Massachusetts News: An Independent News Source for Massachusetts Politics

The wife's earnings have become a necessity for most middle-class families to maintain and improve their living standards despite the economic prosperity of the last decade, according to a report titled, "The State of the American Dream in Massachusetts, 2002."

Three out of four Massachusetts wives in 1999-2000 worked outside the home.

The report, which was released in May, was a joint project of Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies and MassINC, a Boston based think-tank "focused on issues of concern to the state's broad middle class."

Married Couples Do Better

Majority of Wives Work to Pay Taxes

The majority of married women now working outside the home are doing so in order to pay the family taxes. The tax burden on a typical American family from all levels of government was about 5% of its annual income in 1950. By 1997, it had jumped to about 40%. That means that the average woman is working because of the extra cost of taxes that her family is required to pay. However, most people don't realize this. They believe that tax cuts help only the "rich.

"Getting into and staying in the middle class today tends to require two incomes, which for most people means being a married couple or being in a stable, long-term relationship," said the report.

A key strategy for increasing family income over the last twenty years has been for wives to work more hours outside the home. What is troubling at this point is that most middle-class families are already working at their maximum and have few, if any, hours left for adults to add to their work-days. "One of the principal strategies of working-class and middle-class families has come close to being exhausted," says the report.

It also found 38,000 fewer married couples (with and without children) in the Commonwealth today than in 1980. At the same time, single-parent families have increased by approximately 39,000. Other family arrangements, such as adults who live with their parents or grandparents and siblings who live together, have increased by 55,000.

The report stated that married couples tend to have considerably higher incomes than families headed by a single parent.

By 1999-2000, the typical married couple earned $45,000 more than the typical female-headed family (with dollars converted into real terms in order to adjust for the effects of inflation). A single-parent family is more than six times as likely to be at the bottom of the income ladder than at the top.

Although women who do not have children have been working outside the home for many years, the biggest change has occurred in families with children.

Not only do more wives work, but they also work more hours than in previous generations. This is a major factor in holding a middle-class standard of living, says the report.

Wives account for almost one-third of the total earnings of both spouses. Their earnings account for more than three-quarters of the gains that married couples made over the last twenty years.

During that period, the number of working mothers with children under 18-years increased from 61 to 75 percent. The result is that all women, with and without children, work at essentially the same rate.

In 1979, the typical mother with children worked about 20 hours per week. Twenty years later, they work about 30 hours per week.

Married couples with children benefited the most from mom's earnings. In these families, 93 percent of increased income came from her earnings, says the report.

When compared with others across the country, married couples in Massachusetts earn 19 percent more than their national peers. Female-headed families earn the same income as their national peers. However, since the cost of living in the Bay State is 10 to 26 percent higher than the national average, female-headed families are worse off than their national counterparts, and few single-parent families make their way into the middle class, said the study.

Education - Family poverty has essentially been eliminated in Massachusetts for married couples with a college education, and it has come close to being eliminated among married couples headed by a high school graduate since the earnings of wives strongly supplement those of their husbands. In contrast, 5 percent of families are poor if headed by a single woman with a four-year college degree, and 26 percent are poor even if she has a high school diploma.

Geography - During the state's economic growth in the late 1990's, Greater Boston and Worcester County were the most successful in creating jobs. Southeastern Massachusetts also created many jobs, but with lower wages. Job growth in the Western half of the state for the most part did not occur. Even in successful regions there were pockets of unemployment, such as in Lawrence, and in less successful regions there have been bright spots of job creation, such as Hampshire County.

Housing - In 2000, Massachusetts had the sixth-lowest rate of home-ownership in the country due to the high cost of housing.

Economy - Over the last twenty years, Massachusetts shifted from a manufacturing to primarily a service providing economy, leading to a changing demand for workers. Employment in executive and managerial positions grew by 61 percent since the early 1980's, while employment in semi-skilled, blue-collar jobs fell by 41 percent.

Paul Harrington, an economist from Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies, was one of three experts who discussed the state of marriage at a forum in Boston on June 18.

He used data from a report he helped produce on "The State of the American Dream in Massachusetts" to point to the economic woes associated with single parent families, as opposed to the resilience of married couples in handling hardship.

Any strategies to correct the economic problems that single-parent families are experiencing would have to consider family structure, he said.

During an interactive discussion by the panel, a Professor of Women's History from Harvard, Dr. Nancy Cott, appeared to be annoyed at Harrington's conclusions. She said there is a tendency to say that marriage is causal, that if you are married, you do better. She attributed the plight of unmarried and single households to "lack of opportunity, hope and empowerment."

There is no correlation between marriage and income advantage, according to her. It is political rhetoric, she said. Instead, she sees a crisis in the care and maintenance of children, not in marriage.

Harrington said the data shows there is a definite correlation between marriage and economic status. Income advantage for even co-habitating couples is far less than for married couples, he said.

He said he couldn't fail to notice that whenever former Governor Michael Dukakis would introduce a woman who successfully got off welfare through his ET program, every one of those successful women introduced her husband.

The third speaker, Dr. Alan Wolfe, Director for the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, said that since marriage is an institution, it is possible that distrust of institutions plays a part in the marriage crisis he sees today.

Wolfe said we need to learn about our own responsibility to make institutions work. Our aversion to institutions is dangerous over the long run, he said. We need institutions to make life better. We need institutions to play the role of saying "no" to us. Marriage plays that role, he said. He's not sure government can do it.