dogsmilk wrote:
Yes, good issue to raise. It's interesting that the wingnuts on the DIF routinely try to use this dynamic as an attack on feminism: The NWO got ladies out of the kitchen so they could enslave us all. Aaron Russo said so so it must be true blah blah blah.
I think the two are separate. Dual incomes are a pragmatic response to a decline in real wages and increasing financial demands that evolved of necessity irrespective of whether women are allowed to leave the house for purposes other than shopping and coffee mornings.
Some people where one party does have a large paypacket do indeed still have one of them staying at home to look after the kids, do the hoovering and perhaps shag the milkman if they still have one. All that should have happened is a choice as to who works and who stays at home. It was inevitable women would start working more anyway - they ran the fucking country during WWII while all the blokes were shooting at each other.
The shit thing is he way two incomes has become so normalised. It kinda happened and nobody notices. In the same way everyone seems to have forgotten further education used to be free. Soon we'll be forgetting poor people got legal aid and disabled people once claimed benefits.
The distinction I would make is that I'd like women to have the option to stay at home and fulfill the role of a traditional housewife - not a slave as suggested by the document - which is, of course, impossible for the majority of families in society, even those that manage to stay together. And even many of those that are economically able to do so choose not to, as if not getting back to work ASAP is some sort of failure. "You have to be a housewife, and you have to be chained to the kitchen whether you like it or not", is self-evidently bad, but "you cannot be a housewife whether you want to or not, and you will feel social pressure to get back in the workplace rather than raise your children" is equally bad, in my opinion.
This is before you go into a point that a female friend of mine has raised which is that women are putting off having children to a later and later date due to economic reasons, but actually this frequently poses fertility problems. Or even worse, not having them at all, to the point that several nations are experiencing massive demographic problems, and many more will in the future. We tell ourselves that our modern way of living is so sophisticated and superior to what went before it, but are we any happier? Do we have more free time? Are we better off financially? Have our social relationships improved? And are we doing a better job of raising the next generation? I would probably say "no" to all of those.
But we do have a lot of consumer goods to make up for it, we do have the freedom to consume. And ultimately everything in our society and social systems is directed to ensuring we do more of that, whatever the social cost is, not to mention all of the other obvious problems that it creates.
