That's the linchpin you see. The truth is that femininity and masculinity are a continuous spectrum of variation and almost all such statements tend to prescribe something or the other. To tell you the truth I fulfill the stereotype you are proposing in quite a few ways, but most women don't. Just as most males aren't the fist beating cavemen they are made out to be. Why can't we let people just be?
Why do we need to box them into little boxes, so that they conveniently fit into our tiny little realities? Why do we need to make statements like, it's tough to be a man/woman/american/indian/african american/whatever category you can come up with?
It is shocking just how ingrained this is into our consciousness and even though I can articulate it I still can't get it out of my head. I still box people in.
Look earlier women who had it in them to become scientists were told explicitly that they should become housewives. Take a look at Joan Feynman; her thesis adviser told her the only geometry she needed to learn was the geometry of the cobwebs she should be cleaning at home. Imagine what would have happened if she would have given up. We would have lost a great mind to something as abhorrent as prejudice.
The same lesson still exists. Let the kid be. Let her grow up into who she wants to be. Not who society thinks she ought to be. She will be depressed if you take the fight out of her so that you can squeeze her into a housewife. She will be depressed if you force her onto a stage against her wish. She will be depressed in all the cases where you push her into becoming something she isn't. I think that this is what you were trying to say.
On the other hand, what boggles my mind is why aren't more males taught to exit their boxes and give a hand in raising their kids. Raising a human being isn't a full time job if it's a shared responsibility and I think expecting anything other than that is just another small box.
Only men are capable of (starting up a company | working at a senior
level | working at a technical level). There are plenty of people who
could never achieve that level of competence (namely women), they
can stay at home.
It's true that early on you need to nurture and protect them by taking stuff into your hands, but by the age they need to start thinking about stuff like this. They should be mature enough to do that, because you can't be there for them all their life telling them what to do, can you? It's just that your role as a nurturer needs to evolve with time as the dynamics of the relationship changes, and you need to respect that. Not fight it.
The pressure does not come from being stigmatized but from the fact that a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places.
And if you don't have children and your spouse is out working you might as well go to work yourself, rather than to hang around the house all day, and increase your expendable income.
edit: Yet another factor, it makes you feel good to not be a dependent but to bring in your own share of the household money.
My dad calls it the pay-your-neighbor-so-he-can-pay-his-neighbor phenomenon. Uncle Sam makes the most money in that relationship. He makes nothing when you babysit your own kid; he makes plenty when you hire someone to do the same thing(and someone hires you to do their thing).
This isn't politics. It's a simple fact. You stick out 5 years or so with very expensive child care (maybe 4, for many families, where someone stays at home for the first year), and then two-income families make sense again.
And since you've fostered relationships with the parents of your friends' children (or fostered your childrens' relationships with your friends' children) odds are there will be enough overlap in after-school activities that rides home are equally simplified.
Of course, this sort of stuff does take planning and relationship building, but generally it will be a lot less trouble than having a single-income household.
It seems fraught; taking care of someone else's children is a serious commitment. If you screw up your schedule, people lose half a day of work. After-school child care just isn't expensive enough to be worth this hassle.
I believe that high taxes would rather put a stop to the one-earner household since marginal effects on two incomes at X is usually a lot less than the tax on one income of 2X.
Is subsidized child care, really cheaper - if you are paying higher taxes to receive the subsidies? Kind of an odd logic.
Also, as you are growing up, the parents typically make a bigger investment than an average parent. I never have to "repay" my Dad any loan. Nor does he need to repay me. Does it all balance out in the end? It may or may not; it's pretty irrelevant.
My mom gave up practicing medicine after her first kid. She never really had to worry about not being able to return because she didn't plan to.
Which places?
The fact is, plenty of people survive and overfeed themselves in spite of working less than 27 weeks/year (80% of the poor fall into this category). If a person can't feed their family working full time, they need to move out of Manhattan.
Overfeeding is more related to what you eat than the money you spend on it, in fact it is easier to overfeed on cheap food than it is on better grade food.
Food in the US is much more expensive in the majority of the world. I imagine that in the Netherlands it's even more expensive. Still, home-cooked adequate nutrition in the US costs a great deal less than junk food. McDonald's, Popeye's, and Frito-Lay can't even come close to competing with dried corn, dried beans, dried brown rice, soybean and canola oil, potatoes, squash, onions, collards, carrots, ramen, eggs, multivitamins, oranges, bananas, molasses, oatmeal, and the occasional spinach, lettuce, tomato, and cucumber.
(This was even true when I lived in a poor inner-city black neighborhood in Dayton, where everything in the supermarket cost more, and you couldn't take the carts out into the parking lot. Supermarket prices were a lot cheaper in the rich neighborhoods, and I went to Aldi maybe once a month to stock up on the stuff that was cheap there.)
It does take work, but not a huge amount of work, especially if the aim is to feed your family, not to cook well. Oranges and bananas, you don't even have to cook. A peanut-butter sandwich is two minutes if you already have bread and peanut butter. Cooking brown rice or lentils involves dumping a measuring cup into a pot three or four times and setting a timer. Same thing's true of eggs, oatmeal, polenta, ramen, and grits. Other beans, you have to dump into a pot of water the night before, and you probably ought to sort them so you don't bite a rock, which might take five or ten minutes for a big pot. A big pot of beans and a big pot of rice can satisfy the caloric and protein needs of a family of four for a few days.
And if you dump garlic, onions, butter, soy sauce, salt, pepper, mayonnaise, and hot sauce on any random barely-edible non-sweet crap, you can get it up to the level of McDonald's or Popeye's pretty quick.
There are some cheap foods that require a lot of work. Collards are a pain. Baking your own bread may be cheaper than buying it in a store‚ but it's a lot of work. And about any vegetable you use in a dish is gonna need some slicing. But it doesn't require you to be "industrious" at the level of digging a ditch for eight hours, or working overtime at the bubblebath factory they can't afford to heat.
Now, it's true you aren't born knowing this stuff. You have to learn it, and even if you know it in theory you may not be in the habit of putting it into practice. The soft-drink aisle and the potato chips are pretty tempting. Stopping in at McDonald's on the way home from school is a lot more immediate than stopping at Jewel Osco for a loaf of bread and some peanut butter, even if you evade the peanut butter. And if you've just gotten off your split shift at the call center and you have a couple of kids to feed before you start in on your homework, it's pretty hard to motivate yourself to cook. I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty of being poor in the US.
I'm just saying the problem with food is not that good food is out of reach.
If you can't hold down a decent job, odds are you aren't going to be much use in the kitchen.
Yes, you need to move out of Manhattan, and give up non-essentials, but a single person on full-time minimum wage can easily feed and house a family of four. Now if that person actually makes an _average_ wage, they can also afford a car, vacations, and college for the kids (they will get good financial aid at that income level).
It's not the finances, it's the societal expectation.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. It's not "societal expectations" that cause lots of gainfully employed people in the United States to be part of the working poor and hungry.
As an example, the minimum wage in DC is $8.25, which yields $1320/month. The actual amount would be even lower after taxes, but let's even forget about that.
About the absolute rock bottom price you'll pay for a room in this city is $600/month and that's assuming you're in a group living situation or a pretty bad neighborhood. Since a family of four will need two rooms to be even reasonably comfortable, maybe you luck out and grab a similarly crappy two-bedroom for $900/month. So now, you pay your rent, somehow keep your utilities hovering around $120/month (good luck with that) and you've got $300/month left.
But wait, now you've got to get to work (and to the grocery store, etc.). Minimum bus fare in this city is $1.50. If you (and just you, not your kids or spouse) make a round trip every day plus, say, three extra trips a month, you will spend about $100.
So now you've got $200 per month left to feed and clothe four people. But what about insurance? Savings? Unforeseen expenses? Doing something nice with your kids every now and again?
At what point does any of this sound easy to you?
If you want to be ignorant, that's your business, but please try not to peddle this BS to others who don't know any better. It's really irresponsible to further the notion that those less fortunate than us are having a difficult time making ends meet because of societal expectations. Ugh.
As of 2001 (the most recent data I've seen), more than 2/3 of poor households had at least 2 rooms/person, and only 6% were overcrowded. Just under 3/4 owned a car.
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi...
In the same year, 80% of the poor neither had nor were looking for a job, so bus fare is irrelevant to most of them. (This number hasn't changed much up to 2008, I haven't seen 2009 data.)
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2001.pdf
It would seem that even most of the poor do not suffer the problems you describe.
(I'd love more current numbers, anyone have them?)
The Heritage Foundation study assailed the Census Bureau's definition of poverty. My point made no comment about that; I was just debunking the idea that a family of four can live "easily" on a single minimum wage income, which is preposterous.
An idea that you made up yourself to fight with, and was never supported by anyone else. If karma points were made of straw, you'd be the undisputed champion.
"I was just debunking the idea that a family of four can live "easily" on a single minimum wage income".
That's BS, my friend.
The grand-parent claim for my post is "a single person income is not enough to feed a family of four in plenty of places". (By "feed" most people understand food and housing, not insurance, savings and unforeseen expenses.) My point, which you didn't bother to even read completely before coming here and yelling slogans, was that _even on minimum wage_ one person can pay for housing and food for a family of four (and you have yourself proven this point even for a relatively expensive location such as DC); therefore, _on average wage_, it's possible to do OK with such an arrangement (assuming one person to stay at home and cook). Since financially it works out for the _average_ family, it's social norms that cause the typical situation to be different.
You should really work on your reading comprehension.
Actually, I didn't claim you said that. I simply quoted you saying that "one can easily feed and house a family of four" on a minimum wage income. That's an actual statement you made and I rebutted ... I'm looking at those exact words from you on the screen right now. So where's the strawman? Or the lack of reading comprehension? Or are you actually claiming that you didn't say it?
"As an example, the minimum wage in DC is $8.25, which yields $1320/month. The actual amount would be even lower after taxes, but let's even forget about that.
About the absolute rock bottom price you'll pay for a room in this city is $600/month and that's assuming you're in a group living situation or a pretty bad neighborhood. Since a family of four will need two rooms to be even reasonably comfortable, maybe you luck out and grab a similarly crappy two-bedroom for $900/month. So now, you pay your rent, somehow keep your utilities hovering around $120/month (good luck with that) and you've got $300/month left.
But wait, now you've got to get to work (and to the grocery store, etc.). Minimum bus fare in this city is $1.50. If you (and just you, not your kids or spouse) make a round trip every day plus, say, three extra trips a month, you will spend about $100.
So now you've got $200 per month left to feed and clothe four people. But what about insurance? Savings? Unforeseen expenses? Doing something nice with your kids every now and again?"
Is this true? Surely the cost of living has decreased over the last 100 years, so it must be easier for a single breadwinner to feed a family than it was back then.
The breakdown: mortgage 500 (no paying towards the principal, so you're stuck with the debt) food 350 (yes, it's that expensive), health insurance 280 to about 320 depending on the coverage, energy 100 to 250 (depending on season and insulation), commute 150 or more, clothing, various taxes (on top of your income tax) and 'unforeseen' will easily eat up the remainder.
If you live in 'subsidized housing' it gets a bit better.
> but if the person staying home does cook, 350 euro ($450) seems too expensive for the basic ingredients.
That's from direct experience and believe me I don't throw money around if I don't have to. A very basic bit of shopping for 3 or 4 days costs you 50 bucks easily, if you're careful you can whittle that down a bit but not by much. And then of course I still have to get to the cheap supermarket and back, which is 20 km by car, if I bought it in the one around the corner I'd pay quite a bit more. No freezer here (no space for one either) so I can't buy larger quantities.
Please note that I left things like cell phones, internet connection and TV subscription, newspapers etc out because they're not strictly speaking 'needs'.
Can you install a loft bed and put the freezer under the bed? Do you have any space outdoors where you could put a freezer? Have you tried buying dried foods only in bulk?
I am also not an economist, but you're only covering the supply of workers. Do more workers = more money being spent = more products/services demanded = increased demand for workers? In other words, does it even out?
I have read that wages have decreased in the last few generations while dual income houses became normal, but I don't know whether those are cause and effect or have common causes.
If you wanted to make this argument, I think a better way to approach it would be from the supply side. The supply of goods and services should increase, because well, that's what workers produce. This should theoretically lower the prices of existing goods and services, because increased supply of a commodity puts downward pressure on pricing.
That's all in theory. I highly doubt it's anywhere near that simple. The thing about macroeconomics is that it's somewhere between cargo cultism and ancient mythology: people compare situations that superficially resemble each other, and then invent models that explain several situations but are entirely untestable.
What I'm saying is that (inflation-adjusted) cost of living has been going down for the last couple of decades, and that salaries have gone up in absolute inflation-adjusted terms. You can argue that this trend won't hold for the future for a myriad of reasons but I wouldn't support such a view.
Still many of the factors that are considered 'requirements' today aren't in my book, but of course this can be subject to discussion. To take your telephone example, here in the Netherlands (an advanced Western country by all measures) I don't know of many jobs that one wouldn't be able to get or keep without a phone. For those where you're on-call, you are provided with one.
Similarly, cost of living statistics by our national statistics institute changed their household budgets a few years ago - the tv has been a 'basic necessity' for decades (in these statistics), but the budget was upped several hundred euros because now LCD tv's are the norm. Still I think it's stupid to budget 800 euros every 5 years for a TV into a 'basic necessity' budget.
I remain convinced that even after accounting for an adjusted lifestyle to the level of a 'basic lifestyle', and where 'basic needs' have evolved to match societal progress, the increase in income has outpaced the rise of cost of living.
I would have thought they would have been paid for by increases in efficiency (largely due to new technology).
As they become more productive, their wages are going up, too.
This is not the case at all. The Chinese can produce vastly more items than the US can for the same price/time. Do you have any examples where some US company can produce things as such an improved production speed compared to China?
My guts tell me that the US is more productive than China in, say, software development and probably finance. But don't trust my guts. Do some research yourself.
A quick search for "productivity US china" turned up "U.S. Leads Productivity Ranking; China Gains" (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/business/worldbusiness/04o...).
I'm a bloke, but we (my wife and I) share running of our business and care of the children (one toddler, one infant) pretty close to 50-50.
Effectively between us we're SAH parenting.
How?
Those who say they envy us aren't prepared to live in poverty in order to look after their own kids. We four now live on about 40% of what we two lived on - less than a single minimum wage. It's very hard work particularly with no nearby grandparents.
I should have qualified my statement - it's a luxury to stay at home and be a mother and maintain the same standard of living. Ie, having a husband with a high income.
All of that, but particularly the last line certainly applies to me, and I feel I'm fairly well along the line of self-actualizing professions.
I would say it probably is, i don't think increased suicide rates or depression rates are high enough to actually effect the average experience. though that is obviously just an opinion and could do with some data
In general, young people need some form of emotional support and mentoring as they grow up. Young men and women need to be protected from the emotional and sexual depredations of other men and women. I'm not saying to lock them away in single-sex institutions, but there is an actual function performed by the over-protective father and mother in traditional society. Truth and decency should be the order of the day. There is room for that and freedom. In fact, I would say that without truth and decency, one only has a false freedom.
Having children generally makes your life rougher. Across history, women have rarely had the choice to opt out of that, while men often have. Furthermore, women have generally borne the brunt of the enormous workload of childraising. The statistic you cite, therefore, supports the point you claim it to undermine.
It's a bit different if they're going to be with you on the farm and, within a few years, helping out.
It's similarly thought provoking, but a bit more balanced, less angry, yet a bit patronizing to men.
the majority of men died without descendents. Things like that.
I think you'll find it a thought-provoking essay regardless of your personal ethics. It's well-written, has lots of numbers, and brings up a lot of counterintuitive/counter-cultural points. I found it through Hacker News originally, actually.
There is absolutely an important and in many ways terrible impact on a society from having one gender mostly in charge of the official hierarchies of social and political control. But it’s also the easiest thing to examine and understand from afar, and so it can overshadow other (maybe just as important) parts of the culture.
[edit: I skimmed the essay under discussion and part of it makes loosely the same point as this latter. One thing it does which I find annoying is that in using Larry Summers’s sacking as an example it ignores that the faculty wanted Summers out long before his famous comments, for completely unrelated reasons. His misdeed was not “to think thoughts that are not allowed to be thought” and to characterize it that way is quite misleading. I also am annoyed at the analysis of histograms of grades, test scores, and salaries as implying more about innate ability than they do about cultural assimilation.]
Yes, this is kinda the little secret of Feminism. They see that men have "good" jobs like CEOs and want some of that for themselves, and who wouldn't? But they overlook that men are also collecting the garbage, working in the mines, and generally doing all of society's dirty, dangerous jobs. Where're the calls for "equality" in those industries?
GALLO: I drive "the wrecker" — any piece of equipment that the department of sanitation has — I could pick it up. I have people in the truck - who say, you don't drive that big truck and I say, "oh yes I do."
REPORTER: Sixty-year-old Gallo says she still enjoys her job and the physicality of the work and is no hurry to retire."
http://beta.wnyc.org/articles/wnyc-news/2008/mar/29/city-hon...
How the original poster missed the many women who have chosen to be (and often fought hard against the same prejudice they meet in "prestigious" careers to be accepted as) police officers, firefighters, soldiers, nightclub bouncers, oil rig workers and do various other dangerous, dirty or under appreciated jobs I have no idea.
But I thought the example presented summed up the issue quite well given the obvious enthusiasm the worker had for her job.
A group which sees itself as oppressed can't just wishy-washily campaign under a banner of `equalism' if it wants to effect change. It must first identify itself as a group of people with something in common, and which is somehow oppressed according to that something. This way it can articulate the problem it sees, and what needs to change. After that change has come about, then we can all just be equal people.
-isms, generally, exist to advance the interests of their sponsors, to the detriment of society as a whole.
But that generalisation about -isms is intellectually vacuous nonsense.
regardless of your personal ethics
However this assessment that it was a poor reason would have been itself post hoc, since I have already discovered that it's a fairly good essay. In fact the quote about number of descendants doesn't represent the essay well and I'm not sure why your parent chose it. So it's more that you turn out to have made a bad decision, than that your reasoning was unsound.
> Throughout history, it has invariably been easier to be male than female. Yes, this is an overgeneralisation and yes, there are exceptions, but by any important measure, women have had it rougher than men.
This one is a PC-friendly thing to say, the opposite point of view is not. If you haven't read it, I must urge you to check out the excellent "Is There Anything Good About Men?" essay by Roy Baumeister:
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm
Across history, it's estimated that 80% of women all-time had children, whereas only 40% of men did - the majority of men died without descendents. Things like that. Definitely check out Baumeister's essay.
> In any arena you look — education, legal and voting rights, career opportunities and so on — it is far better to be a woman today than at any other point in history.
At the risk of being controversial, I would point out unhappiness, depression, and suicide are all massively up in those countries among women. I think - I'm hoping - that we're in a transition phase while society gets acclimated to having women as equal participants in the labor market. For a while, being traditionally feminine (focusing on beauty, kind temperament and disposition, managing a household, and raising children) was out of fashion and seen to be a lesser choice, despite the fact that women who act in that traditional role actually have higher happiness levels, lower depression levels, and lower suicide levels than women who are working in so-so positions. As the risk of being controversial, I'll say I firmly understand why a woman would give up these traditional pursuits of being a good wife and mother in order to be an excellent scientist, architect, artist, or entrepreneur, but I have no idea why a woman would rather be a low level middle manager or a clerk instead of being a wife, mother, and active member of the community. Motherhood seems to me like it'd be more enjoyable and more rewarding than all but the most satisfying and self-actualizing of professions. I know this is controversial, but I'm hoping society will adjust to a point where traditional femininity can peacefully coexist as a respected choice for women on how to live their lives, because I think it can be a suitable, powerful, happy, and meaningful for choice for many women, and it'd be a shame if a woman was peer-pressured to do a job she hates because "just getting married and being a housewife" is stigmatized these days.