As an addendum to my post from last week, I wanted to write down some thoughts on the figure of the graduate students' wife as a source of labor for the university. Although PhD programs at institutions like Yale, which did not co-educate its undergraduate population until 1969, were often open to women far earlier (1892, in Yale's case) than were those same institutions undergraduate schools, the majority of PhD students for most of the 20th century were men. (It wasn't until the end of the 21st century's first decade that women outnumbered men among both full and part time graduate students, with a far larger margin in the latter category. By 2004-5, women also outnumbered men as recipients of doctoral degrees, a figure which includes PhDs as well as MDs, EDs, DDSes, and LLDs.) Many of these 20th century male graduate students were married, and many of them were married to women who were not themselves graduate students. Given the cost of graduate school and the miniscule salaries of teaching assistantships (Yale TAs, for instance, made three hundred dollars per semester until a series of grade strikes in the spring of 1972 raised wages in some departments) women who were married to graduate students often worked to support their households, and often provided universities with a source of short-term labor in a variety of clerical and related positions. But the contingency of these jobs often meant a high rate of employee turnover, which could be destabilizing and expensive for institutional operations.
In a 1968 Yale Daily News article on the restructuring of the university's library system, the turnover of graduate students' wives was raised as a distinct challenge facing library administrators. The graduate student's wife was a common and important, usually informal, category of university labor, bound to the university by the unwaged world of gendered domestic labor as well as by her own waged work, her relationship to the university and both worlds of labor profoundly determined by her gender (as well as her class and her race - there weren't very many black PhD students at Yale, and their wives would have had a much more difficult time gaining access to the kinds of work white students' wives did. The graduate student's wife was a desirable worker because of her education, her impermanence, and her need to earn enough to support both her and her husband, but also a problematic worker for the same reasons. For other library employees, the graduate student's wife could represent at the very least a bellwether of an encroaching "9 to 5 feeling" (this was over a decade prior to the film of the same name.) As wives' turnover clogged the works, remaining employees voiced a feeling that they were themselves "cogs in the machinery" of the increasingly taylorized operations of university managers. But the wives themselves also played important roles in some radical movements within and beyond the university -- several were involved in the women's liberation movement and in radical and populist and labor organizations. In New Haven, for instance, they were critical to initiatives like the American Independent Movement's Radical Community School. Others joined organizing campaigns which were widespread among university clerical and library workers in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Despite challenges to compulsory heterosexuality and marriage and the increasing numbers of women in graduate school since the 1960s, the graduate student's wife has remained both a discursive category within popular culture and a laboring subject, the concern of social scientists. In the conventional mythology of the figure, the woman who supports the student while he works towards his degree (a relation haunted by the implicit failure of normative masculinity) is then abandoned by him upon or nearing completion of his dependence upon her. It's a relationship structured by exploitation made possible by love, or at least justified by love, sustained by the sanctification of gendered forms of work which are projected beyond the walls of the home as an act of sacrifice. She supports him because she loves him, and he leaves her for a younger woman because he has extracted all the use value from her which he cares to. If both instead stick it out, she gets effusive praise in his acknowledgements which invariably belie the real value of her labor, the extent of his dependence upon it. This is what Scheinkman (1988) calls an "asymmetrical marriage". A staff social worker at the University of Chicago's Student Mental Health Clinic in the 1980s, Scheinkman observes that male graduate students dependent upon female partners were likely to "maintain an overadequate position" toward non-academic wives. Like most white working women who were not performing waged domestic labor (some surely were) graduate students wives performed what feminist sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called the second shift, unwaged domestic household labor in addition to the waged work they performed outside of the home. (I should note that this is a schema which scholars like Mary Romero have complicated through attention to the particular forms of value and labor extracted from working class women of color who perform domestic and other forms of care work in multiple waged and wageless contexts.) Part of what is interesting to me as graduate students' wives pop up now and then in my archives are the ways in which these women were often working for the university in the formal sphere of clerical and other forms of waged labor, and in the informal sphere of reproductive labor as unpaid workers often making possible both the subsistence of both the household and the reproduction of the academic labor force. Just as the historiography of the university elides and omits the millions of hours of formally-paid service work which has played a significant role in the growth of endowments and the administrative class alike, so it elides the ways in which formally-unwaged labor has been crucial to its project in a variety of forms for much of its existence. It seems to me that this is a history worth exploring at length.
(I describe waged service labor as formally-paid because as Marx notes in Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 18, the capitalist never pays the laborer the full value of the labor. Surplus value is the remnant, the time the worker loses and the capitalist takes gratis. Thus, capital is "is essentially the command over unpaid labor. All surplus-value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent), it may subsequently crystallize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self-expansion of capital resolves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity of other people’s unpaid labor."
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