The fallacy was obvious. A certain amount of housework was inescapable. If the mother was unable to do the work, what happened to it?
Answer: somebody else did it.
Who? Even in the abundance of those days, most of us couldn't afford nurses, maids, cooks, laundresses, or cleaning women. The era of the poor relation who came to help out for a few months was long past.
Who did the work, then? The father, that's who.
I stared deep into the shocking chasm between the mental processes of men and women.
I studied the statement again. There was no mis-statement at all—if you granted the hidden premise and didn't boggle on the implication. It was perfectly valid.
The hidden premise was that women did all the housework. But that hadn't been true for a generation. The husband-father had been drafted into home service, and there was no discharge for him short of death or total disability.
The latter was hard to prove.
But the implication was the deadly thing: in the consideration of second child, a father's time and labor counted for nothing.
I remembered a shaggy little story about a farmer who held up his hog to let it eat the corn off the stalk. "Doesn't it take a long time to fatten up a hog that way?" exclaimed the efficiency expert.