Why Girls' Work is Worth Less Than Boys' Work: The Great Pocket Money Swindle

Frustratingly, it seems I’ve lost the girlsliterature.com domain name, at least for now. I do apologise to anyone who happened to end up viewing some slightly different images of “girls” than they expected and am endeavouring to buy the domain back. I’ll keep this new URL active regardless of what happens.

At the moment, I’m continuing to work on the colonial girlhood project and this has meant boning up on Australian feminism, girls’ education and women’s work at the beginning of the twentieth century for a book chapter. As I’ve spent a lot of time researching British girls in this period, I naively thought that attitudes to work and education would be reasonably similar in Australia. (Research assumption that proved false no. 374.)

Attitudes to women’s work were substantially different in Australia in part because of changes brought about by the Harvester Case in the Commonwealth Arbitration Court in 1907. The judge’s decision prompted the introduction of a “family wage”, in which it was deemed that a man’s salary ought to be sufficient to pay for his own expenses, as well as those of his wife and children. In some respects, this was a welcome development for the welfare of many families, but it had major repercussions for women’s work. The family wage innately suggested that women need not work once they were married, and that young working women were merely passing time and earning frivolous spending money before marriage. With these assumptions about women’s work, it became easier to justify lower wages for female employees—women were not going to be responsible for ensuring that their children were fed (never mind about families in which husbands had deserted their wives). Branches of work that were traditionally performed by women began to pay lower wages than ever before. These poorly paid areas became even less desirable prospects, thereby discouraging women from seeking employment and, to an extent, compelling them to marry for financial security.

I thought of these changes when I read about bank surveys in the UK and Australia that suggest that today’s girls and boys, on average, receive different amounts of pocket money, which is quite often tied to performing chores. In the recent Westpac bank survey, boys earn an average of 7 per cent more pocket money than girls, which is not a huge difference. However, the same boys spend 28 per cent less time undertaking household chores than the girls. If the boys spend less time working than girls, then the extra money they receive can perhaps be explained by the difference in the kind of jobs they are being rewarded for. Boys are sent outside to take out the rubbish, mow the lawn or help with gardening more often than girls. Girls do more work inside, like cleaning their room and washing the dishes. Even in the family home, parents are assigning greater value to work that is understood as men’s work, and providing greater rewards for it.

Predictably, the odd male online commenter has argued that jobs such as mowing the lawn are so strenuous and beyond the ability of most girls and that the hard slog involved should rightly be “worth” more than bringing in the washing. Others have rightly pointed out, however, the increased frequency of many indoor tasks. You might need to mow the lawn every month in winter, but the dishes will need washing, drying and putting away each and every day. How is it that a far greater amount of time spent working on typically feminine housework doesn’t equal, and is in fact regarded as far less of a contribution, than a short amount of time in the backyard, the stereotypical domain of men's work?

It seems we have internalised the values assigned to different forms of work based on gender that were responsible for forcing many Australian women to marry in the early twentieth century. If treating their children’s help on different value scales according to their gender is something that parents who love their children unconsciously do, what hope is there in the wider workforce for valuing the jobs that women typically undertake, such as childcare, for example?

And, for the record, I mow the lawn with a push mower and would much rather take on a football field with it than iron a basket full of laundry.

The Forgotten History of the Babysitter

Some people think that the study of girls' literature and culture is somewhat frivolous or pointless. Others, including one grant assessor I recall, feel that researching girls reveals nothing that we don't already know from studies of women. Babysitter: An American History by Miriam Forman-Brunell (New York University Press, 2009) is a compelling counter to such ideas. It takes the topic of the teen girl as child minder and, in turn, unravels the history of girls' employment (including their formation of babysitter unions), the development of youth consumer and print culture, theories of child development, and the tension between competing discourses of sexual "threat" in the home and girls as victims of sexual harassment. The book  explores both the lives of actual girl babysitters, who contribute their own little-heard voices —often with indignation about their working conditions—cultural imaginings of the babysitter in film, television and literature.

Forman-Brunell approaches babysitting as "a cultural battleground where conflicts over girlhood—especially regarding sexual, social, cultural, and economic autonomy and empowerment—are regularly played out" (4). She shows that adults were uncomfortable with "modern" girls from as early as the 1920s, when babysitting was a only new concept. In this period, girls were redefining female adolescence, especially through their part in the burgeoning youth commodity culture by wearing make-up, reading magazines, and going to the movies, amusement parks and ice-cream parlours (often on a "double-date"). Girls' new-found independence and interest in socialising at night made the task of caring for other people's children less desirable. Babysitting therefore held little appeal to many American teens at this time. Child development experts also advised parents to be cautious about babysitters, describing these "flirtatious girls" as posing a threat to helpless children.

Barbie embodying the myth of babysitting as
"easy" labour

The Great Depression, as Forman-Brunell argues, provided financial incentive for girls to become more enthusiastic about sitting, as their own families were no longer able to provide generous allowances and constraints on employment meant that other jobs were not available. More than 750,000 high-school aged girls became "mother's helpers" or babysitters, in part, Forman-Brunell explains, because of significant cultural shifts such as the number of teenagers becoming a larger part of the overall population, the growth in high school attendance (which enabled fads to spread rapidly) and the growth of commodity youth culture.

Adults nevertheless remained suspicious of girl babysitters, at first over their contested use of the home telephone, and later over crimes such as raiding food from the refrigerator. There were also numerous urban myths of wild parties, drug use and child neglect. Forman-Brunell punctuates her history with the various ways in which this suspicion has been made manifest through fears about "bobby-soxers" in the '40s, who were scandalised for "pursuing their social and sexual pleasures" (42) and sexually unstable girls who might spread communicable diseases, as well as fictional representations of crazy, murderous vixens out to destroy happy marriages. The "disorderly babysitter" becomes a prominent figure in the 1960s when American culture "simultaneously stimulated girlhood rebellion but also stifled it" (121). While from the 1970s, the babysitter is heavily eroticised in slasher movies, including Halloween, and pornographic novels.

Throughout their history, babysitters have consistently complained about poor and unfair working conditions: adults regularly failed to provide sufficient emergency information, girls were left stranded for hours when parents did not return home at the agreed-upon time, sitters were commonly underpaid (or received no payment at all), and, in the Depression-era, girls were required to complete extensive housekeeping tasks in addition to childcare. Sylvia Plath is perhaps the most famous babysitter of the 1940s who recorded her cynicism about child minding. As a fourteen-year-old she declared that "little children are bothersome beings that have to be waited on hand and food" (56). The discontent among sitters, primarily about overwork in comparison with meagre remuneration, grew to the point where girls began to form their own babysitter unions in the Midwest and Northeast to demand fair working conditions and payment.

Iowa State College "Y" members, 1955

World War II opened up many employment opportunities for girls, not only in after-school positions, but in jobs that lured them away from school altogether. The growth in new occupations for girls, an increasing birth rate, and the movement of many families away from cities (and grandparents) to the suburbs created a chronic sitter shortage. Forman-Brunell shows how many magazines therefore presented babysitting as a patriotic duty for girls, in which a girl might "guard the home front" in a mother's absence.  Parents attempted to find their own solutions, such as sitter exchanges or co-ops where groups of parents would take it in turns to mind each other's children. Inevitably, some parents did not pull their own weight and these co-ops failed to provide the answer to the sitter shortage.

An unexpected aspect of the history of babysitting in America is the cultural support for boy sitters, who were viewed as more reliable and authoritative than their female counterparts. During the Depression, the scepticism about girl babysitters contributed to the popularity of hiring boys to mind children and, similarly, during World War II, the sitter shortage meant that boys actively pursued jobs as child minders. Male college students even formed their own babysitting services, such as Princeton's "Tiger Tot Tending Agency". Male sitters also answered fears about the feminisation of boys while their fathers were busy working 50-hour-weeks: "boy sitters could pry loose the 'skirt-clinger,' and by playing 'rough-and-tumble' games outdoors, instill the manly hardiness experts anxiously promoted" (107).

Ann M. Martin's
The Baby-Sitters Club series

The latter part of the book concentrates on the increasing popular cultural representation of the babysitter from the 1970s and offers some intriguing insights into how this figure comes to be blamed for the destruction of the domestic ideal (especially by maniac male stalkers). For girls themselves, however, series such as the Baby-sitter's Club, which began in 1986 with Kristy's Great Idea, promoted sitting as a means to a career and a demonstration girls' competency. The books also presented sitting as an enterprise among a confident sisterhood of friends, well in advance of the concept of "Girl Power". Forman-Brunell argues that the cultural construction of the "Super Sitter", which the Baby-sitter's club espoused, "appropriated feminist ideologies but neutralized empowerment so that girls would not become too powerful" (177).

The Babysitters (2007), a babysitter transforms her child-
minding business into a call-girl service 

Babysitter: An American History necessarily charts the "fall" of babysitting, as girls became more preoccupied with after-school activities and part-time work in malls than minding children in private homes. While girls have always shown some reticence about sacrificing their social life during their teens, Forman-Brunell includes the perspectives of girl sitters that show that discontent with parents sometimes turns girls away from sitting. This history uses the practice of babysitting as a focal point for mapping changes in girls' education, employment and popular culture across the past 90 years. While babysitting may be a less popular form of employment among American teen girls today, the cultural resonance of the babysitter, however, lingers on, as both a trope of forbidden teen sexuality in pornography and a potential threat to children themselves in the horror genre.