Posted on 02/12/2019 7:02:44 AM PST by SeekAndFind
In his State of the Union address, President Trump announced, "All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before." It was one of the few times he received a standing ovation from both Democrats and Republicans.
I would not have stood and cheered.
Either the president or whoever wrote that line honestly thought it was something worth celebrating, or the president simply wanted to say something that would sound wonderful to both Democrats and Republicans, as well as to Americans who do not otherwise support him.
Whatever the reason, both the fact that there are more women in the workforce than ever before and the fact that Trump thought mentioning it would bring credit to his administration constitute a victory for the feminist left. Getting women to leave home for the workplace has been one of the central goals of modern feminism.
Feminists deny this, claiming they don't prefer women work outside the home; they only want women to have the choice to do so. But if that were true, why did congressional Democrats -- the women in white, feminists all -- jump up and cheer?
The answer is obvious: Feminists consider women who eschew a career to take care of their home, their children and their husband to be less than women who place career first.
But even if one prefers that women work outside of the home, "All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before" is simply not true. As feminists often note, many women work outside of the home not because they want to but because they have no choice: They have to support themselves, their household and/or their children.
Why should we be proud of that?
What if every woman in America were in the workforce? Would we be proud of that? By the "more of women than ever" logic, we should be.
On the other hand, if the president had said, "All Americans can be proud of the fact that more women than ever now have the choice to work inside or outside the home," that would be true. That is something I, too, would have cheered.
But the members of Congress did not stand and cheer because more women have the choice to work outside the home. They cheered because more women than ever before are working outside the home.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2017, nearly 75 million women were in the American civil workforce. But it is inconceivable that 75 million women want to be in the workforce. So, again, why all the cheering?
We know why Democrats did: They want women to eschew homemaking and time with children in favor of work outside the house.
But why did Republicans stand up and cheer?
One reason bears testimony to the thesis of a recent column I wrote: The greatest fear in America is fear of the left. The last thing Republican members of Congress wanted was to be photographed sitting quietly after the president of the United States announced, "All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before"-- especially while every Democrat was standing and cheering. The left-wing media, meaning virtually all mainstream media, would have depicted every such Republican "sexist" and "misogynist."
A second reason bears testimony to another fact of contemporary life: Republicans have been far more influenced by leftism than Democrats have been by conservatism. While many of the Republicans who cheered did so out of fear of the left and/or to support their party's beleaguered president, many sincerely believe the record number of women in the workplace is something worth celebrating.
But believe it or not, there are still many women and men who do not agree. We all acknowledge that with enough money and/or familial support, a woman can raise fine children and maintain a happy home and a loving marriage. Nevertheless, we also know that doing all three is difficult enough when a woman devotes full time to those three goals. But when a woman works outside the home, devoting full time to home and family is impossible.
So, yes, more women than ever are in the workplace. But before we stand and cheer, it is worth asking:
Are women happier today?
Are families doing better today?
Are marriages happier with wives at home or in the workplace?
Do young people grow up happier and better-adjusted with mothers at home or with mothers in the workplace?
Is society's emphasis on work and career inhibiting more young women from marrying and having children?
Is society better off or worse off when a record number of women leave home to enter the workplace?
Only when those questions are answered will we know whether to cheer.
Our 'welfare' policies encourage and subsidize this.
Thank you for that reminder.
I agree. Being in the work force isn’t in the best interests of all women and all families. It’s not good that society has reached a point in many environments in which a women is expected to bring in a second income instead of supervising home and family obligations....which is a full time job.
I think what is laudable is that it is now possible for all women to choose work. In my parents day jobs for women were very limited. Female higher education was rare for most in the middle class. Now more than 50% of many college student bodies are women. For me if they choose to work more power to them. We can argue that they should stay home for family stability, but that is definitely a personal and family decision.
In my case my wife never worked after our children were born. My mother worked after we all were gone only because she wanted to. Ascribing the increase in female workers to financial necessities is an over-simplification. Much of it is a rational choice made by educated and motivated women.
I will say this: I stayed home seventeen years raising kids. It was brutal. No rest, ever, family holidays, up at night, loneliness, people treating you like nothing. The family pathology is magnified when one person is the family slave, everyone else had a life except me. If I had it to do over, I would have worked and gotten a nanny.
please tell me you are kidding. Survivors from Quiverfull tell of beatings and all kinds of sick abuse.
Several of my close friends are “Quiverfull” supporters and look at my family with disdain. (/s) We home-school, wife stays home, no unapproved (by me) movies, etc. However, we only have five and had to stop when my wife got cancer.
She survived but her ability to have children went away. But you have to explain it to these people or they look at you as if you are not Christian.
Children represent 24 percent of the population, but they comprise 34 percent of all people in poverty. Among all children under 18 years of age, 45 percent live in low-income families and approximately one in every five (22 percent) live in poor families.
Welfare policies may have an impact
I think it's unquestionable that it does. You get more of what you subsidize. "Welfare" subsidizes poverty and bastardy. Anyone shocked that we have more of both than we did in the late 1960s when socialist Lyndon Johnson declared 'war' on poverty just isn't paying attention.
At that point in the SOTU I turned to my wife and told her that I didn’t think there was anything to cheer about the fact that 58 percent of new jobs are going to women and certainly nothing to cheer about so many women being elected to the congress because most of those elected are nutcases. She did not disagree at all.
I don’t even have a “gender”! I was taught in grade school that there were two and only two SEXES, male and female. I was also taught that the word gender applies only to pronouns. Any usage contrary to those rules brought a sharp reprimand from the teacher. In the day of the movie “Norma Breckenridge” we learned of SEX change operations, men who elected to try to become women were referred to as tranSEXUALS, not transgenders, I’m too damned old to change or to give a damn what new words people want to invent now.
“If you have enough children, the wife is never home alone. “
I laughed at that-—I stayed home and raised the kids,a day alone was rare,and like a gift from the good Lord.
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‘ Western women have learned that sitting in a cubicle getting obese while clicking around in spreadsheets for a multinational corporation is far more rewarding than raising children. ‘
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Genius
Women AND men would be a lot better off if women stayed home to raise their kids!
Is Prager’s point that having more Women in the workforce means there are less Men in the workforce? What’s his point?
Who cares if there are more Women? If they want to work, good for them. My Father’s former Girlfriend helped build P-38’s during WWII.
The idiotic Women in White did nothing but embarrass themselves and prove the Democrat Voters (Legal and Illegal) have lost their frigging minds.
Why?
I normally like Prager's "Prager University" clips on Youtube but I reject the premise he has here. A woman just sitting at home while her children are in school is doing what for the family or her own betterment when she could be working part time? Women are making a choice here.
Once children came along, mother didn't go to work. It wasn't what my father wanted. She also had an elderly mother to look after in the home. He also had two incomes, his career Navy retirement and the job he was working. The grandmother had a retirement income and modest expenses so it was an efficient situation to bring up kids, better than either of his son's have managed to date. That was long ago, however.
Good points!
My wife was a stay at home mom and we homeschooled. Kids are all gone and my work travel is heavier now. She loves when I’m gone. She can watch the tv she wants at night and blast Christian music throughout the house all day.
Also, it was one of the harder things *she* did. She worked one night a week for some spending money...and "adult time" :-). The pressure for her to go to work full-time was immense - friends, co-workers, her boss, even her own mother - got after her to work full time. Fortunately she told them all to stuff it. Yet another reason why I married her.
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