Work Inside the Home Is Still Work, Right?

{Theresa Funiciello, a former welfare mother, is the author of Tyranny of Kindness: Dismantling the Welfare System to End Poverty in America (Atlantic Monthly Press) This article was originally published in Ms. Magazine, April 1998.}

In a landmark divorce settlement, a Connecticut judge awarded an estimated $20 million of General Electric executive Gary Wendt’s assets to his former wife and the mother of his children, Lorna Wendt. She argued that she was an equal partner working with him to advance his career, that she’d given up her own career to raise their two daughters, and that her work in the home enabled his success—so current assets and stock options, and other deferred income earned during the 32 year marriage but not yet vested, were half hers. To a significant degree, the court confirmed the economic value as well as the social benefit of Lorna Wendt’s not quite invisible labor to her family and by extension, to GE. She’ll receive a bundle at least partly because, as the saying goes, “every mother is a working mother.”

Except, apparently, if you are poor. In the welfare debate that put an end to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Wendt’s point that mothering has value and is work was entirely missed. Tens of millions of adults in the U.S. were raised on welfare by poor mothers who managed to keep them alive and teach them values. The “results” are everywhere—doctors and truck drivers, waiters and teachers—contributors to society whose mothers stretched the puniest incomes to meet their families’ needs and sang all the lullabies by themselves.

But the national confusion over “work” has resulted in a system of so-called reform that negates these accomplishments and requires every needy mother to get a job outside the home, even if the family becomes poorer (less than one in three welfare mothers with a high school diploma escapes poverty through wage work). The new welfare law also effectively takes from poor mothers the power to decide how best to care for small children and hands it over lock, stock and barrel to the same welfare bureaucracy that so miserably administered AFDC. Competent, caring mothers who fail to sustain wage work risk the total withdrawal of income support. And although poor families are receiving less income assistance than before “reform,” government is actually paying billions more to states for everything from substandard child care to massive computer systems that became necessary for increased bureaucracy. Duh.

The point is not to restore AFDC to its former ignominy. Policymakers should be asking how to structure social or tax policy to secure—with dignity—food, shelter, and clothing, regardless of a person’s place of work. Instead, they focused on red herring issues like “dependency” (though surely welfare mothers were no more dependent than Gary Wendt). We already know what happens if income is unavailable to poor mothers with children. It was called the nineteenth century. It was not pretty.

Trouble is, too often slips of the tongue, and pen, breach feminists’ own pact, implying that the generic meaning of the word “work” is only that activity for which one is paid. In so doing, we allow wages (or the lack thereof) to define our own and our sisters’ value.

Whether hanging from the chandeliers of the glass ceiling or falling through the cracks in the floors below, we all remain cheap dates in the gross national product. Whether CEOs or cashiers, women’s jobs outside the home fetch the lowest relative wages because our historic work in the home is perceived as valueless. Many of the new, low-paying jobs are “mother replacements,” such as child care. The good news is that having had to pay for so much work that was once hidden hasn’t hurt the economy—it shows up these days in national statistics as employment growth.

On the other hand, leaving home for the marketplace doesn’t always help families or society, and those who stay home shouldn’t be forced to choose poverty and a slap in the face for “not working.”

We’re not by any stretch close to full productive choice. Redefining work and the benefits that ought to come from it is a start. Fashioning a modern distribution system that supports those without wages and those whose wages are insufficient, in a way that enhances a robust market economy and a healthy society, would help us cross safely into the new millennium. Tall order, yes. Impossible, no.