We used to have only one person working per household, plus maybe a part-time job. Can't we go back to that, preferably without the sexism this time?

> Can't we go back to that, preferably without the sexism this time?

No. The sexism is what made it work. If society permits both spouses to work then couples where both spouses work can afford to pay more for a house which increases the price of housing (and likewise for everything else). As more two income families come to exist it thereby becomes more difficult to sustain a family on a single income, which further exacerbates the problem by increasing the incentive to become a two income family (and thus the number of two income families inducing price inflation).

The only way to prevent that is for society to somehow discourage couples from both working full time jobs. And since employers have no way to tell what an employee's spouse is doing all day, the most effective social enforcement method is sexism. (Obviously the math doesn't care which sex is inhibited from working but existing culture is a different matter.)

Probably the closest you could get to it without the sexism is to provide everyone with a basic income.[1] A spouse who didn't work full time would still receive the basic income which would significantly reduce the income inequality between single income and dual income families, thereby reducing the pressure for both spouses to work and making single income families more practical.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income

    > The sexism is what made it work.

This is a nonsensical claim and characteristically (for an engineering-oriented discussion forum) a-historic. The reason for the traditional division of labour between the sexes is rooted in biology: before humanity had worked out (1) how successfully to control female fertility and (2) make birthing an almost risk free process (a process that started about a century ago, and was successfully completed only in the last two decades) a large fraction of women were either pregnant or had recently given birth. Carrying out jobs other than looking after offspring was difficult for them and deeply problematic for society on many dimensions. A lot more can be said on this than I have time for but roughly, it made a lot of sense to give the task of rearing offspring to female and to let men provide, and protect. What you call, with derogatory intent, sexism, are simply the rational sex-based division of labour and the concomitant social expectations that stabilised and on this biological basis.

Recent innovations in medicine and fertility control such as condoms have -- to a certain extent -- made obsolete (some of) these sex-based social expectations. However, social expectations evolve slowly, more slowly than technological progress. Moreover, it is entirely unclear if the new orthodoxy, that it is unanimously better completely to abolish sex-based divisions of labour, and modern society is currently in a fierce struggle over this question.

Marx, in "Preface to the Critique of Political Economy" (1859) claimed that revolutions occur when technological development has moved so far ahead of (and hence made obsolete) the social expectations that govern propery relations, that revolution must occur:

    At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces
    of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
    production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal
    terms - with the property relations within the framework of which
    they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the
    productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then
    begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic
    foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole
    immense superstructure.

Whether so simplistic a view is tenable (I don't think so) is another question and I don't want to side-track this discussion. Instead I want to remix/repurpose the quote:

   At a certain stage of development of the contracteption technology,
   the division of labour between the sexes come into conflict with
   the existing relations between the sexes or - this merely expresses
   the same thing in legal terms - with the property and entitlement
   relations within the framework of which they have operated
   hitherto. From forms of development of the reproductive forces
   these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of
   sexual revolution. The changes in the socio-sexual foundation lead
   sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense
   superstructure.

It is too early to tell how this will play out. On one hand educating women leads to increases in productivity, because skilled workers are so much more productive. Moreover workers who feel (whether correctly or not) feel that they have self-choosen their career paths, their destiny, are also more productive than workers who feel they are herded into a career. Even though women, on average, still work less then men, I think the impact is already felt, and this would point towards societies without sex-based divisions of labour winning out. But there is an antithetical tendency which is difficult to ignore: highly educated, working women don't have children, or have only few. We already see this clearly when we compare e.g. female academics with that groups with traditional sex-based labour differentiation (e.g. conservative religious groups, and societies that are too poor to offer educational oppertunities and up-to-date fertility control and reproduction medicine): The latter are vastly outbreeding the former.

It's interesting to see how this will play out in the long run.

You're explaining the reasons for the traditional division of labor. But what we want is (one of) the consequences, not the causes.

Somewhere in your argument is the notion that sex, unlike e.g. race, is actually based on a biological difference that matters in practice, and is therefore a legitimate criterion on which to base socioeconomic behavior. But that doesn't make it not sexism, it just calls into question the legitimacy of "sexism" as a pejorative.

I'm not sure what you mean by "what we want is (one of) the consequences, not the causes".

As to "it just calls into question the legitimacy of "sexism" as a pejorative", sure, that's right. But in day-to-day English, "sexism" is pejorative, and that is not going to change any time soon. Therefore it is confusing to use the term when describing the biologically-based division of labour that was for 99.9999% of human history the only game in town. Calling this division sexist is therefore misleading to casual readers.

> I'm not sure what you mean by "what we want is (one of) the consequences, not the causes".

OP wanted a society in which only one member of a couple is expected to work a full time job. That type of society was historically a consequence of sexism and would be difficult to achieve otherwise for the reasons I explained above. The causes of that sexism have nothing to do with it.

> As to "it just calls into question the legitimacy of "sexism" as a pejorative", sure, that's right. But in day-to-day English, "sexism" is pejorative, and that is not going to change any time soon. Therefore it is confusing to use the term when describing the biologically-based division of labour that was for 99.9999% of human history the only game in town.

Statements that are accurate but confusing are inherently necessary as a precondition to identifying and eliminating the confusion.

Or to put it differently:

AnthonyMouse: 2+2 = 17

mafribe: saying 2+2 = 17 is confusing

AnthonyMouse: we need to keep saying 2+2 = 17 so point out that a world where 2+2 = 17 holds is problematic.

There is nothing confusing about the biological basis of the historical division of labour. You are deliberately introducing this confusion so as to avoid confronting the relevant issues. One has one's opinions as to why you would do this ...

> The reason for the traditional division of labour between the sexes is rooted in biology

In other words, sexism.

You didn't intend saying this, but what your flippant remark amounts to is that sexism has been the rational answer to the facts of human biology for almost all of human history, and that even today, given the advances in reproductive technology sketched in my post above, it's far from clear whether 'sexism' isn't still a good or at least reasonable division of labour.

This sits uncomfortably with the everyday meaning of the term.

And the rest of the comment explains why that is no longer a valid reason.

If by "the rest of the comment" you mean my original post, then I did not say that the traditional division of labour is obsolete. I said it's unclear if it's obsolete or not.

Actually, enforcing sexism or providing basic income are not the only solutions. For example, in the Netherlands, 40% of women work only part-time (and only 4% of those say they want to work full-time, so it's not because of discrimination). It seems that it's possible to shift back towards single-income families simply by becoming a highly-developed, socially-safe country.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/11/du...

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2010/11/going...

http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/the-feminismhappiness-axis...

> It seems that it's possible to shift back towards single-income families simply by becoming a highly-developed, socially-safe country.

In other words, do something sufficiently similar to providing a basic income.

The point of a basic guaranteed income is that you get the income unconditionally, even without working. So what tomp is alluding out is emphatically not a basic income

When women primarily work part time and (by implication) men full time, you still have a sex-based division of labour. It's just less extreme than in the olden days, where men did all the work and women sat around and raise children.

Two earners is a strategy to pick up slack, but it drives down pay over time.

The only way to sustain a "one worker per household" system is to have some kind of force preventing more than one worker per household- be it social, legal, or otherwise. Without that, some folks will try to get ahead, and we will wind up right back where we are.

In short, it just doesn't seem to be something we can have a mix of. Either everyone has one worker per household, or everyone has two (or more).

I also suspect one worker per household might well be the best long term choice! However I don't really know how to implement that effectively without sexism or some other discrimination.

One of the upsides to the old gender roles is it enabled heavy specialization. Men studied business, women studied domestic work. Without those roles, you either have to gamble on one of the two studies, or learn both and in the process sacrifice specialization.