I don’t normally go in for responding directly to blogs, but Verruca annoyed me with her rant that Most Women are Nothing More Than Wasted Potential. As far as I can tell a lot of folks have already been bitching about it, so I’m going to go at it at a (hopefully different) angle.
I haven’t had a whole lot of exposure to full-time homemakers in my life. My own mother started back to college and then into a career when I was eight years old. My sister-in-law is still working for the organization she worked for before she married my brother.
But these days I’m spending a lot of time with my aunt, who has mostly been a full-time homemaker for most of her adult life. And I’m starting to realize that not only is homemaking a philosophically respectable job, it also is an economically respectable one.
I’ve had great difficulty tracking down any plausible estimates of the economic value of homemaking. There are all kinds of silly articles that want to value homemaking based on the replacement costs of services with commercial labor. But I just don’t buy the six-figure numbers. How could a homemaker’s economic value be twice that of the wage-earner in the household?
I did find one court case with some numbers. In 1993 the Supreme Court of Appeals in West Virgina ruled in the case of Raley v. Raley, basically a divorce. The court found that over the 30-year marriage, the economic contribution to the marriage of the homemaker was $216,572. Breaking that down and adjusting for inflation, that’s about $10,000 a year. But, realize that the wage-earner worked for a coal mine in West Virginia. That $10,000 per year was easily one-third as much as the wage-earner’s yearly salary.
Which is a more believable number. Full-time homemakers don’t generate earnings, but they can create a lot of savings. Home-cooked meals are always cheaper than eating out. Homemakers have the time to search for bargains on items, to clip coupons, and watch for sales. They can buy in bulk and store goods, thereby lowering the per-unit costs.
Basically, all those money savings tips you read about, but can never implement because you have neither the time or energy, a full-time homemaker can use.
Not too mention the cost of child care.
Now, I don’t completely disagree with Verucca. In her follow-up article, If You Are a Stay-At-Home-Mom without Interests Outside of Your Kids, Hobbies, or Marketable Skills, You are NOT a Feminist, I get the impression that she is complaining about bad homemakers. Lazy ones who do not contribute much to the household. They are self-centered and lazy, and therefore not particularly valuable. Those kinds of homemakers do exists.
But I think Verucca does a disservice by lumping them all together and saying their lives are without value. Being a homemaker is a respectable career, and can be a “feminist” career. If the decision and the result is to be a successful homemaker.
