The Great Recession may be over--officially--but its deep and lasting impact on American families becomes clearer with each new set of statistics published. Recently we learned that as of last year, the number of Americans living in poverty was higher than it's been in half a century. Today, a paper is being released which suggests that those households lucky enough to have weathered the recession with roofs over their heads and food on the table may have one family member in particular to thank for it. Wives.

The paper, part of a study by Kristin Smith, a family demographer with the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, shows that during this recession, with its punishing unemployment rates and extended bouts of joblessness, wives stepped into the breach as never before, laboring to offset their husbands' vanished earnings. Job loss during this recession was--and continues to be--infamously concentrated among men; of the millions of jobs lost since late 2007, many were in manufacturing and construction, sectors that are still male-dominated. Responding to the urgency of the situation, wives who were not in the workforce took jobs, and those who were working already increased their hours and/or took second positions. Many wives went from being secondary earners to being the primary breadwinner, a role reversal that can be validating and empowering, but also wrenching and destabilizing, particularly given that much of the realignment was occurring in red state regions, with more traditional views of gender roles.

As a result, we as a nation have reached an important milestone. In 2009, Smith found, employed wives contributed a greater percentage of the family income than ever before. Last year, working wives contributed 47 percent of family earnings--very close to half. This is a two-percentage-point jump from 2008 and the largest single-year increase in 15 years. If you've wondered why we aren't seeing people standing in breadlines and jumping from ledges and even more families hammering on the doors of homeless shelters, the answer lies, at least in part, in the number of wives who are working harder and longer to keep their households intact.

As Smith points out in this paper, working wives' portion of family earnings has been increasing steadily over the past two decades, but escalated sharply with a startling three-percentage-point rise from 44 percent in 2007 to 47 percent in 2009. The recession accelerated a change that was already transforming workplaces and family dynamics, as women's earnings have become central to household functioning. This isn't pin money.

The earlier gains may have been good news for women--a signal of progress--but the more recent gains aren't good for anybody. That's because this latest jump is due not to an increase in women's earnings (women have suffered unemployment, too, of course, just not at the rates men have) but to a decline in men's. "Normally the share of family earnings contributed by the wife is an indicator of women's progress," says Smith. "In this case, I really see it more as an indication of family financial strain, or economic turmoil."

A related research study that Smith and a colleague published in this month's issue of the journal Family Relations underscores just how much wives have adjusted to make up for what their husbands have lost--giving up stay-at-home-mom status, putting their kids in day care, mass-mailing résumés, visiting job banks. Their study found that "[w]ives of husbands who stopped working during the recession were 2 times more likely to enter the labor force" as wives whose husbands continued working. Moreover, the data suggest that women are not picky about the jobs they're taking. "We suspect the recession is pushing many women into jobs that they may not consider during times of prosperity," the authors noted. On a recent trip to Michigan, I saw this first-hand, interviewing any number of women whose husbands had lost jobs, often high-paying ones, often in the auto industry. While their husbands were waiting for the jobs to come back--something that may or may not happen--the women, typically willing to work for lower wages than their husbands would, were working in sales, in customer service, in retail, at Home Depot, anything to keep the mortgage current. To the men's credit, they were cleaning house and cooking and taking care of the kids. "He's wonderful with children," one woman said of her husband. Not one of the women expected to be thanked or took any special pride in what they'd accomplished.

It's true that women have stepped in before during crises, notably World War II. After that conflict ended, they were sent back to the kitchen. Not this time, Smith says. This time, for many, there's no going back. Family savings are so depleted and home values so compromised that even mothers who would like to return home to care for small children may not be able to do so, if and when their husbands find new jobs. Smith also points out that with so many women as breadwinners, it's more important than ever to make workplaces more family-friendly, to make hours more flexible, and to narrow the wage gap. (Skeptics like to attribute the lingering pay gap to women's choice of lower-paying professions, but numerous studies doing careful dissections have found that while some of the gap may be due to job choice and other factors, there is an "unexplained" portion of the pay gap that is likely due to discrimination.)

It would also be nice if somebody in a high place took to the microphone to recognize not only the hardship of those who lost jobs through no fault of their own, but the commitment and flexibility of spouses who get out of bed every morning to pick up the slack. Until that happens, Smith's study is a valuable reminder of women's special economic role during this recession, and likely after. I am woman, clock me in.

(On a related note, I am working on a book about female breadwinning and am eager to interview readers with relevant stories. I would very much like to hear from any women out there who bring in the bulk of income in their family. I'd also like to talk to self-sufficient single women who can talk about how their salary affects dating and marriage; and also college students with insight into what it's like to be on campus in an era when women outnumber men, a trend with major implications. Men, I'd love to talk to you, too. You can reach me at lizamundy@gmail.com.)

Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: breadwinners, Carsey Institute, Kristin Smith, recession, wives, women earners

— Annals of masculinity: why rethinking manliness is one way to avoid "The End of Men." [Newsweek]

— Are therapists capable of inception? Meredith Maran, who falsely accused her father of molestation, discusses her new book My Lie: A True Story of False Memory. [Salon]

— Sarah Palin vs. Mike Huckabee: Is there more to their rivalry than meets the eye? [Politico]

— "I have fears of becoming a bag lady." The New York Times investigates what the recession means for unemployed over 50-year-olds and the fears and consequences of never working again. [New York Times]

— New ways to spend on your marriage: Vow renewals are the rage for some while others investigate divorce insurance. [New York Times, Time]

Photograph of wedding rings from Wikimedia Commons.

Tags: divorce insurance, manliness, meredith maran, mike huckabee, recession, Sarah Palin, vow renewal

It sounds like the ultimate in helicopter parenting—not to mention the ultimate bad idea. If your fashion-design major daughter can't get a job, why not buy her one? The Wall Street Journal is reporting on what might be a recession trend: parents "giving their kids the business." Buying a "Pita Pit" (surely the subliminal 90210 reference is intentional; who could resist the mental image of Brenda's dad handing over the keys?), a "College Hunks Hauling Junk," or a "Fibrenew" franchise for a jobless kid is one way to stave off unemployment and hope to help your heirs beat the sentence of doom and gloom that the downturn seems to have brought upon them. (Who hasn't read the reports that a slow start to a career could cost big over a lifetime of earnings?)

Other media outlets are profiling students with multiple graduate degrees and no prospects, with headlines like "Gen Y: No jobs, lots of loans, grim future." Buying a franchise might look like a better investment than grad school for a kid with no real calling toward either. But how well is a young franchise owner without, say, a passion for pitas really likely to do with a small business in a tough market? The WSJ article overflows with hints that it's the dads in question (all obviously successful enough to afford franchise fees) who really wanted a fresh start. One father had to push his son to sell his services; another worried that his kid wasn't making enough sacrifices for the business. It's hard enough to watch a kid struggle, or even fail. Watching them fail with your money (and a conviction that you could have done it better) sounds even worse.

My kids are too young for me to have a personal take on this. I'm still financing the occasional lemonade stand (and yes, I make them pay for the sugar and lemons). If I were the parent of an entrepreneurial jobless grad, I might be willing to help out some. But I'd make sure she had plenty of skin in the game.

Photograph of lemons by Saul Loeb/Getty Images.

Tags: Gen Y, parenting, recession

Apparently there's been a "row" in the U.K. over some comments that parenting author Oliver James made on a show called Woman’s Hour. James, the author of How Not to F*** Them Up, implied that children would be better off if their mothers stayed home with them during their first few years. Writing in the Telegraph, Kate Figes disagrees. "No choice is better than another," Figes says, sensibly. "But given that the majority of women now have no choice but to work, it is time we moved the debate on."

What struck me about Figes's piece is that the debate has already moved on, at least in the United States. In my admittedly anecdotal survey, I haven't read anything like it in months. I've been covering the "woman" beat for three years, and for the first two years of it, one could not go more than a few days with out some wrinkle in the working mom vs. stay-at-home mom debate bubbling up in a mainstream publication. As recently as last summer, our own Emily Bazelon was writing about rescuing a playdate from the mommy wars. But in the past year, that old saw has been thrown over for a new meme: Working women will rule the world (as a Newsweek story touts). Because of the recession, the choice to be a stay-at-home mom has evaporated for many. As Newsweek writers Jessica Bennett and Jesse Ellison speculate, "Perhaps the revolution will simply be the way we think about workplace culture."

Which is to say, perhaps this is an opportunity to lobby for things like paid maternity leave and better child care, rather than fight over whether women should be working at all. Sharon Lerner argued last year that maybe better workplace policy is what's going to improve those depressing parenting happiness stats we keep reading about.

Photograph by Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images.

Tags: england, mommy wars, recession, women at work

Are diapers a basic need? Looked at on a food-shelter continuum, it feels iffy. A baby, after all, can survive without a diaper. But in practice, in this country—how? A mother could stay in and rush her infant to the toilet all day (and clean up a lot). She could wrap the child in some cloth and plan to head home. Often. She could—well, actually, I don't see that many other options, other than getting someone else to do the same. She can't travel. She can't work. She can scarcely leave the house.

Suddenly, diapers are looking like a basic need after all. Most mothers agree—95 percent in the United States, according to a study authored by the Director of the Institute of Human Development and Social Change at New York University and commissioned by Huggies. That isn't such an earth-shattering finding (unless you're Kimberly Clark), but it gets more interesting. In the United States, the average mother spends 2 percent of her household income on diapers. For a third of U.S. women, buying those diapers is a financial hardship, and requires cutting back on food, child care, or essentials. One in five U.S. women reports running out of money for diapers—and when women run out of money for diapers, they don't have many choices. They can borrow, they can leave diapers on for longer, they can wash out a poopy diaper, or even dry out a wet one, and make it go around again. Or they can stay home. Keep the kid out of daycare (and if you're even thinking of suggesting that cloth diapers would help here, please consider that many day-care facilities don't accept them and that may laundromats don't permit them—and that you have to buy them in the first place). About 20 percent of U.S. mothers report doing one or more of those things. None of them make it easier to get by.

Looking for work is a full time job—and so is holding a family together on any form of state assistance. You can't do either if you're stuck at home, trying to figure out how to get something on your kid's bottom so that both of you can get on with the day. "Diaper need" (the Huggies phrase for it) doesn't sound that overwhelming, but enduring it daily would leave anyone overwhelmed. You can't buy diapers with food stamps, although you can with other forms of assistance. "Diaper banks" offer help, as do churches and other parents—but maybe, the next time you see a food bank box, you might think about tossing a couple packs of disposables in along with the peanut butter.

Photograph of baby courtesy of Getty Images.

Tags: diapers, families, parenting, recession

I agree with Jess, Dahlia and others that Elena Kagan is a screen onto which we project our anxieties about work, ambition, motherhood, and marriage. She may (or may not) be unusual in the intensity of her ambition, but she seems relevant to many women in that she raises anew the decades-old discussion over work, family, and the difficulty of pursuing both. And I think Lisa Belkin's piece yesterday in the New York Times Magazine is terrific. In it she explored the ironic fact that the first two female Supreme Court justices were able to fashion lives that included husbands and children, despite (or because of) their having risen to prominence in an era hostile to female achievement; whereas Sonia Sotomayor and Kagan came of age in an era during which there were so many spurs to women's ambition, so many opportunities, that women, paradoxically, had less freedom—or may have felt they did—to raise families as they were pursuing their professional rise.

Increasingly, though, what interests me about Kagan is not her parental or marital status or, God knows, her sexual orientation. It's her age.

Rather, it's her age and how it's perceived. Throughout the discussions of her nomination, the other common trope—the thing people are constantly observing and commenting upon—is how young Kagan is. Why, she's only 50! If confirmed, she will be the youngest sitting justice on the bench. Similar things were said about Chief Justice John Roberts when he was appointed. A veritable baby! A toddler on a panel where the average age is close to 70. Better find out what she really thinks about things—if you can—because she's likely to be with us for a long, long time. At 50—the point is made—Kagan has, what, 20 years to exert her influence on American jurisprudence. Or, more likely, 30. Maybe even 40. Why, it's as if her professional career is just getting started.

To be 50 and feel as though you have a rich and productive working life ahead of you, to feel as though you have something relevant—not only intelligence but wisdom and experience—to offer your profession. How many 50-year-old Americans can say the same at this moment?

Not many. For fiftysomethings and older workers who lost jobs during this lingering economic crisis, returning to the workforce is much, much harder than for workers belonging to younger cohorts. And for those still lucky enough to have jobs, there remains the uneasy, nagging feeling that your paycheck is too high, your skills too outdated, for you to be truly wanted in your workplace. Fifty tends to be the age at which workers qualify for a buyout when companies offer them, as plenty of companies having been doing in the recent past. Some workers are happy to take these offers; others (and I know them—journalism has been hard-hit) feel that their career abruptly ended 10 or 15 years before they thought it would. Even worse is a layoff or, of course, the abrupt disappearance of your company. Nationwide, I think it's fair to say, the message is that employers often would prefer to off-load fiftysomething workers—with their salary expectations, their dependents, their mortgages, their need to pay college tuition—in order to replace them with cheaper, Web-savvy twentysomethings. And it's worse, of course, for industrial workers. The economic crisis, combined with the decline and relocation abroad of the industrial sector and the full flowering of the information age have made many fiftysomething and sixtysomething Americans feel that they are in the precise opposite position of Elena Kagan: They have few to no options at all. What many workers hear is that, at 50, they are too expensive, too insufficiently skilled in modern technology; they have the wrong degrees or, worse, no degree at all. Anachronisms. Woolly mammoths. Sliding into oblivion.

At 50, Elena Kagan is where a person really should be: reaching a new level in her career, a whole new set of opportunities and challenges to which she can apply her formidable energy, learning, and wisdom, stretch herself to a new level in a venue where her skills and talents matter more than ever. This is a stark difference from the situation of so many American fiftysomethings, fighting fears of layoffs, a sense of obsolescence, anxiety at not having the skills necessary to survive in a new economy, and not much of an administration-led push to train them, that I'm aware of. People wonder whether Kagan, not having children, can understand the woes of "ordinary people." I would argue that it is in their extraordinary job security, not so much their sexual orientation or marital or parental status, that the Supreme Court justices are most at variance with the way ordinary people, just now, live.

Photograph of Elena Kagan by Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Tags: age, buyouts, Elena Kagan, layoffs, recession, Supreme Court, unemployment

Eight years after their last report detailing the characteristics of women getting abortions, the Guttmacher Insitute has released another report tracking the same information. Most of the demographic information of women seeking abortion has remained the same—most women getting abortions are still in their 20s and 30s, and more than 60 percent are mothers already. (Contrast that with the stereotype anti-choicers trot out of young women too dumb to know what they're doing.) But one statistic changed dramatically from 2000 to 2008—the percentage of women getting abortions under the poverty line jumped 60 percent, from 27 percent of women getting abortions to 42 percent.

Why this is the case is so hard to say, but there are some probable possibilities for the leap. The most obvious answer is the economic recession. Bad times have a dramatic influence on poorer women's choices when faced with an unintended pregnancy, and that alone could explain much of the leap. A lot of it simply has to do with the fact that the lower-income classes took a battering in the last eight years, and the number of women living in poverty overall jumped 25 percent. But there is some good news that could be influencing these numbers. Abortion funds have been raising a lot more money in recent years, meaning that many impoverished women that want abortions can have them, when they wouldn't have been able to afford them before.

Of course, my mantra has always been, "The No. 1 cause of abortion is unintended pregnancy," which sounds sort of obvious, until you realize how little talk of preventing abortion centers around preventing unintended pregnancy through contraception. The rise in abortion rates among women living in poverty could owe a lot to reduced access to reliable contraception. The recession created a spike in demand at family-planning centers just as these centers had to cut services and staff. It's hard to imagine that this reduced access for poorer women hasn't resulted in many simply taking their chances, and then ending up in an abortion clinic weeks later.

The most cost-efficient, straightforward way to reduce the abortion rate in this country is to make sure that women who don't want children don't get pregnant in the first place because they didn't have the time or money that month to fill a pill prescription. Too bad Republicans have decided to make hay over this issue and attack the already meager federal spending on family-planning services.

Tags: abortion, contraception, recession

There comes a time when a political observer is forced to conclude that conservative legislators enjoy wasting taxpayer money for the hell of it. Or at least this political observer was forced to conclude this over the past week. It's not just the Arizona "papers, please" law, which will waste taxpayer money while allowing the real crime rate to go up. It's also Oklahoma legislators' dogged insistence on passing outrageous laws designed to shame and hurt women who seek or even may seek abortion, laws that immediately and routinely drain the taxpayers' wallets in legal fees spent on their defense.

The vote overturning the governor's veto on two laws—a mandatory ultrasound law and a law that encourages doctors to trick women into bearing children with birth defects against their will—had barely passed when the Center for Reproductive Rights challenged the law. The Center has already successfully sued the state of Oklahoma for similar anti-choice restrictions in the past, costing the taxpayers tons of money, strictly so legislators can win a game of, "Who hates women more than we do?"

And boy, do they do a good job at proving that they do. These laws exhibit a perverse love of poking and prodding women's bodies for no good reason—and often for great harm. The ultrasound law specifies that a vaginal probe must be used, even though doctors often prefer to skip that if their patients have been through sexual trauma in the past. But it's hard to imagine these legislators caring too much about rape victims. They love the idea of penetrating the vaginas of unwilling women so much that this is the second time they've tried to pass this law. And the other law is an attempt to encourage doctors to perform amniocenteses on pregnant women, but withhold any information from the patients regarding actual test results. Apparently, sticking needles into pregnant women for no good reason seems like reward enough to these legislators.

Apparently the legislature of Oklahoma thinks they have money to burn defending these laws that have more than a whiff of sexual assault by proxy to them. They should tell that to the employees around the state who are facing layoffs and mandatory furloughs to make up for a $1.2 billion shortfall. Sure, the people of Oklahoma say they need jobs, food assistance, education, a criminal justice system. But their legislators know better. They need to spend money they don't have forcing women to have their vaginas probed against their wills if they have the nerve to have abortions.

Tags: abortion, Oklahoma abortion law, recession, state budgets

This article in the Washington Post explaining why the unemployment rate might go up even as jobs are being added to the economy should be treated as proof positive that the way we measure unemployment in this country is completely screwed up. In sum, the fact that more people are getting hired means that people who've given up looking for jobs might feel re-energized. Which means they're more likely to tell a pollster that they're "seeking," which counts toward the unemployment rate. But if the very same people told the pollster they'd like a job but aren't looking because they can't find one, they don't count.

On paper, it seems like a good idea to filter out adults who don't have jobs but aren't looking for jobs. You don't want to count housewives, full-time students, and the idle rich toward the unemployment numbers. But the current system creates a situation where the real unemployment rate isn't being fully measured. And it's not just that discouraged unemployed workers are left out of the numbers. If you don't have a regular job, but you got paid $100 to do some lawn work this week, you count as employed in the government statistics. The current unemployment rate is hovering around 10 percent, but it could actually be much higher under common-sense definitions of unemployment.

Take, for instance, the fact that one-quarter of the new jobs added to the economy are Census jobs. Common sense should tell us that this just isn't enough. Those jobs are badly paid, temporary employment.  In an ideal world, they'd be jobs for students and housewives looking to make a little extra cash, but unfortunately, those jobs are going to desperate people who are responsible for paying the expenses of their households. Their desperation isn't being measured in our official unemployment statistics, making it harder to understand exactly how bad off the economy really is.

Tags: jobs, unemployment

—Obama Administration officials say the jobless rate may actually rise from March's 9.7%. Job increases show economic promise, and draw former "discouraged" unemployed back into the search. [Washington Post]

—The U.S. military admited to killing three Afghan women in a Special Operations raid. Military had formerly denied any involvement or cover up in the February deaths. [New York Times]

—The New York gubernatorial hopeful, Carl Paladino, has a love child.  The conservative nominee admited to fathering the child ten years ago during an afffair. [NY Daily News]

—Should Charlie Sheen get a raise? [The Daily Beast]

—The anti-cupcake backlash has begun. [Times Online]

Photograph of cupcake by Flickr user Hello Darlin, under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Tags: afghanistan, carl paladino, charlie sheen cupcakes, recession, unemployment