We’re told, in the dulcet tones of history textbooks and corporate diversity videos, that the ‘double income household’ was the great liberation. Women marched out of the kitchen, men learned how to boil an egg, and all was well with the world. Cue a slow-motion montage of shoulder-padded power suits, briefcases clacking like castanets, and the tune of ‘I Am Woman’ swelling in the background. The myth runs something like Exodus itself: let my people go – from aprons and irons into spreadsheets and board meetings.
But liberation? I rather think not. To borrow from Marx (a man I seldom borrow from without washing my hands afterwards), the system merely ‘changed the chains.’ The single breadwinner wage – once sufficient to feed a family, pay a mortgage, and leave enough for a pint – was conveniently dismantled. Wages flattened, housing costs rocketed, and suddenly one salary couldn’t keep the wolf from the door. Two people had to work, not because of freedom, but because the establishment quietly moved the goalposts, and then told you it was feminism rather than fiscal necessity.
It was a grift of the highest order. The state now had two taxable incomes instead of one. Employers had twice the labour force with which to suppress wages. The advertising men (those Mad Men with Brylcreemed hair and Satan’s imagination) could flog twice the lipstick, twice the cigarettes, and twice the ‘time-saving’ gadgets to a population that no longer had any time at all. Liberation? More like conscription into the consumer army. You didn’t march into freedom; you were dragooned into service.
Consider Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet. Her great anxiety was to marry well, lest she spend her days in genteel poverty playing the pianoforte badly. Imagine her today, liberated, free to pursue a career in human resources, still unable to afford a house in Hertfordshire unless Mr Darcy also pulls a salary in finance. Liberation begins to look suspiciously like the same trap, only with better stationery and an ergonomic chair. Even Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, desperate for romance beyond her stifling provincial marriage, might have paused had she seen the existential horror of a Monday morning commute on the Northern Line.
Meanwhile the family itself, that great little platoon Burke once praised, was quietly hollowed out. Children came home to empty houses; the hearth grew cold. Dinner became microwaveable. Mothers and fathers staggered back from work too tired to speak, let alone to read their offspring Wordsworth by candlelight. The television took up the burden of parenthood, and the nation duly sank into idiocy. ‘Train up a child in the way he should go,’ Proverbs insists, ‘and when he is old he will not depart from it.’ Alas, the way he should go is now supervised by TikTok, and a smartphone that never blinks.
The genius of the con was its moral cover. Who dares criticise the rhetoric of ‘liberation’ without sounding like a grumpy Victorian patriarch? Yet liberation that makes you more dependent on the state, on employers, and on credit cards begins to resemble Sartre’s vision of bad faith – an inauthentic life dressed up as choice. Nietzsche would sneer that we’ve simply swapped one herd morality for another, bleating that we’re free while shackled to mortgages, overdrafts, and ‘flexible working hours.’
Psychologically, the strain shows. Husbands and wives no longer share labour as complementary roles; they compete in a grotesque tally of exhaustion: “I’ve had three Teams meetings and a commute” versus “I’ve wrangled the kids, signed forms, and answered fifty emails.” Freud might mutter something about sublimated resentment; Jung would diagnose an archetypal imbalance – an anima and animus warring inside every household. Children sense it too: raised less by their parents than by algorithms, they inherit a gnawing sense of abandonment that no material abundance quite soothes.
And still the sermon goes on. The clergy of progress tell us that this is all emancipation, that the Promethean fire has been stolen from the gods and distributed equally. But liberation, in this case, is in the same sense that Prometheus was liberated when his liver was pecked out daily by an eagle. The chains are shinier, the slogans are nobler, but the belly’s still torn. Kierkegaard said anxiety is the dizziness of freedom; here it’s the dizziness of debt, the nausea of the overdraft, the despair of two incomes stretched so thin that the dream of Eden is replaced by the nightmare of Aldi.
We were promised liberty, but we were handed laundry baskets, inboxes, and a culture of frenzied consumption. If there’s theology in all this, it’s not redemption but the Fall repeated daily: Adam and Eve didn’t leave Eden to enter the office block. The double income household, then, isn’t salvation but Babylon – a tower built high on the weary backs of mothers and fathers, destined to topple under its own absurdity.
Liberation? No. It was, and remains, the greatest grift of the modern age: a scam that sells slavery as freedom, toil as choice, exhaustion as empowerment. Or, to put it in the Gospel’s language, we were promised life ‘and life more abundantly,’ but what we got was overtime.
Wording 