[A review of "Third Ways" by Allan C. Carlson]

Adam Smith and David Ricardo expressed cautious optimism that an unhindered market in labor would provide the ordinary working man a large enough wage to marry and raise a few children; but neither claimed to have demonstrated the necessity of this. Radicals such as Marx and Engels soon challenged the idea, maintaining that capitalism transformed labor into an ordinary commodity which women and even children could sell to capitalists at a fraction of the cost for adult men. The traditional autonomy and solidarity of the family would thereby fall prey to industrial efficiency and the Faustian quest for profits. Later liberal economists such as J. S. Mill and Alfred Marshall came to agree with the Marxists that the capitalist market economy makes no natural accommodation to the family.

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It might at first sight seem paradoxical that families could ever be economically worse off having a second income instead of just one. But this is a classic example of what logicians call the fallacy of composition. It works like this. When an exciting play occurs in a baseball game, all the fans jump to their feet to get a better view. Do they actually get a better view? On average, no. If only one fan were to rise, he would get a better view; but when all rise, the overall view is no better than before. Analogously, an individual woman entering the workforce undoubtedly improves her own material situation; but if the great mass of women enters the workforce, the overall effect is merely to glut the market for labor, driving down wages for everyone.

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No “law of economics” prevents such insulation of women and children from the labor market. All societies treat certain things they especially value as extra commerciam—outside the scope of market exchange. There need be no market for beef, for example, in a country where cows are considered sacred. Or again, as long as a market in slaves existed they were subject to the same law of supply and demand as any other commodity; but this market could be abolished, and was. Similarly, there need be no market for women’s labor in a country which values home life and family solidarity more than maximal industrial efficiency. Except under rare conditions involving extreme destitution—e.g., where women’s or children’s wage work might be necessary to allow everyone in a family to eat adequately—any society can enjoy as much family autonomy as it is willing to pay for in such efficiency. Proponents of family-centered “third ways” believe such a tradeoff worthwhile; some may disagree, but there is no economic absurdity involved in the idea.

If you are even familiar with the term “family wage” today, you are showing your age. Yet this ideal, writes Carlson, “dominated labor goals throughout the North Atlantic region from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries and had measurable effects on wages and the labor market.” While industrialists almost without exception advocated the “right” of poor women to work (and drive down men’s wages), working class husbands felt differently. They fought for and won wages that permitted their women to remain at home with the children. In Britain between 1842 and 1914, for example, “substantial gains in material standards were achieved by the working class, accompanied by the movement of women from wage-earning to domestic pursuits.” Similarly, in Belgium there was “a thorough transformation in the family life of workers between 1853 and 1891, based on a withdrawal of married women from the labor market and a dramatic rise in the real incomes of men” (p. 44). Keep this in mind the next time you hear a feminist complacently assert the “impossibility” of returning to the days when a woman’s place was in the home.

In America the family wage ideal rested on legal barriers, direct discrimination (gasp!) against categories of female workers, marriage bans, and labor laws requiring the special treatment of women, discouraging their employment. The system was strong enough to survive the New Deal, but was dealt a body blow by the entry of the United States into World War II and the consequent mobilization of women for industry. The National War Production Board recommended “a single evaluation line for all jobs in a plant regardless whether performed by men or women.” Only 13 percent of US firms had followed such a policy in 1939, but by 1947, 57 percent did (pp. 45–46).

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“Equal pay for equal work” is a masterful piece of political rhetoric with a sort of “2+2=4” ring to it. Carlson catalogues for us a few of the realities this deceptive slogan has served to conceal. First of all, family households with only a single male wage earner have experienced a decline in real income: between 1973 and 1993 alone, this decline amounted to 13.6 percent. Next, single-income families have been put at a mounting competitive disadvantage relative to two-income families in the acquisition of consumer goods. There has also been a sizeable increase in the number of men earning less than a “poverty line” wage, and similar growth in the number of children living in female-headed households. Married women are increasingly faced with a stark choice: leave their young children during the day to try to earn income, or stay with them and fall into poverty. Either way, the children lose (pp. 50–51).

For the first time in history, notes our author, the family is becoming completely industrialized. Gardening, food preparation, home repairs, child care, and other residual forms of home production are being abandoned by busy couples in favor of market-provided services; in other words, the home has no economy of its own, but has become at best a kind of consumer’s cooperative (pp. 51–52). With the economic rationale for marriage thus eroded, divorce, transitory cohabitation, bastardy, abortion, and loneliness all increase. We have come a long way, baby.

Sweden is often held up as the best model of a country pursuing a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Carlson devotes a chapter to the evolution of Swedish family policy in the past century and the ideological debates surrounding it; rumor has it that its original title was “Desperate Swedish Socialist Housewives.” However that may be, this chapter makes especially clear the difficulty of arranging family policy prescriptions neatly on a conventional left-right ideological spectrum. As early as 1866, delegates to the First Socialist International “approved a resolution calling for bans on the employment of women. The measure’s sponsors reasoned that working women pressed down overall wage levels and displaced men; in their view, working women were the equivalent of strikebreakers” (p. 113). Sweden’s Social Democratic Party adopted this view, and for many years it remained normative for Swedish “progressives.”

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By the 1960s, however, Alva Myrdal and her stridently anti-familial feminism were again on the march. Individual rather than familial taxation became a central issue in Swedish politics. As passage of the measure approached, a “Campaign for the Family” was launched. Fifty thousand letters of protest poured into the Prime Minister’s office; thousands of women marched on the Riksdag in (as one Swedish newspaper put it) “history’s first housewife demonstration.”

It was to no avail. In 1970, individual taxation went into effect; overnight, a housewife became an expensive luxury (pp. 129–31). Carlson writes: “Correctly labeled the era of Red Sweden, the first Olaf Palme government committed a kind of feminist genocide, intentionally eliminating a whole class of women through coerced ‘reeducation’ and forced labor” (p. 179).

The family wage is by nature a compromise with industrial capitalism; it turns one member of the family over to the labor market in exchange for keeping the rest insulated from it. Distributism, the economic platform advocated by Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton, went farther by seeking to counteract some of the inherent tendencies of capitalism directly.