Women’s Progress & Unintended Consequences
Prior to the 19th Century, only in a tiny number of very wealthy homes did servants free wives and mothers from the running of a household. Nursemaids were a supplement to the mother, not a replacement; before aspirin and antibiotics, women could expect to spend much of their time, wracked with anxiety, tending the sick.
From the early 19th century, paid employment outside the home became increasingly possible for educated women. Outside the middle classes, full-time work until marriage was the norm; and poor married women and widows supplemented family income out of necessity.
Today, about 13% of British women of working age can be classified as professionals, managers or employers, and nearly 70% of them are in full-time work. For non-professional women in this age group, the figure is just 35%.
In the recent past, a woman’s earnings over a lifetime were a fraction of her husband’s. This has ceased to be true for the educated but childless in the generation that is now middle-aged.
A female graduate born in 1970 who has two children can expect lifetime earnings that are 88% of her husband’s, whereas for those with middle-level qualifications the figure falls to 57%, and for those with no formal qualifications at all to only 34%. This gap mostly reflects part-time work and career breaks.
A majority of British law students and almost two-thirds of medical students are now female and, based on current trends, the majority of doctors will be women by 2012.
By the 17th and 18th centuries, upper- and middle-class women were educated, cultured and well-read, but they had no career open to them other than marriage.
In the 19th century, a network of schools for all classes developed. In 1851, the British census counted 42,000 schoolmistresses, plus 21,000 governesses, but not a single female physician or surgeon.
By the 1891 census, the “professional occupations” group contained a remarkable 313,000 women compared to 342,000 men. Among the women, 217,000 were teachers and 53,000 were nurses.
In the early 1990s, American girls scoring in the top academic decile were less than one-fifth as likely to become teachers as their 1964 counterparts had been.
About 30% of British graduate women born in the early 1960s entered their forties childless. For graduate women born in 1970 (a substantially larger group), the expected figure is 40%.
Among British women born in the late 1970s, almost half of those with no academic qualifications at all had their first child by the age of 20, compared to 1% of those with degrees. Only 20% of the first group, compared to 85% of the latter, were still childless by their late twenties.
There is plenty of evidence that the children of teenage and uneducated mothers are likely to be relatively unproductive future citizens, less skilled, and more likely to experience unemployment.
The average proportion of women bearing children, and the average number of children per mother, is pretty much the same for those born in 1910 and those born in 1970. What is different this time is that there is a very strong inverse relationship between education and childbearing.
“Working girls, broken society,” by Alison Wolf