Posted on 10/31/2013 6:52:52 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Women in the workplace isn't just about feminism, it's economic necessity with the GOP-shredded safety net
During a HuffPost Live segment last week titled “Masculinity Now,” Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes aired a series of expletive-laden perspectives on modern femininity, none of them positive. While McInnes’ host and co-panelists maintained their calm, the blogger and publisher ranted that “feminism has made women less happy,” citing cultural pressure to “feign” toughness and inappropriate presence in the workforce as culprits.
In short, McInnes’ claim is that the majority of women are naturally predisposed to derive satisfaction from “being domestic and shaping lives” rather than from labor market work. McInnes’ intuition is essentially a condensed and profanity-laced version of a common conservative sentiment. The issue was last raised on the national stage when Hilary Rosen made the fateful mistake of suggesting that Ann Romney, the wife of then presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, had never worked. Romney retorted by quoting her husband to Fox News: “Mitt said to me more times than you would imagine, ‘Ann, your job is more important than mine … your job is a forever job that is going to bring forever happiness.’”
The sort of happiness McInnes and the Romneys refer to when they speak glowingly of motherhood and childcare does sound blissful. Unlike the temporal and profane world of labor for monetary gain, caring for one’s family is routinely imbued with a sort of transcendent, sacred quality. Descriptions of this sort have the effect of casting aspersion on women who work outside the home: With this sort of happiness awaiting you, why would you hold a job?
The reality is, of course, that McInnes and the social conservatives who share his views imagine a particular familial arrangement not only in which the husband is the sole breadwinner, but is successful enough in that capacity to render a second household income unnecessary. But our analysis of 2012 census data shows that most families with two incomes rely upon the wife’s work to stay afloat financially. The census reveals that out of 59 million married couples, 36 million feature wives with positive earnings. When we subtracted the wives’ incomes from those 36 million families, roughly 7 million fell below the federal poverty line, with another 6 million falling below 1.5 times the poverty line, and a further 6 million falling below twice the poverty line. Thus, were the incomes of working wives to be suddenly subtracted from their families, a full 54 percent of families with two incomes would be in or near poverty.
As Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi illustrate in their 2009 book “The Two-Income Trap,” American families with two incomes do not generally put their second income toward extraneous or extravagant purchases, but rather use the boost to keep up with the rapidly rising costs of housing, transportation, healthcare and tuition. So it should not be surprising if McInnes and his cohort are correct: With the dual burdens of supporting family life emotionally and financially bearing down on parents, a certain amount of anxiety is natural.
Fortunately, reduced financial circumstances or limited time with one’s children are not the only two options available.
In 2007, Dutch psychologist and journalist Ellen de Bruin spelled out the solution in her book “Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed.” (De Bruin submits that the title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek – of course some Dutch women get depressed; nonetheless, the Netherlands routinely scores highly on global surveys of happiness and well-being.) Dutch women, by de Bruin’s account, have it all: happy families and time to spend with them, as well as the precise level of employment they want, and not more. Most Dutch women elect to work only part-time. In fact, less than 40 percent of Dutch women report that they do not work less due to financial necessity. In other European countries, the number of women who are unable to work fewer hours due to financial necessity is well over 50 percent. The secret, of course, isn’t in the water: It’s in the government programs that fill in enormous expense gaps, leaving Dutch women financially able to fit work into their lives rather than their lives into work.
It is notable that freedom from financial anxiety works wonders for fathers, too; in countries where healthcare is universal and reliable and wages are fair, there’s less need to spend weekends and holidays toiling at the workplace, even in families with only one full-time income.
But the American social conservatives who advocate for women to spend less time in the workforce and more time in the home rarely advocate for the creation or expansion of programs that would support their goals. They operate in a fantasy world in which it’s possible to turn back the clock to the middle of the 20th century – or a television version of it, anyway. But in the real world, poverty and inequality militate powerfully against family life, rendering marriage an unattractive option and child rearing stressful and financially perilous. Anyone interested in promoting participation in family life should thus look to the nations that have managed to do just that.
Conservatives’ refusal to consider strategies to better support family life is telling. If there are programs that would make child rearing and domesticity more appealing options for mothers – and there are – then the question becomes: Why do social conservatives ignore them or even resist them? The answer is likely evident in McInnes’ own explosive tirade: The toothless advocacy of women returning to the home without increased programmatic support suggests an interest in encouraging female dependency upon male partners rather than a genuine interest in loving, stable family life. Those who would push women out of jobs and into the home without any recourse aside from the potentially inadequate earnings of their partners are not seriously concerned about the well-being of mothers, fathers and children; rather, they’re invested in a particular kind of gender power structure that leaves families poor and unhappy.
Liberating women (and all people, for that matter) from the depressing tyranny of the boss has been a long-standing leftist project. McInnes and other social conservatives pay lip service to such liberation when they talk about the unhappiness of working women, but they tend to advocate solutions that merely replace the tyranny of the boss with the tyranny of the spouse, and lock breadwinners into similarly grim straits. The proper aim is to free women and their families from both forms of control, and for that, robust social income and benefit programs like those found in European social democracies are the proven ticket.
They don't know how to think.
They have no understanding of history.
They've been programmed to believe they are victims and that men are predators.
They can't see that it's the socialists that they champion who are ones who have stolen their freedoms and the fruits of their labor.
And they always feel the need to tell everyone else how they should live their lives.
I think of grill cheese sammiches being served with tea by a log legged femme in fishnet hose :)
Yep, idiotic article. Conservatives don’t want women to stay home....necessarily....we want the women in our lives to have the choice. Period. What’s so hard about that?
“naturally predisposed to derive satisfaction from “being domestic and shaping lives” rather than from labor market work”
Most anthropologists will agree with this statement. It has a truckload of evidence. Looking back, cultures across vast gulfs of time and distance have all had a division of labor between men and women roughly as described by Gavin.
Oh, Lordy, where to begin?
Liberals are so confused.
Reminds me of Reagan’s line, “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
None of the women I know want to stay at home.
They all want to go out shopping.
Another point that the author of this crap misses is that the real reason that many men cannot earn enough income to support a family is PRECISELY that there are now more women in the workforce than there were in the 50’s and 60’s. There was a large influx of women into the workforce. This increased the supply of labor without a corresponding increase in the demand for labor. When you increase supply without an increase in demand, the price falls; basic economics.
With a first sentence like that, there’s no point in reading on. They are announcing up front that only their ideological compatriots should read the essay.
The point of this long-winded post: Wells meets and falls in love with a woman he meets in modern San Fran. He asks her to come back with him to Victorian England; but she balks because she doesn't want to "leave her career". Her "career" is "bank teller". It's always struck me as funny how they preach that "women should have a career". Apparently, repetitive drudgery is a career all should aspire to.
Back in the good old days, a man could earn enough for his family so that his wife could stay home and take care of their children. Children grew up to be civilized and not drug-addled perpetual adolescents who were unfit for adulthood.
But Greedy Government started pillaging family finances, and the foolish feminists bought the government’s line that working outside the home equaled freedom, an exact copy of the German’s concentration camp motto, “Arbeit macht frei.”
So now, mothers and fathers work, with about half the money of both going to the family’s survival and the other half going to the local, state, and federal governments who suck up the rest so their execs can live large in state capitals and the five counties around Washington D.C. And in this arrangement, children are the biggest losers. No wonder so many are so damaged.
Don't laugh; a woman friend of mine actually had something almost identical said to her in marriage counseling by her soon-to-be-ex-husband. She's always been a good conservative, but she dumped him and started a business that supported her and her offspring. That's choice.
But then, the economy was friendly to small business at that time. Now, nobody has as much choice about anything.
Not to mention some more basic economics. Once there were two income households, those households could afford to spend more on housing, food and other necessities. That increased prices of these items so that one income households no longer could afford them. Think about it, if you are selling your house and a two-income family offers $250,000 for it, but a single income family can only offer $150,000 for it, who are you selling to?
Yay! Unchecked Muslim immigration! Yay! Knives plunged into filmmakers' chests! Yay!
Have a nice day!
“it’s economic necessity with the GOP-shredded safety net”
What is this fantasy? Do they really think that the only way single income households worked is because everyone in the country was on government assistance?
Yea, when I want to understand Conservatives, I go to Salon. /sar
When I want to learn about militant homosexual activism, I go to Salon and skip the hair styling.
i stopped reading at “GOP-shredded safety net “
Yeah, when the heck did the GOP shred the safety net? The last Republican President added a large new entitlement program. The only “shredding” I can even think of in recent memory was welfare reform, which of course was implemented during the administration of a Democrat. This “shredding” has been mostly reversed by the current administration. Are there now more people able to afford to have a single income?
Just as a comparison, pre-New Deal the safety net did not really exist. There was no Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, etc. Compare the percentage of households with one income then vs. now. At which time were there more single income households? A much better case could be made that the safety net caused a reduction in the ability of a household to survive on one income.
some women want to stay home and tend the family
some women want to work
what’s the controversy?
as far as “economic necessity” goes, there is none anymore in our recently-Transformed Amerika. nowadays, anybody (women, men, or Obama types) can just sit on their asses and watch Oprah reruns all day (courtesy of the fast-disappearing “working class” and the Communist Chinese buying USA bonds -— and the Chinese are already figuring out this Ponzi scheme so..... it ain’t gonna last forever, gang.... it ain’t gonna last forever..)
The stupid it burns. The writer does not understand that its the cost of the government programs that cause the expense gaps in the first place.
Yep. They sure do.
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