That happened some time ago. In fact, one of the issues with so many women in the workforce is that in the 50's that same class of women were providing community networking functions, allowing for local problem solving and support that is somewhat extinct now. Frankly I am unsold on the benefit to society of women in the workforce. Did we gain women's freedom at the cost of strong and good families? It's a taboo, now. I'm not saying we should go back, but as a society we appear generally unwilling to discuss this reality and loss to family. As if nannies are an entirely sufficient replacement for mothers, but I don't think they are.
Yes, exactly. We traded away strong families and neighbourhoods for women's freedom. And then most of the benefits of that freedom were captured by employers through stagnating wages and landlords through skyrocketing rent and real estate prices.
We should be aiming to have fewer people in the workforce, not more. The economy is for the people, not people for the economy.
> And then most of the benefits of that freedom were captured by employers through stagnating wages and landlords through skyrocketing rent and real estate prices.
If you go further back, it's easy to argue that the dissolution of the extended family in favor of the nuclear family as part of the western industrial revolution caused even more problems that were hidden by the high rate of economic growth during this time.
That's a hot take you've got there, and probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, but I'm curious about some of these points:
> community networking functions, allowing for local problem solving and support that is somewhat extinct now
What are you referring to in particular? Community booster orgs? The PTA?
> Did we gain women's freedom at the cost of strong and good families?
Were families really that better off? I think back to the 50's and all I see is things like alcoholism, racism, parochialism, and insularity. I also see a world in the aftermath of WW2, where all other global-scale economies were devastated, save for the US, and could afford to pay husbands fantastic wages while mom stayed home and ran the house; those salaries aren't a reality now.
Yes, yes, and.. social networks. You know, the kind where people call each other and make plans like play dates and canning sessions. These days that seems to be only available to the upper middle class. All of it is still here, but weaker, less pervasive, and unavailable to many.
> Were families really that better off?
You're absolutely correct, and to answer that requires better and more data than I even know how to look at. The 50's is maybe not even the best time to evaluate since the suburban boom was creating some of these problems for the first time, too. How many families were really doing well, vs how many families were struggling? Perhaps the data would show that in fact it's better for families that women can choose either (or even in exceptional cases, both) paths. The good news is that this subject is not as taboo as I'd feared, the comment is not being obliterated.
> alcoholism
There is no evidence I can find that shows we are any better off now than we were in the 50's with regards to alcoholism. In fact, according to [1] and [2], we appear to be in a low point of per-capital consumption, similar to a low that occurred in the late 1950's.
The benefit is that the other half of the population also deserved life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Likewise, we didn't abolish slavery because it would be good for cotton prices.
Do you have reason to believe that most women throughout history were not happy being homemakers and mothers? Do you believe women are happier now that they are having few or no children and are instead working to support a corporation that will kick them to the curb when they are no longer of use to it, rather than giving love and care to the most cherished people in their lives?
Some women will prefer that sort of corporate lifestyle, for sure, and I don't think anyone is advocating for making it illegal for women to work. But you don't get a successful and happy society by catering to small minorities at the expense of the success and happiness of the overwhelming majority.
>Some women are happy being homemakers today, and some are happy in the workforce.
Far more were happy being homemakers in the past.
>I'm not sure how we are currently catering to women in the workforce.
Affirmative action, equal opportunity laws, corporate funded programs to instruct men how to behave around women in the workplace, pervasive media praising women with jobs, praising the child-free husband-free life, on and on and on. You have to not be looking in order to not know about it.
Oh, I didn't think reducing discrimination counted as catering. You're not really saying increasing discrimination to previous levels would make women happier, are you?
I think encouraging them to be homemakers rather than encouraging them to be in the workforce would make them happier, generally, and that we should strongly prioritize catering to the majority. Do you think women are happier now than women in previous generations? Because all of the polling I've seen says no.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl... for instance. You can always blame it on there not being enough equality yet, or once they've passed men in whatever metric you have your eye on, you can always blame it on more abstract things.
But I don't think any amount of equality is going to make them as happy as they would be making their homes into warm and loving places for their families, and experiencing their children growing up and eventually having children of their own, in a society that appreciates them for doing just that.
If the small minority of women that that doesn't work for have a worse time in the work force because society prioritized things other than making it nice for them, too bad. I don't care. You make society strong with rules that work for the majority.
You keep coming back to whether women were happier in the aggregate before. That's a great link, but I don't draw the same conclusions you do from it.
We're in a transition period. Women who work still have to do the majority of housework and childrearing at home, due to their male partners' lack of participation. You exalt domestic virtues in women, so surely you must agree that these men should do more to make their homes warm and loving places, experience their children growing up, etc? Or is that not the same thing?
You say you don't prioritize making workforce participation "nice" for women, but we're really just talking about making it "fair". You make society strong with rules that are fair for everyone.
Ultimately, I believe women, as all human beings, are capable of making their own choices and deserve a fair playing field. I think your preferences unfairly limit the viability of one choice and tilt the scales toward the choice you like better, and your assertion that it's for their own good just serves to infantilize them.
You can say that, I guess. There's no particularly compelling reason to believe that getting through the transition period to the promised land is possible or that the grass in actually greener on the other side.
>You exalt domestic virtues in women, so surely you must agree that these men should do more to make their homes warm and loving places
If that's what will make quality of life better for them and their families. I don't know of any compelling reason to believe it should.
>Or is that not the same thing?
I don't know, for sure.
>You make society strong with rules that are fair for everyone.
I think there's a lot to be said for that, in general, but is it really fair to women or to their families if the pursuit of achieving this ideological vision of total fairness and equality between the sexes ends up reducing their quality of life?
>I think your preferences unfairly limit the viability of one choice and tilt the scales toward the choice you like better, and your assertion that it's for their own good just serves to infantilize them.
We know from data that they did like it when the scales were tilted toward that choice better than what they have now. There's no compelling reason to believe that they'll like the "fair playing field", if it's possible to get there, better than they'll like what they had before.
I don't know for a fact that most of them won't like it, but I think there are good reasons to guess that they won't, and, if your goal is to increase their life satisfaction and that of their families, it seems insane to me to push an entirely ideologically motivated set of changes onto our entire culture all at once without having pretty damn good reason to believe your end goal is achievable and actually desirable.
The science is still out on whether men and women are genetically predisposed toward different average behaviors and preferences. The idea that they are seems completely reasonable to me, given the simple fact that men produce thousands of gametes per second for their entire post-pubescent lives, while women produce one per month for 20-30 years. Reproductive and child-rearing behaviors are obviously vitally important to how we turned out because we only descend from the people whose succeeded in reproducing and keeping their children alive. I don't know for a fact that our brains are hardwired to help us out differently as a consequence of our different relevant anatomy but I think it's totally reasonable to guess that they do, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary.
If they are predisposed toward different behaviors and preferences, then trying to socially engineer men and women to all be exactly the same is doomed to failure, and a whole lot of people are going to suffer for it, and indeed they already are, as we can see. And sure, some women would benefit from it while the majority suffered, but like I said, if you want a strong society, you make rules that work for the many, not the few.
Canadian parental leave policy is now granting an amount of parental leave for the mother who carried the pregnancy, an amount of parental leave to be shared between the two parents, and an amount of parental leave for the second parent. So basically the second parent is strongly encouraged to take time off to spend time with the child, so that they too, not just the carrying mother, partake in early parenting...
