Read this, from How the University Works. Then read the whole site. People cannot support their families. But remember: capitalism and general exploitation really are good and rational. If you have suffered and not benefited from them it is only because you are not virtuous enough, and have not absorbed the correct spiritual principles.
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I just have to add: when I was nine, I realized that marriage was not compulsory and women could work – not just temporarily until they got married, but their whole lives. Working seemed a lot safer, both physically and financially, than submitting to a random marriage, so I chose that.
Marriage was random because before it got too late you had to accept one of the people who chose you and then serve them – and submit to their violence, if any – in exchange for a living, forever. If I did not turn out to be really desirable my options were going to be limited, and the proverbial aisle could easily be a gangplank. After her marriage, Sheherezade forestalled her death for a thousand nights and a night, and then forever, but her predecessors had not.
At the same time wages for women were then not much over half what they were for men, and women could not hope for promotions. So right then I gave up many expectations, including the idea of supporting a family, so I am less strapped now than some of the people in the stories told at How the University Works. Careers and jobs in that context could never be “just something one does to support the family” because (1) one had no right to a family if one had a career or job, and (2) a career or job one might get would not support a family, anyway.
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Notice all the things I knew about the limitations that were placed on one and possible strategies to navigate them at age nine. Notice that academia, where I went to evade this maze of limitations, is ironically enough a prime locus of that same maze, and is so ever more blatantly. There is far more to say about all of this; my remarks here are mere synecdoches which barely scratch the surface.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
We need to re-occupy our country.
Yes. That is the spirit!!!
P.S. I am lifting this quotation from Bosquet, from Lumpenprofessoriat.
“Degree holders frequently serve as university teachers for 8 or 10 years before earning their doctorate…. Many degree holders have served as adjunct lecturers at other campuses, sometimes teaching master’s degree students and advising their theses en route to their own degrees. Some will have taught 30 to 40 sections…. During this time, they received frequent mentoring and regular evaluation…. A large fraction will have published essays and book reviews and authored their departmental Web pages. Yet at precisely the junction that this ‘preparation’ should end and regular employment begin — the acquisition of the Ph.D. — the system embarrasses itself and discloses a systematic truth that every recent degree holder knows and few administrators wish to acknowledge: in many disciplines, for the majority of graduates, the Ph.D. indicates the logical conclusion of an academic career.”
See Lumpenprofessoriat:
http://lumpenprofessoriat.blogspot.com/2008/01/survivor-issues.html
I had no notion of marriage being an economic arrangement. It was an emotionally irrelevent social structure just like everything else. I was a true child.
Oh, it was so obvious! It was discussed often, between couples and among women, and my mother started training me in it early on, about getting educated enough so you could get a good man, good being well off and of the right class (if not straight out rich then ideally, someone in a profession like academia, medicine, or law, and not a trade like business or engineering), etc.
The point was repeatedly made that women were barred from lucrative work and so must attach themselves to the most successful man possible, to ensure their own survival; we had to put up with a lot in that arrangement, but the one thing to make sure of was to clean up in the case of a divorce. We would never leave them but they might leave us, in which case we would need to fight tooth and nail to be sure we got good settlements.
In our suburb, all the men had jobs outside their homes and all their wives were domestic laborers in the homes. Women who also worked for pay only did so to supplement their husbands’ inadequate incomes, and were pitied, both for having to sully themselves with paid work and for having husbands who needed their financial contribution.
At least this was my mother’s dark attitude at the time, as it was communicated to me. She was apparently feeling very trapped, but then again she kept saying her main objective, was not to have to work a paid job, and she did hold onto that.
…..about getting educated enough so you could get a good man, good being well off and of the right class (if not straight out rich then ideally, someone in a profession like academia, medicine, or law, and not a trade like business or engineering), etc.
This kind of idea is interesting, and probably more narrow in its cultural aspects than you might think. Something I noticed in Australia — perhaps it was only a feature of the 80s and 90s — was that educated women GENERALLY had tradesmen husbands. I’m not sure that this kind of thing is still the case. It may have to do with the relatively lower prestige that is accredited to education here. Or it may have to do with certain ideals of masculinity.
There’s been a lot of discussion of that, as it was a big phenom here in the 80s and 90s as well. Part of it was that educated men were competitive with professional women and it destroyed the relationship, whereas a tradesman who will even contemplate dating, say, a professor, is not going to be an individual who feels the need to compete over education.
But in my mother’s generation, the concept was that women did not work. Your education was to get you a prestigious man, as piano lessons would in Austen’s time.
Both my grandmothers had college degrees, of a type which then existed, slightly beyond the B.A., and also jobs. One grandfather had gone to a technical college, and the other had not even gone to high school. Men could get work without being as educated as women needed to be to have middle class jobs.
There is a similar phenomenon now in some fields: white men can get lucrative employment after the B.A., with no need for more advanced degrees. The liberal professions, and the graduate programs, thus have more women, minorities and immigrants in them than they had formerly.
The liberal professions, and the graduate programs, thus have more women, minorities and immigrants in them than they had formerly.
Yes, and of course this plays into the hands of the right wing ideologues who want to say that the liberal arts are “feminine” – ie. for weak minds. But to the contrary, we others keep bashing our heads against all sorts of windows until something or somebody lets us in.
Yes but it’s also in science and technology that there’s more space for ‘others’ – an interesting phenomenon; women, minorities, and immigrants study harder of course, so they sometimes have the scores to get in that white men do not, but then again they need them (and the degrees these permit them to get) to a degree that (elite) white men do not.
Medicine and science — yes.