I would argue that the decline of the family is directly linked to feminism, or better stated, the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. The two forces behind that are birth control and women entering the work force. These two are magnified by online dating and social media. I am not saying at all that these are bad things, just that we have yet to see the true effects of feminism on society. Again, I am not asserting that feminism is a bad thing, just that when modes and patterns of societal interaction break down after hundreds of years (or more) of existence, we should take a step back and think about what is really happening.
It's too early to tell how this will play out, but we as a society have underestimated the effects and consequences of rapid change. It may be another one hundred years before we can look back and understand what we are currently going through.
At the risk of wading into deeply controversal territory, I'll add some personal observations. One of the harsh realities I have seen is that it's very difficult for women to "have it all" meaning a fulfilling personal, family, and professional life, especially in the most competitive fields. Yet for many years this idea has persisted in a mythical sense as broadly achievable. I am now in my late 30s. I've watched my female friends and classmates have productive and inspiring careers, but often at the cost of their personal lives. The writing is on the wall that many of these women will likely never end up having biological children due to declining fertility. It makes me sad because while they are awesome entrepreneurs, physicians, lawyers and so on, they would have been awesome mothers as well. And at the societal level, from a selection standpoint, these are the type of genes we should want to pass on. I'm not sure what the answer is, but we should at least be honest about discussing the reality of what people wrestle with and why and how.
> It makes me sad because while they have awesome professional accomplishments, they would have been awesome mothers and parents as well.
I just wanted to point out politely how strange this language reads to me. It's ultimately the decision of each person whether to have kids or not. This being "sad" for them is an overreach, morally, IMO--and part of the fight feminism led was to carve out a space for women in society not to be mothers, if that is their choice.
I have many female friends in their mid-30s and early 40s, and the ones without kids are almost always sad/regretful about it themselves. Some won't admit it, but some will, especially in more intimate settings. I've had one cry on my shoulder - she is very successful professionally, but feels she missed out on the opportunity for motherhood.
Whether it was her "choice" is hard to say. Very few people get the chance to engineer their lives the way they want. Most people instead play the cards they are dealt. And now that there are many more different types of possible cards in the deck for women, they are coming to the understanding that it is possible to be dealt a bad hand, and not realize it until it is too late.
The issue is that there's no objectivity here. Are these women actually sad because they truly wanted to experience motherhood, or is it more because of pressure (even unconscious pressure) from family and friends to have kids? Or just the built-in feelings due to upbringing that having kids is "just what you're supposed to do".
I wonder, though, if these same women did have kids, and sacrificed their career for it, would they look back and have regrets in that regard, too.
So maybe it's just... given a multitude of options where we can't choose them all, perhaps humans will just naturally have some regrets around the path(s) not taken?
As counterpoint, I know women in their 40s and older who are very pleased with their decision to not have kids.
I didn't reference sadness as a moral projection but rather out of empathy as some of these friends will share fears, doubts, and regrets from time to time. If a woman (or man) doesn't want to be a parent, then more power to them and we should all support that.
I think the idea of sadness is that choice were not made with relatively few externally imposed restrictions from a place of independence. Rather the decisions were taken from a set of choices made in a context of a society that imposes restrictions than necessary based on somewhat arbitrary traditions, or genderism, or biased, or at least questionable economic restrictions.
Making a choice properly requires having knowledge about the particular options. Fertility education particularly in regard to age is not part of the sexual education curriculum in the UK [1] nor in international guidance documents [2,3] (just Ctrl-F "fertility"). And a recent poll in the US showed that 77% of women did not properly understand the relationship between age and fertility [4]. At some point this stops being choices made with appropriate knowledge and starts being a massive and tragic policy failure.
The statement you reference is "77% of women do not know that when a woman is 35+, her age is a better indicator of her fertility than her overall health." As a women in her 30s, I'll say that every damn woman in America has heard of a biological clock by her 20s, and is quite aware, and many are getting calls from Auntie every two weeks about whether she's getting on it yet.
>At the risk of wading into deeply controversal territory, I'll add some personal observations. One of the harsh realities I have seen is that it's very difficult for women to "have it all" meaning a fulfilling personal, family, and professional life, especially in the most competitive fields.
This is perfectly possible. Imagine your stereotypical 1950s head of household. Fulfilling job, family is provided for, hangs out with friends on the weekend, etc. Now imagine them being female.
The fact of the matter is that this life doesn't exist for just about anyone anymore. It just never existed at all for women because back when it was possible for large numbers of people to do this they weren't part of the well paid workforce. (It didn't exist for non-whites for similar reasons but I digress)
Part of the problem is that our definition of "having it all" comes from times when circumstances were different. Now, I don't think just giving up and saying we'll never have it that good again and people have to choose between family, work and friends is a good solution but it sure seems more tractable in the short term than recreating that level of prosperity.
I have a serious question for you, curious on your answer.
Can men “have it all”? Is “having it all” different for men than women?
My experience is that men are able to “have it all” often at the cost of their spouse making sacrifices to stay at home, with the implicit idea that this is the way things are meant to be.
If both people in a relationship try to “have it all”, some sacrifices do have to be made (speaking from experience), but I am not sad about these choices since trade offs are an inevitable part of life :)
I mentioned women since I was replying to a specific observation in the parent comment. It's difficult for men to "have it all" also. An advantage men generally have is more time to reproduce. They can spend a couple decades checking off the "professional career" box and then settle down in their 40s and have a family, and scale back work (or leverage prior accomplishments and position for forward autonomy and flexibility) at the same time to accommodate this new life. Although society is much more supportive of male parents than female parents in the workforce, when it comes down to it a man is no more capable of working (some obscene number of) hours/week professionally and "having it all" than a woman is. Workaholic men with stay at home spouses may appear to have more than they do, when in reality they may be guests in their own homes. You always have to sacrifice something.
Not the parent, and I don't have sources handy, but just from some things I've read:
When hiring decisions are made, hiring managers will often prefer men with families, because they will generally stick with the company longer because it's riskier to change jobs with a family to support. This doesn't work for women; hiring managers will be less likely to want to hire a woman of child-bearing age because they're afraid she'll get pregnant and suffer productivity losses as well as take maternity leave. They also assume that a woman with children will be less attentive to work due to child care duties. They assume that men will be less affected by this because, while things are indeed changing, the default assumption is that men will prioritize career over child-rearing, while women will choose the opposite.
I guess, as a man, I feel the expectation is quite the opposite. Namely, that a female in my position would be excused more often to take care of child duties, while my employer would think I'm just being lazy if I told them I wanted to take extra time to care for my child.
In my mental model (note: this is not what I would do, but what I imagine others would do), a woman saying she needs to go home because her baby needs her would be seen as a responsible woman, because a baby needs breastmilk and its mother provides that, whereas, if a man said he needed to go home consistently, the boss would think he's irresponsible, because -- as a man -- his baby doesn't strictly need him, and thus he is better serving his family at work.
But I understand your viewpoint; it just didn't occur to me. It seemed obvious to me that men, due to male biology, were more likely to be forced to work longer hours in order to be seen as being as responsible as an otherwise equivalent woman. Although, I guess today, formula is quite popular. Well regardless, I'm not always the best at understanding how others would react to things.
Why do people want so much? I love minimalism, owning hardly nothing, saving, having no friends or acquaintances. After reading this thread I feel like everybody else is greedy.
I sometimes wonder, too. I'm not quite in your boat: I have quite a few close friends, and many acquaintances, and find they all enrich my life in many ways. But I never understood the "keeping up the joneses" mentality. I have my well-worn furniture, a practical amount of kitchen stuff, some plants, a small amount of art, some tech gadgets, and a 15 year old car, and I just don't feel the need to own more than that, or to constantly "upgrade" all my existing stuff to things that are more expensive but don't actually make me any happier.
I wasn't criticizing feminism in my comment; I also wasn't saying there was anything expressly wrong with the status quo (men trading off on work so women could have more family time)--I'm sure it works well for many families. I was only pointing out that there's nothing inherently female about "not having it all" with the exception of the notion that women should be able to have it all--there has never been a broad movement that lamented that men can't have it all, after all.
I don’t see a reason to be sad because I think it’s a wonderful thing more people have a choice now. Whether I end up making perfect decisions or not I wouldn’t trade anything for that.
What a condescending comment... My wife and I are childfree. Should I tell her that her accomplishments in the workplace or even getting a good education and graduating from university mean nothing because having kids should be her top priority?
This is the problem with people who think they know better.
You think people should have more kids, what do you propose? Are you going to pay for the diapers, the education, the bigger house, the bigger car, the childcare? Do you want to become our live-in nanny?
After all, you seem so eager for people to have kids, surely you must be volunteering every night to help kids from low socio-economic areas get better grades and break the cycle of poverty or maybe you have adopted 5 unwanted kids already?
My wife and I don't need your sadness and your condescension. Thank you.
1. If you're a working mother, you're currently assumed to either be a bad worker, or a bad mother. (Sad corollary: If you're a working father, most people don't assume this about you.)
2. If you're a professional man, and you want children, your wife is expected to compromise her career, to raise them.
I like to look at this from the perspective of "how are we going to organize society given further technological advancement in the far future" and how do we get there.
Ignoring the endgames that come after the cessation of traditional human existence - either robotics replacing organics completely or mastery of genetics leading to the engineering of super-intelligent custom lifeforms to replace us - we are almost always either going to go extinct or refine our genetics to optimized templates. Eventually, we will be manufacturing humans with mathematically weighed balances between genetic diversity for disease resistance and optimized traits and features to make people live longer, stronger, and smarter. Probably going to be codified to be obedient to authority and not deviate from the social order as well, because that just honestly seems borderline unavoidable.
These humans will eventually be manufactured in artificial wombs in automated facilities meant to produce the population because in practice its severely debilitating and economically inefficient to take the females out of operation for so long to reproduce with such high biological risks associated. Cloned gametes from engineered templates grown in factories. The children would probably be mentally implanted with knowledge via brain-computer interfaces and taught everything virtually. Their biology would accelerate their development as much as is possible within our genetic profile. Years of research would have gone into optimizing their environments, interactions (if necessary, organic ones), and development to yield the most potential.
When you start stepping back from there, the closest bridge to that reality is going to be the institutionalization of child rearing. Before we have automated facilities breeding engineered templates we will almost certainly have public institutions dedicated to population replacement - in the optimistic scenario, women would simply "major" in parenting and live their careers as mothers. We will probably already be using engineered gametes by then because the technology is already mostly available, so these women would just have children and raise them as their full time career. Given current understanding of developmental psychology there would probably also be men assigned to play paternal roles in upbringing in full employment at such facilities as well.
I don't think at all this evolution in child rearing would ever happen overnight and its very likely in the same way you can still ride a horse today over owning a car or in the future how some will still drive manual cars in the age of autonomous vehicles some couples will do it "the old fashioned way" because they can. But it will probably, almost certainly, happen a lot less often.
And honestly from my perspective its for the best. Historically raising children is an absolutely full time job. Living on a farm, despite "working" in the fields at all hours of the day, still lets you keep the children at hand and raise them. You are never separated and the family is always together. That seems to be, barring abusive relationships, the optimal way human children develop. We have constructed employment institutions that make that impossible and try to both put pressure on laborers to reproduce but then also to somehow "do the job" of parenting at their own expense and economic disadvantage. It costs tremendous amounts of time to raise children, even more to actually do it well, and its never priced into the economy.
For now, this isn't a problem, and it likely won't be for a long time. We just get the collateral damage of mentally and physically harmed children from parental negligence that society pushes them towards. Eventually the economic pressure not to reproduce drives enough people not to that replacement becomes impossible and then such professional parenting institutions need to start being taken seriously. When it happens, its likely to be a very good thing - children raised by people paid to raise them, whose job is to be the best parent possible, and who will have comprehensive education in the hugely complex fields surrounding human development will be a substantial boon to the first children raised under it. Its just the cost of basically privatizing reproduction has to justify the investment, both culturally and economically, to make it happen.
For now the best thing to do would be to reduce the economic burden of life on adults to let them be more recreational and social and thus less lonely. Trying to force people back into a mold that was already broken to begin with is a violation of liberty with no real corresponding benefit - we aren't going to go back that way ever again, because truthfully we can do much better. We just have to choose to.
Not feminism, the establishment of the discrete nuclear family as a social and labor unit divorced from kinship groups. When you've already pared down the web of fundamental relations to 2-5 person cells, your already only a step away from complete individual social collapse.
That doesn't even touch on the breakdown of community organizations (churches, fraternal orders, what have you).
Arguably this all comes down to economics/capitalism.
Unpaid favors to family aren't measured in GDP and can't be taxed. Breaking down extended family into individual workers is good for the economy. Having stay-at-home moms work while sending their kids to group childcare is also more economically efficient.
Surprised you were downvoted. This is a very good point: unpaid labor still exists, it's just not counted, either for taxation or economic statistics purposes. That means that everyone who has an incentive to optimize these metrics (meaning most people within the for-pay, capitalistic economy) has an incentive to favor policies that replace unpaid labor with paid labor that makes the transfer of value explicit.
You see this trend in other areas as well: the gift economy of the early Internet became the advertising economy of today, the open-source economy of the early 90s now has Github etc. offering rewards for creators, the karma economy of early social media contributors is replaced by the Patreon model today, the idea of driving a drunk friend home is replaced by calling them an Uber, the practice of quietly giving a family in need money is replaced by GoFundMe, and so on.
There are pluses and minuses to this: it's certainly been good for the economy, and generates liquidity where previously there was none, but it's done a lot to destroy social relationships and trust.
I think you're right that it comes down to economics/capitalism. But I doubt it's a conspiracy to boost GDP and tax revenue, as you allude by saying "is good for the economy". I think you're closer to the mark with "economically efficient" -- what seems a more likely explanation to me is comparative advantage:
Sure, grandpa might be a great primary caregiver while mom and dad are at work, but he might also not be. Chances are low he has any training in early childhood education, though he may have raised his own kids -- but he's tautologically not as young as he used to be. But he might have training in law, or medicine, and might plausibly be very valuable as a consultant for the hours that he's instead watching little Ephra.
The licensed daycare in the neighborhood, by contrast, is set up to care for children, and -- depending on grandpa's hourly rate -- might do so at a lower cost. The folks there are (maybe?) trained in early childhood education, and have years of experience handling 1-2 year olds, or 2-3 year olds, or 3-4 year olds, at least compared with grandpa who might only have a year or two of experience with each.
> the establishment of the discrete nuclear family as a social and labor unit divorced from kinship groups.
Where has the nuclear family ever been divorced from kinship groups. A nuclear family is by definition part of an extended network, because mom and dad are both parents of one nuclear family as well as children of two others. Without a strong nuclear family there is no kinship, and all nuclear families imply extended kin groups, by definition. I will never understand where this nonsense dichotomy of nuclear family v 'kin' has come from.
When people talk about the nuclear family, they're talking about the setup post-industrialization and particularly post-war spurred by the birth of modern civil engineering and the simultaneous spread of the highway system - where the term nuclear family came from.
Many societies and cultures have large extended families living together. That is definitely not the norm in the U.S. and Canada, nor is it the case in most of Northern Europe (from what I understand).
It is not the norm today, but it certainly was in the heyday of 'nuclear' family, in the sense that grandparents, aunts and uncles, would be living nearby.
Could you be reversing the roles? It could just as well be the case that it's the "liberation of men from the home and from conservative sexual values" that is the explanation. There's not a lot of real data on what people actually want in terms of relationships. But some attitudes have been quite stable over the last 50 years. For example, women's ideal number of kids has been stable at about 2.5 since the 1970s: https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-many-kids-do-women-want. Anecdotally, it seems like it's usually men that are less interested in settling down, not women.
This is a really good point, and may also tie back to the role of American capitalism (to differentiate how it's done here from pure capitalism as an economic system). The "decline of the family" in the US has a lot to do with people not getting married or delaying marriage, and a lot of that has to do with how men see their role in a marriage. Men are delaying marriage in part because they want to be "economically settled" first -- they want to be able to provide for a family -- but changes in our economy have really impacted that ability.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I'm agreeing with you or not :) The paradox is that people have the ideals of the past but react in a way that produces the opposite result ("I want to be conservative, but I can't do it so I'll enjoy myself in the meantime").
Feminism has brought about a lot of changes, but I don't think we can lay this one at the feet of women trying to escape their compulsory reliance on unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate men.
Most people are alone because they don't prioritize the families they already have (parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, etc). They graduate high school, attend college in another state, move to another city far away for work, etc. Those are choices and they carry consequences. It's not good by default to follow your dreams if the only way to follow your dreams is to be alone and isolated in a strange place. Career is only a portion of our lives and it is far from the best way to draw meaning and purpose for ourselves. It's much better to draw meaning from something that is more permanent and guaranteed, like your identity and your home, not the job you just so happen to be doing at that moment.
There are exceptions to every rule, but it should be understood that when people graduate from high school, they should pick a trade school or university that is close by, not far away. When they choose a focus/major, they should ask what jobs exist in their area, not what kinds of jobs exist in the whole world. When they graduate college, they should be looking for work near their home, not on the other side of the country. Work and career is unreliable and people fail a lot. It's not the thing you should rely on to make you happy or satisfied.
It's better to have less of a career and more of a family than less of a family and more of a career. Your career accomplishments are not as important or valuable as they seem. If you didn't do them, someone else very probably would, and you will also very probably be forgotten quickly after you retire or quit or die. But more humane pursuits like family, home, faith, and community will always be there if you invest in them.
I don't think we can lay this one at the feet of women trying to escape their compulsory reliance on unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate men
That's begging the question. Of course, one cannot, "blame the victims of villains," to paraphrase. The vast majority of people are just imperfect, normal people trying to get by. It's the aggregate actions of everyday people we should be looking at, not such outliers.
Most people are alone because they don't prioritize the families they already have
It's like the "Thanksgiving arguments" are engineered precisely to create a rift between generations.
> It's like the "Thanksgiving arguments" are engineered precisely to create a rift between generations.
Isolation is a self-perpetuating thing. People hate going home for Thanksgiving and arguing with their relatives because they don't actually know their relatives (their own fault) and they don't belong at home anymore (also their own fault). They isolate themselves, then become indignant when the result is disconnection and conflict. It's absurd.
They're all brainwashed by capital into thinking there should be no negative consequences from following the path that maximizes career success. The idea that we can leave our homes, chase money, and live separate lives without destroying our relationships is the greatest enemy of the traditional family.
A lot of people aren't leaving home to "follow their dreams", they're leaving home because there just aren't any jobs there anymore. Jobs of any sort are scarce outside urban areas.
A lot of people are, though. I realize there are people who have no choice because life sucks and work is hard to find, but I'm not criticizing them. I'm criticizing the ones that choose to leave when they don't need to. We are all uprooted sometimes, but the goal should be to place those roots back in the ground and rebuild what was lost, not float around from place to place with no sense of identity or home.
Feminism is a symptom rather than the cause. The cause is the commoditization of humans into productivity and consumption units in a post-industrial environment where the state and corporations dominate. Corporations want to extract every bit of production and consumption out of individuals. A woman taking time off for pregnancy or deciding to become a stay-at-home mom is a drain on corporate productivity. And every state has to some degree tried to diminish the role of parents and family in order to sap every ounce of allegiance from an individual to the state. In totalitarian states, the head of the state becomes the father of the people and the state becomes its family. It's easier to control and manipulate individuals with weak family ties. And it's easier for entities to inject themselves into a controlling family role with individuals with weak family ties. It's why pimps and madams target runaways and make themselves into paternal or maternal figures.
Society and culture doesn't grow organically. They are created and manufactured by the people with wealth and power. For the time being, those with wealth and power have decided that the breakdown of the family is in their interest. But it could shift quickly if the people in charge want it to. An extreme example is china where they encouraged women to have lots of children in order to strengthen their country. And not too long after that, they had a change of heart and encouraged the complete opposite - one child policy. Now it seems like they are backing off of it after a few decades of one child policy.
Agreed. A large part of american culture has been engineered consciously or unconsciously to be some sort of productivity/materialistic porno. It is completely unbalanced. The american values nowadays all go towards trying to create an "Übermensch".
> Society and culture doesn't grow organically. They are created and manufactured by the people with wealth and power.
BS. You give them way too much credit. The world is too complex and dynamic for a queen ant to "create and manufacture" the efficiency of the ant hill.
I didn't credit them with creating the world. I credited them with creating society, culture, etc. It isn't really a matter of debate. It's well understood the elites create societies and the institutions underlying them. The masses didn't create the US government or any of the systematically important institutions. A handful of elites did. This is pretty much true of every country/society on earth throughout history.
Notable mention for flat/declining wages since the average cost of raising kids probably doesn't get cheaper as time goes on.
Imaging paying your you and your spouse's student loans, then having two kids and paying their student loans or putting that debt on their shoulders. Much easier before tuition skyrocketed.
Real wages, wages adjusted for inflation, have been flat. So people arent exactly getting poorer (on average) in the US. You're right to point some stuff out, medical care and housing have inflated at disproportionately high rates. Higher education as well, but that's elective. Problem is even in countries, like several European states, that offer state incentives or support or regulation to take the load off parents, birthrates are still low among the educated and well to do natives. In fact I'm pretty sure that's a general trend across the world, the poor and less educated are typically more likely to have kids than people who should be financial more capable of supporting kid, at least up to a certain level.
So economics is probably a weak explanation. Personal freedoms, especially for women, is probably the root cause of low birthrates.
I always felt that my mother, as a traditional housewife, seemed rather lonely, and that she blossomed once she started working outside the home. But the social support she provided for my dad and us kids took a hit. I would argue the net effect was still a positive one for the family.
These are all anecdotes though. My mother -- who wanted to be a traditional housewife -- but, as a migrant to this country, was forced to work to support our family seemed incredibly depressed that she couldn't be at home. Once she started staying at home (by becoming a teacher, and thus getting some months off with us), she became so much happier and it was a net positive for my family. Once she retired early, it became even better, and she was just a much happier person.
Granted, my father also took a job that let him stay home most of the day, because he hated working too, so I guess we're one of the few families which seems unaffected by marketing, and instead seek what we actually want. Why in the world would literally anyone want to work a job? I feel only someone who's never worked could want to do it
> Why in the world would literally anyone want to work a job?
I'm a big proponent of financial independence & early retirement. It's mind-boggling to me how many people I've talked to about this that thing it's "unnatural" to stop working so early. Some have reasonable questions/concerns about meeting financial needs later in life, and others give an envious/sarcastic "must be nice" sort of response, but by far the majority of negative reactions I get are from people who can't even fathom the concept of not going to work every day.
And then there's always the "won't you get bored?" argument, which... honestly, if I ever get chronically bored in this amazing, rich world we have, simply because I don't have a job, I will consider that a huge personal failing.
> I've talked to about this that thing it's "unnatural" to stop working so early. Some have reasonable questions/concerns about meeting financial needs later in life, and others give an envious/sarcastic "must be nice" sort of response, but by far the majority of negative reactions I get are from people who can't even fathom the concept of not going to work every day.
Right. Literally, every one of my family members in the United States retired early. They came to this country with nothing -- at the time they emigrated, their country did not allow migrants to take currency over the border. The oldest one to come was almost 45-50, and they retired before most Americans, and have just made do with less, but are otherwise happy.
I cannot fathom the obsession some people have. Even my mother-in-law had a lot of consternation when she decided to quit the job she hated (they have more than enough money to retire). Luckily, that's over now. I do actually get working until you die if you love your job. Most of us are not so lucky though.
At the end of the day, most people (not all though -- some people truly have difficult circumstances) choose to not be wealthy (in the sense of being able to live off their savings), not because circumstance forces them to, but because they are afraid to, for some reason.
we as a society have underestimated the effects and consequences of rapid change
That's the fundamental bias of human beings. Alvin Toeffler and other authors have been banging on about that since the 60's and 70's. Vernor Vinge used to talk about this. (He helped popularize the "Singularity.")
we should take a step back and think about what is really happening
Do this, if you want to grab hold of a piece of intelligence which is invisible to the general public. This is something of a corollary to, "What you can't say."
If one has tried to talk about evolution to an anti-evolutionist, one is familiar with the depth and surprising strength of mental defenses working against evidence. If one wants to have an awareness beyond the ordinary, one has to do self analysis at this level. (While not succumbing even more to one's deeply held biases.)
There's imo a stronger argument that economic/financial factors are far more significant than "feminism." The closing in the employment gap in the 1980s was driven by hyperinflation and consumer debt - everyone had to work to pay the bills.
Similarly, contraceptives aren't the reason people have fewer children. It's the fact we can't afford childcare and housing for a family.
These are big factors. I'm also struck, though, by the short historical view most of these comments have. Back in the day, many people "stayed at home", where that means tending the gardens and fields, tending the cows and pigs, hunting for additional protein, gathering for additional carbs and sugars, doing the washing and getting the water. Pre-Industrial Revolution, this whole "men go to work and earn a wage while women stay home" thing did not exist the way it does now. Servants lived in the houses of the people they served, merchants operated as families, and rural people all devoted significant amounts of time to food production. And there was no real choice "not to work" unless you were rich.
I mean I don't think you're wrong, I just think talking about pre industrial society isn't particularly helpful when trying to understand factors behind trends in our current lifestyles.
In other words, yes current state is a function of all past states, but recent history has a far higher influence on next state than the far past. At a certain point you have to assume its influence to be close to zero.
In terms of influence, I agree. But in terms of imagining alternatives, I think it's useful to look at history. In finance people often do stress testing for portfolios by looking at periods of historical downturn. I'm proposing doing that for ideas here.
In my own family, the American half reproduced earlier and had many more children than the "old country" half, due to economic distress and war. People in my father's generation were not directly affected by World War II, but the economic contractions that gripped Europe in the 1970s really show when you look at the reproductive choices my "old country" family made compared to my US family (which supports your previous post).
It's just weird that this longer conversation posits either idealized 1950s suburban America or an individualist society. Especially as employment configurations evolve, we should be aware that those are not the only options.
I believe it's not really feminism so much as a societally pernicious type of individualism.
Certainly liberated women may be part of the cause, but there are also no shortage of boy-men who are incapable of sacrifice, hard work and the drudgery of responsibility.
The social structures that enforced all that appear to have broken down. And that's not all together a bad thing but certainly it causes societal problems in the short term until things adjust (hopefully better than what they were before).
There's a recent review essay of Houellebecq's work by a Dutch populist that goes into this topic a little bit. Well worth a read IMO, even if his conclusions are quite extreme.[0]
I would say it's important to look beyond simple labels of "good" and "bad" and think of the situation in terms of trade offs. Feminism has greatly helped some portions of the population and cost others greatly as well. Just like with any other culture or ideology, there really is no free lunch.
Feminism is surely related, but I’m not sure if it is a cause or a consequence (or maybe both?) to the decline of family.
An important factor to consider is the nature and place of work: Men used to inherit their families business or work in the same town. Big families and relatives lived close to each other, so women could use help from other women in the family for child rearing and house chores. Nowadays you have to move to capitals/big cities to find work which deprived women from the assistance they found in extended families. I think this had an impact on gender roles and the increase of feminism and nuclear families.
> Men used to inherit their families business or work in the same town.
Few men got to inherit a business but if your father worked a trade then you would probably find going into that trade to be a natural path. The latter part is still very true today.
I have heard this argument before, and think it is extremely overstated. Our current version of feminism has expanded across almost all of the west. Technologies like birth control and economies/technologies that allow for women to be in the workforce at mass scale were simply impossible in the past. It's really an apples to oranges comparison, and is an intellectually dishonest one at that.
Can you please provide examples. Birth control has only been available for a short period of history, so its not obvious to most of us what societies you are talking about and how their liberation of women actually affected the society.
>Birth control has only been available for a short period of history,
If you are talking about the pill sure, but there are forms of birth control that date to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, And China. Not to say these methods were effective and the book of Genesis did regress things a little with God slaying Onan for practicing the old pull out method, teaching that procreation is for reproduction only.
I feel you've said more or less the same thing the article is saying, just in more casually dismissive and incendiary terms. TFA refers to many of these factors as being driven by the second demographic transformation. Yes, feminism is a very important part of the SDT, but one needs to be careful with cause and effect. Did feminism cause the SDT? Unlikely. Did the SDT cause feminist ideas to become attractive to more people? That seems far more likely. If that's the case then I wouldn't necessarily lay this (more old people living/dying alone) at feminism's feet. Feminism may provide an ideological argument in favor of certain relationships, but we are the ones choosing to live and die alone, and when we choose we do so for myriad reasons.
Also, women haven't been liberated from the home [1].
> the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values.
Everyone is unhappy, married people on average are happier than unmarried, religious people are on average happier than unreligious people.
The sexual and feminist revolution got some 'splainin to do.
Of course, my view, the answer isn't "liberating women from the bonds of motherhood and family" but empowering women and supporting them in arguably the most powerful and most important thing one human can actually do in this world: bring new life into it.
Feminism was motivated by the minority of women that wanted a job in 1950, and their legitimate frustration with how the system was trying to stop them from doing that. Somehow that got switched around into a society where almost every woman is required to have an income. It's like we went from oppressing half of all women to oppressing the other half of all women.
It's a form of prisoners dilemma. "Cooperating" with traditional society meant being a single-income couple. "Defecting" is being a dual-income couple. Once enough couples start defecting, they're so much more competitive that other couples have to defect to survive.
Seems a bit circular to me. If the most important thing a human can do is bring life, then that life also has as its most important mission to bring some more life into the mix and so on. You end up with an endless chain of causation and no real answer as to what makes the entire thing worthwhile.
I'm pretty sure reproduction/biological success is considered the prime biological directive of any species. There's no romantic explanation for it be worthwhile.
I'd say the idea of a directive is also a romantic explanation, since it implies a some sort of planning. The reality is more tautological. The current crop of beings is there... because they made it to this point. There is no deeper reason or value to be assigned to their survival.
A being doesn't want to reproduce in itself, it wants to fulfill needs that compel it to reproduce. A desire for sex, for companionship, for a social role, etc. It's possible to be highly attracted to someone who is infertile because we chase the signs of procreation rather than its actual occurrence. We can rationally plan to make procreation happen but even in this case it is an illusion, we are still chasing some state of mind that leads to procreation.
On the contrary, I am trying to dispel the romanticism here and the hidden additional romantic layer that anthropomorphizes the process of evolution itself by giving it some sort of direction.
"An endless chain of causation" isn't circular, that's more or less the definition of life. What's the alternative, a task that a species must complete so that it can then go extinct?
Perhaps a chain of loop-de-loops would be a better mental image: a series of circles rather than just the one. If the importance of any life is justified by its relation to other lives that are themselves justified by other lives, you end up with no core importance. There's no meat inside the loops.
I don't have a definite answer to your question but looking at most of what has happened in history I do wonder if developing opposable thumbs and a frontal cortex was worth it.
Is bringing another being into the world the most important thing one can actually do? I'm not sure if you've noticed but we're getting pretty full. And we're living longer. Feels to me like the bus is getting full.
Not saying that it's the most important thing one can do, but it's at least as important as making money for other people as some career schmuck. Which is what most work outside the home boils down to.
Well procreation is essential for all self reproducing organisms. If you don't prioritize it, then congrats, people like you won't influence future too much.
Also bus isn't getting full. The issue is two fold: chain smokers in first rows and overcrowding in back rows.
In my experience & observation feminism and women working has nothing to do with the inability to sustain a rich family or romantic life. My grandmothers worked, my mom worked, the women I’ve dated have great careers.
It is absolutely possible to have a career and be a phenomenal wife and mother with a happy family. If a person’s priority is family, it may limit career opportunities but that is true of both men’s and women’s careers (for example rejecting a promotion that requires a geographic move to keep kids in the same school or live near relatives will impact both partners).
It seems a stretch to blame feminism when economics has thinned most workers wages to the point that multi income households are a requirement to eke out a life.
While there was feminism involved there, I think one should question how independent the political movement was from economic pulls at the same time. You can't for example, take large amounts of single women into factories as workers in the industrial age, without some form of practical feminist changes in how women were treated.
You see similar modern pulls today in nations like China and India. It's really difficult to separate which came first - the economic pull or feminism. I lean to the economics of factory owners wanting low cost labor being a leading phenomenon of the cycle, and that induces the question of the rights of women who now have income, and practical freedoms going to work and working, and that independence inducing a desire for wider rights.
Once industry gets access to that labor though, they'll pay the minimum amount possible, and that practical acceptable minimum lowers if there are multiple people in the household making income.
I agree, economics, politics and philosophy are all intertwined. I think now that we have a surplus of labor, automation and globalization that we’re due for another shift in all of the above. The loneliness discussed in the OP seems like a symptom of larger societal and technological change.
My theory is that we have a labor surplus because the rules of capitalism were formed when we had a shortage of capital, now that we have basically enough capital, we’re still constraint managing capital, causing underuse of human labor.
Feminism can't avoid taking some of the blame for the economics.
If some households are multi-income, then they can pay more for housing.
This bids up the cost of housing. More households decide to become multi-income in order to pay for housing. This of course makes the housing price go up even more.
I think the shift to eschew "traditional" gender roles plays a part, certainly, but I don't think it's the dominating factor.
I'd say the strongest factors, at least in the US:
1. Work/career is #1 priority. Career has always been a big deal in the US, but I feel like it's become more extreme in my generation (nearing 40) than it was for my parents or their parents. For them, it was more about putting food on the table and providing a better life for their children than what they had. For us it seems more about intangible things like "being successful".
2. Geographic barriers have broken down a lot. In the mid-/late-1900s, you'd likely grow up in the same place, and more often than not would find a job or go to college nearby, and stick around as an adult. You'd probably meet your future partner through family, local, or church events, and after marriage would probably still live in or near your original hometown. Nowadays, it's much more likely to move hundreds or even thousands of miles from your hometown, often to chase job opportunities (see #1). New adults going to college far from home also makes them realize that living near your hometown isn't the only option.
3. And yes, changing gender norms fit into this: women have caught the bug of #1, and we are still struggling with the "having it all" mentality of women having a strong, ambitious career, but also raising children. I personally don't think there's a universal solution to this; there are only so many hours in a day and so much energy to go around. Child care is expensive and a stretch or out of reach for many couples, even with dual incomes (and the jury's still out as to whether or not pervasive third-party child care is a detriment to early childhood development). In heterosexual couples, many men still resist taking an equal part in child-rearing duties, but I'm not convinced that would completely solve the problem anyway (again, only so many hours in a day); it would just make it more equitable as to bearing the responsibility.
Definitely agree that it may be another few generations before we fully understand the effects of all these societal changes. Some of it may be bad, even if the overall changes are good.
Perhaps the more interesting question is whether the traditional nuclear family is the "optimal" mode of human society?
Is the unhappiness that we may be observing with the decline of family a product of this transition period from traditional family structure to individualism? Is our current society just not well equipped yet to handle this mode of living? Maybe in 50 years, this will become the norm and people who choose to live alone will have alternative sources of happiness.
I really doubt the traditional nuclear family is natural and hence "optimal" although I guess that depends on your goal. I think as an extension or outcome, perhaps the purpose of civilization, nuclear families provide safety and security rather than producing the best offspring for the species as a whole. What's better, people of every level of fitness and intelligence pairing off to produce God knows what sort of mutants that will be protected on some level by society, or a handful of males who are naturally predisposed to good health, fitness, and intelligence, turbo Chads if you will, seeding large groups of females.
I'm not saying one is better for than the other overall, but one is surely better than the other for certain outcomes. Do we want an equitable society where low status individuals, but particularly males, have a better shot at reproduction and may contribute more to building a society that propagates that "culture" of safety and equity? Or do we go with what is probably more natural? I mean i can guess why and how religions of old and civilizations formed and why they were patriarchal
I don’t know if it’s optimal, but it sure is intimate and stable.
Your spouse will never move to another city for a new job w/o you. Your kids won’t leave the nucleus, at least not until they’re college ready.
Unlike family, different kinds of arrangements between people result in relationships that are less committed and less durable.
So maybe if you take stability and intimacy into account, it might as well be optimal.
I guess it begs the question, what are we optimizing for? And on what time scale?
What might seem optimal for the time being, could unleash a series of unforeseen circumstances in the future.
But I guess we can keep an open mind, allow people to choose for themselves and then report back after 2-3 generations the consequences of different paths taken.
It's interesting that you consider the nuclear family as "traditional", while it's actually a fairly recent phenomenon. And in many places in the world it's still common for a family to consist of multiple generations and often aunts/uncles/cousins/etc. living in the same household.
I'd say it is a natural way of living, but maybe you have been unlucky in not experiencing it for yourself. This debate is pretty old, Plato's Republic hinting at the disappearance of the family echoes much of the current western culture. He figured out you could not impose a totalitarian state while having people's allegiance lie on their family.
Social media and not feminism is the likely root cause of the decline in families. Families are declining world wide including in repressive societies. Social media itself is likely the root cause.
Before social media people had to meet face-to-face in order to date and they had to break up face-to-face in order to end a relationship. This forced people to develop social skills at a young age that are required to form a family.
Now people can date someone they never met and break up by ghosting. They can get to a preliminary relationship without acquiring social skills. There are also online equivalents of a mate that seem good enough if you don't understand the benefits of family.
I try to avoid social media and it makes my life much more sane. It forces me to go out and socialize with people.
There's an opposite political argument that the decline of the family, especially among the poor, was due to government benefits replacing the need to maintain social networks and interdependent families. In the 1800s and early 1900s, at the height of the industrial revolution and in the absence of any welfare state, poor Americans of every ethnicity had incredibly close-knit communities and extended families.
Life was harder, but you could lean on friends, family, and congregation. That's where the classic trope of rich people being lonely and surrounded by fake acquaintances while poor people have authentic community comes from. Maybe now that every level of society is relatively richer we're all that much lonelier.
I am curious how do you and your LTR define feminism. Nobody is forcing anyone to choose career over family. That would be anti-feminist.
I never viewed feminism as mutually exclusive of having a family or a career. I might just be more mellow than everyone else. Feminism just means that men and women deserve equal opportunity and respect. Why is this the worst thing?
I might have an advantage over everyone else since my parents grew up in the great depression. All of the women in my family worked often because of hardship. One grandmother married a very bad man and ended up becoming a hairdresser and opening a salon to support my mother. Another grandmother had a sick husband and had to take over his business. My father also had an illness and although he continued to work they both agreed that my mother needed to finish her education and go back to work. Nobody made such a big deal about it since the women were also supporting the family. In fact, in most societies the women support the family working or not. This is the norm.
When my husband and I got married we I was still in school so our whole life was ahead of us. We agreed that I would finish school first only because I was only a year from graduation. Then he finished school. We both agreed that having a family was important so we both prioritized children. We both had awesome careers, but I never let go of the fact that family is more important than career. My husband and I are still feminists.
In my daughters case she decided to stay at home with her three boys. Her awesome husband is still very much involved with his boys. They are both still feminists.
I'm sure feminism plays a role. As the article said, women can now more freely leave abusive husbands. That's one example of how it would increase divorce rates.
However, I don't think it is the sole reason. For example, why then are wealthy people more likely to have families, as the article describes? The fact that wealthier people have families more seems to support the idea that it is at least partially caused by neoliberalism.
Sad times we live in that you have to say it twice that you don't oppose feminism, otherwise you know your comment will get flagged, which means your opinion will simply be hidden away. That is the state of the debate, if we can even call it a debate.
Yeah, to be honest, I would like to elaborate more but I don't want my account banned. Best we can do is hint at our opinions and hope that it fosters some thought and debate
I would surmise that we can solve the loneliness problem without going back to having larger families which would only place more stress on the environment hastening our eventual extinction. The crux of the matter is having opportunities for meaningful social interactions daily. While this may have been provided by family in the past, there is no reason this has to be so as far as I can tell. If we can't solve the problem I would still rather have people able to choose their own paths in the world rather than have some arbitrary and oppressive system imposed upon them.
It's too early to tell how this will play out, but we as a society have underestimated the effects and consequences of rapid change. It may be another one hundred years before we can look back and understand what we are currently going through.