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Notes -
Some scattered thoughts:
Partner hires pretty clearly evolved from the complexities of what is an insanely punishing market--but also partly, I think, just plain old-fashioned feminism.
Suppose you finish your undergraduate education quickly--let's even say you were double-promoted as a child, dual-enrolled your way to an Associate's degree at age 17, completed the rest of a five-year Master's program at age 20, and launched straight into your PhD. You get your first postdoc position at, let's say, 24 years old, but this requires you to move to a new community, perhaps a new country. Call it a three-year postdoc, during which you are consumed with applying for long-term positions all over the map; say this is when you get involved in a potentially long-term romantic relationship with a fellow academic in a similar position.
Now you are 27 years old (I don't know what the real median age is for people completing their first postdoc, but it's probably more like early to mid 30s). Statistically, you're lucky if one of you gets a long-term position, and the other is going to be an adjunct, or do a second postdoc, or something similarly menial. Here it's pretty common for couples to start having the "whoever gets the best job, the other one will follow" conversation--but unless the "best job" is in a place planted thick with colleges and universities (Boston, say), the "one who follows" is likely to be stepping out of academia, creating a career break that could very well become permanent.
If the "one who follows" is ready to settle down and raise some children in a single-income household (rule of thumb, the pay schedule for professors is commonly 10%-20% above what a kindergarten teacher in the same geographic area makes)--no problem! The timing is good (assuming you only want one or two kids--if you wanted more than that, you should have started before you finished your undergrad!) and life goes on. But of course the person who is traditionally expected to give up everything to raise children, at least for the first several years, is the mother. Many mothers are totally okay with this. But a feminist might observe that not engaging in partner hiring perpetuates patriarchal oppression and contributes to the particular subjugation of smart women.
Throwing the "one who follows" a low-salary, untenured teaching position may be an effective way to fill out the ranks of the underpaid teaching positions on which most universities rely to stay solvent; I doubt Yale has too much difficulty finding all the teachers it needs, but even large state universities are sometimes left scrambling for qualified instructors. At any institution smaller or less prestigious than that, you can bet they are in a somewhat perpetual staffing emergency. Not for tenured faculty, no! Everyone wants those jobs. But for qualified adjuncts, lecturers, and the like, absolutely. Partner hires thus also help alleviate the single-income-household problem, though it probably discourages actual childbearing less than one might suppose--I have never been part of a department where more than about 60% of the faculty had children, and my female colleagues generally have fewer children than my male colleagues. I have one co-worker right now who, when she joined us 5 years ago, had no children but planned on having one "in the next year or two." She recently turned 40 and mentioned that "the longer I go without having children, the less it appeals to me to do so."
People who are determined to succeed in academia are, in short, often faced with years of brief residence followed by dramatic relocation, and it only takes two or three such stints to put you past prime childbearing years--especially when you are female. This is true almost regardless of how precocious you are, or how efficiently you complete your studies.
So while I wouldn't personally advocate for a partner hire (because I am old fashioned enough to feel comfortable battling the two income trap by asking others to make costly defections from the status quo), I don't think there's any real harm in them. The colleagues I've had who did the long distance relationship thing so they and their partners could pursue separate academic careers have often been poor campus citizens, as they spend so much time traveling that their service contributions suffer. This is just one way in which partner hires can be made to the advantage of the university, and on balance they probably do not shut any competitors out of any highly desirable positions. Rare indeed is the university willing to hand out tenure on the basis of romantic entanglement!
I mostly agree with your explanation of how spousal hires came to be common and accepted, but I think feminism might play a somewhat smaller role than you ascribe to it. It had some influence, but in my opinion, its most important effect was simply increasing the number of couples where both partners are academics. As long as such couples are common, and as long as the academic job market works the way it does now, spousal hiring will be appealing.
Well, okay, but in the larger sense that partner hires would not be a thing at all if women were still overwhelmingly homebound, feminism is the single most important cultural factor responsible for all partner hires.
I think this is buying the propaganda a bit. Feminists would love if that were true, but I think it's a more complex story on how that happened.
I think this is both an interesting and very complicated topic. I have actually wondered before if the changing demands of the job market (i.e. a shift from physical labor to more desk jobs which it is easier for women to be competitive at) partially drove the growth of feminism (rather than feminism causing the job market to accept more women).
Not sure if the timing works out, there.
The textbook answer is that women entered the workforce thanks to the World Wars. That meant a lot of manufacturing, not just desk jobs. Our transition to a service economy really hadn’t taken off.
Women really started getting involved with factory work in the 1800s, which was definitely before the growth of desk jobs. In this era, they also started gaining access to higher education. I think that predates the main suffrage movements.
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Yes, I completely agree with that.
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