This is a good point. It's simple economics. If there is a sudden rise in worker supply, but not a corresponding increase in demand for those workers, wages must fall to accommodate the influx.
No, it's not a good point. Do you think women were just shuffling their feet at home before they became wage earners? Technological improvements that reduced the total domestic workload for a household made it feasible to have two earner households (as a side note it didn't eliminate domestic work which working women continued to do disproportionately to men to this day).
So the total labor required to live and work successfully in industrialized nations dropped but instead of that leading to more individual wealth it just meant that households now had allocated more of their labor to wage labor compared to before where half or more of the labor of a household was simply unacknowledged and unpaid.
And it should be noted that poor women had been working. For less compensation than men, while performing domestic labor. Middle class and upper class women getting jobs was another story.
Boo, hiss. Feminism. What an odious little comment thread.
wages are drawn from the output of workers labor, not the other way around. At most, wages are an advance on the return a worker would expect from their labor. Subjugating half the population into not being part of the labor force is not an aspect of a free market in my opinion.
