Adam Smith, The Inventor of Capitalism Lived With His Mother. Here's Why That Matters

Time​ Magazine

2 days ago

The man largely credited with inventing marketplace capitalism, Adam Smith, lived at home with his mother. While he wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, she cooked and cleaned for him. This juicy morsel of history makes for such perfect satire, I can hardly stand it. How magnificent that the person responsible for defining what capitalism needed in order to function had unpaid help at home making his paid work possible!
Notably, the necessity and value of domestic labor was absent from his reflections on men acting in their own self-interest. These were the real 'invisible hands' in Smith's accounting of the market, and their conspicuous exclusion is hardly surprising. It was a foregone conclusion that a woman's biologically predetermined role was to be the de facto caretaker of society. In the United States in 2025, not much has changed.
Women are still more likely than men in heterosexual couples to do the work that never ends—the work that must be re-completed every single day, as Silvia Federici writes, a feminist who founded the Wages for Housework movement in the 1970s. A 2021 profile of Federici summarized the message of her life's work: Unpaid domestic work is a form of gendered economic oppression, and in some ways, the core exploitation upon which all of modern capitalism is built.
In her 1975 book Wages Against Housework, Federici wrote, 'We have cooked, smiled, f-cked throughout the years not because it was easier for us than for anybody else, but because we did not have any other choice . . . we want to call work what is work, so that eventually we might rediscover what is love.' She rejected the idea that a 'labor of love' existed, or that any person in society was preordained to be more naturally subservient.
For all our progress, women continue to consistently shoulder more than their fair share of the load. An aggregation of years of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Time Use Studies found that when both parents work for pay (whether part-time or full-time), the average employed man spends fifty-seven more minutes per day doing paid work than the average employed woman—but the average employed woman performs about one hour and ten minutes more unpaid household and caretaking labor per day. If you want to know why a woman might be spending less time and energy doing paid labor, the answer is: She's doing unpaid labor.
As one way to measure the financial consequences of these differences, consider that women today retire with approximately 22% less Social Security income than their male counterparts, and about 57% as much retirement income overall. Worse yet, going years (or even decades) without any 'real' work while you're taking care of family members translates to zeroes in the Social Security work records, which means forfeiting access to Social Security payments of your own. Approximately one in five divorced women ends up in poverty, a rate 56% higher than that of divorced men. Sixty-one percent of women report that they left paid work for 'family responsibilities,' compared to 37% of men. These statistical disparities are often painted as gendered inevitabilities.
When cultural attitudes dictate that women are society's 'natural' primary caregivers, not only is their paid labor valued less, but the attitude directly enables a complete dearth of support for families from the government—why do you need childcare or paid family leave if a woman's natural role is 'full-time mother'? As such, the universal logistical and financial burden of childcare falls on individual parents, with the lower-earning partner, often the mother, more likely to downshift their career to accommodate their family's needs, thereby all but guaranteeing a lifetime of financial disparity.
Navigating our current paradigm requires a huge expense and serious sacrifice, and the majority of U.S. households find life without two incomes to be too precarious. Seventy percent of families are dual income, meaning both adults work for pay and need assistance from someone else to care for other family members while they do.It's not just that more families have two earners now: Of these dual-income households, women earn as much or more than men in 55% of them.
Despite women's workplace gains, Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin found in her research that one adult often leans into their career and keeps the 'greedy' job, as she calls it, which may be more demanding and higher-paying. The other adult typically downshifts, and while they may stay employed in some capacity, they tend to be the one who's on call to leave work to pick up a sick kid from school, take care of the laundry duty, coordinate the goodie bags for the class party, and—ultimately—defer the type of paid work that would lead to the accumulation of resources. Goldin theorizes this is the primary reason the wage gap widens as women age and their familial responsibilities increase; that it's the reason why more men end up in leadership positions, and why men are far more likely to earn the high incomes necessary to build wealth be high earners than women.
Being financially prepared for these circumstances can provide more optionality when you face them. There's a practical, mundane reason why many women in the U.S. today find themselves in a position where they must downshift or leave work altogether to raise children. It's as boring as it is disheartening: the absurdly high expense of childcare.
Taking your unpaid domestic labor and transforming it into someone else's paid labor costs money, and many couples look at their respective salaries and choose to forfeit or deprioritize the lower paycheck so one parent can save the family the cost of care by performing it for free. (Some people prefer this arrangement and choose it regardless of the availability of another choice. Others feel it's their only rational choice.)
This state of affairs disadvantages women across the socioeconomic spectrum—it's not just those who must find space in their budgets to pay for care work, but those providing it. Right now, this work is almost always low-wage, which means these jobs are often worked by women, too: 94% of childcare workers and 97% of prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers are women. Black and Latina women are disproportionately represented in this group, comprising shares of the early childcare sector that are nearly twice as high as their shares in the overall workforce. This work is undeniably valuable—but it's not currently valued, and it won't be until we begin paying fair wages for the labor that allows the rest of society to function.
Understanding how to save and pay for childcare before you ever need it such that you're not automatically and singularly faced with this career-versus-family dichotomy is just about the only practical option families have to prevent women from being sidelined in the workforce as a gendered default. The U.S. leaves families with few other 'choices' if they want to have kids, which is why the conversation about a mother's 'choice' to stay home often rings so hollow: How can one make fully autonomous choices in a system that structurally incentivizes one path over another?This is not a discussion about our choices. It's an examination of which real options are available to us in the first place. Our true goal is not a superficial 'choice,' but liberation from the systems that limit which paths we feel we can choose. In the meantime, in America's version of Adam Smith's capitalism, diligently saving ahead of time is the best choice we have.