This time it’s “Breadwinner Wives.” According to author Hanna Rosin “About 40 percent of wives in the United States now out-earn their husbands, and researcher Liza Mundy predicts they will be the majority in a generation.” I’m interested in where that data comes from and will post later about what I find. Rosin also writes:
Over the last 30 years, women have started to work considerably more hours than they once did, without easing off on child care. In fact, the opposite has happened. In 1965 women reported doing an average of 9.3 hours of paid work a week and 10.2 hours of child care. Now women not only do an average of 23.2 hours of paid work a week, but they do more child care—13.9 hours, according to the latest American Time Use survey. The hours in a woman’s week have not expanded, and mostly women have made up for it by shaving off time in other areas—housework, personal grooming, and, tragically, free time, which women have begun to claim less of in the last decade. (And, no, men haven’t decreased their leisure time lately.) But mostly what the time-use surveys confirm—for the United States and many other Western countries—is a vision of every woman as a slowly expanding colonial empire, failing to cede old territories as she conquers new ones—either because she doesn’t want to or has just fallen into the habit of doing too much Or more likely, because men don’t yet pick up enough of the domestic slack.
Women are “shaving off time in other areas” that include “personal grooming”? That sounds a little odd to me.
