Do Socialists Believe in a Family Wage?

The Long History of the Family Wage

Family wage ideology was widely embraced in the early twentieth century. Henry Ford’s famous five-dollar-per-day wage was so rooted in a belief in this idea that eligibility for it was contingent not just on an employee’s work on the job but also his personal characteristics. The wage—roughly twice what most companies paid when it was introduced in 1914—was available to any man living with and supporting his family; any man over twenty-two of “proven thrifty habits”; and after some protest over the entire exclusion of women, women who were “the sole support of their next of kin or blood relatives” and who, if married, had husbands unable to work. ⁹ By making his factory jobs actually support the family wage ideal, Henry Ford drastically reduced turnover and suppressed unionization efforts. ¹⁰ Ford’s effort succeeded because rank-and-file workers shared the family wage ideal with captains of industry. So too did many activists trying to tame the worst excesses of industrial capitalism. Labor leaders framed their demands for higher wages around this ideology—some going so far as to argue that the presence of women in the workforce was undermining men’s ability to draw a family wage. ¹¹ Progressive women working out of settlement houses also shaped their advocacy around the idea that a family wage supporting a breadwinner and homemaker was the normative ideal, even as they pushed for better wages for women where that ideal was not being met. ¹²

By making his factory jobs actually support the family wage ideal, Henry Ford drastically reduced turnover and suppressed unionization efforts . . .

But socialists had a different approach. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels offered a scathing analysis of the patriarchal family—as supported by the family wage ideal. He wrote,

In the great majority of cases today, at least in the possessing classes, the husband is obliged to earn a living and support his family, and that in itself gives him a position of supremacy without any need for special legal titles and privileges.

Engels concluded,

The first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole female sex back into public industry, and this in turn demands that the characteristics of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society be abolished. ¹³

Engels believed socialism demanded considering the economic needs of individuals instead of family units.

Other socialist voices agreed. Eugene Debs, the voice (and candidate) of socialism in America in the early twentieth century, wrote,

The Socialist Party proposes that women shall be economically free. In present society she must be provided for—must be supported. What does this mean? It means she is dependent, in economic servitude. In a sane society, rationally organized, woman would be able to provide for herself. ¹⁴

In his 1906 treatise, Socialism and the Family, H.G. Wells argued that women need not change their actual occupations under socialism, but their work had to be recognized for its public value. In other words, women had to be paid for their work in the home. He summarized, “That is the gist of the Socialist attitude towards marriage; the repudiation of private ownership of women and children, and the payment of mothers.” ¹⁵ Engels, Wells, and Debs each believed in a socialism built around the idea that the state would have a direct relationship with every adult citizen; its political and economic relationships with women would no longer be mediated through their husbands.

The Family Wage in Social Welfare Programs

Over the years, socialism has been interpreted and reinterpreted. Many of its basic premises—if not the full socialist agenda—can be seen in the social welfare states that developed over the course of the twentieth century. But the architects of many of these social insurance systems have relied equally on the idea of the family wage that early socialists rejected.

One of the clearest examples of how socialist and family wage ideologies mixed lies in the proposals of William Beveridge, who designed England’s entire postwar social insurance system. Beveridge, a social democrat member of the British Fabian society, which also briefly housed Wells, was deeply influenced by socialist thinkers. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, in his famous 1942 report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, Beveridge embraced the family wage. He proposed that marriage serve as a reset for women’s entire economic relationship to the state, writing, “On marriage every woman begins a new life in relation to social insurance.” Beveridge suggested that the social insurance system mark this new beginning by stripping a newly married woman of any entitlements to unemployment and disability insurance she might have earned by working prior to marriage and, in exchange, awarding her a marriage grant. Going forward, a wife would earn social security benefits as a member of a husband and wife “team.” Furthermore, married women in the workforce would be eligible for smaller unemployment and disability benefits than single people (in exchange, Beveridge argued, married women would receive a robust maternity benefit). ¹⁷

Beveridge’s proposals were designed to ensure that the social insurance system did not undermine the male family wage. Indeed, historian Susan Pedersen argues that preserving gender hierarchies within the family was essential to Beveridge’s project. ¹⁸ A modified version of Beveridge’s plan was ultimately adopted. The final policies maintained the core premise of Beveridge’s proposal regarding married women, that is, that their economic security should flow through their husbands.

The ideas laid out by Beveridge bore much in common with the concurrent structuring of social insurance benefits (public and private) in the United States. As we have seen, Social Security—often described as Debs’ legacy, although Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his compatriots strenuously denied any connection to socialism—developed over the 1930s to offer men a dependent benefit for their wives. ¹⁹ New Deal policymakers expected that most women would receive their retirement pensions only through their husbands. Historian Alice Kessler-Harris has shown that this was a choice driven by gender ideology, not economics. ²⁰ Private benefits like employer-based health insurance, which developed into a robust and state-supported system in the 1940s and 1950s, also mirrored the breadwinner–homemaker structure. ²¹

New Deal policymakers expected that most women would receive their retirement pensions only through their husbands.

This structure has proven durable, shaping debates and legislation about the social safety net well into the latter part of the twentieth century, a point when women had moved firmly into the workforce. ²² For example, to this day, men are entitled to a dependent Social Security benefit for any woman they are married to for at least ten years. A man with three ex-wives can draw a full dependent benefit for each of them—potentially a significantly larger benefit than would be available to a husband and wife team that earned the same total income as that divorced man. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, many feminist activists argued that the breadwinner-dependent structure that allows for these odd results should be replaced with individual Social Security benefits calculated for a married couple on the basis of their joint earnings during each year of marriage. The only rationale for maintaining Social Security’s breadwinner-dependent structure—now de-gendered to allow men or women to be breadwinners or dependents—in lieu of adopting an individual instead of marriage-based benefit structure was policymakers’ commitment to using public policy to uphold the family wage ideal. ²³

This commitment has had consequences. The flip side of men’s ability to draw full dependent benefits for multiple wives is that two-earner couples have to decide between drawing benefits on their earnings as individuals and forgoing the dependent benefit to which the higher earner is eligible or vice versa. This choice effectively creates a family wage in retirement and renders women’s (generally the lower earner is the woman) individually earned Social Security retirement saving irrelevant in many cases. This encourages women to stay home in uncompensated caregiving roles during their working years, but if a woman subsequently loses the husband whose income she relied on, she may find herself on the brink of poverty. Two-thirds of the impoverished elderly are women. ²⁴ By treating husbands and wives as an economic unit instead of guaranteeing a secure old age on an individual level, Social Security shortchanges women whose lives do not fit this expectation.

The history of full employment legislation in the 1970s provides another example of how the family wage ideal worked to shape public policy in the late twentieth century. In 1978, after much advocacy from a broad range of left-leaning organizations, Congress passed the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act (more commonly referred to as Humphrey–Hawkins). While this relatively weak legislation did not include a public service jobs guarantee, such a measure had been debated extensively prior to the bill’s passage. Over the course of these debates, married women with working husbands were slowly edited out of the proposed policy. Early drafts of the proposal guaranteed a public service job to any individual who wanted to work and could not find a position. During the amendment process, this guarantee was qualified so that administrators would have been instructed to allocate one job per household, prioritizing men. ²⁵ The family wage had reappeared as the structure through which resources—in this case jobs—would be distributed.

Black women in Congress were particularly concerned about this amendment. ²⁶ They knew that black women needed jobs whether or not their husbands were in the workforce. In 1974, over half of adult black women were members of the civilian labor force, while only 44 percent of white women were. But the unemployment rate for black women—the number of women actively seeking work but unable to find it—was almost twice that of white women. ²⁷ Family wage ideology did not reflect black women’s lives, and molding full employment legislation in its image would have made the legislation significantly less useful to their families.

In the last year, socialists and others on the left have renewed the call for a federal jobs guarantee (such a proposal is prominently featured in the Green New Deal and Bernie Sanders’ presidential platform; versions of it also appeared in other candidates’ platforms). The legislative history of the Humphrey–Hawkins Act provides an object lesson in why it is critical that the role of the family in social policy be discussed now. As broad ambitions are turned into legislation, two things happen: legislators look to the structures of existing policies for models and are forced to narrow the scope of their proposals. Because so many existing social policies use the breadwinner–homemaker structure to allocate benefits, the structure offers a ready-made strategy for narrowing the reach of new social benefit legislation. Before falling back on past precedent at the point of compromise, the left should proactively think about what—if any—models of family social benefit legislation should support and encourage, who those models include, and who they leave out.

The Family Wage in 2020

There are plenty of rational reasons policymakers might want to use the family to determine need and ration goods. Once policymakers decide to make public goods available on a means-tested basis, using family wealth and income as opposed to individual income to measure means makes a good deal of sense. After all, most people in families gain and experience their individual economic security not on the basis of their individual wages but on the basis of their family’s collective income and wealth. But when social policies start using family structures to determine individual entitlements, they wittingly and unwittingly promote certain family structures and leave those who fall outside those structures vulnerable. Nevertheless, the platforms of the two left-most candidates in the 2020 primary, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, do not deliver a consistent message about how the government should assess and award families’ economic security.

The policy proposal to take up the most air space in the primary so far has been Medicare for All. Both Warren’s and Sanders’ proposals approach the family as early socialists would have proposed. Each plan creates a universal, individual right to health insurance, free of judgments based on family structure or wealth. A Medicare for All system would eliminate our current system where health insurance benefits are extended to individuals under sixty-five predominately through their employers or their spouses’ employers. Every individual would have his or her own right to health insurance; no one’s access to insurance would be contingent on his or her connection to a spouse (or parent) as a dependent.

In contrast, while both Sanders and Warren have proposals to reform Social Security and raise benefit levels, both leave in place the existing dependent benefit structure. Interestingly, Warren does offer a policy proposal that begins to contemplate breaking down the breadwinner–homemaker structure at the heart of the program. In addition to increasing the value of everyone’s Social Security benefit, Warren proposes adding a caregivers’ credit. The credit—awarded based on hours spent caring for a child under six, a disabled family member, or an elderly parent—is not quite the wages-for-housework envisioned by Wells, but it is a step in that direction. Importantly, Warren does not require recipients of the credit to be outside the paid workforce. As a result, a woman (or, less likely, man) who has reduced her hours in the paid workforce in order to meet caregiving responsibilities might layer the caregiving credit on top of Social Security credits earned in the formal workplace. ²⁸ Warren’s plan leaves in place the existing dependent benefit options in Social Security, but the addition of the caregiver credits would begin to chip away at the underpinnings of the breadwinner–homemaker benefit structure: the fact that because of their long-term attachment to the workforce men typically earn more Social Security credits than women.

Both Warren and Sanders have also proposed and made central to their campaigns a wealth tax. But the two candidates have structured their proposed wealth taxes around two different understandings of family wealth. Warren proposes taxing family and individual wealth in the same way. A two percent tax would be applied to both individuals and couples after the first $50 million of wealth is exempt. As a result, her plan has been accused of having a significant marriage penalty—savvy and emotionless couples with $100 million in joint wealth could divorce and split their assets evenly to dodge this tax entirely. Sanders’ plan, in contrast, doubles the exemption for married couples no matter their earnings—a plan one economist dubbed a “trophy-wife tax credit.” In other words, a wealthy man (or woman) who marries a woman who leaves the workforce and does not hold her own wealth would get a significant tax bonus. This model harkens back to the family wage model. ²⁹

. . . Sanders, Warren, and much of the left have not provided a consistent approach to how the government should think about family income.

The substantive differences between the resources in question in Warren’s and Sanders’ different policy proposals vary enough that it is difficult to compare them directly. The point of this essay is not to argue one is taking a better approach than the other, but rather to point out that unlike their ideological predecessors, Sanders, Warren, and much of the left have not provided a consistent approach to how the government should think about family income. The policy proposals being debated in new proposals for public goods range from preserving marriage as a mechanism for distributing benefits, to working around existing structures that do so by actively rewarding caregiving work in the home, to bypassing the family entirely in order to extend benefits to individuals. These differences have been far from the focus of the policy debate, but they are critically important. How a policy approaches and defines family determines who it reaches and who it excludes.

Sunkara’s Manifesto declares, “At its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they did.” ³⁰ From this, he argues, it follows that the government must ensure every person’s individual political and economic security. In this way, Sunkara aligns himself with past socialists like Engels and Wells who treated the individual, and not the family, as the relevant economic unit. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the primary candidates are less clearly aligned. But insisting that the government engage men and women as individual economic and political actors rather than as family units should be a critical step to establishing a theoretical basis for universal public goods. It can serve as a lodestar during legislative debates that will inevitably lead to narrowing programs, but do not have to do so in a way that exacerbates existing inequalities.