Meredith Thornburgh is a Ph.D. candidate in Economic History at Princeton. As a historian of the domestic economy, her research examines how social and technological changes over the twentieth century shaped the modern relationship between work and family. However, as a mother planning to stay at home to raise her kids, the domestic economy is more than a research fascination for Thornburgh. The following is adapted from an interview with the Rover on economics, motherhood, and why household labor is largely unrecognized as work.
The dichotomy between professional work and staying at home is a recent development. Thornburgh explained that “for most of [the nineteenth century], everyone was working towards the same productive enterprise in their different ways, men, women and children.”
During the twentieth century, the domestic and productive arenas became increasingly divided. Thornburgh explained that the male breadwinner “was engaged in some industrial form of labor that furnishes a monetary wage, and then it’s primarily the work of the woman to take that paycheck and turn it into the stuff of life.” “Work” and “production” became increasingly a matter of what was done outside of the house.
Thornburgh argued that this distinction was formalized with the development of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)—a metric developed in the wake of the Great Depression to assess the economic health of a country.
GDP, Thornburgh noted, fails to account for domestic labor: “If you provide a service for someone in your household, it’s not considered productive. In fact, for housewives in particular, none of their work counts towards the GDP. They don’t count as employed in any of our labor force participation rates, [nor] any of the main statistics we use to understand the country’s productive efforts towards the common good.”
However, the exclusion of domestic labor was practical rather than malicious. Thornburgh explained, “the [point] wasn’t [that domestic] work … is not really valuable, so we’re not putting it in, or [that] it’s not real work.” The problem was the availability of data. She continued, “The formal economy … produces receipts and contracts and things that we can … collect and see, oh, this person was paid this much during this quarter for this service that they provided … the home doesn’t generate any of that kind of record keeping, nor is there as clear a monetary basis for what we would award the value, even if we did have records of what people did.”
Thus, in a measure of economy that assesses only GDP, domestic labor falls through the cracks. Thornburgh continued, “It has remained a very sore spot over the course of the 20th century, that what women do, or what anyone who kind of works in the household sphere does, doesn’t count towards what we now think of as the economy.”
Thornburgh argued that these trends contributed to the feminist movement of the 60s and 70s.
She said, “You have to look at what changed immediately before that to prompt that social change. The two changes that I talk about in my dissertation are the technological change in the modern home … [and our] thinking about the economy and what counts as work.”
To Thornburgh, the devaluing of the home can portray professional life as the sole path to fulfillment for women. Reflecting on her own life, Thornburgh recalled, “The cultural messaging seemed to me that I would waste my potential by not doing something professionally.”
At the time, it seemed impossible that life at home “could be ambitious and challenging, and in such a manner that you are developing your human faculty and pursuing excellence in virtue. Not just virtue like being nice or being patient, but even intellectual virtues.” Thornburgh continued, “It made me wonder whether I was even supposed to get married or have kids.”
“Around the time of the pandemic … it just occurred to me, if I could realize my potential in some … professional sphere, how would that potential go to waste in the home? It would be used in the home to some positive effect for myself or my family.” After she defends her Ph.D. thesis, Thornburgh will continue to stay home and raise her growing family. She also plans to continue pursuing the intellectual life, even if it doesn’t take the form of a traditional full-time job.
She concluded by urging appreciation for those who have dedicated themselves in the home: “Call your mom and thank her for everything she did.”
Darius Colangelo is a junior majoring in mathematics and the Program of Liberal Studies. He can be reached at dcolange@nd.edu.