There's a strange sort of situation: In the past, women were forced to be housewives, which was awful. Nobody should be forced to be something they don't want to be. But now that women have the ability to do mostly whatever a man can do, neither men nor women really have the option of just "being a housewife." We kind of both have to work. I wonder if it would be better if, as a family unit, one person decides to do the housewife-type stuff, and the other decides to pursue a career? You could even switch off after a few years. That'd be a pretty ideal life for me, I think. But again, in most marriages, both people have to work.
Says who? Sure if you take out a fat mortgage and car loans that require two incomes to repay then, sure, you need two incomes. But you can also just choose to live in a smaller house and drive cheaper cars instead. The issue is the lifestyle inflation that comes with two incomes, it is avoidable.(1)
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/11/04/raising-kids-and-r...
>The median household income for families with two full-time working parents and at least one child under 18 at home is $102,400, compared with $84,000 for households where the father works full time and the mother works part time and $55,000 for households where the father works full time and the mother is not employed.
$55,000 a year provides a good life in 99% of the United States.
BTW, the share of two-parent households in which both parents work full time is only at 46%.
My way of handling two incomes is saving and investing the vast majority of the second income, not spending it. That leaves us in a much better financial position and also a lot of leeway for one or both of us to go without employment for an extended time. The ultimate goal being to retire early. Or at least semi-retire.
I mean, my SO and I are looking at the fact that we need two incomes simply to buy any house. We recently saw a 650 sqft shack go for ~$500k, an we don't even live in California.
There simply aren't 'cheaper houses' in places where we think we could get work.
Nowhere in the world does $55K a year before tax provide anywhere like 'good life'. It means endless misery and generational psychological poverty passed on to your children. Only reason of doing it is if your desire to exert psychological pressure on your wife is greater than even desire to consume. It simply doesn't sound healthy, and it is almost a crime against children, because they will grow dirt poor and view this crap as normal.
Background: i earned just $45K a year after tax one year in my life, 10 years ago. I had no children back then. I still spent $60K eating out some of my savings, having to cut on anything including some food, and it felt so crappy i don't advise anyone to repeat my experience.
Sure, $102K isn't too much either. But it puts you into a totally different league anyway. I can imagine how to survive on $102K with a kid in a cheap place, if your house is fully paid and you are an introvert, but not $55K.
Even in Seattle, I know of married couples who spend under $2k a month total, inclusive of rent, utilities, eating out, buying random stuff, etc while earning north of $120k each. Sure, its a meek lifestyle, but it can be quite fulfilling to know you aren't a consumerist whore.
If money = happiness, you are apt to lead a really sad life!
I know that I'm very privileged in that I could afford to live at a higher level than what we do, but I don't want that. I've got my American dream. I've got a wonderful wife who dotes on me (it's mutual), a small house in a quiet town, and a cat. That's all I really need in life. All the other shit (gadgets, new cars, etc.) is cool, but I realized about 5 years ago that none of it made me happy.
If we have kids, of course those expenses will go up, and we'll probably have to find a bigger house, but for now, we live cheaply not because we have to, but because expensive stuff won't make us happy.
(Just to be clear, I know what it's like to be poor, I grew up in a very poor family. I very much realize that I'm lucky and more fortunate than a lot of other people in that I have the luxury of living below my means, a luxury that not everyone has, even in the US).
We have one car even though we could afford two, we both share our commute to work, I drop off my husband on my way to work and pick him up again on the way back. Most couples would buy too cars but we feel that our money is much better used on fun stuff than a second vehicle. A second vehicle is a large money sink for a small amount of convenience.
I made $30k a decade ago when I lived in the Midwest ($36,000 in today's dollars) and lived very, very comfortably on that. Making more than double that now along with two incomes allows us to have the sorts of comforts and luxuries I couldn't have at $30k (homeownership, guest rooms, expensive travel, booze/restaurant money, coffee at DDs every day) while still saving.
We are happy and we are very blessed. We could buy more but we are happy with less. Part of why we save so much is to avoid being wage slaves as I don't feel that to be an ideal lifestyle.
Even in UK, I make ~$35k before tax and I'm living a very comfortable life.
It's been a long time since I've made less than $20k and I do well, but I have a 25 year mortgage on a flat, much less a house.
Krakow, Wroclaw, Poznan, Gdansk - 6250/month lets you live extremely comfortably.
The fact that you say your kid is going to the best private school and yet you can't afford other luxuries (while clearly holidaying regularly) makes me think you may be disconnected from the average person's idea of what a luxury is.
Median household income in the U.S. is $56k a year, meaning half of all families get less than that.
Where are you living, and how much does housing cost there?
My brother lives in Saint Joseph, MO and is married and their combined income was close to the 50k mark. So this is doable.
> Nowhere in the world does $55K a year before tax provide anywhere like 'good life'.
Are you defining 'good life' in relative terms or absolute? Because 55k a year would put you in the top 1% of earners in many parts of the world.
My mother and even friends frown upon me. Like I push her to be a housewife. Actually, I supported her working and even helped her to be self-employed. But she's most happy being a housewife.
I think people just want to have a big home, 2 cars annually 2 holidays and that costs a lot of money. Which means both have to work to support this life style. Luckily I make sufficient money to support us both.
For example, being liberal usually implies greater freedoms, such as being pro-choice. However, it can also be pro-gun ownership, or anti-war, pro-research, etc. To me that's the dichotomy the U.S. is facing is really about the progressives and religeous conservatives duking it out, but (I'd argue) most people are much more moderate.
It's interesting to me that a third party (libertarians, or someone else) can't capture that group. As many liberals differ pretty substantially from the progressives, and concervative minded people just lump liberals and them together because they all identify as Democrats
In fact, I prefer to classify political views differently, by splitting them into two buckets: those who have figured out that every issue needs an actually effective solution, and those who follow their ideologies blindly.
For the most part, my politics are similar to progressives - higher taxes, public healthcare, more expansive welfare (I support UBI), and social justice in general.
The reason why I don't consider myself a progressive is that I feel that the progressive ideology in US has largely abandoned the traditional concept of natural individual rights in pursuit of all these goals. You have people openly claiming that freedom of speech is not worth it if it gets in the way of criminalizing offensive speech, for example. Or how due process is an outdated notion that makes it hard to prosecute sexual harassment properly. Basically, the further left you go with progressives, the more individual rights are sacrificed to collective ones.
That, to me, is the line past which you can no longer meaningfully call yourself a liberal, since liberalism is all about individual rights, ultimately. Where left-wing and right-wing liberals differ is on the matter on how to best maximize those rights, and to what extent government regulation is advantageous or detrimental to that, especially on economic matters.
And, to some extent, on what those rights are, precisely - for example, I don't consider property rights to be fundamental natural rights (but then again, neither did Thomas Jefferson, and he sure wasn't left-wing!). Note, it doesn't mean that property is a bad idea - I think it's a social construct that is broadly useful, it's just not an absolute right (and hence taxation and wealth redistribution is not inherently an infringement on such).
Fortunately in the UK there's another voice at the table in between the extremes. People tend not to vote for them because of fear, and a misunderstanding of the soft power available in politics.
If I started a political party and wanted to capture myself. I'd just steal all the good ideas from all the parties.
Personally, I would prioritize extensive political reform and reconstruction, but I fear the level of financial capture and constitution worship in the United States makes thus impossible.
The fundamental problem with the Libertarian ideology is that the emergent outcome is of a fully economically captured state.
The fair comparison would be to see how they reacted if your roles were reversed: if she worked and you made her lunch.
Conservatives are supposed to be the ones that pressure people into gender roles, and liberals are supposed to be tolerant of all lifestyles. What point would be made if liberals were tolerant of a very, very non-traditional relationship, and our conservative friends were uncomfortable? That both groups have gender roles which they use social pressure to enforce? That the left isn't actually more tolerant than the right? That liberals have enjoyed an undeserved positive stereotype?
That said:
> if my conservative acquaintances are more tolerant of a "left-of-center" arrangement than my liberal acquaintances, why would it be more fair to push the comparison further left?
That isn't a left-of-center arrangement. It's a hundred+ year old conservatives dream (see: traditional family values), of course they're accepting of it.
The point of the opposite scenario is that it's non-traditional, and I GUARANTEE you that the acceptance would be reversed on both counts.
Obviously preferably the acceptance would be there regardless, when both you and your wife's roles are self-chosen, but you must see that it's easy from the outside to suspect that it's formed by traditional gender roles, even if it happens to be unrelated?
In the same way people generalize about a white man with a pacific looking younger wife, or just a younger wife in general, which isn't the same thing people think when they see an older woman with a younger man.
These things could be great, loving relationships, but the generalizations about them are at some point rooted in truth, because of a traditionally asymmetric power dynamic.
I remember very clearly who it was that made my mother miserable for daring to enjoy being a housewife and mother, and it wasn't our conservative friends.
I also remember who made our family miserable for loving and caring for my gay brother as he died of AIDS, and it wasn't our liberal friends.
( http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything... for an excellent essay on the topic. )
Is this the right, or the religious right?
So why not just do it, at least for a period of time? Partly because having a job can give a sense of purpose, partly to not lose her options for later, but most importantly because staying at home all day with nothing but kids to talk to is kind of hard on your psyche. After all, almost everyone else is at work.
Contrast that with her grandmother who was a housewife in the 1950s. According to her, there was plenty of manual work involved, and it could be stressful in its own ways. On the upside, the neighborhood was full of housewives. They would drop in for coffee, they'd look after each other's toddlers when necessary, and when the older kids came home from school they would pretty much roam freely with the other neighborhood kids. For better or worse, this kind of "infrastructure" is missing today.
In here, you are expected to take a lot of time away of work while the child is small. Colleges were honestly horrified when I told I consider staying shorter. You are "just a housewife" during that time. It is love or their life for some women, but definitely not for most. That time is actually considered risk time for depression and alcoholism - people drink out of isolation and boredom and depression. Good think through is that you can talk openly about all those negative feelings with other women, you don't get shut up with "that was your choice be happy".
If you feel like trying it, I would say try it even if you are a man. Maybe it will work for you. It is more practical in some ways, but you became dependent on partner on a lot - not just money but also social stuff. There is a reason why women were supposed to be so much more talkative and on the phone constantly by 1950 stereotypes - because alone in the house most of the day.
I don't think switching would work for most people, you have to make a lot of changes. It is major lifestyle switch and adjustment period is tiring (both into it and out of it after). You will basically need new hobbies (old ones will be frustrating or cease to be satisfying or are impossible), need new ways of finding people to socialize with (when I work, the society is sort of around you without effort - the challenge is to be alone once in a while. At home you have to work on not being isolated.). You have to get used to slow speed of doing things and deadly routine suddenly and basically having to wait for partner while he is out and it is depressing until you do.
One issue is, your partner will not understand your challenges, they are not real challenges from his point of view as an employed person with deadlines and crappy boss nor what it is like - while you will slowly forget what it was like to be at work. That is where nagging wife stereotype comes from - she is supposed to exist for the sake of family which includes partner, but from partners point of view nothing of interest is at home (neither much duty or really fun). Which basically means, it can work but both needs to be aware of this risk and communicate well.
As for the household work, I was just telling someone today how much I miss being able to work all the time. I love my kids and they come first, but it's a sacrifice to for me not to work 12+ hour days.
However, I think on net it is still more economically productive, at least in a large portion of cases.
It's unlikely that housework and childcare would optimally take up a full 50% of our entire reservoir of workable-hours, especially in the age of household appliances and childcare centres.
"Economically productive" in what way? If you want to adopt a short term perspective of a particular nuclear family making X dollars over Y years, maybe.
But that's a rather shallow and irresponsible way of looking at things without accounting for what's better for the future society of our descendants, economically and otherwise.
What in most cases will produce a better quality of individual, a child raised at home by a loving mother, or a child shuffled off to some "childcare" to be looked after by a minimum wage worker absorbed in a smartphone half the time? (Not that all non-motherly childcare is like that, but you get the point)
1. the economy is bigger and produces more goods. 2. much of those goods are distributed to the two-worker families. 3. a few bored minimum wage workers can look after a very large number of kids.
The quality of childcare is on average a function of how much you pay. The boutique ones have professionally trained staff that get more than minimal wage.
But what about the families that can't afford any but the most rundown centers, I hear you ask? Won't they be better off under the old system? You know, the one where the economy was 30% smaller due to halving the labour supply?
Perhaps they would be living poor but honest lives, perfectly happy in their squalid conditions and lack of medical care.
What I'm saying, and a big component of what I'm thinking about is housing costs, is that we're chasing the same things with more dollars. If household incomes double, expect the price of houses to follow suit. Assuming supply doesn't change, it doesn't help to earn 2x the money when all the bidders in the marketplace also have 2x the money.
you're missing the part where more demand creates more supply.
Sure, sometimes the market is distorted due to zoning, like in SF, and also land is finite, but generally speaking the market responds to the added demand by creating more housing, possibly denser housing. Same with other goods. Those are not empty dollars that got added into the system by fiat - they represent additional productive work done, and the goods / services they create is added to the economy.
My point is that I think the supply side isn't keeping up. The economy itself isn't bringing home 2x the bacon, but rather 1.5x the bacon when you're feeding all this extra labor into it. And yes, this is due to market distortions and diminishing returns.
The choice to sacrifice wages for more time with your kids is a luxury good, even if people choose to spend some of that time doing housework.
- We don't spend our weekends shopping.
- my wife can volunteer at my sons school and church, which opens up more social opportunities and keeps us tight with school.
- We spend less in clothes, groceries and eating out. The value of this is much greater than anticipated.
Overall, life is better. We're not driving new cars anymore. Other than that, the sacrifice is minimal. Her skill set is such that she can basically become employed again at any time.
This is the difference. If you were making, say, a quarter what you're currently making, perhaps the sacrifice would be huge.
As it happens though I think neither of us is going to need to. Maternity/Paternity leave here is almost a year, and by the time that is ended I think we'll be in a good place where neither of us needs to quit entirely, although there may be some part-time working now and again.
If my wife could make more than I do and she might one day (we're working on business she's starting), I would quit my job in an instant and switch places if she wanted. I miss my kids, work late/nights frequently and feel like I often don't get enough time with them some days. Part of that is my own fault.
In either case, we're incredibly lucky that only one of us has to work to maintain a good lifestyle and at least one of us has the option staying home to raise our kids, give them more individual attention and education, etc. Many households are in situations where both parents have to work one or more jobs to maintain just an average lifestyle.
Yes, it does. The demand dropped.
What you hear about real wages is in reference to the US and other parts of the global north. Those manufacturing jobs moved to the global south and now there is less demand for them here.
More income is chasing the scarce resource that is housing. Thus prices increase (supply/demand curve).
It is the same with the cost of education increasing horrifically due to the open firehose of student loans making price no-longer-an-object-of-consideration.
Both are enormously overinflated bubbles.
Excerpt from my own writing:
http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/2015/09/affordable-...
Wages may play a role, but "housing inflation" in terms of houses getting bigger and more luxurious and thus forcing costs up absolutely is a huge problem in this country. Plus, we razed something like 80% of SROs in the 60s and 70s.
There is a huge and growing shortage of actually affordable housing in this country. This has been true for decades. It is one of the reasons I am not crazy about the idea of basic income. If we don't do something about this trend, it won't matter if you cut a check to all the poor people. Many of them will still be either homeless or crowded together horribly in situations they find objectionable.
We basically assume these days that single people in their twenties with entry level jobs should get into housing really designed for a family and share it with roommates. This is basically a post 1980 expectation. Historically, people rented a room in the form of an SRO or a room at a boarding house when they were just starting out. Now, we view those as something provided for chronic losers who can't find another way off the street rather than just cheap housing for single people who don't need much space.
Until about the 70s or 80s, salaries of CEOs and workers grew at a similar pace. After that, the salaries of workers stagnated, while that of CEOs rose dramatically. Looks like that's where the profit of the increased labor force went.
The Wife Drought - Why women need wives, and men need lives https://penguin.com.au/books/the-wife-drought-9780857984289
"'I need a wife' -- It’s a common joke among women juggling work and family. But it’s not actually a joke. Having a spouse who takes care of things at home is a Godsend on the domestic front. It’s a potent economic asset on the work front. And it’s an advantage enjoyed – even in our modern society – by vastly more men than women."
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/06/05/growing-number-of-...
There are people who are talking about the terrible thing the mother did when her own father wanted to punish her for lying and she said "Lola will take my punishment." Why vilify her and not her father, who made Lola a slave to begin with, who decided lashing was an appropriate punishment for lying and who went along with his daughter's suggestion that Lola could take the punishment? What teenager wouldn't want some means to get out of abusive treatment from their parent of that sort? Why is this so damning of her instead of her father?
I'm talking about what's in the article we're discussing. If you were talking about one specific incident only, you should have said that.
If the mother isn't responsible because her father was abusive, why assume that her father was responsible either? Maybe his parents were also abusive.
The cycle of abuse is an awful thing, but adults must take responsibility for their own actions.
I mean the key difference here is the obvious one, which is that spouses have complete access to the other's money. period.
If Lola had been the equivalent of the mother and the mother the father, Lola wouldn't need to ask the mother for money -- she could just go to the bank with her marriage certificate and take it herself.
My wife and I live in California, a community property state. At the moment we married, everything that is mine became hers and vice versa.
Right now, for various reasons, she's not working and she does a lot of the housework. She's hardly a slave though. Firstly, if I didn't give her enough money to live on, she could just go to the bank. Secondly, if I hid my accounts from her, she could sue me for neglect. Thirdly, if I were to take on a mistress, she could sue me again for spousal neglect. Of course, the same would apply if the situation was reversed.
Let's not compare marriage to slavery. The entire institution of marriage is meant to prevent one spouse from controlling the other by simply making ownership joint. Show me a system of slavery where the slaves own the entirety of their master's estate, and I'll show you justice.
> The entire institution of marriage is meant to prevent one spouse from controlling the other by simply making ownership joint.
The way this particular point is phrased makes it sound like this was always the case. However, it is a very recent change in how the laws work, as a direct result of mainly women fighting for their rights. It used to be the case in many countries that only the men can decide to end a marriage, and I'm sure that is still the case in many places.
Maybe the legal framework of modern marriage in California is decent at guaranteeing equality, but that is not something to be assumed to be the general way marriage works, let alone something to be taken for granted. And I'm sure you'll agree that the institution of marriage is important enough that it deserves critical examination.
This is not correct according to my understanding. Community property is anything that is acquired after marriage (not including inheritance), any house that you both live in, or any accounts that become commingled during the marriage. If you have an investment account before marriage that you don't use to pay for stuff and don't add to with salary, then it remains individual property, even in California. I think being a community property state just means that community property is mandated to be split 50/50, not that all property becomes instantly community.
My point is not really about slavery, it is about how this example shows how much work there is and how difficult it is, and how we don't seem to account for it even in normal life.
This is the primary reason these domestic labourers are so common in the Philippines and in pinoy culture. Also, many men's involvement in their children's lives is non-existent or minimal. A lot of men get their girlfriends or wives pregnant and dump them quickly. So there's also a huge number of single moms in the Philippines. It's a matriarchal culture, and women (including servants, nannies, and housekeepers) are the glue that hold the culture together.
Absolutely. This observation was/is the catalyst of many leftist movements, for example Wages For Housework:
> The Campaign was formed to raise awareness of how housework and childcare are the base of all industrial work and to stake the claim that these unavoidable tasks should be compensated as paid wage labor.
There are a lot of grown up adult children that are being supported by their elderly parents.
It doesn't always work out as you are implying.
Most folks aren't cut out for celibacy, honestly. And every other option costs money. Besides, we actually need some folks to have kids, so we still have to deal with this sort of issue.
There's a lot to talk about in the article, and I'm not super-excited about digging deep into that here on hn, but I think it's worthwhile to point out her real name.
"Lola" is an affectionate nickname that means "grandma" in Filipino.
In Western society, the act of marriage confers (often vastly) increased wealth and status to the lower status partner, and it is usually women who prefer to "marry up". Furthermore, it is also vastly more fulfilling and satisfying to care for one's own children than one's mistress's children. No two roles could be more different, frankly.
Speak for yourself. I'd much rather take care of other people's children. I can go home to a nice, child-free house, as I have no desire for children of my own.
it is usually women who prefer to "marry up"
My mom grew up during the Cold War. I haven't asked her specifically but I'm pretty sure she would just be confused by your comment. Women in the Soviet Union didn't get compensated either for domestic duties, like spending an hour standing in line to buy food staples.
... or more (for the same amount of homework), if her spouse started earning more.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you forgot that intent doesn't convey well through forum posts.
What? Non-capitalist societies don't have housewives?
I worked on a farm in high school. The wife drove a school bus and was like your grandmother. But... she ran the books, ran the pipeline of hard working students for summer labor, could throw 50lb hay bales when necessary and change a tractor clutch in a field with an just a wrench and a hammer.
The problem of uncompensated labor by women does not break down neatly on the borders of economic concepts like captitalism, agrarian, industrial, etc.
In isolation, I think I can agree with that. But in context you seem to be making a moral point using "slavery" as a jumping-off point to an economic argument.
Needless to say, slavery isn't well-defined by "compensation". That whole "freedom" angle tends to be more important to most people.
They are of course not compensated for what they provide their children, but the same applies to the breadwinner, whose expenditures on the children are not compensated. That's what child-rearing is: an expense in money and/or time.
This is not exclusive to the "capitalist system", and it does not just apply to the traditional mother's role.
The housewife and the traditional father consume the same products. They go on the same trips, eat the same meals together, live under the same roof, drive the same car(s), watch the same TV, sleep in the same bed, etc. Her work is just as compensated as his.
Are you insinuating that in a traditional nuclear family, where a father provides all the money for housing, food, clothing and sundry - the mothers house work constitutes "uncompensated labour"? And that this is the basis of capitalism?
What's your humane socialist alternative? Collectivising the children and raising them in a commune?
This article just puts it in stark relief for me. All of the work that Lola had to do for so many decades, working herself to exhaustion... all of that work still needs to get done for every other family too.
"Money" is just a metric of economic value, and basically everything has an economic value, including leisure. The emotional and educational value of raising your own children instead of putting them in a daycare has a real economic value that can be measured in dollars. Just like housework has an economic value. Every family I know has weighed these values when they have children.
in order to end professional segregation, we need not end capitalism so much as the patriarchy. we could redefine "masculinity" as cooking for one"s family, providing emotional support, and other domestic labor -- and stop assuming women need to do it or that a "masculine" worker's time is too important for doing their own laundry or their own dishes.
it's complicated, and testosterone may even be a disability in a sense, but many of the differences between genders are not biological so much as social constructs that re-enforce constructed economic inequality.
we can stop accepting and propagating a narrow status quo.
This tends to not work. Paying people to care often means paying people to pretend to care. This often goes bad places.
Furthermore, the history of paid work suggests that the unpaid labor of mothers in the family is the critical thing and we shifted "jobs" (gender based work) around to make family life still function while freeing up men to go do paid work in order to benefit all involved parties. Until around 300 years ago, most people were literally and directly working to put food on the table. Men hunted or raised crops. Women had vegetable gardens and did the cooking. Women did the sewing to provide clothing. Etc. Money was generally in short supply.
I write at times about such things on my blog. I hope we can find better solutions than what we are doing now. But your position is not really all that well thought out or researched. Reactionary stuff of this sort is not helpful. It tends to just entrench the problem.
Thank you for this much needed shift in perspective. It should be obvious: mothers' work has been on the critical path for humanity, and other work has shifted around to accommodate it. This is such a forehead slapping observation.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-history-...
They already get paid for emotional labor with emotional reward.
>we could choose to economically value teachers and nurses instead of economically devaluing "feminine" roles
Maybe you could stop being sexist and calling things like education and nursing "feminine."
>in order to end professional segregation
If you can point out actual instances of sexism in professions I'll be happy to back you up. Differential outcomes is not sufficient evidence of sexism. There are sexist people out there, and I'll be happy to metaphorically march alongside you against any of them.
>it's complicated, and testosterone may even be a disability in a sense
LOL, testosterone is a disability? According to you testosterone lets one gender "win" so it sounds like estrogen would be the disability, right?
>, but many of the differences between genders are not biological so much as social constructs that re-enforce constructed economic inequality.
Maybe money isn't the most important thing in the world? Maybe instead of complaining that there aren't more women at the top of the income food chain, we should be asking why any men at all are willing to work themselves to death to get there? Maybe women enjoy better lives than men because they realize earlier on that it's our connections and family that matters the most in life and they live their lives accordingly while men generally don't figure that out until much later in life. Maybe the reason why reported happiness among women has been on the decline since we wrote all these laws encouraging families to break up and shoving women into the shitty corporate ladder lifestyle men have been on for longer should tell us something about life.
Great, so they can just pay the rent with emotional reward then.
> Maybe you could stop being sexist and calling things like education and nursing "feminine."
Clearly these occupations have a larger percentage than average of female workers, they're associated with women, and probably not coincidentally, they also have low pay and low prestige. I don't know why it's the "enlightened" move to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend that's not the case.
Keeping with gender roles... should we pay men to mow their own lawn? Of course not, people cut the lawn themselves to save money when compared to hiring a lawn service. Every dollar a family doesn't spend on lawn service or daycare is a dollar that can be spent on food or shelter. We do put an economic value on the domestic work that women do and every family I've ever known has seen it exactly that way.
>Clearly these occupations have a larger percentage than average of female workers, they're associated with women, and probably not coincidentally, they also have low pay and low prestige.
I feel like you just have a complete lack of understanding of how market value for skills and labor is determined. Picking crops is a field of work that has a larger percentage than average of male workers, it's associated with men, and probably not coincidentally, it also has low pay and low prestige. See how silly that sounds? The only thing that matters is whether or not women are intentionally being kept out of fields they're qualified for. Find specific instances of sexism, let's go get them! If salaries of teachers are too low it's only because there are too many qualified people in the market willing to perform that labor.
>I don't know why it's the "enlightened" move to stick your fingers in your ears and pretend that's not the case.
The fact of the matter is that sexism has a real economic cost. If it's true that women are underpaid then hiring men comes at a premium. If it's true that women are being undervalued in the market then certainly there's at least ONE business owner who can hire up all these women and take over any given market because they can keep all that extra profit, right?
Look, I'm not saying there's no such thing as sexism. I'm not even saying that there aren't likely many cases of sexism in employment. But we know rather scientifically that after a relatively low income level more money doesn't increase your happiness. Maybe women are wiser than men and choose career paths which afford them a better work life balance so they can spend their time doing other things that matter to them. Maybe being a top tier lawyer where a client can call you a 3am on Christmas morning and expect you to work for the next 12 hours because they have $100 million on the line is a shit way to live, and maybe we shouldn't be all that concerned that women tend to choose a different path in life.
Alas, in the environments I've been in, that's definitely not the case. A shortage of qualified teachers doesn't trigger pay rises, it triggers a change in the qualifications required to be considered a teacher. 15 years ago, my Biology teacher was a fresh-out-of-university BioChem major and graduate, with no teaching experience or qualifications, but a nice enough personality and thrown into teaching sixth form A-level Biology (last 2 years of school before university, for which the results are used to determine whether or not you get into your chosen university or not)
I got lucky, and still managed to pass my exams and get into university, but he's the first to admit he wasn't qualified for the job, and that we all succeeded mostly in spite of him, rather than because of him.
The point being is that salaries are not just a pure function of supply and demand. There are many other factors at play. The markets are not always right.
"Right" is kind of a loaded word. The markets may not reflect your personal values towards education, and also don't really reflect mine either in this case. But I suspect that the market still reflects the aggregate value society places on education. There's a small caveat here for government legislated requirements and salaries will lag because government is slow to react. For what it's worth though, my understanding is that private school teachers, whose salary and benefits are not legislated, tend to be paid less than public school teachers. They are probably a more accurate reflection of the market value of teachers.
On the other hand, people have kids anyway, and then the children suffer when the parents cannot afford them (in either money or time with them, as is the case of most two income households). It isn't a black and white moral situation though, because you don't want to put people in the state of mind that having children can be profitable.
This was tried in the kibbutz and is almost unanimous that it failed completely.
People often make indirect little attacks against capitalism here as some kind of socialist dog whistle. I want to call them out, and asking what concrete things they propose. Anything they can put to words has likely already been tried and ended in disaster - people advocating for misery need to be exposed for what they are.
Potentially, I suppose. The only alternatives I hear being peddled are socialist though. So I associate any petty wry remark about "in capitalism, so and so" as a socialist agenda pushing.
In 2017, I don't think it should be considered at all acceptable to advocate socialism in polite company. We've failed that experiment every time we've tried it, we're witnessing two horrific failures in Venezuela and North Korea right now.
Socialism is an extremist view, that ruins peoples lives, and should be marginalised at every turn - the same way Nazism is.
In one case there are no groceries on the shelves, in the other the shelves are fully stocked, but you can't afford anything anyway. Either way, a few are very powerful and many have their basic needs go unmet.
This is kind of an odd damning of capitalism, because no matter how we organize society, there is going to continue to be mothering so long as our species is to survive. And whatever societal system we may have, that society is going to be built in large part by mothering.
I'd also like to point out that the statement would not only include mothers, but children and slaves of different sorts. The current equivalent is likely things like community service, prison labor, homeless working in stores to stay in shelters, and charities - at least in the US.
right. time to move to venezuela.
* not that every wife was treated like a slave or that there aren't still women who are
There is no room in a civilized society for bondage and servitude through violence. Eudocia in this story was never given the choice until she had lived the slave life so long she was no longer able to adapt out of it, and that is fundamental to any moral discussion.
Strangely, it seems if you give people the necessary tools to have an option, ie, a public education, then nobody seems to willingly choose this lifestyle. There is no real barrier to stop someone from the street knocking on my door and asking to be my surrogate housewife for free, as long as they are doing it of their own free will.
What is important to remember is that Eudocia's behavior was conditioned through coercive violence. She never had the chance to live for herself. She was forced through threats and abuse to be the person she was, as a product of an environment that gave her no reasonable alternative. We should never wish that on anyone.
Absolutely, I think the point I'm trying to make is that slavery or something a whole lot like it has existed long since explicit buying and selling of human lives ended. To make an inappropriate cultural reference, many different situations "just sound like slavery with extra steps"
> a product of an environment that gave her no reasonable alternative
I think a whole lot of poor people in America and the world beyond don't really find themselves it conditions much different than this sort of slavery. Coercive violence and lack of choice not excepted. The illusion of choice and freedom that a tiny wage give doesn't necessarily make liberty real, it just makes slavery a little more difficult to recognise.
The nature of her labour is not what made Lola a slave; it was the circumstances around that labour.
I don't think you know as much about the history of women as you think you do. This is probably not due to personal defect. Most history focuses on the accomplishments of men out in public. The lives of women tend to be more private and a lot of it just does not get recorded or noted. But I am a woman, I have been a history major, I did the homemaker and mom thing for a lot of years and I have had a class in the history of women and have read books out of personal interest on both women's history and the history of slavery.
The role of a wife and mom is often not as different from Lola's as you seem to assume.
Well, I know enough to know that 'women only left the house twice in their life' is an outlier, not a yardstick. You can just as easily point out nomadic herder groups where there is almost zero gender power imbalance, with the women and men sharing equal power, and it's just as wrong to suggest that that is somehow historically representative as 'normal'.
I'd call a woman that was kept to a house and never allowed out to be a slave anyway. Well, perhaps a 'prisoner' if not forced to do work.
> The role of a wife and mom is often not as different from Lola's as you seem to assume.
My point was that Lola was a slave not because of the kind of labour she did, but because she was forced into that labour and not allowed freedom of movement. The list of things I wrote wasn't meant to be a canonical description of what defines a slave, but parts of her life that defined it for her. Unlike wives (who by definition at least have a husband), Lola had no-one and no permission to even try. She didn't even have a bed to sleep in when the others did. But in history, some slaves were encouraged to have families, homes, beds. Some slaves historically did get some pay, and likewise direct money. The article even describes slaves that owned their own slaves.
The mistake the GP made was confusing role with circumstance. Just because Lola's role was mothering, doesn't mean that mothering is slavery.
It boggles my mind that with all the years I have participated in good faith on this forum while largely failing to make the business connections I came here to make that men on this forum can say this sort of stuff to me with a straight face. I was one of the top students of my entire state in high school. I have six years of college. I worked for a Fortune 500 company for over 5 years. Yet I continue to be frustrated in my attempts to figure out some way to establish a successful and profitable business, but you are telling me women are free to choose something else at will in a world where men typically make more money than women and being a woman is a huge obstacle to breaking into business or otherwise having a serious career.
There is a reason an awful lot of women throw their hands up and either go along with marrying well or go into sex work. If my medical situation did not preclude sex work as a viable option for me, I would have thrown in the towel years ago and just moved to Nevada where that is legal.
The odds are very much stacked against women having career success like a man. To some degree or another, most women get a large portion of their money from a man they are either related to or sleeping with. Thousands of years of progress has not fundamentally changed that fact.
If you really want to engage such ideas in public effectively, it helps to up your game in terms of framing. People tend to be unforgiving and will tend to remember what they thought you meant and will tend to not give you a second chance to clarify. There are a number of people on HN who are quick to vilify people as presumed MRAs etc. Due in part to the generally high education levels here, it is a tough crowd.
Best.
You ask what the fundamental difference between Lola and last-century wife? Hiding her from public view and not letting her out of the house seems like a pretty big one. Refusing to let her visit sick and dying parents seems to be another. Expecting her to sleep on the couch or the laundry looks like another. Not letting her have friends outside the family seems to be yet another. There's tons of differences if you look beyond the kind of work she spent her life doing.
The way you hear a minority of Bible-enthusiasts talk about the role of a wife is in _no way_ different than the slavery described in the article.
That much at least is pretty black and white, and even 100 years ago that was not the default state of most wives, so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, and I'm certainly not sure what you think is "lite" here.
I think you are putting too much emphasis on the formal status of wives a century ago, and not enough on actual social mores, but regardless of whether that is so, it is not much of an argument for what is right.
I am so confident that a robust case against slavery, that is also applicable to this situation, has already been made, that I will take my chances that someone calls "citation needed" on me.
One thing that struck me is that Lola did so much of the work of a traditional mother's role: raising the kids, cooking, cleaning, laundry, and even providing emotional support. The mother had to take on a traditional father's role in bringing home an income. And the actual father - well, he did neither role and seemed to just freeload, gamble, abuse, and finally disappear.
All of the work in a traditional mother's role, well it's usually uncompensated too. Sure it's a "labor of love" but it's also just a huge amount of work, for decades. An argument could be made that the entire capitalist system is built upon uncompensated labor. Just ask your mom.