Each of the seven previous economic recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began. But many women in their prime earning years from across the states stopped working this decade, according to recent numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And with the economy in the toilet, those numbers are likely to accelerate.

Economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, but many then thought it was by choice that women were staying home – to raise kids, run the house, or just because their husbands made enough money for the both of them. But government data to be released today, which follows the women’s story through the end of 2007, shows that women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And, again, like men, they are either dropping out of the daily grind altogether or just taking a break from it.

"When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids," Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, told The New York Times. "We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was."

Even though the proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years fell only 2.2 percentage points since 2000, that small amount erased more than 12 years of gains for women. If that decrease had not occurred, more than 4 million additional women in their prime years would be working now.

"Women bring home about one-third of family income," said Carolyn Maloney, Democrat of New York and vice chairman of the Joint Economic Committee. "And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards."