Financial Security

When it came to issues of family support, however, the traditional view of women as dependent ultimately took clear precedence. Consonant with its view that women had unique responsibilities with respect to families which justified differential treatment in employment, the commission also affirmed that men had to continue to fulfill traditional support obligations. The Committee on Civil and Political Rights recommended that "in view of the childbearing and homemaking functions of the wife" the husband should continue to bear the primary burden of financial support.^[46] The commission concurred in

the committee's judgment, which colored many of the commission's additional suggestions.

The Commission made no recommendation for changes in the Social Security system for women workers who paid Social Security taxes and, in many cases, received no additional awards over that which they would have gotten as wives who had not made payments. The system presumed the dependency of both wives and children on male workers and so also denied benefits even for the children of working women. The commission did, however, emphasize the need for increased payments to the widows of workers and to divorced women.^[47]

Part of the commission's reluctance to tackle these questions came from the complexity of the Social Security system and the expense of making changes in benefits.^[48] But the Committee on Social Insurance and Taxes went out of its way to affirm that it would not "be appropriate for the social insurance program to provide a benefit so that the father could stay at home to care for the child" in the event of the mother's death.^[49] Childcare, after all, was women's work. Thus, despite the assertion throughout the commission report that women worked to provide necessities for their families, the commission nevertheless failed to acknowledge that such families would continue to need the mother's income if she died—without recognizing that this omission undercut its initial premise.^[50]

Although the commission declined to explore the implications for equality in employment of leaving traditional assumptions about financial support untouched, it did acknowledge some danger in the complete economic dependency of the homemaker. Most states followed the common-law precept that income belonged to the person who earned it. Thus, in a family where the husband worked for pay and the wife did not, she had no legal right to any of the family income or property. The commission took exception to this state of affairs. Calling marriage a partnership "in which each spouse makes a different but equally important contribution," it asserted that wives should have a "legally defined substantial right in the earnings" of the husband and in the property acquired through those earnings.^[51] The implementation of the commission recommendation would mitigate the financial insecurity of full-time homemakers.