history

Ed at Gin and Tacos offered up the figure below comparing the minimum wage (adjusted to inflation) and the poverty line for a family (he doesn’t specify how many children).  It reveals that, as Ed puts it: “not once in its 80-year history has the minimum wage, if earned 40 hours weekly, hit the Federal poverty line for a family.”  That is, a dedicated full time worker earning minimum wage does not earn, and has never earned, enough to keep a family out of poverty.

So, if you are a single parent, you’re screwed.  (And, frankly, if you aren’t, you’re still screwed because child care will likely wipe out, if not exceed one person’s entire income.  Subsidized day care only serves a fraction of the children that are qualified.)

Ed notes that, given this, the rational choice for a parent is to go on welfare.  Welfare doesn’t get you above the poverty line either, and you’re still likely to be miserable, but at least you’ll be miserable while parenting your children instead of miserable while flipping burgers.

Some argue that, if people choose to go on welfare instead of work, then welfare must be too generous.  Lower welfare payments and people will choose to work.  Ed, however, suggests that the real problem revealed by this figure is the insufficiency of the minimum wage.  Raise the minimum wage and people will choose to work.  Only one of these solutions actually mitigates human suffering.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Penny R. sent in this picture from c1943.  In it, two women model newly designed safety gear for working women.  The woman on the right is wearing a plastic bra designed to protect her breasts from “occupational accidents.”  Don’t worry fellas, the “girls” will be safe!

From commenter, Sanguinity, who seems to know what s/he is talking about:

I couldn’t say, not without knowing what the job in question was, what the job’s hazards, why the employer went for protective equipment instead of changing the job, nor when (or if!) breast protectors were required (as opposed to being requested by the employees).

(And frankly, those answers would only help me judge whether were useful from today’s perspective. The methods of occupational safety have changed hugely since the 1940s; quite a lot of what was common safety practice in the ’40s would be unacceptable today. Even if breast protectors for a given job wouldn’t pass muster today, they might very well have been useful then, within the context of acceptable safety practices of the day.)

No, what’s unusual about this photo to me, as a safety professional, is that they were willing to consider issuing sex-specific safety equipment at all. Nowadays, creating and maintaining sex-specific safety regs looks very much like sexual discrimination, and can easily cross the line into outright discrimination if you’re not thinking about it very carefully. (Not to mention: who’s going to check under these women’s coveralls to make sure they’re wearing their required protective equipment, assuming breast protectors are required?) Nah, even if initial analysis indicated that breast protectors would be reasonable/useful for a given job, any contemporary safety pro worth his or her salt is gonna work pretty hard to find another way to do things.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Today we think of prunes as something old people eat.  But, as this ad from 1958 reveals, the California Prune Advisory Board hoped to make prunes a favorite with moms and kids.

Text:

Win their hearts with prune tarts

Just yummy, Mummy!  A delicious, healthy way to satisfy that yearning for sweets.  Wonderful California prunes are fairly bursting with energy, iron, vitamins and minerals.

To make delicious, decorative prune tarts just use your favorite prune whip recipe.  Pour into tart shells and top with whole prunes, stuffed with almonds.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

I love this 1981 Lego ad, sent in by Nora R. (found at Flikr):

This is what I looked like as a kid. Except that I have naturally curly hair that my mom couldn’t control, so add a halo of frizz sticking out everywhere. And it’s been a while since I’ve seen an ad that shows a girl like this–wearing clothes and playing with a toy that aren’t meant to be specifically “feminine” in our current version of that. She’s playing with regular Legos–not some special version for girls that makes a shopping mall or purse or tube of lipstick! And she’s beautiful!

I’ve seen other ads from the ’70s and ’80s, particularly for Tonka trucks, that show girls like this–in clothes that look like they’re actually made for playing instead of making a fashion statement, and playing with toys in the same way boys would, even if it means getting dirty (gasp!). When we see ads that always show girls in pink, playing with “girl” versions of toys, or engaged in passive activities, that’s a particular marketing choice, not some inevitable, obvious way girls need to be depicted to sell products.

[Note: In the comments, we’re getting a lot of love for the Legos. That’s fine and all, but I must speak up for Lincoln Logs, which were way more awesome if you wanted to build corrals to hold your Breyer horses.]

[Note 2: Holy crap! Someone remade the “Thriller” video with Lego people! I have to admit, Legos probably work better for this purpose than Lincoln Logs would.]

NEW! Nov ’09 I found three more examples of ads that seem devoid of gender differentiation (here, here, and here):

The New York Times has some interactive graphics showing various types of data about social class and class mobility. You can see where you fall in terms of four characteristics often used to measure class status, see the overall class breakdown for various occupations, and so on. This graph shows social class mobility by depicting which social class (divided into quintiles) the U.S. population fell into in 1998 based on the social class they started out in from 1988:

You can hover over a particular group, such as “lower middle,” to see the outcome just for them.

Another graph of social mobility:

This next graph counters the idea that poor families remain poor forever (often explained by some version of the “culture of poverty” thesis) by showing that if you track a poor family over multiple generations, there is a general trend toward upward mobility:

That isn’t to ignore the fact that being poor leads to circumstances (poor schools, etc.) that make upward mobility difficult. But the idea that poor families stay poor for generation after generation, passing on poverty almost like a genetic characteristic, simplifies a more complex story about how families become poor, how long they remain poor, and the importance of looking at structural factors as opposed to a “cycle of poverty” explanation.

Since Lisa shared an embarrassing story today, I’ll share one too: for some reason, I think because he had the album Purple Rain and was famous for wearing purple a lot, for the longest time I thought the book The Color Purple must be a biography about Prince.

Mark Thoma at Economist’s View posted the following graphical representation of changes in the age distribution of the population of the U.S. between 1950 and today, and projected to 2050:

The bump, slowly moving off to the right, is the baby boom generation. The downward slope in the lines as you move to the right represents a population with a larger percentage of older people or, in other words, an older average age. If the forecast is correct, about 10 percent of the U.S. population will be over 75 by 2050.

Mark observes that many examinations of historical trends likely need to take into account this changing age distribution. For example, he asks:

…with a larger and larger fraction of the population moving into the asset liquidation phase of their life-cycle, how is the saving rate affected? How much of the change in the saving rate in recent years is attributable solely to changes in the age-distribution of the population?

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Remember the hymen? The hymen is that flap of skin that “seals” the vagina until a woman has sexual intercourse for the first time. Supposedly one could tell whether a girl/woman was a virgin by whether her hymen was “intact.” (It bears repeating that neither of these things are true: it doesn’t “seal” the vagina and is not a sign of virginity at all.)

Because an intact hymen signaled virginity, and virginity has been considered very important, preserving and protecting the hymen was, at one time, an important task for girls and women. You can imagine how tricky this made the marketing of that brand new product: the tampon. Early marketing made an effort to dispel the idea that sticking just anything up there de-virginized you. It worked. (In fact, some partially credit tampon manufacturers for the de-fetishization of the hymen that’s occurred over the last 60 years.)

We still see tampon marketing addressing the question. Here’s a link to a website where it’s a FAQ and here’s an example of an advertisement from the ’70s ’90s:

Selected text:

I really wanted to use tampons, but I’d heard you had to be, you know, ‘experienced.’  So I asked my friend Lisa.  Her mom is a nurse so I figured she’d know.  Lisa told me she’d been using Petal Soft Plastic Applicator Tampax tampons since her very first period and she’s a virgin.  In fact, you can use them at any age and still be a virgin.

See this post, too, on the marketing of tampon to women in the workforce (wearing pants!) during World War II.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Married women in the U.S. do about 70 to 80 percent of the housework. When women marry, the number of hours they spend on housework increases; for men, it stays the same. When couples have children, her housework increases three times as much as his. Feminist women do less housework than non-feminist women; men married to feminist women do the same amount of housework as men married to non-feminist women.

All this and more, including some data on Portugal, China, Russia, South Africa, Italy, Britain, and the Netherlands, can be found at this fact sheet at the blog Social Studies.

The discrepancy between the number of hours wives and husbands contribute to housework decreased between 1965 and 1995:

According to the fact sheet:

…in the 1990s, U.S. women spent about half the time on housework as they had 30 years earlier (17.5 hours down from 30 each week), while men, on the other hand, were spending just over twice the time they had spent (10 hours up from 4.9).

Women, however, still do nearly twice the amount of housework as men.

You may notice that the increase in hours that husbands now spend on housework does not match the decrease in hours that wives now spend on housework.  This means that we have dirtier houses (no, really, we do).  We also now hire housecleaners, and that makes up some of the difference.  It may also be true that our gadgets (e.g., washers and dryers) save us time.

Relevant Links

Historical examples of the social construction of housework: husbands “help” wives by buying machines, gadgets replace slaves, feminism by whirlpool.

Contemporary cultural endorsements of the idea that men just don’t do housework (not so funny in light of the data): porn for women, men are jackasses, cleaning products are for women, men do housework fantasy calendar, KFC offers moms a night off, men are lazy oafs, and porn for new moms.

Also, women love to clean: cleaning is power, joy in cleaning, cleaning products are women’s special friend, and mmm, a new washer.

And, the intersection of housework, gender, and race: the color of housework.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.