all started with women’s lib. Guys are sick and tired of the North American me, me, me attitude.” BarranquillasBest.com, which offered Colombian brides, had tips on how to prevent foreign women becoming Americanized: “Let her have constant contact with her family in Colombia. Phone cards and 2 trips home a year are important.”

  Sam offered two-day package tours to Barranquilla for $895, including airfare, hotel, and mixers where a group of 17 American men would be introduced to 750 young Colombian women. “The guys think they died and went to heaven,” he told me. Sam himself was into his second marriage to a Colombian woman, following a divorce in the United States.

  In 2008 more than 42,000 foreign women were brought by Americans into the United States on temporary fiancée or spouse visas. In a way, the bargain they entered into was not unlike that of marriages in the past. The man offered a green card and a crack at a relatively prosperous life; the woman offered youth, beauty, and acquiescence. I spoke with several such couples who declared themselves happy—some after years of marriage.

  The danger was that the men often did not realize that the Doris Day model was no longer operative in other countries either. “He wants to be the king of the house and buys into the promotional claim that he can
get a more traditional woman in Russia—she will cook dinner and have sex and otherwise shut up,” said Randall Miller, a lawyer who has represented foreign women abused by their American fiancés and husbands. “He is taken aback when the woman is outspoken and has opinions and wants to get a job.”

  Changes in the marital bargain even seeped into politics. They pushed women to the left, as economic vulnerability increased their support for taxes and government benefits. And they nudged men, who typically earn more and usually don’t have custody of the kids, to the right. In 1979, American women were 5 percent more likely to say they preferred the left than men, according to election surveys. By 1998 the gap had grown to 13 percent. In the 2008 presidential election, women were 30 percent more likely to vote for President Barack Obama than for his Republican rival, John McCain. Men, by contrast, split their vote almost equally.

  To some extent, similar dynamics have been at play around the industrial world. In Canada, New Zealand, and the Nordic countries, even more women work than in the United States. And women’s labor supply has soared in traditionally patriarchal countries such as Italy, Spain, and Japan. Between 1994 and 2008 the share of Spanish women at work grew from 32 to 56 percent; in Italy it jumped from 36 to 48 percent.

  In these countries too, the traditional family capsized. The marriage rate has fallen to about five marriages per one thousand population a year, on average, across the industrial countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, from eight in the early 1970s. Nowhere has divorce reached the heights it did in the United States in the 1980s. Still, it rose everywhere. And fertility declined sharply, as women decided to delay childbirth to pursue careers, and fewer families were formed. Only 5 of 31 countries in the OECD—the United States, Iceland, New Zealand, Mexico, and Turkey—have a fertility rate at or above 2.1 children per woman, the so-called replacement rate that guarantees a stable population. In Spain women have only 1.5 kids, on average, and in Germany 1.3; in Japan they have 1.4. Fertility is so low that the population in some of these countries is starting to shrink. By 2050, Korea’s population is forecast to shrink 17 percent.