> You can tell how good a job corporatists and statists did at eliminating homemaker by observing how most moderns fruoously rebuke even the mere suggestion that the role was A Good Thing.

Indeed. Ironically, the effect is to be expected, and in every other situation people would call it obvious. Give everyone $1k in unconditional basic income? Obviously, the market will quickly readjust prices to consume surplus income. But then, get people to run two-income households, and be surprised the prices readjusted so that single-income household is no longer a possibility?

The sci-fi story solution I've come up with is we put everyone into a lottery. Everyone draws a number. Evens get their salary doubled, odds are no longer allowed to work. Everyone find a partner.

Evens will pair up with evens to quadruple their unit income (why attach yourself to a deadweight odd?), with odds becoming a shunned caste largely doomed to death.

>and have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.

After many years of denying this would be better for us, my wife and I have recently decided that one of us (maybe her, probably me) will focus full-time on the kids and house. A big shift after 20 years of working, but we’re looking forward to it.

> We had other solutions for a while too[...]

There were more solutions besides monasteries and marriage. My grandparents, living in a small town in a rural area of Austria maybe 50 years ago, had a large family. That town's teacher was single, and it simply wouldn't have been economical for her to do her own cooking, so she had a deal whereby she paid my grandparents so she could come over every day to have dinner with the family. This arrangement was so common that there was even a word for it ("Kostgänger").

I'm surprised that there isn't a sharing economy startup yet, trying to reinvent the concept. -- "Uber for warm meals". Or at least I'm not aware of one. It probably exists.

On another note: The nuclear family household with one dedicated homemaker was historically a relatively short-lived concept. Prior to that, we tended to have extended families sharing a household, and the significant amount of work involved in food preparation was surely one of the drivers of that.

Regulations around selling food are far more brutal than "ride sharing". It varies by state in the US, but generally speaking unless you keep your income below certain dollar amounts and stick to things like jam and pickles, you need to operate out of a commercially licensed and inspected kitchen.

Far better to do as hoc, personal arrangements than try to scale it into a fully fledged market.

I just got back from a week at a hiking camp that generally changes locations each year. I was talking to the head cook and she was saying some locations are more stringent than others but generally there's at least a cursory inspection required.

This is somewhat of a plot component in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, set in New York in 1790. Ichabod Crane is a schoolteacher, and he is sustained by food and lodging from the villagers.

This comment reminded me to thank my wife for doing the hard work of being a homemaker.

>have one person do the more-than-fulltime job of homemaking.

This was almost always the woman.

>disappeared because corporations needed

Also because women did not like the absolute dedication of their lives to homemaking as a default. They wanted the freedom to join the paying workforce, and wanted equal pay for their work (still waiting on that).

There's some truth in your comment, but it glosses over the very real problems that came with the gender roles and subsequent power structures of that time.

These power structures have existed for millennia, so this abstracted idea that women wanting to step out of their traditional gender roles ONLY in the last century is a bit arbitrary.

It makes much more sense that because the ruling class wanted a bigger work force they sanctioned for (or at the very least turn a blind eye) women’s role in the work force.

Do we have examples of the 1970s women's lib movement (for one example) receiving broad financial, social, and political support from large corporations across multiple industries?

Exactly two millennia. The role of housewife didn’t really exist until the 1820s, and even then it was more of an upper-middle class thing and a distinctly American concept. It didn’t even really take off until the industrial revolution when factory jobs became more mainstream.

It was also created by corporations, largely to sell magazines, cookbooks, and home appliances.

Everywhere else in the world, especially outside of cities, the labor of the home was evenly divided because everyone in the family had jobs.

That’s two centuries, not millennia.

More obvious explanation is that the movement really took off after the World Wars, as there was a huge labor shortage on the market to be covered, in the form of a whole generation of young men who never came back from the meat grinder.

And many women spent WWII in factory jobs or even more directly combat-related roles especially in Europe. (Just finished reading a book that mentioned how Mary Churchill--daughter of that Churchill--ended up commanding an AA battery.)

While, of course, the period after is probably widely seen as classic white picket fence suburbia, the WWII experience couldn't have helped but set some changes, however slow, in motion.

At the same time, let's not discount the fact that it's made the single-earner family increasingly impossible to sustain for younger families. I'm sure I'm not the only heterosexual man who would be grateful if he could quit his day job and take care of the home while his spouse went out and made the money.

The problem was that which of those two roles you played was assigned at birth, and if you didn’t want the homemaker role, well too bad, you can’t have a bank account and most employers won’t hire you. That didn’t change in the US until the 1960s.

If you were a gay woman, you were forced to be a homemaker for a man you didn’t love because it was the only way to even access an income.

Black women could get jobs… as homemakers for rich white families where the wife either didn’t want to do the work or couldn’t keep up with the mountain of labor dumped on her. But they were paid a fraction what a white man could earn.

If you were a man who wanted to be a homemaker, literally everyone looked down on you and many institutions considered you a drain on society. This attitude still persists to this day.

But sure, corporations are why women now exist in the workforce.

House husband households, where the man is the homemaker, and the woman (in the case of a heterosexual relationship) is the high powered lawyer/c-suite exec/other highly paid professional are on the rise. Attitudes that the man in this case is a "drain on society" are slowly changing.

Funny how that works.

I've known a few couples where that was the case. They had maybe a couple young kids and the wife made very big bucks. You could hire a nanny but, if the husband wasn't especially passionate about his work and was happy to stay home, it's not the worst system one could imagine.

> The problem was that which of those two roles you played was assigned at birth, and if you didn’t want the homemaker role, well too bad, you can’t have a bank account and most employers won’t hire you. That didn’t change in the US until the 1960s.

The point is that this didn't change into a choice. It changed into everyone being assigned the role of a laborer at birth - instead of reality where anyone can get a job, we have a reality where everyone has to get a job.

Want to be a homemaker? Well, too bad, that's generally not an available role anymore - unless you find someone with above-average income (or accumulated wealth) to fund your stay-at-home work. Man or woman, gay or straight, your only role is now to make money on the market. All the usual homemaker responsibilities? Why, those are all services now, which you can pay for out of your salary.

More than full-time? Ha, I could manage three households and still have time left over compared to a 40h wage job. I doubt the average person spends more than 2h/day on housekeeping. My mother certainly didn't when I was a child.

I think the home-maker role would be a better thing if it hadn't been largely determined by one's gender.