Abstract
The replacement of housework done on an unpaid basis by purchased family care services has increased, due to the entry of more and more married women into paid work. The “industrialization” of childcare and food services, and perhaps of housecleaning services as well, can be thought of as the ultimate episode—and the logical conclusion—of a process that began millennia ago. Before economies based on regularized exchange were well established, the only way to get some product or service was to have some family member produce it. As economies have developed over the centuries, more and more products for family consumption have come to be supplied by barter or purchase and fewer by within-the-family production. Housework and child care are the major do-it-yourself products that remain; if they are absorbed into the exchange economy, only self-chauffeuring, some amateur housepainting, and backyard vegetable gardening will be left.
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Notes
Clair Brown, “Home Production for Use in a Market Economy,” in Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (eds), Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions (New York: Longman, 1982).
Quotes are from Maxine L. Margolis, Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 71 and 89.
Margaret Talbot, “Attachment Theory: The Ultimate Experiment,” The New York Times Magazine, May 24, 1998, pp. 22–30, 38, 46, 50, 54.
NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, “Early Child Care and Children’s Development Prior to School Entry,” American Educational Research Journal 39 (2002): 133–164.
See Jay Belsky, “Developmental Risks (Still) Associated with Early Child Care,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 42 (2001): 845–859.
The majority of the experts associated with the NICHD study appear to take this attitude. For example, see Christine M. Todd, “The NICHD Child Care Study Results: What Do They Mean for Parents, Child-Care Professionals, Employers and Decision Makers?” (University of Georgia, 2001).
The NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, “Parenting and Family Influences When Children are in Child Care: Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care,” in John G. Borkowski, Sharon Landesman Ramey, and Marie Bristol-Power (eds), Parenting and the Child’s World: Influences on Intellectual, Academic, and Social-Emotional Development (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002).
Christopher J. Ruhm, “Parental Employment and Child Cognitive Development,” Working Paper W7666 (Washington, DC: National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2000).
Elizabeth Rose, A Mother’s Job: The History of Day Care, 1890–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999);
Sonia Michel, Children’s Interests/Mothers’ Rights: The Shaping of America’s Child Care Policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
Carolyn Teich Adams and Kathryn Teich Winston, Mothers at Work: Public Policies in the United States, Sweden and China (New York: Longman, 1980), p. 67.
For a more extended treatment of the history of child care legislation, see Sandra L. Hofferth, “The 101st Congress: An Emerging Agenda for Children in Poverty,” in Judith A. Chafel (ed.), Child Poverty and Public Policy (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1993).
Suzanne Helburn (ed.), Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes in Child Care Centers (Department of Economics, University of Colorado at Denver, 1995).
Julia Wrigley, Other People’s Children: An Intimate Account of the Dilemmas Facing Middle-Class Parents and the Women They Hire to Raise Their Children (New York: Basic Books, 1995).
Committee for Economic Development, Preschool for All: Investing in a Productive and Just Society, 2002. Other CED publications, issued in 2004, include “Developmental Education: The Value of High Quality Preschool Investments as Economic Tools,” and “Preschool for All: A Priority for American Business Leaders,” a newsletter designed to brief the business community about the economic and social benefits of investing in early education.
See Barbara R. Bergmann, Saving Our Children From Poverty: What the United States Can Learn from France (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1996).
For brief discussions of housing projects in Sweden and England, which had a variety of family care services on the premises, see Delores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1984).
See also Ellen Perry Berkeley, “The Swedish Servicehus,” Architecture Plus, May 1973, which served as the source of the discussion in the text.
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© 2005 Barbara R. Bergmann
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Bergmann, B.R. (2005). “Industrializing” Housework and Child Care. In: The Economic Emergence of Women. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982582_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982582_12
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