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/ National Archives, Records of the Extension Service |
According to Motherly, some Stay-at-Home-Moms (SAHMs) would be salaried at $184K/year if they were paid for all that they do. Investopedia asked, "How Much Is a Stay-at-Home Parent Worth?" and placed the "median annual salary of $178,201" with a footnote from Salary that appears to be a periodically updated article, asking the more blunt question: "How Much Is a Mother Really Worth?"
In 2019, that number was $178,201, which is what Investopedia used as its number in an article for 2021. So Motherly's article appears to provide an increase from 2019 that isn't present in Investopedia's article. I suspect something to do with more focus on stay-home parents since Dads began engaging more active parenting in recent years. The pandemic has also very likely shined a spotlight on the realities of parenting and working from home ever since Covid came to town.
Anyway...
...a SAHM would be salaried today, if she were paid for all that she does...roughly $184K per year.
I wonder about this from time to time for various reasons, and I just chuckle to myself about it. Mostly.
Recently, though, I got to thinking more deeply about something else that is connected with this topic, and a couple of memories were jogged.
I had a relative who graduated from a women's college in the 1950s with a degree in Home Economics. For some reason, I never stopped and actually thought about that. It never occurred to me that how I understood "home economics" (in my own experience in the 1980s, middle school) had exactly nothing to do with her experience with the subject- academically, professionally, or personally.
By the time I was in junior high, Home Ec was viewed by me and many of my peers as largely outdated with ideas that were cute if you liked Holly Hobby, but otherwise part of a bygone era that played no direct role in our lives.
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| The Betty Crocker Kitchens 1940 (Retrieved from Finding Betty Crocker) |
Some of us would learn faster than others just how important Home Economics actually is out here in the so-called real world. Sadly, I haven't seen a Home Economics class offered for any of my own kids, two of whom are adults now.
But even having (gratefully) learned the fundamentals from a parent of an earlier era than my mom, I had the very basics to start with -- which mattered because I was on my own at 17. Later, I would live for a spell with my grandmother (who was a few years older than my dad), and she added a few interesting elements of home economics I'd never learned in any classroom. All of which I've tried passing on to all of my kids.
Over the years, I developed connections with people related by way of my own family or by marriage -- some relations more distant than others, and I would learn about family histories that were interesting in their own right.
Such as a relative having a college degree from a women's college in mid-20th century America, mid-1950s no less, post-WWII era with a degree in Home Economics.
By the time it occurred to me to ask about it, I realized, she was long since dead. I'm grateful for every connection offered, because home economics in practice is really a set of very important human adult survival skills.
Gratitude, though, no matter how sincerely felt, doesn't satisfy the curiosity about what all would even be in a Home Economics academic program in the 1950s in the United States.
Digging around, I came across an interesting essay from 2010, KU ScholarWorks, by Julia Barnard - Home Economics and “Housewifery” in 1950s America - and I just sort of sat in wonder. The essay is written around and focused on a Centron film about "Why Study Home Economics" from 1955 in Lawrence, Kansas. The essay is not long, definitely worth the read in its entirety.
These bits stood out to me:
"...This curriculum reflects the larger socio-cultural context in which Home Economics, a unique subject taught almost exclusively to female students was situated in the 1950s. [...] Home Economics classrooms became an important site of much of the explicit and implicit advertising that contributed to the way American eating habits and the structure of the food industry changed in the 1950s. These classrooms were important in changing and shaping the minds of young American women. They combine ideas about gender roles with technical points about food preparation and marketers’ interests in affirming a society increasingly influenced by agents of mass consumption.
Not only were corporate interests being served by the particular contents of the Home Economics curricula, but cultural values both old and new were also an element in the new, post-war Home Economics setting, serving as a sort of hidden element of the curriculum in these classrooms...
[...]
...Terms like “Domestic Science” and “Home Economics” helped to frame the study of cooking and buying as an academic discipline, full of skills worth learning and studying. This series of conferences, and later the entire discipline of Home Economics, was founded on the idea that consumer culture was something one could be educated in. Home Economics was the study of consumption: how to buy, where to buy, what to buy, and also what to eat, where to eat, when to eat, and who to eat with..."
...and not paid for.
Evidently, despite its overwhelming importance, seemingly, to society, such that it was written into our entire culture, our upbringings, our educations -- it was not deemed important or relevant enough to be paid for.
For the woman of that era, she could be educated, with a degree in something she was told she had to know...placed uniquely as one of the few science degrees allowed to women at the time...
...but not get paid for the work her conferred degree intended.
I'm not shocked by this anymore. I knew about this from other books that cover what part of the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s focused on, and that was the fact they thought their own moms should be paid for what they do. It was part of some of my previous research, while still fairly brand-new to anything involving stay-home parenting, since the entirety of my career had previously been outside the home.
I just hadn't read about specific curricula or syllabi for a Home Economics degree and I was curious.
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/ U.S. National Archives, Records of the Office of Government Reports |
The above image from the same NPR article linked at the very top of this entry. The article discusses elements of "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government's Effect on the American Diet" - a National Archives exhibit that goes into the government's effect on the American diet, tracing back a couple of centuries.
During the 1950s (when my mother was a toddler and my grandmother was younger than I am now), much of the focus was a blend of post-Depression and recent ending of WWII. The hardships of post WWI and the Depression weren't ancient history. WWII was still very fresh. There were a lot of different social upheavals brewing on the horizon.
Some women resented returning home from work; others preferred staying home. Both were expected to do the "women's work" regardless...and neither was paid.
The root traces back to earlier than my own research, insofar as monetary value matching everything we do.
My degrees aren't in Home Ec, though sometimes I wonder if they shouldn't have been. I actually rather enjoy the reality of living home economics in practice. I know that, because of my degrees, I am literally worth more dead than alive, but because of a degree I don't have, I should have a few decades of the SAHM salary saved up to pay that off nicely and then some.
So back to that Motherly article. In that short article is a link that takes the reader to Salary with a "What is a Mom's Work Worth?" quizlet thing. I played along.
My salary range is between $231,769 and $284,463, based on criteria listed and my zip code...median to high. I'd probably be slightly on the higher end of some of the criteria, fairly...but that was admittedly gratifying. Especially since I carry skills over a century old that it seems nobody even knows how to do anymore, so I guess either those are priceless...maybe that qualifies (along with those degrees that sometimes have me doubt my value as a human being) for the national high of $330,269.
Heh.
See? That's why I usually just chuckle to myself about it.
Mostly.
~dw
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