Be Prepared For More Heat Than Light

During the early months of World War II, American mothers had to be virtually dragged out of their homes and into the work force. Nowadays, according to sociologist Arlie Hochschild, women have to be dragged out of the office to care for children and the household.

The thesis in Hochschild’s controversial book, “The Time Bind,” is that many women devote long hours to paying work not out of economic necessity but out of preference.

How things have changed. The recent death of the real life Rosie the Riveter has summoned up that very different era of five and a half decades ago. “Rosie the Riveter” was the name of a hit song that paid tribute to the American women who worked in the nation’s defense plants. While visiting an aircraft parts plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., actor Walter Pidgeon came upon an actual Rosie who operated a rivet gun. Rose Will Monroe was then drafted to help sell war bonds.

Monroe enjoyed factory life, although as a widowed mother of two, she had little choice. Her enthusiasm for working outside the home, however, was not shared by most of her contemporaries. Mothers then were expected to labor only for the good of the family. “No woman with dependent children should be encouraged or compelled to seek employment until all other sources had been exhausted,” said War Manpower Commission chief Paul McNutt.

However, serious labor shortages left no alternative but to go after the homemakers. And that policy met fierce opposition. In her book, “No Ordinary Time,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the outcry. A 1943 editorial in Catholic World, for example, argued that “women who maintain jobs outside their homes … weaken family life, endanger their own marital happiness, rob themselves of man’s protective capabilities, and by consequence decrease the number of children.”

To counter such concerns, the War Department stressed the temporary nature of the jobs. The positions would terminate the moment the men returned. (And they did.) “A woman is a substitute, like plastic instead of metal,” a government brochure asserted. Indeed, women’s absentee rates on production lines soared because of their insistence on maintaining traditional standards for home life.

Listen to this: Eleanor Roosevelt asked the factories to hire personal shoppers who would take grocery orders in the morning from the women and have filled bags waiting for them at the end of the shift.

To reassure women that they could do the jobs, a Labor Department pamphlet made comparisons between work done at home and the production line. “If you’ve used an electric mixer in your kitchen,” it said, “you can learn to run a drill press.”

Today, working mothers put in longer hours at the job, yet few social scientists have suggested they should be devoting more of their efforts to tending the home fires - until recently. Hochschild reports that many young children are now routinely left at day care centers for 10 hours at a time, to the detriment of their mental and social health. Even babies under one year of age are found to spend an average 42 hours a week in day care.

Hochschild contends that personal comfort rather than economic need is the driving force behind these trends. Women, she says, find the orderly workplace to be a more nurturing place than a home filled with drudge work and unruly children.

This is hot stuff. Feminist critics see Hochschild’s book as another attack on the career aspirations of women. Where are the fathers in all this? They don’t want to stay home with the kids, either. And what about the many single mothers who must support families on their own?

Politicians find it useful to support the myth that most American families need a second paycheck to preserve their middle class status. Democrats blame low wages. Republicans blame high taxes.

But sociologists are now noting how the definition of middle class has inflated over the years. Compare the tiny houses and apartments of the stay-at-home moms of two generations ago with the massive, multigaraged manses of many working couples today.

No, working mothers are not an evil. Fathers should do their part. However, children cannot be put into storage until some agreement is reached on the proper sharing of family responsibilities. Do not expect a civilized debate on this issue.