Does anyone else feel like we are moving in the wrong direction?
Like every discussion I’ve seen about childcare takes the 1950s as the baseline for some reason. Like being a housewife in the 1950s sucked and it was unfair that the women had to do it and the men didn’t have to. Like people don’t explicitly say this, but this is what it boils down to.
And being a housewife in the 1950s (or 1970s or whatever) did suck. But why did it suck?
It sucked (and still does) because of the breakdown of the extended clan. A long time ago there would be a ton of family very close by to mutually spread the load.
So why did clan breakdown happen, and can we reverse that instead of pushing further and further into more and more atomization? I don’t really see that being discussed, it’s just like “1950s house wifing bad” and the analysis stops there.
One thing people are going to say is that family members are too different from each other now, or that they have economic incentives to scatter. Well, can we make them stop becoming so different? Can we delete the economic incentives? Etc.
It sucked because society back then (and currently in some cultures) was structured in such a way that women were de facto forced into marriage and motherhood, even if they didn't want to do these things. Women couldn't open bank accounts or buy cars easily without their husbands present; consequently, leaving bad marriages was considered very risky, to say nothing of the social ostricization that would ensure.
Marriage is made up though, it’s a tool for structuring human groups that are a big jumble of individuals. In a clan structure you wouldn’t need marriage, necessarily, and “motherhood” would look entirely different from how it does today.
My point is that lots of women do reject what exists today for those, and the conservative reaction to this may be wrong. But just because the reaction is wrong doesn’t mean the “progress” is correct. We may be doing the wrong kind of progress, and the “conservatives” may be trying to conserve an overly recent and short lived model. They should instead be trying to conserve (or restore, really) a much older model, one that would resonate better with women and humans in general. IMO anyway.
And replies to me are all stuck in the modern progressive/conservative dialectic, which is not useful or interesting to discuss. We need to break out of that structure.
I have no clue how your response relates to what I said. Either I’m not understanding you or you’re not understanding me. Since my comment is much longer I’m going to wager the latter.
Like every discussion I’ve seen about childcare takes the 1950s as the baseline for some reason. Like being a housewife in the 1950s sucked and it was unfair that the women had to do it and the men didn’t have to. Like people don’t explicitly say this, but this is what it boils down to.
And being a housewife in the 1950s (or 1970s or whatever) did suck. But why did it suck?
It sucked (and still does) because of the breakdown of the extended clan. A long time ago there would be a ton of family very close by to mutually spread the load.
So why did clan breakdown happen, and can we reverse that instead of pushing further and further into more and more atomization? I don’t really see that being discussed, it’s just like “1950s house wifing bad” and the analysis stops there.
One thing people are going to say is that family members are too different from each other now, or that they have economic incentives to scatter. Well, can we make them stop becoming so different? Can we delete the economic incentives? Etc.