Women and Financial Security

The recent news that women are now the sole wage earners in their families garnered headlines similar to this one over an article in the Wichita Eagle reprinted from the Los Angeles Times, “More Women Are Breadwinners.” Nicole Santa Cruz cites Kristin Smith, a family demographer at the University of New Hampshire, who says, “‘As husbands lost their jobs, the role of the wife's income became critical to keeping families afloat.’ In a study based on census data and released in December, Smith found that in 2008, employed wives contributed 45 percent of total family earnings, up from 44 percent in 2007. It was the largest single-year increase in 10 years, she found.”

Women have always worked. Homemakers who care for children and keep a household running work just as hard as those who bring in a paycheck. Further, women being in the workforce is nothing new. What is new is that women now make up almost half of all workers on U.S. payrolls. According to Heather Boushey, in “The New Breadwinners,” on The Shriver Report, “As women move into the labor force, their earnings are increasingly important to families and women more and more become the major breadwinner—even though women continue to be paid 23 cents less than men for every dollar earned in our economy

Add to these statistics the fact that according to the U. S. Census, in 2006, there were 10.4 million single-mother families. Granted, some of these mothers may be on government assistance programs, but most of them are probably gainfully employed.

Those who have been paying attention cannot have missed the changes in the world of work. While many conclusions can be drawn from what Boushey calls a transformation, one conclusion that smart young women might come to is that they should be prepared to be the breadwinners in their households. Women are placed in vulnerable financial situations for a variety of reasons. Of course, the women who know they will never marry or have children are prepared to be on their own financially. Other women, those who do marry and have children, may find themselves unexpectedly single when divorce rears its ugly head. A husband’s illness or death could leave the mother supporting the family. Men lose their jobs in hard economic times. Lesbian couples work to support themselves and their families.

For periods of time in the history of humankind a woman could count on marriage as her life’s work. During one such period, much of the first half of the twentieth century, social norms dictated that a woman’s role was to find the right man, get married, and have children in order to have a complete life. Even today, it is unlikely that a woman enters into a marriage thinking that it might not last. A smart woman, however, will keep in mind that half of all marriages end in divorce.

This perspective on a woman’s need to protect herself financially may seem overly pessimistic. On the other hand, women should consider the value of having an education and developing marketable skills in order to deal with the realities they may face. The reality is, when a bill arrives in the mail, the postal carrier won’t know whether the recipient is a man with a good construction job or a stay-at-home mom whose husband just took off with his best friend’s wife. And that bill is going to have to be paid one way or another.

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