Economics of Being a Woman

 

April 15, 2023

I decided to post this year on the randomness that goes on in my head. Unfortunately, my head is full of wild and random thoughts and I have trouble focusing. Sounds like an apt description of ADD, although I have only been diagnosed by coworkers.

I have on my desk a book I cannot part with, The Economics of Being a Woman, by Dee Dee Ahern with Betsy Bliss. It’s not because some child of mine has scribbled between the back covers, although that brings back fond memories. It’s because this book opened my eyes to the way women’s role in our society (U.S.) limits our achievement. Most heterogeneous women grow up dreaming of finding that soul mate, marrying, and having a family. At least my generation did, although this changes with every generation, thankfully. In my childhood, women could aspire to three professions: nursing, teaching or secretarial work. I was surprised in 1969 when I married and was told I shouldn’t work at all because it indicated the husband was not a good provider. Luckily, I ignored his wishes and he enjoyed the income. 

From 1956 to 1974, women’s pay went from 63% of men’s pay to 57%. Yeah, I was surprised, too. Even with lots of protesting in the 60s and 70s, women’s share of income went down. Luckily, we weren’t so easily overcome. Women’s rights became an essential part of civil rights. By 1979, our share had gone up to 61.5% of men’s, and by 2021, it rose to 84.3%. The exception was West Virginia, where it was still 36.6%. (1)

What are the reasons women earn less? When I entered the workforce, I had a choice among low-paying professions. There were women chemists, physicians, and plumbers, but they were the exception, rather than the rule. The unions in the 50s made sure men could make enough to support a family, and teacher’s union made sure a job would be there after a child was born. Women’s birth control had undergone a significant change in the 60s with the advent of the birth control pill. Now women could control when and if they had children, but they were still held back by employers that expected them to take time to have a family. Women were also expected to take care of sick family members or elderly ones. They were expected to move if the husband was transferred, and they were entitled to very low retirement benefits because of low earnings during their lifetime. Women who were widowed were just out of luck and often had to move their family into smaller houses or apartments. It is still true that the survivor of a marriage has to choose between the two retirement packages, if there are any. 

The pandemic has showed us that it is still the women who usually have to leave their jobs to care for sick family members, and divorce has certainly shown us it is often the woman who provides for the family. I hope my granddaughters will know equity in the respect (and salaries) paid to women throughout their lives. Maybe pay equity will be up to 90% by the time they are working.

(1) https://www.businessinsider.com/gender-wage-pay-gap-charts-2017-3#major-cities-show-an-even-bigger-discrepancy-3

Gender Wage Pay Gap Charts, accessed 3/29/23.

This year's theme is "Ideas"

 I took me a few weeks to come up with a theme for this year, but I have decided on “Ideas” as my theme for 2023. I was cleaning out my closets and realized that I will probably not keep my web site up to date because there is just that one extra layer of effort needed to post on it. So here are the Relics of the Past, as I like to call them. I hope they help you all.

The first place I wanted to take you was to an article by Glenda Thorne. Yesterday I searched to find it and it was gone. I hope you see this Glenda and repost the chart you entitled “Memory Self-Test.” I downloaded it in 2008 from the Center for Development and Learning, which is no longer available. While it is written for students, i think there is a whole generation that could use this advise; the Boomers. As I approach three quarters of a century, I am constantly frustrated by short-term memory loss and word retrieval problems. I have begun to read books on improving memory, but your article was short, simple, and thorough.

Luckily for all of us, she has a new article up, called 10 Strategies to Enhance Student Learning. (1) I should say I hope it is the same Glenda Thorne, because when I searched for a way to get in touch with her, I found many Glenda Thornes with PhDs. I hope you will all check out her article.

On the same page is another article by By Jonathan Mooney called “Strategies for Improving Memory.” Seven tips are listed that use more than one sense, which is always a good idea. I do better with numbers, but my short-term memory is weaker than it used to be, so I have to keep repeating the numbers out loud if I am going to use them right away (like all those numbers we use to log in with double security).

This page may disappear like Glenda’s first article on memory, but at least you have the name of two researchers in the field.

(1) Thorne,Glenda”10 Strategies to Enhance Student Learning,” https://impactofspecialneeds.weebly.com/uploads/3/4/1/9/3419723/10_strategies_to_enhance_students_memory.pdf, accessed on Jan 24, 2024.

Mooney, Jonathan, “Strategies for Improving Memory,” ibid. 

A Big Adjustment

A Big Adjustment

When I first saw Phil Duncan’s farm, I felt elated. The trees and bushes were wild, the gravel path led down the hill to the barnyard, and silos and a barn stood silently nearby. Within a few months we married and moved to the farmhouse. My  handsome suitor disappeared into his work, and I became a farm wife, with only a romanticized idea of what that meant. Phil farmed about 800 acres with his father and brother and we bought the farm next door a while later. Phil also raised pigs, eventually expanding to include a confinement for birthing, another for piglets, and another for finishing. At its peak, Duncan Farms sold about two thousand hogs per year. 

My first adjustment to farming was the work farm wives were expected to do. In the suburbs, the men take out the garbage and mow the lawn. Now it was my job. I also learned to amuse myself. This took me several years, but there was no movie theater near us and no great restaurants. I tried every craft I heard of and began sewing again for the first time since high school. Maternity clothes were the first thing I made.

Our first child arrived ten months after we married. My mom came for a week, and I didn’t want her to leave. Then, I was on my own. Son #2 and daughter came within seven years. I started a big farm garden, canned vegetables, and froze corn.

The advances in crop yields led to record production. Then inflation caused the Fed to raise interest rates, which led to a drop in the value of farm land. I worked as a substitute teacher for two of those years between kids, to supplement our income. Another aspect of the Farm Debt Crisis of the early 1980s.

Coming up next: The drought.

The Family Farm

I’m the last person to be writing about a family farm. Born in Chicago, raised in the suburbs, I lived on a pig farm for only fifteen years, and I really don’t have the perspective of a third generation farmer. Yet farms have played an integral part in my family’s story.

During the second half of the nineteenth century in Sweden two driving factors for emigration were the compulsory membership in the state church and the potato famine. All Swedes were required to register with the state church—the Swedish Lutheran Church. The church collected taxes. If you moved, you had to tell the church where you lived and then register with the church in the new location. 

The potato famine hit Sweden about the same time as it hit Ireland, causing poverty and starvation, so there was hope in emigration by looking to the U.S. One of my ancestors was an eighteen-year old woman with a one-year-old child. They had been living on one bowl of potato soup a day. 

My mother’s grandfather (Axel Victor Gabrielsson) was unable to hold a job because of alcohol use, so he left Sweden illegally (did not tell the church) and came to the U.S. His son (Johann Albert Edward Axelsson) followed in 1874. I have little information on where they lived until Axel shows up in Varna, Illinois (in north central Illinois). I looked Varna up and decided to take a trip. What I found was shocking. The town of 3,000 people had decent homes, but the downtown area was run down with empty stores scattered among the ones still open. On the main street, a set of huge grain bins overwhelmed the little ones next to them. Instead of seeing miles of family farms, there were miles of huge farms, obviously owned by corporations. How had this happened over our lifetimes? 

When my great-grandparents and grandparents came to the United States, they found their way from New York City to rural Illinois and Iowa. The railroad offered steady work, and farms needed hired hands. Western Iowa was the frontier, and those who stayed on the land for five years could acquire it for free. A man in Sweden bought land in southwest Iowa and put ads in Swedish papers for God-fearing men to settle it. I like to joke that he got my great-grandparents instead. 

My mother’s parents met in northwest Iowa, where her father was a circuit preacher and her mother was an organist in two churches. They traveled to Boston, New York City, and Chicago, where he ministered to large Swedish churches. When the Depression hit he  retired to a farm in Red Oak, Iowa. The remaining family consisted of him, a son, daughter-in-law, three children and my mom. They lived off the food they could grow, since ministers weren’t paid salaries then. The idea that a small farm could sustain a family seems ludicrous now.

My father’s parents lived in Stanton, Iowa, a very Swedish town, where his grandparents owned the local hardware store. It failed in the Great Depression. My parents knew each other in high school, but became interested in each other on a train trip home for the holidays one year. Dad rode the rails with cattle for the stockyards in Chicago, then worked in the steel mills in Gary, Indiana. Mom had gone to Swedish Covenant Hospital for nurses training.  My parents left the small towns for the suburbs and never missed it. 

The government began legislating to help farmers. The years of 1940-1950 brought technology making it easier to plant, fertilize and harvest. Farmers began to sell excess crops to other countries. The Food Stamp Act of 1964 had as its goal “to achieve a more effective use of agricultural overproduction, improve levels of nutrition among individuals with low-incomes and strengthen the agricultural economy. “ (1) Schools found their free lunches were often heavy on surplus dairy and corn products. 

Fast forward to the 1960s. Young people were not happy with the culture and created a counterculture. Going “back to the land” was a trend, although most hippy-like famers were not successful in living off the land. Nevertheless, it was an ideal. The environmental movement was in its infancy. Heavily influenced by this, my brother left his well-paying computer job to live in a Colorado commune. I was offered a job in western Illinois in January and chose it over one on the west side of Chicago. I fell in love with the land and the people and stayed, met my children’s father. Small family farms were still available at that time, although it helped if your parents and grandparents had land to leave you. 

The farm debt crisis in 1980s was a result of higher interest rates and lower land and crop prices. I remember news of a farmer that went to a savings and loan company and shot a person. I also remember wondering what we would live on for two weeks, when our money ran out one month. 

To be continued…

(1) The History of SNAP, https://www.snaptohealth.org/snap/the-history-of-snap/. Accessed 5/7/22.