Who created unequal wage rates?
These developments reveal the fallacies of the second feminist misperception. It is that “the Patriarchy” connived to subject women to separate but unequal wage rates. The facts, as Robertson discloses them, again show otherwise. The women s movement of the 19th Century struggled to establish not a male but a family wage. It did not favor men; it favored breadwinners. This policy derived from their primary concern that mothers should be able to devote full time to raising children and managing a home. To do that they had to be provided for, and it was the husband and father who had to do the providing, which meant that he had to earn a wage sufficient to support not only himself but his entire family. The long enduring effort to institutionalize the family wage eventually succeeded. Robertson writes that “it has been estimated that by 1960 a family wage was paid by 65 percent of all employers in the United States and by 80 percent of the major industrial companies.” He adds, “Although
