It's possible that white women are more dependent on white men than black women are on black men: "Black women have historically had higher labor force participation rates than white women, but the latter closed the gap in the early 1990s. Black women's labor force participation has risen more rapidly than white women's since 1997, restoring the gap" (@ <http://www.jointcenter.org/DB/factsheet/employ.htm>). Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for instance, argued that "[a] fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife" and that "the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is to [sic] out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well," suggesting that what he thought of as "a matriarchal structure" is responsible for such social problems as crime (_The Negro Family: The Case For National Action_, the Office of Policy Planning and Research of the United States Department of Labor, March 1965, Chapter 4 "The Tangle of Pathology," <http://www.dol.gov/asp/programs/history/moynchapter4.htm>). It may be the case that there exists a racial difference between blacks and whites with regard to marriage and women's economic dependence upon men, but what is commonly represented as "a racial difference" may be more of a class difference, i.e., more of a statistical artifact due to the dominant tendency in sociology either to divide and analyze data by race without taking income and wealth stratifications into account or, having income and wealth stratifications into account, to "forget" about them and to go on to present their findings about "racial differences."
Here is an interesting trend: "For most of the postwar era, female unemployment was greater than male unemployment. . . . However, in the early 1980s, women's unemployment began to dip below that of men and since that time women's unemployment has cycled just beneath male unemployment" (Heather Boushey, "Unemployment, Pay, and Race," _Left Business Observer_ 84 [July 1998], <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Race_curve.html>). The latest finding confirms the trend: "The unemployment rate for adult women (5.0 percent) is slightly lower than adult men's (5.3 percent)" ("Unemployment Watch: Women's Unemployment Increases Across the Board in February 2003," <http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/qtr1_2003/0307-135.html>). If we divide data about "whites" by income and wealth, the male-female unemployment gap among "whites" may very well mirror that among blacks (Cf. "For African Americans, it [unemployment among teens] reached 42% for men and 37% for women, and was 19% and 16%, respectively, for white men and women," <http://www.jointcenter.org/DB/factsheet/employ.htm>).
At 8:21 PM -0400 8/15/03, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
>Women in low-paid occupations are paid less, still, than men in
>low-paid occupations (car park attendants, for example, are paid
>more than childcare teachers). I haven't looked at figures in the
>last 3 years but I'd be surprised if this has unaccountably reversed
>for the population as a whole, especially since there is some
>evidence that the welfare reform drove low-waged women's wages down,
>increasing the wage gap. Women's wages are closer to men's than
>they were 30 years ago (partly from men's dropping) but the lines on
>the graph have not yet kissed.
On the average, gendered wage gaps still exist, but take a look at the following trend: "Data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) show that the proportion of dual-earner couples in which wives earned more than their husbands increased from 16 percent in 1981 to 23 percent in 1996.3 The figures suggest the presence of a growing number of married couples in which traditional gender roles vis-à-vis labor market activity may be reversed -- that is, the wife is the primary earner and the husband is the secondary earner" (Anne E. Winkler, "Earnings of Husbands and Wives in Dual-Earner Families," _Monthly Labor Review_ 121.4, April 1998, <http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1998/04/art4exc.htm>). In one in five dual-earner families, the wife is the primary earner.
What is really remarkable is that "the mean hourly wage for husbands whose wage was in the lowest quintile was $6.06, compared with a mean wage of $8.09 per hour for their wives. For husbands whose wage fell into the top 20 percent, by contrast, their mean hourly wage was $28.14 and their wives' was $13.45" (Anne E. Winkler, "Earnings of Husbands and Wives in Dual-Earner Families," _Monthly Labor Review_ 121.4, April 1998, <http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1998/04/art4full.pdf>).
Crucially, "the data indicate that wives earned more than their husbands in nearly 60 percent of the couples in which the husband's wage was in the lowest quintile, a result that holds whether current hourly wages or career wages are considered" (Anne E. Winkler, "Earnings of Husbands and Wives in Dual-Earner Families," _Monthly Labor Review_ 121.4, April 1998, <http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1998/04/art4full.pdf>).
Combine the facts in the previous two paragraphs with data about gendered unemployment rates on the low-income end of the working class.
In conclusion, I stand by my thesis that women's economic dependence on men is the least common among the poorest and the most common among the bourgeoisie in rich modern nations, because poor men whom poor women tend to encounter, sexually or otherwise, are the least capable of supporting dependents. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>