A Woman’s Lifetime Earnings Lost To Pay Gap Could Feed A Family Of Four For 37 Years

[Luminous Animal]

49. Some stay at home parents are like that. I know, I used to cater to

those kind of moms when I managed one of the most exclusive children's store in San Francisco. They'd shop through the sterling silver teething rings, the $400 velvet capes, and genuine $200 mohair Steiff bears... while the nannies tended the kids.

Other moms stay at home and are very active with their children, their schools, and their community.

Poor women have always had to work for the bare necessities. Now most labor class and lower middle class women have to work full time. Declining wages, outrageous housing, medical, and education costs have pretty much ensured that. Not much thought is given to them and their little unsupervised monsters.

I'm glad that my dad was a union worker at GM while I was growing up and he could afford to provide for an entire family of 5. I appreciated my mom mostly a stay at home mom... she did drive school bus for a few years to add to our college fund. There were times that my mom wanted to be branch out but my dad was resistant and maintained that her place was in the home (much like Romney). But when my dad was sick for 2.5 years, and they drained all of their savings and our college funds and he died when she was 38 years old, she had no higher education and no job skills. This was in 1977 when nearly 100% of private industry in the state of Delaware had a hiring freeze. It took my mom nearly 2 years to find a full-time job that would pay the mortgage and the bills. During which, as a consequence, I, at age 18 and a full-time sophomore in college, expanded my hours at K-Mart to work full time and was paying 100% of the mortgage, and buying about half the groceries and the utilities and still going to college full time. A situation that still 35 years later, causes my mom undue guilt.

But, it did have an upside. Her experience spurred her on to become a champion of feminism... a concept that she knew little about but readily mocked. She lost all of her old friendships over her, "I Am Woman" transformation. She found better friends.