The Family Wage

The concept of a family wage, a wage sufficient to allow a man to ‘‘support a wife and children’’, was rooted in the tension between an economy based on family production and one based on individual wage employment.

Most conservatives and most economists invoked the forces of supply and demand to reject the notion of a family wage or, as it came to be more broadly defined, a living wage. 12 The very idea that workers’ needs should be taken into account, rather than the ‘‘market rate of wages as determined by the laws of the universe’’ was sometimes labeled ‘‘pure and simple communism.’’¹³ Male trade union activists seized an opportunity to make common cause with social conservatives who worried that the new economic order was disrupting family life. Pope Leo XIII's Encyclical on Capital and Labor had pronounced women, by nature, ‘‘fitted for home-work”.¹⁴

The concept of a family wage was often deployed in efforts to exclude married women from paid employment and to justify lower earnings for single women than for men. Spokesmen for the American Federation of Labor, such as Samuel Gompers, were particularly vociferous in their denunciation of married women's labor force participation. Father John Ryan, of the Catholic University of America, wrote that, ‘‘the welfare of the whole family, and that of society likewise, renders it imperative that the wife and mother should not engage in any labor except that of the household.''¹⁵ A more empirically oriented defense of the family wage was mounted in England by Seebohm Rowntree and Frank Stuart, who provided detailed estimates of the distribution of responsibilities for supporting dependents among men and women workers.

Despite protests from the many women workers who supported families on wages that averaged less than half of men's, the concept of a male family wage remained influential, with discernable implications for public policy. During World War I, the National War Labor board in the U.S. used family-wage based budget studies in its wage adjustment determinations. In England, the Departmental Committees on Teachers and the Majority of the War Cabinet Committee on Women in Industry did the same.1⁸ Grad­ually, however, the notion that employers should pay men directly for the childrearing services of their wives was displaced by a new emphasis on public support.