The one place where they historically had the shorter end of the stick is the high risk of dying in childbirth. Things have improved much with regard to that, though.
Cooking is not "crappy work". Risking your life in coal mines, fixing broken pipes of shit, garbage disposal, being shot to death in useless wars, those things are crappy work (although apparently many miners like their jobs).
You can perhaps argue about having a choice, but even that works both ways. Men rarely have the choice to stay at home to do the crappy work, rather than risk their lives in the outside world. But that is for another discussion. I just wanted to point out your obvious misguided bias about cooking here.
It doesn't seem impossible to stay living close together and still give people more options. Most freedoms were won by the invention of the washing machine and other modern appliances, making household chores less time consuming.
My SO cooks like 65% of the time, but it’ nice for her being able to just rely on me when she is overwhelmed, or just doesnt feellike it.
I believe everyone should learn to cook to some degree.
You can save money and eat more healthy foods that way compared to takeouts / fastfood (which would be the alternative if your SO wont cook and you cant)
> I have a full time career
> despite that I still find cooking for my family
that's nice for you.
we were talking about people without that choice though.
so you are a man. you have a full time career. period.
this is the happy multi generational family living that was described.
Do men with full-time careers not qualify as people without a choice? ;)
(Of course, you meant the choice of cooking.)
I am another man with full-time work who cooks at home. Used to be 50% before corona, now it's maybe 80% because it is easier to do while working from home; as a bonus, I can now also eat with my family. I wouldn't mind sharing the cooking with someone, like one day I would cook for two families, the next day the other family would cook for me. (Cooking twice the amount is not twice as much work.) I am too shy to offer this deal to my neighbors, but if I had family members living close to me, I probably would have arranged something like this already.
I agree that multi-generational family living is unlikely to work well; with that much closeness, the temptation to interfere is just too high. I suppose the optimal distance would be on the same street, in a different building. So you can easily share child care or cooking, but having to put on your coat and shoes somewhat discourages unnecessary visits.
In theory, you could have a similar arrangement with your close friends. But that also requires them living close to you. My point is that this degree of cooperation, if it works well, can make your life significantly easier. Just imagine, if you have kids of similar age, you could have free babysitting 50% of time in return for having an extra kid or two in your house the rest of time. Again, twice many kids is not twice as much work; sometimes it's even less work, as the kids play with each other and leave you alone.
Do we, though?
It seems the past generation had a very nice thing going about 30-40 years ago. Fast forward and our societies are literally crumbling around us, what once took one man going to an average job to provide is now taking two full-time people on skilled labour to do the same. Happiness is down. Stress is up. Planet is rotting.
So do we really need to keep beating down a path that has, quite obviously, served us very fucking poorly?
The social approach is to change a culture so that we make deep friendships for life. Like having a new family, except by choice. Make it normal for friends to buy houses next to each other, so that in future they can help each other take care of kids, cook for each other, and other things family members could do for each other. This could help people live in a commune of their own choice.
(The obvious problem: two people get married, each of them has a different group of friends. In some sense this is a nice problem to have, because it assumes that many people already have communes. Still a problem.)
The technical approach is to make houses like Lego bricks, with standardized dimensions, that can be picked up from one place and placed to another place. To make relocation easier and cheaper than it is now. So again, you have a group of friends, and you agree to live together. Except, if you find new friends, you move to live close to them.
In places where most homes are rented, this is a potential product for a very rich company: make a few buildings in different parts of town, with identically shaped flats (or maybe two or three types of flats of different size, each type existing in each building) and provide a furniture that is easy to disassemble and reassemble. Part of your offer would be the possibility of cheap and simple relocation: if someone chooses a different bulding where a flat of the same type is available, you could disassemble the furniture, move it, and reassemble in the same shape in a week. You could also provide some related services, such as redirecting mail coming to the old address.
I think at a social level, we'd generally get happier, healthier, more well adjusted young adults in exchange.
This is very disrespectful to the many women, and a growing number of men that are making a conscious choice to prioritize raising children and caring for a family over salary work.
The problem is forced labor here, i.e. not having a choice to enter the work force. Not that the work is inherently "crappy" - it is not.
Also something I was thinking about lately: in every other human endeavour there has been increasing specialisation and humanity has benefited from greater productivity. Why is domestic duties (cooking, cleaning, looking after kids) something where we cannot have specialisation? I don't really care if the man or woman does it but would we not benefit from one partner doing most of it efficiently rather than both doing it badly in between stressful jobs?
For various reasons, many families don't even have the choice anymore. They need both parents to work fulltime to make ends meet.
> I would love to spend a lot more time cooking
> I do all the cooking on weekends and holidays/vacations because it is so much fun. I love it when I have my six week sabbaticals since I can cook everyday.
This is exactly the kind of choice that we were talking about which does NOT exist in the "happy multi generational example" that we were talking about.
As a woman, as well as being in STEM, I see how tenuous my position still is. On my team I’m still the only female in an engineering role. I can’t imagine what life would have been like if I had been born 100 years ago.
That's not to say we don't all deserve self-determination but the story we were sold, of ultimate freedom for everyone, is just a new wage-slavery for everyone. Lest you think I'm a deplorable, loveless man shaking his fast at the world from his parents' basement: I am loved by a wife of the bravado feminist ultra class who herself acknowledges this secret trap Capital sprung upon us.
Your life will be wrung from you, bit by bit, and you'll profess it was your dream the whole time.
Two people earn a lot more than one person used to by any material metric. People don’t feel any richer because any surplus gets eaten up by positional goods. It’s not enough to have a perfectly reasonable 1950s house. You must have one twice as big, like your friends. It’s not enough to go on a camping holiday, or road trip. You have to have a trip to the Caribbean twice a year. Most of all, the ultimate positional good, the real prestige markers, an Ivy League degree for your children and a house in a good school district, i.e. one with no poor people.
This is a global trend
... in the US maybe.
Other places are arguably way more progressive in their equality between men and women, and do not have this problem either.
(the lesson from this should be that the USA has multiple problems, not all of which stem from lack of equality, one of which is their cultural attitude wrt capitalism, in particular being nearly blind to its obvious shortcomings)
OP was talking about Vietnam, my experience is in rural Italy and matches the idea of people helping each other, not of the exploitation of the women.
And not in an idealised way either, I could make countless examples that I experienced first hand, growing up with 18 cousins and spending together every easter, Christmas and summer holiday for large part of our lives. Especially summer holidays that last three months in Italy.
They are my sisters and brothers, even though I only have one "real" sister, my 8 aunts are my moms, my 8 uncles are my dads, when I was a kid I probably spent more time with them than with my parents that were working 12 hour shifts in hospital (they did the exact same job and shared 50/50 parenting) and sent me and my sister to our grandparents when schools were closed, so we didn't have to be alone at home or with a baby sitter.
I feel lucky to have a family where no one is left behind or alone.
I never felt we were dependent, on the contrary, they let me develop my independence and I have been a kid who spent long moments alone and still do as an adult.
What you call pastoral I call it sense of community.
Yes, women had it bad in the past, but what you're seeing is not reduced dependence, it's solitude.
Maybe the fact that I grew up in a socialist family makes my perspective different, but I can't imagine old people wanting to be alone, away from their family and loved ones, unless they are forced to.
And the worst thing is that even if you were right and old people are simply fulfilling their desire of independence, women have it worse all the same: stats say that in USA 75% of the elderly living alone are women and to make things even worse widowers have more chances of remarriage than widows.
Considering that old people living alone have more chances of falling into poverty, that poverty increases the chances of being alone even more, that eating it's a social activity for many people, so living alone increases the risk of malnutrition and that in the presence of health issues loneliness increases the chances of the symptoms getting worse, I wouldn't consider more time alone a blessing, not for men nor for women.
Or, to reitate once more, a family that accepts you for who you are.
I'm glad for you that it's been so happy and all, but really get it into your head, this situation is not, CANNOT, be for everyone.
You're excluding people without a family and/or who chose not to breed.
Are you saying that most elderly have no family or kids?
And why people with no family or kids should live in solitude?
I have no kids, for example.
Family is not built on blood alone.
A good chunk of what I call family is formed by people who had no family, lost everything during the ww2 and are not my blood relatives.
I simply said that a community that cares about its members is not a pastoral, there are place where it's still the way they live.
The community can be a group of houses in the Italian country in the middle of nowhere.
I am not passing judgement here. The women woke up in the morning and cooked for everyone else.
> It was so nice to have that much support around all the time.
People have written about this in books that are now almost four decades old. Everywhere women entered the workforce in a highly compensated way, this arrangement came to an end, the number of children went down, etc.
Of course on Hacker News, where maybe 9% or less of the commenters are women, there are people fondly writing about these pastorals where the women do all this crappy work. It's completely bonkers. Or it's the men who come from immigrant backgrounds, looking at photo albums of grandmas and grandpas in school, not admitting how rare it was for the average person, in the 50s, to go to college - that your family isn't average, it was rich in all the ways that mattered, even if in some superficial sense it was a destitute or hardscrabble life.
It's easy to explain the rise in time spent alone among the oldest Americans. You're really observing a trend in reduced dependence.