Family Wage

The ideal-typical construction of the family wage is one designed for a male breadwinner to support his wife's in-home caretaking responsibilities. The initial impetus for the family wage can be traced to the increased industrialization and labor activism in the early 1800s. With the shift from the agrarian eighteenth century to the early industrialization of the nineteenth century in the United States and Britain, there developed a view of separate spheres that ideologically located the primary role of women within their homes. The ideological separation of public and private spheres provided justification for employers to deny employment to married women, to regulate the type of work women performed, and to treat women as secondary workers who were supplementing the wages of the primary worker, namely, ...