Maybe if women aren't joining you in your fight, it's because you've declared war on women. Not many black people fought for the South either.
258
Oh, gee. Here we go again. The American family as conservatives yearn for (but never existed) is under attack, again or still, and it's all women's fault. Correction. It's the fault of women who dared to believe they were more than breasts and uteruses, that they could contribute to more in our society than its census roles. What tired tripe. Schlafly was an ugly-spirited woman who preached "stay home" while actually traveling up hill and down dale to spread her bilious messages, collecting healthy paychecks in the process. No staying home for her!
The answer is simple, lady. Marry. Often if you wish. Have children until your own uterus falls out, if that's the life you choose. Just don't try to force your lifestyle on the rest of us. I promise you that no one will make you marry another woman or take birth control.
268
Very interesting article!
10
"Perhaps the reason no Schlafly has emerged is the same reason Schlafly was such a singular figure in her own time". I'm 66 and would posit that probably the reason no new Schlafly has emerged is that everyone I knew at the time (male and female) couldn't stand her. How could you respect someone trying to resist the breaking of the chains that women have worn throughout time? If American society lost some elements that made things "familiar" for my generation (like all the Mommies stayed home), it has benefited, in my opinion, from the fact that whether your chromosomes are XY or XX, you can, with a bit of financial help and a lot of work, do anything you want and be anything you want. If we had better national policy, it would certainly make everyone's life easier, especial for children. But like it or not, the days of "Father Knows Best" are over. This is, and I hope, will continue to be the century and millennium of women. They have certainly earned the right to be free.
194
Sigh.
Citing data generated from “The Institute for Family Studies” to support your argument is like using The Trump Foundation as a source for an article about business ethics.
Tucker Carlson is also laughably quoted here as a subject matter expert on... gender issues? The guy who said that “sexual harassment is a concept made up by Democrats”? And that rape survivors who don’t immediately come forward are “part of the problem”? The Tucker Carlson from Fox News who said that Iraq was not worth invading because it was a country made up of "semiliterate primitive monkeys”?
Ms. Andrews is forces to include biased, suspect data and individuals of Mr. Carlson’s ilk because her argument is otherwise unsubstantiated. Women go to school and get jobs because that’s what they (we) want to do.
Besides, the heir to Phyllis Schlafly that Ms. Andrews is begging to step forward already exists- as Serena Joy Waterford, author of "A Woman's Place," architect of Gilead.
175
OMG!! This was hilarious!! The later parts of the essay made good points, but how you got there was hilarious. "SEE!?! Working women made things expensive. And they don't want to work anyway! So we should go back to the 50's when women were dependent on men and had few other options!!"
How about we acknowledge the world is different so we need to adapt, not go back.
Lets not forget that America is now the world's cash cow and no way are they going to accept us giving less milk.
I will admit the questions and the answers are more complex than usually shown. But I will never vote republican because of the idiots who share your tent and are more likely to take away control of my body, my vote and who I can be or love.
168
I find it interesting that the author of this rather convoluted essay is a”working” woman with a responsible white collar job. Her premises are faulty and therefore her conclusions have little or no merit.
108
I don't understand why the NYTimes would choose to publish this (overly lengthy) column on the front page of the SundayReview section. It takes so much space to make a ludicrous, offensive, and overly simplistic point that women should be shoved back into the home where they belong. This column actually contains quotes from a Tucker Carlson monolog about men making less than women, and subsequently women not wanting to marry them. Come on, statistically, women still make less than men, and nobody makes enough to get by, even in a two income household. Maybe women are marrying less, and having fewer babies for other reasons, like for example the fear of climate change, having no money because of student debt, or lack of libido.
Let"s be real here, in these times, where we are facing a loss of democracy, the NYTimes has a responsibility to publish and use its space for legitimate ideas and not for a column that has no basis in fact, and spreads more ignorance and backwardness.
165
It's the income inequality stupid. Raise wages and either one or two earners can have a choice how they want to raise a family. Many stay at home parents are freelancers or part-timers who would love affordable child-care so they could have a few hours of "work time" each day. Personally I think a better organized child (<4 yr.old ) day care system run by competent professionals is what is needed...children in daycare generally thrive better than those raised exclusively by exhausted, frustrated parents. Conservatives will not be happy until women are back in the kitchen, gays are back in the closet and men are free to exhaust themselves paying for the American dream.
65
Phyllis Schlafly was a bigot & a hypocrite. And celebrating the defeat of the E.R.A.? Please. Why was this even published here?
156
Sounds like socialized feminism to me...
5
First, Phylis Schlafly wasn’t fighting for women to progress she was fighting for them to sit down and shut up. Stay out of politics and let the men do it because they knew best. When asked why what she did was appropriate in view of her views she made it clear that she was special! Please. The views expressed in this article on old Phyllis are revisionist history.
As to conservative men protecting families, what a crock. Conservative men are against health care for kids, families, seniors, pregnant women and everyone else. They are against good wages and fair pay. They are for tax cuts for billionaires. They are against clean water, air and food and for gun sales with no limits, supporting the anti human regime in Saudi Arabia and else where. I could go on and on.
I’m sick of this kind of delusion being presented as scholarly discussion. It’s retooled right wing anti women propaganda, nothing more. Enough.
216
finally. Someone to stand up against the feminist agenda.
12
Helen, they're keeping their mouths shut like their husbands tell them to....focusing their entire lives on being moms like god intended!!!!! My god, to mention Schlafly in the first paragraph just gave you away....and the only reason any of you have a platform at all is because of the rights won to you by liberal women.
109
Whenever people say, “you don’t need to work” to a presently stay-at-home-mom, grandmothers as far back as time role in their graves. Wake up. All people: men, women, gender fluid -all need to develop skills, expertise through experience in the work force/outside of the “family”. Have you heard of accident, divorce, death, or illness? We are obsessed with the transient period of infant and toddler care and what women “choose” to do postpartum. Families figure that out any way they can, seven ways to Sunday. Then each adult finds their role in society/the world. Both my grandmothers worked and raised babies/kids in the hellishly sexist 40,s /50’s.
Btw: “baby wearing” in a factory or shipyard (where Rosie the riveters worked in ww2) really would not have been good for the family.
38
“By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else. Pressing the brake on the trends set in motion by the feminist revolution would leave women more free to follow a diversity of paths.”
Opinion without facts. I.e. Deranged Donnie mode. Exactly how have we made it harder to do anything but pursue success in the workplace? How are women impeded from a diversity of paths by feminism?
Next she’ll be offering the opinion that women should do nothing but make babies and keep house!
54
The sub headline today about 'men leading the charge' is truly one of the more ludicrous that I have seen in the NYT in recent memory. Democratic men and women are 'leading the charge' for families, but no conservatives of any sex or gender. Does that that help clean it up a bit?
32
For me, the second paragraph says it all. Marriage rights for gays, unisex bathrooms, women in combat - all these things happened, and surprise! Here we are, and all is chugging along. The Armed Services haven’t imploded. People use public restrooms freely and safely. Boys and girls still can tell each other apart. Gay married couples turned out to be as ordinary and good as some heterosexual married couples (it has always been straight people who messed up marriage in multiple ways). So, please retire, women social conservatives. You were wrong about far more than you were right. Time to acknowledge your failure, and let others lead.
108
The writer laments that “In the 40 years since that banquet, nearly everything that Schlafly warned that E.R.A. would bring about has been achieved by other means, from coeducation at military academies to gay marriage.”
If the question is where socially conservative women are in some battle to “protect” the American family, maybe the answer lies in the fact that changes such as coeducational military academies and gay marriage have proven not to be the things from which the “family” needs protecting. Why waste one’s time fighting something that isn’t a threat?
50
Maybe there is no “heir” (shouldn’t it be “heiress?”) to Schafly because in their oppressed hearts they know that she was wrong.
68
Women who care about the rights of others- all others- are Democrats.
This author is a typical “Conservative”- as the label has been co-opted- concerned with taking choices away from people and drawing moral equivalents where there are none.
Phyllis Schlafly would be proud.
And that is not intended as a compliment!
43
Women have always deserved to be paid for their labor to produce children. Whether this pay goes to a mothers investment portfolio or hospital bill, paying daycare, or birthing stipends, it doesn’t matter. Women keep having babies for free but the new generation is buying the “motherhood” badge of honor. I’m releasing a book in a couple weeks on biblical feminism—“Pink Sunglasses and Yoga Pants: 31 Reflections On Biblical Feminism.” I’m not a political organizer however I did want to provide somebiblical thought behind the dying gender role argument
4
Ms. Andrews, yours is the voice of inexperience.
28
This author sounds a bit like Serena Joy, advocating that women give up hardwon liberties...in return for...what? A return to the mythical 1950s when everything was do fantastic?
36
Who on earth okayed publishing this overtly sexist screed?
"If you asked the women in the David Autor study...which they’d rather have, a few extra cents an hour or a husband and a child, what do you think they would say?"
Choice, probably. Like fully equal adults, instead of the whimpering infants desperate for husbands and children and a Phyllis Schlafly figure to save them that Andrews seems to think women are. (While we're here, it *would* be great if public policy moved to make it easier for one parent to stay home, and not to "shovel" both parents into the workforce--but why fixate on women? There are men who'd prefer to stay home, and women who'd prefer to work.)
Why is outright sexism still acceptable fodder for the Times opinion section? Women should care more about husbands and babies than the fight for fair wages? Women need a figure to save them from their desire to be equal humans? Both the author and whoever okayed this piece should do some real soul-searching.
61
When I saw the title of this piece I thought, quite honestly, that this had to be something from the Onion. It borders upon self satire to see a privileged, educated woman opine about the good old days of brutal patriarchal family structures that she simply assumes - with no evidence other than nostalgia - are superior to what she sees today. She is being utterly foolish.
While she offers nothing to support the goodness of her cause, her choice of "conservative" as a label in 2019 connotes little today but fervent racism, unending corruption, undeserved male privilege and oligarchy. How that ever supports real loving families is beyond me, and clearly far, far beyond her.
61
Oh, my. I’m nearly speechless. Under what upper middle class rock has this woman been hiding all these years? There are no women leaders pushing “conservative women’s issues” because there is no such thing. Conservative women have wrapped themselves in the anti-abortion movement and have ignored the problems faced by real, living women. Thankfully, this movement of rich white ladies is dying on the vine as the likes of Tucker Carlson take their rightful place as the “defender of the weaker sex.” Phyllis Schlafly? I’m choking on my orange juice.
59
Astonishing article..... astonishing in that 55 years after Betty Friedan wrote that women were not being treated as equal humans... forget "citizens" ... equal human beings, that this article's muddled, impoverished thinking still remains among some educated women, as well as men. The culture warriors continue to oppress women. No let up. What explains this piece? Well, many readers may not know that the Washington Examiner, as are the Washington Times and Fox News, is a right wing news outlet. Whenever I go onto the news aggregator Google News and see some wacky, distorted headline, such as " AOC Displays Ignorance" or "Hillary Clinton Emails Reveal Treason" (these are made-up, but similar to their real headlines) even before I look down to see which news source is pandering the distorted slanders, I know that it has to be one of those three right wing news sources... Oh, or the Daily Caller.
Let's be careful out there, people. This is propaganda masquerading as disinterested analysis.
46
American individualism is really at the centre of the problem. The idea of group rights and maximizing the outcomes of the family just doesn't make it within American 21st century priorities. That's why Americans work the longest hours and have the smallest holiday/vacation breaks. That's why they don't marry. The feminist agenda is far better aligned with the basic narcissism of the American life than Schlafly's family oriented 50's vision. I wish that their were more Schlafly types around but every culture revolution has to finish its run. No marriage and/or no children will in the end kill off both feminism and liberalism in Western society. Kind of ironic that the people who don't believe in Darwin will when the future generation by its very tenant.
5
What a joke. I can’t believe commenters are giving her argument serious thought. In 2019, it should be greeted with mockery. Send this woman back to the 50s.
42
Phyllis was a sham. The hypocrisy is in her resume. The visual proof in her condescending smile. Her slip was showing. And feminists back in the day knew it and we remember.
Beware the conservative feminist - speaking on behalf of women's "rights", there is no such animal.
40
This is an extremely regressive, woman punishing article. Women giving up their rights and gains in society's wealth to bolster men who can't meet the unreallstic masculine goals set by society? NEVER.
26
Ms. Andrews, why are you satisfied being critic and encourager, instead of creator and leader stepping up to the focused effort you seek from someone else?
7
Of course women want to marry a man with a job! We know that we’ll be doing the bulk of the housework, child care, and social organizing, so who would want to do all that AND work outside the home AND take care of a layabout?
40
You mean the women so demonized by the left that can only be housewife automatons? Conservative women are active - the press chooses to ignore this demographic except to make fun of our demean it.
7
While I realize there are two sides to every story, I cannot fathom why you would possibly believe that Caucasian males are leading the fight for families? When did Caucasian males begin to understand the challenges that females have thrust upon them? When a family dissolves, secondary to divorce, death, its the females who keep that family together, never a conservative male.
When children need tutorial assistance, or there is an emergency at school, the father is never called. Phyllis Schlafly was an example of females who promoted themselves over the needs of all females. When a family dissolves, is it in the interest of all females to be fairly paid so as to insure that the tumble into poverty for that child & mother is not complete. But never, the Bachmanns, Schlaflys of the conservative movement only sought self promotion, never female legal protection.
As far as conservative women voices, they need to do the United States a favor & keep their mouths shut. Women's health care, financial equality for jobs performed & recognition that if non conservative women stop having babies, the United States will cease to exist. I take that back, because after all, those old conservative Caucasian men will be able to impregnate enough women to populate the United States. Really? GBV&HA [God Bless Viagra & Heart Attacks]. Barbt stated this more succinctly.
17
I had to read this whole dumb, sexist article to land on the idea that we need to consider pros and cons of two-income households when creating policy?
13
The author here is ignoring the fact that our planet is in severe danger from climate change, due to overpopulation and pollution. The decision not to continue to breed more humans is an intelligent one, and should be encouraged. Having multiple children is a selfish and ego-based thing to do in these times. Thanks to birth-control, so many women are now able to live happy, productive lives to better our world through so many formerly male-dominated fields, like science, politics, medicine, and education. Let's make it easier for women to be contributing members of society, rather than turn the clock back to when women were just oppressed by men to be breeders.
24
Get us a health care plan that doesn’t force people to work full time. That way parents can split their wage earning time as best suits their situations. To espouse family values without going all out for universal health care is either pure hypocrisy or pure stupidity.
30
This author simply wants the return of a white, patriarchal system. My advice: find a time machine and return to 1851 Georgia
36
This is indeed interesting. A NY Times article that does not hold Phyllis Schlafly up to ridicule! A step forward!
I was admiring a photo of the bronze statue of Artemision Zeus today, a product of Greece's Golden Age, when the first truly realistic statues of humans appeared, partly because bronze made detailed rendering more possible. I was wondering how the Greeks must have felt in the Age of Pericles when they had made advances in art every bit as stupendous as our discovery of evolution or relativity.
Athens also provided the world with its first experiments with democracy, including the right to trials by jury, although the rights of women were severely limited. But democracy did not last. And Socrates was executed in 399 BC because of politically correct speech.
Why did the Greeks regard women as having separate rights from men? The obvious reason was that fighting was a necessity in ancient Greece, and women didn't fight but stayed at home with children. Greece had gone through a Persian war and went through a bloody was with Sparta.
The views in ancient Athens might have been close to those of Phyllis Schlafly, in which men and women are seen as having different roles.
Perhaps it was war that doomed the Athenian democracy to replacement by more autocratic governments.
Just as the inability of readers of the NY Times to consider broader viewpoints may doom what is left of our own democracy.
Liberals seem to have trouble allowing freedom of speech.
5
The idea of tapping into one's Social Security to take parental leave is an example of economic punishment, not reward. So the person who taps into his/her Social Security will have to work longer at a higher rate of pay than when he/she left for parental leave to replace the withdrawal.
Politicians can keep working well past the age when they would be dumped by business. When the 2008-09 recession hit, I can tell you that many of my friends over 55 lost jobs never to regain the economic status they once had. This is reality so tapping into Social Security may look like that payment is a long way off and is not a necessary part of retirement, but periods of unemployment have been part of most working peoples' lives. Who, of those proposing this idea, had no income during the recession?
35
Great essay! And imagine it being in the New York Times? Hooray for the editors! Steps on a lot of PC landmines, but these work-family tensions are all over the place and being solved without open discussion by default. Elizabeth Warren's book TWO-INCOME TRAP remains a classic and she should take ownership of it, regardless of current political pressures. More discussion of these issues is better. Long overdue. (Also nice clarification on media distortions of Tucker Carlson's somewhat similar analysis some weeks ago.) Also need more discussion of the lack of "family-wage" jobs for men.
11
So where is the conservative leader who is going to step up and advocate for a universal child subsidy, for a working or SAH parent? I don't think such a leader exists. That's why Republicans poll poorly on these issues. They simply don't have any policies, besides those mentioned in the article, which are a shortcut to making social security revolve around private accounts.
17
I took the time to read this essay carefully. I wanted to have an open mind and understand the case the writer was making and the ideas she had for addressing the issue. Sadly, I’m never going to get that time back.
Regardless of how one feels about shifting gender roles, they are not the cause of the social ills described here and no cherry-picked study or statistic will prove otherwise. Basic observation and common sense tell us they are caused by a society that has grown more interested in material things than family and community, and by an economic/political system increasingly driven by greed and corruption. Until we find a way to change that, opinions like those expressed in this essay will continue to distract us from the real changes that need to be made.
44
"political conversation tends to overlook those women who would prefer to raise their children in one-breadwinner families like the ones they grew up in."
Pray tell - most women today were NOT raised in one-breadwinner families. Not sure where she is getting her data from about this. That boat sailed in the 1970s and 80's - so those women would be in their 30's now - and the baby boom echo mainly had two working parents.
Privileged much?
28
In the statement: "When mothers started entering paid employment in large numbers in the 1970s, it led to a bidding war over middle-class amenities that left everyone paying more for the privilege of being no better off than before."
Ms. Andrews pictures a zero-sum competition for economic and social status, and suggests the cause our current culture malaise is women entering the workforce and inflating the cost of entry into the middle-class. In this worldview, what is unsaid (but not a stretch to extrapolate) is the role in this of immigrants. Has not the influx of overseas academics, professionals and financiers since the 70's also inflated the cost of "middle-class amenities" (for instance, seats at Harvard)? So if society is better off without women diluting the workforce, would it not be better without these immigrants also?
Also, citing Patrick Brown: “If you’re on Twitter, the energy behind broadly pro-natal politics tends to be male, for reasons I’m not sure of,” Mr. Brown said. Now that is a bit disengenuous, It doesn't take more than a few more steps down the twitter and reddit rabbit hole to suss out those "reasons". It has everything to do with the association of "pro-natal" politics in America with "white replacement" conspiracy theories and "identitarian" politics, which are male-dominant. When you fill in the blanks in these social conservative articles, you can see that none of it is benign.
35
In most cases pregnancy is a choice in our country and I don't want to subsidize it with parental leave/childcare policies which use tax dollars. If you want children, great, but you pay the cost. I contribute enough taxes supporting public education, which I applaud. On what historical basis did we even decide to subsidize people to have kids?
6
on the simple basis, that the society does need more people to pay taxes to help care for the older members of the society, not to mention the society just needs people who will care for elders.
26
Even most "socially conservative" women champion a woman's right to prevail over her own body and a woman's right to choose whether to have a baby or not. Socially conservative men are simply much less likely to champion those beliefs. Men run most things in socially conservative America. Socially conservative women's response to this is to quietly do what they themselves want (quietly abort their baby and tell everyone they miscarried) yet leave all the executive decision making to men, no matter how clueless those men might be....
12
I ended up with no just one but two deadbeat husbands who took off and left me holding a bag containing two kids, a house and a car payment. I pulled up my big girl panties, went back to school, established a good and rewarding career, raised two awesome adults both now with wonderful families of their own, cared for both of my parents until their passing. Now I’m happily enjoying a comfortable retirement. I could not have done any of those things without the women who preceded me who fought for the rights I enjoy every day. This article is nothing but a big fat insult.
96
Wow. If anything epitomizes the incredibly limited thinking of a conservative, this does it. The author seems to be suggesting that we go back in time to a point where people got married because economically they had no other choice. Now when people do have a choice, they don’t seem to want to. But instead of pondering why that is and finding things like how capitalism has turned us into consumer robots and we humans are struggling to be able to connect emotionally, the author would prefer to bypass that difficult discussion for the easier and more cowardly route of painting a rosy picture on a past that was anything but. Slavery, whether physical, emotional or economic, is never a step forward for mankind. It is a step back. We can do better than this.
44
Although this essay takes an interesting direction, it is based upon false assumptions, even thought those assumptions are widely shared among a readership that sadly asks the wrong questions.
The assumption is that more growth is good, that growth can be continued forever, that growth will lead to prosperity in some dreamed-of golden age to come.
Planet Earth is pushing back. Global warming and climate change is Planet Earth telling us: No. Growth is not always good. No there are limits to resources and limits to growth.
It is said that 6 million people died in the thirty-years was, partly a war over opposing views of Christianity. Nobody seems to have asked the obvious question: Wasn't killing people in battle inconsistent with turning the other cheek as proclaimed by Christianity's leader in the sermon on the mount?
So today, we have political battles over how to increase the number of children born, even as the evidence from global warming is unmistakeable: The world is already overpopulated.
We need a one- or two-child policy for the survival of Planet Earth. Yet while liberals hold up conservatives for ridicule for denying global warming, they essentially deny the limits to growth necessitated by living on a finite planet in essays like this which essentially: The problem is not having ENOUGH children.
That way liberals can continue to characterize the only rational people left in our society as racists and bigots because they oppose population growth.
1
She didn’t consider the women who never wanted kids or to marry in the first place but had societal norms pressured on them. My mom was the breadwinner and my dad never came close to her salary even when he worked two jobs (one was running his own business). She even said if people hadn’t pressured them, they may not have had kids. I wish she had the freedom like I do now. Yes, I may not have been born but I never would have known that (science). Maybe men should suck it up. Don’t blame my wanting of a career and the freedom and fun of having a well paying job as the cause of men’s ego problems. If men want to get married, maybe they should accept their new reality in the world. For the record, I’m married.
33
I’m 55 and for the first time since graduating from college, I’ve taken a break from the working world. The last 25 years have been spent juggling a great job, 2 wonderful children, aging parents and a husband with some serious health problems.
Honestly, it’s just too much. Too many months and years trying to keep all the balls in the air and afraid that if I didn’t keep going, something really bad would happen. I’m completely fried.
Is this what it means to have it all?
I certainly agree with the author that it’s time to take a step back and look at how we can support what we value in this country. I’m not sure what the answer is but I’m glad to see the conversation starting.
13
What’s wrong with men “leading the charge” for traditional family values? Doesn’t the Bible state that women should submit to their husbands? We now have a President who meets with widespread approval among socially conservative women and as well as men, one whose commitment to traditional values has been demonstrated by the nomination of Supreme Court justices and other judges who have promised to protect families against abortion, homosexuals, and people using rest rooms not designated for their biological sex. Are President Trump, those he has designated to carry out his policies, and the Republican Congressmen who follow and endorse him not worthy of conservative women’s trust? It seems presumptuous of Andrews to suggest that these men need women to serve as handmaids when they are fully capable of communicating the truth and carrying out God’s will.
3
@CA Meyer God is a has been. Leave this has been alone. Who is to determine the "will of God." The God of more than 52 galaxies. Even scientists, those that believe, have an extremely difficult time figuring out how the universe works. Try to do no harm is probably the best we can do. "Love one another as I have loved you," is another good one but only for Christians and this group of people is a minority religion on the face of this planet.
8
"Social security earned leave" is not "laudable."
Right. Because the social security pot is definitely big enough to dip into now. More conservative reasoning for you!
11
It's 2019 and we're still debating whether or not it's okay to put baby rearing, and ultimately, the growth of a cheap workforce first at the expense of women's rights to choose what they want to be in life. That there hasn't been a majority of men who want to "be stay at home dads" step up is very telling. This article and debate is stuck in the mud, and continuing an old fashioned, divisive, patriarchal argument that pits the modern business woman’s life preferences against the conservative homemaker's dreams, with a subtle and evil sub-plot aimed at handing all power back to the very men who have failed to govern responsibly or engineer the structures of this society to prevent this conflict of interests from happening. How about we skip this selfish debate and go straight to the top with teeth. Raise the minimum wage to $20/hr for part time and $70K/salary full time workers nationally. Give everyone universal healthcare and childcare. Give stay-home parents with children under 3 a tax credit that supports their financial handicap during those early childhood years. Alleviate the financial pressures that makes parenting stressful and financially deprivational, and see if families begin to form again. We have engineered a base society where the primary value of men to women is cash-earner and where the primary value of women to men is baby-breeder. Let people choose to couple and have babies or not without government-engineered, financial pressure forcing their decisions.
24
It must be lovely have one's opinion published in the NY Times. This opinion stirred my memories of an abusive marriage beginning at age 18.
I got married in the 1970s, when the US Senate passed the ERA for ratification. My husband pulled my hair, grabbed my arm, and physically pushed or pulled me in many ways to force me to do what he wanted. He threw food, laundry, and other objects at me to show his displeasure with me. He demanded I go to therapy to "get fixed". I was depressed and anxious. I left him when he was with his girlfriend.
I volunteered in battered women's shelters, rape crisis programs, and care programs for abused kids for the next 25 years. I earned a Ph.D. and worked with crisis emergency services outside the U.S. I received research grants and published research on family abuse and violence. There's a lot family violence but I never saw evidence that 'equal pay for equal work' caused this violence. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms a 20% gender pay gap for equal work in 2018. Forty years of research from around the world shows economy inequality contributes to oppression, family violence and dysfunction - exactly the opposite of the thesis here.
Denying the benefits of science-based vaccinations is bringing back a measles epidemic. What harm is this narrow-minded opinion trying to resurrect?
660
"Marriage has become less appealing in part because of the “two-income trap,” as Senator Elizabeth Warren, now a 2020 presidential candidate, christened it in 2003, when she was a Harvard professor. Marriage simply no longer offers the financial security it once did. The consumer goods that singles buy have gotten cheaper, but the things that middle-aged parents spend the most money on — houses, education, health care — have gotten more expensive, while wages have stagnated."
Well, here's a basic logical reasoning failure (which comes as no surprise from this author). The author erroneously conflates marriage with "parenthood" in this confused, ill-conceived paragraph. Um, singles and married people have to buy houses and health care, too. For DINK couples, marriage is still a benefit. It's a tax-advantaged arrangement, and obviously, splitting fixed costs is financially sound.
243
I wonder what the author would say about conservative policies that require poor women with children to work in order to get healthcare and food assistance.
36
@Observor--While I am for universal free healthcare as a right, I still believe pregnancy is a free choice for most and should be taken only if the parent can pay the cost of having and rearing a child.
8
I couldn't believe that I was actually reading this in the New York Times. A defense of conservative (small c) values founded on an appreciation of what is actually happening in the real world.
This is just one example of the Iron Law of Unintended Consequences at work. The pursuit of "equity" gets us...inequality.
It's one thing for utopian social-experimenters to yap about equality, say, in PhD programs--quite another to tinker with the most basic and time-tested aspects of the human species, in this case a trivial quantity known as "the family."
Read this article and weep.
6
Anyone who is not Trump-like with inherited wealth, and who thinks they will do well economically without a lot of education and some 21st century job skills is living in the past. No one is preventing women from being a mom at home, but for many families, the expense of raising and educating children remains a major problem. Same sex marriage and enrollment in military academies are seen by many people as choices, not problems. Phyllis Schlafly was a bitter, hateful person who worked to limit the choices women could have in life, not expand them.
23
@Bonnie--Yes please note the huge difference in having and rearing a child versus the education of a child. On this latter hand, everyone agrees society wins with education. That's why it is paid for with taxes. But having a child is a free and personal choice for most.
5
Interesting screed outlining all the social ills and problems conservatives pin on women who don’t see themselves and won’t act as inferior to men. Nicely done.
The only thing left out is leggings and their role upending the social order.
31
Schafley “warned” that there would be coeducation at military academies. That’s like somebody warning me that I’m about to win the lottery.
Normally you don’t warn people about good things that might happen.
29
Three major faults glare out from Anderson’s article. First, she and other social conservatives fail to recognize and accept that conservative free-market economics has driven social change. To counter the social changes, they would have to abandon conservative economic values. We can clearly see that conservatives value markets more than the “traditional” family, a structure that, in reality, only covered a small slice of history.
Second, conservatives offer stay-at-home motherhood as the solution to overworked women when a major cause is men’s relative lack of contribution to childcare and housework. Natural solutions to overwork by women—paid leave and increasing men’s contributions at home—run counter to the conservative narrative.
Third, the inherent contradictions between conservative narratives are disgustingly apparent when they try to limit women’s individual liberties. They can’t logically support individualism/liberty and conservative social engineering.
Such contradictions doom the conservative movement. Let it die soon.
28
So: Letting some women choose paid work if they wanted it compelled others who didn't want it into paid work? What?!
The recovery of non-U.S. industry from WW2, technological advances, and reduced protections for labor and consumers, is what drove American women into paid work. Andrews logic appears to be: “If these uppity feminists had just not insisted that women have equal opportunity, working class incomes today would still have the growth rate and relative buying power of 1960.” Ridiculous.
What was feminism’s role? Pushing to ensure that women who needed to work had greater choice and opportunity in the jobs they took; that they were compensated appropriately; that their workplaces were free of sexual humiliation and predation; that employment’s demands not preclude parenthood and marriages’ not preclude an equal share of leisure time; and that women not be the literal punching bags when men lashed out.
I suspect this is why, as Andrews complains, almost all the women’s voices in this debate identify as feminists. Feminism is about freedom, consent, and choice, and the concern here is that many women (as well as men) are being de facto denied the choice to be homemakers by economic circumstance. Concern that rights be real and not just theoretical defines Liberalism in the U.S. Conservatism has little to add, grounded in coercive protection of traditional hierarchy, the infallibility of markets, and clerical authority.
18
@Cormac--ok , as you said: the choice to be a homemaker is the key word. Having children is a free choice(usually) but not a right. So the argument should be about who pays for it. Currently many on the dole are there because they have children and cannot make a job financially reasonable. Why should any worker be forced to support others who made these choices to not work?
4
"Many career moms manage their stressful work-life balance thanks only to low-wage immigrant labor to take care of their children, clean their houses and deliver their takeout." I'd like to see data that substantiates this sentence, specifically the references to the "many" (how many?) career moms' "stressful work/life balance" (staying home with kids is also stressful, and it could be argued lacking "balance"); the "immigrant labor" caring for their children (really? Immigrant labor at Montessori? At pay-through-the-nose daycare? Au pairs? Or is she alluding to the plight of the underpaid working class, disenfranchised women and families of America?); why are these women paying for others to clean their homes, care for their children, and deliver their takeout" and yet "spend nearly as much time on household tasks as their stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers did?" With all of this cheap immigrant labor (sarcasm)? Really? I realize this is an opinion piece, and while the sloppy logic is both amusing and, at times, breathtaking (not to mention beneath the standards I've come to expect of the NYTimes), it provides an interesting glimpse into the conservative mindset re: family...and the latitude Andrews feels entitled to take in respect to journalistic ethics and standards.
25
This is so ridiculous on so many levels. First, who the heck pays 11 dollars an hour for childcare? A nanny costs way more than that, and so does a nursery school. Also, minimum wage should not be 11 an hour! (because it is unlivable). Why not just do what other countries do and give year long paid parental leave? Society benefits. And, make it so jobs are 40 hours a week, not 50 or 60. Divorce healthcare from employment -- many people can't afford to give up their jobs merely because of healthcare.
Moreover, marriage is a guarantee of nothing. After divorce, a woman can be left practically penniless and often men rearrange their jobs to look like they make less, or purposely make less, so they don't have to pay childsupport. Or they just don't pay child support. Or, if the child are gone, they don't pay spousal support, which barely exists anymore, and the former wife, who raised the kids instead of working outside the home, is left in poverty.
27
Strange that the author does not seem aware that the current White House Press Secretary is a socially conservative woman: Sarah Huckabee Sanders, one of the most public champions of GOP efforts to pursue policies in line with the author’s goals. Also strange that she seems unaware of figures such as Penny Young Nance, CEO and President of Concerned Women for America, who has been visibly mobilizing socially conservative women for years. Perhaps such oversights in this article suggest that the author is angling to become “America’s foremost anti-feminist” herself?
8
The conservative female "leaders" out there are as abhorrent as can be - Tomi Lahren and Jeanine Pirro come immediately to mind - and spew the kind of dogwhistle lies and propaganda that appeal to a very specific base of voters for the sole purpose of keeping them angry and ignorant. I suspect Andrews' article, which calls out Tucker Carlson without a shred of irony, is also whistling long and loud to those who keep an ear out for this kind of thing. Additionally, if conservative women think all that matters is having babies and being 'marriageable' how are they supposed to be out leading, anyway?
The rest of us will look outward to the rest of the world, much of which has a higher standard of living, and to accomplished women already in the field like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who are doing the hard work of coming up with solutions to the problems of childcare, maternity leave, wage stagnation, fair taxation, and equality - the real reasons Americans struggle - instead of whinging about how feminism ruined America.
21
A perfect proof that gender does not determine your ideology. Just the opposite: your political ideology determines your experience of gender. I am a woman, a wife and a mother. And every statement in this article is repugnant to me. All women want to get married? Seriously? I married because I fell in love, not because I wanted a diamond ring. All women are first and foremost mothers? Motherhood is only one of my many identities and not the most important one. All women want to stay at home with their kids? You got to be kidding. I couldn’t wait to get away from changing diapers. My sons are grown now and having had nannies and other forms of daycare does not seem to have affected them at all. The author speaks for herself only, not for normal women who don’t want to have their husbands as their employers and their kids as their CV. In short, I will take a male feminist over a female conservative any time.
28
So we all need to take care of other people’s children so they can enjoy a middle class life style? Pipe dream.
1
Barefoot, pregnant and obedient. The “ conservative “ man’s dream, most Women’s total nightmare. NO THANKS. If this is showing all Viewpoints, I’ll pass. I feel so demeaned that I need another shower. Seriously.
32
Socially conservative women have the option to live their lives as they choose. Unfortunately, their lives must be incomplete if they cannot compel others to live as they do.
34
Socially conservative women are counting their tax cuts. Dah...
7
What’s wrong with “co-education at military academies and gay marriage”?
This woman is antedeluvian...
22
Why do we have to deal with this issue from a conservative or liberal point of view? Why not from a common sense view.
Finally someone is willing to state the obvious. More people in the work place brings everyone’s wages down, it called the law of supply and demand. What is needed is for people to get paid a decent wage so someone, man or woman, could stay home or work part time if they wanted. Quess what no one gets to have it all men or women.
7
This entire piece is one big logical fallacy - namely, confusion of correlation with causation. Women entering the workforce in larger numbers is not the cause of any of the economic or social ills complained of, and women leaving the workforce is not the solution.
21
The reason that men are the advocates of making it easier for women to leave the labor market and be stay at home housewives and mothers is that the principal beneficiaries of that change would be men. Most obviously, it would diminish competition in the labor market. Most importantly, it would fundamentally change the balance of power in marriages and other sexual relationships by making women more dependent economically on the husband-breadwinner-patriarch. A woman without marketable skills of her own is simply less able to leave a marriage and more compelled to accept her husband's behavior that she wouldn't tolerate if she could afford not to. A woman with her own earning power has less need to subordinate herself to a male partner in the first place.
31
Sounds like a whole lot of problems actually caused by stagnated wages. Maybe if Conservatives we’re willing to work harder for better treatment of workers by the business interests they worship, families might be in s better place? I don’t know.
Elizabeth Warren is the most pro-family candidate by a country mile.
26
@A. Miller
And also the extreme cost of education. Maybe if we actually had decent public schools parents wouldn't need two incomes to ensure they had hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed away to provide their children a decent education.
Why aren't conservatives advocating for strengthened public schools?!?!? What a puzzle.
18
I have not researched the ERA movement, and I am a male, so no expert here. I find this article insightful, but it displays the simple conservative trap of deceptive correlation. This issue is immensely complex. It is not as simple as trading a few cents for a husband, a concept which is appalling. Treating women equally, in rights and in pay, is the foundation of what it means to be a civil and just society. And if with that equal pay women decide they do not need a husband, that is their choice to make.
This article also is narrow in it's definition of family. There are many more healthy arraignments for a family than one women, one man, and some kids. It seems to be hard for conservatives to allow someone else to have their liberty, but the simplistic nuclear family is not required to have healthy children and a sustainable society.
Further, this author tries to tie women entering the workforce with a decrease in family creation. In truth, during same time cited, the country was still climbing out of a terrible economical crisis, perpetuated by guess what, disastrous conservative policy. Not mentioned at all, perhaps this also had an effect on family creation.
It's true that traditional families are having to work more to maintain their standard of living, but this has more to do with the relentless attack by conservatives on smart social programs, prioritizing the corporation over the individual, and disproportionately favoring the wealthy over the rest of us.
27
The real world is messy.
I think it must be conceded that households where one spouse focuses on earning and one spouse focuses on domestic concerns are more efficient and stable, generally speaking.
However, the spouse that stays home is definitely getting the short end of the stick, foregoing the years of marketable skills they'd gain by participating in the labor force, and children probably do not benefit from being disproportionately raised by one parent and not the other. Moreover, if/when something happens to one spouse (hopefully after the kids are grown), the other often has trouble adapting. The countryside is full of widows being swindled and widowers who can't cook for themselves.
9
This is in many ways a compelling essay. However, if family planning (including abortion rights) were to be acknowledged as a vital tool for ...planning families, that would make it even more so.
6
If this author spoke to very many people under 35 who have not married, even if in long-term stable relationships, she would likely have found that many are not marrying because they want to create independent financial stability before joining finances with a partner. And that has become more difficult with the ongoing trend of flat wage growth and the aggregation of wealth by the already-wealthy. Economic security relates directly to personal security, and the "conservative" agenda that talks about family but promotes economic inequality is a farce.
20
I've been reading about and living 'women's issues' since the 60s.
While there has been some progress, the following remain:
-Unequal pay for equal work
-The Glass Ceiling
-Government by the men, for the men
-Conservative Supreme Court now qualifed to take away a woman's right to choose
-Women are the majority of voters, yet their progress on equality is not noteworthy. If it was, all the statistics, quotes and studies in the article would not be needed.
-Instead we'd have had a woman president by now, an increase on women running Fortune 500 companies, a majority of women as governor, equal pay for equal work, the list continues.
I don't understand why the author is wondering where the next female anti-feminist will come from. There isn't a need. Women continue to be behind in equality without one. Why look for a leader?
16
Egalitarian feminism - as characterized by Simone de Beauvoir - is concerned primarily with the maximization of freedom for all individuals, generally achieved through the annihilation of oppressive forces.
For as long as America bears any vestigial remnants of governmental theocracy, we will never have this kind of "equality."
Religious belief should be protected. And so should the right to self-determination.
9
I grew up in the fifties and sixties in a “typical” suburban home with a stay-at-home mom and a breadwinner dad for the first few years. And then my breadwinner dad came down with a neurological disorder that was diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. My parents faced the possibility that he would never be able to work again, and my mom got a job. Fortunately, he recovered and was able to return to work. My mom left the workforce a few years later but she eventually returned when I was old enough to be home by myself in the afternoon. Truth be told, she was bored at home and happier and more fulfilled when she was working. But had my father not recovered, she would have had no choice in the matter.
Now lifetime employment at a single company, high wages for manufacturing jobs, and benefits negotiated by unions are increasingly rare. More than ever, we need to consider policies that help all families to thrive, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in. And women—who I suspect participated in the workforce far more than popular culture would have us think in those prosperous times after World War II—need to be prepared for employment because there are no guarantees in this life, for anyone.
27
As a little girl I went door to door in 1960 with my grandmother, a former suffragette, who was campaigning for John Kennedy. She was the one who told me that women had only won the right to vote 40 years earlier. I was shocked—and even more so when she told me that the fiercest opponents of the women’s suffrage movement were other women, who fought against it tooth and nail right up to 1920. “But why?” I asked. “I don’t understand.” “Because some women feel more comfortable in their gilded cages rather than having to take responsibility for their future,” she replied. (I did have to have the word gilded explained to me, but basically I got it.”)
43
I was talking to my girlfriend a week ago about this. We are both 36, with 2 small kids and make in the low six figures, as do our husbands. We would both love to stay home and financially could make it work. But there are two main reasons that hold us back. One: we have worked very hard to get where we are and any type of work that would allow us to spend more time with our kids would be a major step back in our careers. Two: there is no real safety net for us or our kids, so we need to provide that safety net. We probably will not get social security, so we need to save for our retirement. College tuition has not shown any sign of coming down, so we are saving so hopefully our kids won’t start their lives in massive debt. One accident or poor luck could send any family into medical debt - not to mention additional medical needs that will happen after an accident. And god forbid the sole breadwinner loses their job- then we are not going to get as good of health insurance. To live comfortably, as one could’ve in the 50’s on one income, we need to have two incomes. If you wanted me to stay home with my kids - which I would gladly do - then give me free college tuition, universal healthcare and better funding for retirement. Make work more flexible with working from home options and not having to work 50 hours a week. Then we may see choices change.
32
Everyone should have the privilege to work, regardless of your sex in a “family “ . Families can come in all forms like two men raising a family” or a single women raising her child is a”family “
Phyllis and other conservatives think of family as a mother and father and children, how bout open your eyes to the modern day “family”.
In truth the issue at hand is that we don’t get much for our taxes in the states...and the corporate culture is to squeeze every bit of life out of an employee while paying them as little as possible.
We lived in Europe for years because of our military service and saw how their tax dollars are put to use for healthcare and affordable education beginning at birth.
To me it’s less about the social aspects of family if a mother or father should work but how shortchanged our society is because the conservatives decry things like subsidized healthcare and childcare while giving the same handouts to big business especially the military industrial complex.
While stationed in Italy we paid $60 a month for our daughter to attend preschool full time.
We should be demanding more for our taxes than libraries and a police force!!
22
The thing is that unrestrained capitalism forces less wealthy individuals to accept a below middle-class wage, so both partners in a marriage must work fulltime to provide for a family. Anti-feminism seeks to keep the woman from an equal career, taking "bread off the table."
For anti-feminism to be effective, we need o make middle-class life on a single worker possible.
I'm not holding my breath.
9
And yet...Schlafly herself was married to a very wealthy man, had a lot of child raising help, had quite a successful career, was away from home quite a lot and has a gay son. She attended law school in the same time frame as me—and I often ran into her. She was the epitome of an upper class, successful career woman, and seemed to urge women to reject the very things that she had. I could never figure out how she—and her various state clones—managed to carry it off.
40
Andrews seems to be writing from a time warp, describing women of the 1990s who might be longing for their childhood family lives of the 1970s. In particular, saying "women long for the one-breadwinner family of their childhood" is referring, more or less, to women born around 1990. I don't know any women of this age who long to be a 1950s housewife.
19
In short, the stepwise progress towards what the ERA would have gained shows that it should have won. Broken down into pieces, everything it stood for was popular and eventually gained on its own merits, has been retained because they were good. The Bad Guys won that one.
The causation very likely runs the other way than the author proposes for the correlation: declining returns for male employment forced families to take on that second job. The decline was happening mostly because of GOP victories against unionism - the better outcomes in more-unionized countries like Canada and most of Europe show that.
And millions of manufacturing and resource-extraction jobs would have been lost to automation whether women entered the workforce or not.
If you want "family values" and traditional one-job marriages, your best bet is to strongly promote unions, free child care, medical insurance not dependent on a job, lower education costs, even direct payments to all mothers, like Canada's own "Baby Bonus" cheques after WW2.
There's nothing worse for "family values" than Republican policies. Maybe that's why women are fleeing your party.
27
"By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else. " There's some truth in that, but the fault is not with feminism but American-style capitalism. As wages stagnate and the cost of living goes up, it takes two incomes for a family to survive. Working outside the home is no longer an option.
12
The problem isn’t women in the workplace, it’s men and women seeking spouses/partners in the same workplace (e.g., economic strata). I remember reading that nearly 40% of doctors are married to other doctors. As one myself, I get that it’s easier to do so and there is appeal to it. But instead of 2 families in the 2-5% and the wealth redistribution to follow, it means one family in the 0.75-1%. This happens in the other professions as well.
A solution? Tax disincentives for the new nobility. Redistribute the wealth that our American caste system creates.
7
Schlafly has been replaced by a shift in what defines a family. One size fits all families of the 50’s and 60’s have been replaced by options that enable most to define their own. Single parents, same sex parents and traditional woman and man parents all comprise a more contemporary family structure with partners who may or may not be married. Grandparents and extended families no longer live nearby so many families include friends who support friends in raising children. Simply put there is no traditional family there is just family.
Our politicians have not taken significant steps to protect women if they choose to stay home and raise children. In the case of divorce women lose 1/2 of their Social Security income and generally they lose health insurance. Escaping damaging or dangerous relationships without some financial support is mostly impossible. Borrowing money, buying a car or establishing credit is not an easy task if she doesn’t have a job. Nope! There’s just no way of going back and why would we want to do so.
13
If the fatcats didn't hoover up all the money for themselves and pay all workers as minuscule an amount as possible and if there were universal healthcare, both men and women would be a lot freer to choose to marry, have children and stay home or not. As it is, marriage -- and children, whether they're raised by a parent at home or by paid help -- is fast becoming the preserve of the wealthy. An article in the Irish Times this year said, 'In the US, as recently as 1990, 51 per cent of poor adults, 57 per cent of working-class adults and 65 per cent of middle- and upper-class adults were married. By 2017, this had declined to 26 per cent of poor adults, 39 per cent of working-class adults and 56 per cent of middle- and upper-class adults.'
13
The question posted by Helen Andrews - "Where are the socially conservative women in this fight?"- is actually very easy to answer:
Women realized that social conservatism is fundamentally detrimental to their prosperity, health, place in society, and overall well-being.
And that, Mrs. Andrews, is why social conservatism is a cause largely taken up by older white men (mainly in the GOP). Just because you choose to see the world otherwise doesn't make it so.
38
It really should be pointed out that the one-income middle class family was a historical anomaly enabled by the American advantage post World War II--most other world economies had been blasted to ruins--and to a great extent by unionization.
In most other places and times, both parties in a relationship had to work, whether for wages or in a business or on the farm. So to claim we need to go back to a one income household for better family outcomes really flies in the face of historical economics--and before the late 19th century, the idea of "family outcomes" would have seemed pretty strange, too.
23
@Glenn Ribotsky And the kids had to work too, often from a shockingly young age. One reason for having kids was to put them to work.
Even in the 50s, a lot of our mothers and grandmothers worked. Mine were immigrants who worked as domestic servants and in food service.
14
Maybe women are less interested in social conservatism than they used to be. Conservatism is more and more bound up with the crueler, colder aspects of masculinity. Some older women don't think they have any choice but to tolerate that, but why would a young woman with her future ahead of her sign on?
30
Long term paid leave may be a good idea but it still leaves women behind in their career path. Universal child care is the way to go. It would allow women to stay on track. If a 20 year old single mother had free child care she could go to college and enter the work force with much greater earning potential, contribute to society and pay taxes. Universal child care is the best long term solution to fight poverty and to allow women keep pace with men in the workplace.
8
This author makes the fundamental mistake of assuming most women want to marry. Not all women want to marry, and be served up a lifetime of breeding and subservience to a household and a man. There was a time when we had to do that but not anymore. And, for the record, women should NOT be happy getting just a few cents more an hour or even getting a mere $11 an hour. Explain to me, a working mother, the mathematics of hiring household help and childcare help when I make $48 an hour. Perhaps I pay for it in order to experience the world, get a sense of accomplishment, and feed my own ego. Yes, my own ego. Also, if a man is unable to find a “wife”, then that’s his problem, regardless of how much money he makes. I personally wouldn’t care if he made 6 figures if I wasn’t ready or willing to marry.
12
I am a socially conservative woman, and I am not sure I agree with Helen Andrews. A healthy family is based on both parents being able to contribute their talents to society so that children can see both their parents as role models. A healthy family can't be based on one person agreeing to be tremendously vulnerable and invisible and mute.
I can think of other initiatives that would help the family far more than returning to a model that hurt our foremothers. How about a GI Bill for stay-at-home moms? How about tax credits for companies that provide on-ramps for women returning to the workforce after being at home with their children? How about undoing the recent tax law change that made you choose between the standard deduction and your itemized deductions? How about penalizing companies that expect 60-80 hour weeks from their employees? How about new forms of work, such as job sharing between spouses?
I feel sorry that Helen Andrews feels the only way to be a socially conservative woman is to go back to a model that did not work well for women, because a model that does not work well for women does not work well for the family. After all, she's part of the family, isn't she?
27
Women "should want men" they can marry - according to conservative, religious people.
Well then, men need to go into the occupations that now pay better, learn to respect women, and be equal partners.
Women now are a higher percentage of home owners than men, despite wage inequity. Studies have shown that men with lower wages actually do less housework than equal partners.
This article reminds me of incels, also stridently unhappy about what women "should" want and discussing coercive ways to accomplish that goal.
Every county that "allows" women to control their bodies sees a dramatic drop in birth rates within one generation.
That is what women want.
26
If the 1% are the "conservatives," (and I think they are, in the main) then it is that same 1% greed that has harmed the conservative women's movement.
In the 60s, a single woman could survive rather nicely on minimum wage pay - even save for college. I know, because I did it.
But the minute that the wages stagnated and even married women HAD to go to work - that's when the conservative women's "cause" also stagnated.
The solution to their dilemma is simple - the 1% needs to stop being greedy and actually pay its workers. Then women can actually choose to marry, have children, and stay at home to raise those children.
(And that this is not naturally happening just demonstrates the rampant hypocrisy of the "religious conservative right.")
17
Ms. Andrews says:
"In the 40 years since that banquet, nearly everything that Schlafly warned that E.R.A. would bring about has been achieved by other means, from coeducation at military academies to gay marriage."
My reaction:
Thank God.
If we want to help women, look at countries like Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden.
They also are way better at helping the working class.
22
The hours demanded by working professionals in our culture is ridiculous in and of itself. It becomes extraordinarily stressful when one is a parent. Getting mom out of the workforce and into the kitchen only solves half that problem (what about poor dad working 60 hours a week and the kids who never get to see him?), AND it creates new problems (the forfeiture of mom's career and the burden placed on both spouses of her childlike financial dependence?)
There are many levers the government can pull to change this unhealthy dynamic of American work, and I support (almost) all of them. But, business culture also has to change. It is toxic. I work in BigLaw. I am finally senior enough in my career that I can (kind of, sort of) ignore emails on nights and weekends, and I try not to work during those times unless absolutely necessary. It has benefited me, my husband, and my kids. Every day, I feel like I'm part of a one-woman-mutiny. Join me!
18
@LL
Loving what you have to say. I was lucky enough to sell my business and take a six-month sabbatical after grinding it out for 25 years. I was in a bad accident and came back to work just 12 hours a week. Now that I'm looking from the outside-in at my co-workers banging out 8 or 10 hour days in the stressful environment of an Animal Hospital, I don't know how anyone does it. I agree 100%. It's toxic and we have a horrible culture of overworking. We don't know in this culture how to live La Dolce Vita. Kudos to you for pointing that out and I'm with you and many others in the mutiny and choosing life over the hamster wheel
4
My wife and I are in our early 30's, both professionals, and considering having kids, and though not politically correct, the author has a point.
My wife would prefer to work less and spend more time at home, but unless I boost my salary accordingly, we wouldn't be able to continue living in NY on one salary. She was empowered to get an education and a good job, but isn't to leave and raise a family. For people not as fortunate as us the situation is far worse.
6
The author is wrong. The Phyllis Schafly's are alive and well in the "pro-life" and anti-Planned Parenthood movement. That movement is less about "the sanctity of life" than about the perceived social responsibility of every female of child-bearing age to produce offspring, and especially those who are white, middle-class and educated and it matters not to them whether those mothers are married and able to support their children or not. There are so many of these single-issue pro-natalist women in fact who vote reflexively for the anti-abortion party and that is the same party that blocks any government support for working mothers like paid family leave and subsidized childcare that would encourage more young women to start families. Conservative "pro-family" leaders must realize that "pro-family" policies are actually on the other side of the political aisle and urge their followers to vote accordingly,
24
I long for the day when people read or listen to the ideas/opinions of others and then consider if there were any insightful or meritorious points rather than immediately launching into full-blown attack mode. As a father who is firmly committed to equal rights for women I candidly almost skipped past this article, and do share many of the criticisms that others have made. But this doesn't prevent me from recognizing its intriguing points.
For example, on current proposals to provide free or govt subsidized childcare for working families. The article reasonably questions: If we are prepared to pay that money so that a stranger can take care of the child, why wouldn't we be willing to instead give that same money to the family if this made it financially feasible for one of the parents to (voluntarily) stay at home caring for that child? (I actually was surprised by that question coming from a conservative source, given past outrage against perceived abuse of the welfare system.)
As another thought-provoking point, consider the following options:
1) Both parents aggressively pursuing careers with childcare provided by others
2) Same as above except one parent (father or mother) staying home until children are in school full-time
3) One parent pursuing a career full time while the other works part-time or from home.
While the first option would seem the most financially rewarding, which is “best” for the overall health and well-being of the children AND the parents?
6
@JR
The simple answer to your question is that staying home v. paying for daycare/nanny is not always a dollar-for-dollar trade off.
For many women, there is a huge opportunity cost to taking 5+ years out of the work force. That opportunity cost might be her whole career. You cannot simply look at the loss of the salary she would earn if she didn't stay home for five years. You have to play the long game and look at the long term impact of the choice to stay home for 5 years on her career.
If your career is one where experience and longevity don't matter-- waitress, retail clerk, whatever-- then sure, maybe it doesn't make sense for you to lose money or break even on child care costs.
But for a professional? For a lawyer (my frame of reference)? Those 5+ years out of the workforce could crush your career and earning potential for the next several decades. Thus, it's not a smart financial choice.
12
I’m so relieved to that most other readers of this article reacted the way I did. Perhaps the answer to the question in the article’s title is that there is no woman to lead this charge because it is not the path women want to take.
17
The notion that "By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else" is vindictive and disingenuous.
Say what you really mean - it's 2019 and the only place for a woman is in the home or the birthing bed. Let's not even talk about the battle for control of our own bodies or sexuality.
And, the all sainted American family is not under attack but everything else sure is. Maybe that is why people are delaying marriage and childbirth.
11
This article is a salad of non sequiturs, illogical arguments, voodoo economics. and typically inconsistent conservative clap trap.
While hinting at the real social problem crushing families (rising financial inequality), Ms. Andrews skips airily down a memory lane festooned with the nonsense that trapped women throughout most of western civilization's history. Women were considered chattel of their husband or male family members until recently, placing them at the mercy of their male overlords. It is absurd to call for a return to that old paradigm.
We find here on full display the type of conservatism that fights with itself. Ms. Anderson's vision would require massive social overhaul. What ever happened to "conservatives" who hated social engineering? Ms. Andrews should be calling for freedom of choice and the end of gender correctness. Women should be free to pursue their aspirations like, I don't know, editing the Washington Examiner.
We don't learn what Ms. Andrews is actually advocating until the very end. She wants child care "benefits" to redound to families with a stay-home parent. Personally, I'd find that a wonderful idea as long as you means test it. I wonder if she would offer this to single mothers getting assistance, those "welfare queens" that Regan used as an outrage tool to stir middle class resentment in the culture wars. I somehow doubt it. That wouldn't be conservative at all.
Oh, and remember that labor creates capital, not the other way around.
18
In 1986, because I married a pilot who was away more than he was home, I responded to an article in the Toledo Blade, "Women Alive in Toledo." The feature reviewed the lifestyles of women. Not one mention was made of the full time mother/homemaker. Because I remember thinking this lifestyle or role was presumably dead, I wrote a poem "Endangered Species" as an attempt to defend the most important role of all, full time mother. Fast forward to 2019, I would add a verse to my poem to defend the most important roles of all, full time mother, father and family. Life choices in 1986, living in a small town in a small house outside of Toledo, were fairly simple. Who's going to take care of the kids? Live off the income of a person recently hired as a pilot, or the almost volunteer status of a substitute teacher studying for a M.Ed. Both of our choices worked out and I wouldn't call us rich. In 2017 we celebrated our 50 year wedding anniversary.
2
The first thing to consider here is that social conservative implies a retrograde viewpoint that inherently implies a bias against women by championing traditional (read old) views of parenthood tied to gender: men go out and hunt, women stay home and care for children. Certainly there are plenty of women who want to stay home and care for children. However to champion a social structure that forces them to do so imposes a bias, and that bias inherently has, and will, create a leveled distinction. Try to sugar-coat it as you might, if one partner is deemed suitable for earning a living and the other is labeled as destined for providing child care, earning a living is going to be advantaged.
What we need are policies that enable a forward looking outlook on parenting roles, not a conservative one. Couples should be empowered by the decisions they make between them to manage the raising of children, and empowerment comes from choice, not lack of choice. Going back, as the word conservative not only implies but mandates, doesn’t empower couples to make choices about child rearing that suit them–having lots of choices does. Feeling trapped in a gender-based child rearing role doesn’t empower anyone, male or female–being able to choose child rearing options that allow a variety of options does.
My feeling is that it is we men to have to move our attitudes further than the women, and male privilege is only enhanced by so-called conservative social systems. Let’s not go backward.
6
There are so many logical fallacies and unsupported conclusions in this article it’s hard to know where to start, but this one’s at the top of my list.
It’s well documented that almost all of the income growth since the 1980’s has been at the very top of the income scale; everybody else’s has stagnated or declined, even though productivity has vastly increased—i.e., all of the added value went into the pockets of the very wealthiest. If you haven’t been paying attention, that’s because public policy (starting with, but hardly limited to, tax law) ensures that the money flows uphill.
If wages generally had kept up with productivity gains, it would still be perfectly reasonable and possible for a middle-class family to support itself on one income, no matter whether it’s Mom’s or Dad’s. It’s not a gender issue (although equal work for equal pay sure sounds like a reasonable proposition to me); it’s a structural economic issue. Solving it is technically simple but politically explosive: Tax the rich more. No need to invoke bizarre theories of whether people decide to marry or not, or have kids or not, or end up feeling forced to work if they do have kids. If you pay them fairly and they can support themselves, then they’re free to choose whatever lifestyle they want. That sure sounds a lot like a Libertarian idyll to me: Let freedom reign!
Family instability and hardship are the symptoms of an exploitative economic system, not the cause—that would be today’s GOP.
20
@David Walker
I agree with you and take the position that tax structure is the core problem. We tax wage income while letting the wealth generators available only to the very wealthy off the tax hook.
This stems from a basic economic misunderstanding holding that capital produces labor. This idea leads to policies that lower tax on the rich to stimulate formation of capital which is supposed to redound back in the form of more employment. That, of course, isn't happening. The reason for that is simple: labor produces capital, not the other way around.
Until we get the economics right, we're in a death spiral of richer rich and squeezed masses. This article is a weird dance down the memory lane of a fantasy world. Typical of modern social conservatism.
11
I remember feeling crushed as a college student in the 1980's when after getting petitions signed to support the ERA we were unable to meet the deadline and states refused to sign on. I couldn't believe that my country did not want me to be equal. I couldn't believe that other women did not want equal pay for equal work and to have full rights under the Constitution, or would accept the canard the "that all men" included women when clearly it did not nor ever had. I was insulted that the possibilities and aspirations I was being educated to aim for were framed as supplementary to my primary duty of future wife and mother. Who were uber-religious Christian women to limit the rest of us? I'm still upset, but no longer shocked. The author of this article seems to imply that an economy based on marriage, parenting, and an improvement in male wages will lift all boats or lead to less stress for women. I'm dubious. Does this plan also apply to gay people? Minorities? I'm all for better paid leave for new parents, subsidized child care after the first year, public preschool starting at year four, and more flexible working arrangements for all ages. We need higher wages for all workers, higher taxation of the rich, more affordable college, and investment in transportation and infrastructure so those of us who commute aren't wasting hours of our lives stalled in traffic. I would love to be a grandma; my daughter and a mate can't afford it. That part is true.
19
Thank goodness we have (so far) been spared another shrill, attention grabbing, aggressively backward Phyllis Schlafly, who proudly displayed and publicly pursued her suppressive stance on equal rights for women. And thank the tireless women and men who, in spite of her machinations, manage to continue to work diligently to bring equality not just to women, but to all.
26
It is sad to see a push for a new Phyllis Schlafly to emerge - on the heels of the recent damage being done to the social and political fabric by the evangelical right (and make no mistake about it, this is all about the evangelical American Taliban mentality). Phyllis was not a supporter of women's rights, as this author seems to imply, but in truth, supported policies that would have kept women barefoot and pregnant. Spend a little time around the child welfare system in any place in this nation to see what the combination of this circumstance, combined with dropping out of high school or failing to have a quality education and job opportunity and living wage does to the family. This author is trying to use intellectualized arguments to muddy the waters - but real life is still out there. This isn't just about college educated women; in reality it mostly affects those at the other end of the education and income spectrum - with or without husbands or partners. No, we don't need a new Phyllis Shlafly - we need any champion for quality education and living wages - income equality would be a start - and support for children (health care, etc.)
20
This piece is a romantic smokescreen for days gone bye bye. She doesn't even touch the most pressing economic factors that affect "the family"--the hetero married ones she speaks about and the others she makes invisible. Yes, stay at home child care, regardless of gender, should be valued, perhaps by giving families gov't subsidies for the child care of their choice--stay at home parent or hired help. The definition of family must include same sex couples, a relative who is raising a child, unmarried couples, or any arrangement where primary care is given to a child. She doesn't mention other crucial aspects of the conversation: with increasing AI, automation, robots, there will simply be less need for human employment; if we forbade working more than 40 hours a week and a guaranteed basic income for the unemployed, we'd have job sharing and much higher rates of employment, financial security, and happiness. Of course all of this is only possible with a wealth tax (Warren) and increases on federal income and corporate taxes.
10
Like others, I also have unpleasant memories of seeing the loathsome Ms Schlafly defending her views on television, making vile comments through that frozen smile and offering frozen-in-time views toward women and how they are supposed to behave. She seemed to want nothing more than to turn back time 100 years. This writer seems to live in the same deluded universe, blaming feminism for the choices it opened and the freedom it created. She alarmingly seems to think of women only as baby-making machines, when many women choose not to have children because, well, they don't want to have children. And many women work outside the home not because they have to but because they want to. I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. My mother worked as a hospital nurse. I remember her friends who didn't work outside the home asking her why she worked when my father had a good job as an officer in the Air Force. No, we didn't need the money, my mother would tell them. She studied to be a nurse because it was what she wanted to do and she found it rewarding. Being married and having children didn't change that.
23
@Balcony Bill
. . . and all the time Schlafly was on television or at a podium lecturing about what women's lives and ambitions should be, she had her own law degree under her belt, and she didn't do her speeches and appearances for free, either. She was a hypocritical demagogue who seemed to have no shame about having her own career while scolding women who wanted to be something else besides wives or mothers. Why in the world would anybody aspire to be an unpleasant, hypocritical, scolding harpy like Phyllis Schlafly?
10
I think this article assumes too much. My experience shows that families evolve. I wanted to be a stay at home mom and also follow a career at different points of my life. I managed to do both. Sometimes I was the breadwinner and sometimes I was full time care giver.
Let families decide what they need and want throughout their lives. This can be done by offering families free or reduced cost childcare, and raising the wages so a family can live on one wage earners income modestly but not at the poverty level as it is today for some full time workers.
Let the family determine what works for them while still giving freedom to stay at home at times or both work and have reasonable childcare. This allows dads and moms to choose what fits best for them and still keeps gender fairness.
I have met many dads who have loved staying at home. Stop trying to squish people in to boxes!
10
Like The Grinch who tried and failed to steal Christmas, Phyllis Schlafly tried and failed to steal female empowerment. Here is something Ms. Schlafly could never have imagined...
Women now make up more than half of all undergraduates and graduate degree seekers in the U.S., and the trend is moving higher and accelerating. Given that college graduates make much more than high school graduates and advanced degrees make even far more than bachelors over a career, and that we are diving head long into a knowledge based economy where knowledge will rule. Women are not only going to power our economy, but they will be behind the steering wheel as well.
11
Woman should be free to choose the path they want. You are correct that demographics can limit those choices, but that doesn't make limiting women's choices right. Encouraging wage disparity between men and women may result in more woman marrying, but it doesn't encourage choice.
It is the growing disparity between rich and the middle class that is driving the decrease in employed men that is limiting women's choices. The growing economy has been benefiting a smaller and richer slice of the country for a long time now.
7
Being a stay-at-home mom is an honorable profession. The majority of comments here (as usual) are written by folks who never had kids, never want to, or had them so long ago they cannot relate to today's family pressures.
For those naysayers - There are ways to prepare:
Make sure the husband has a $2,000,000 life insurance policy in case he dies.
Put mom in charge of managing the family assets so that she is fully aware of where the money is if the husband leaves her.
Make sure her name is on all property.
Know that there are health insurance options for children that are affordable or even free. I, as well as many of my friends, have had them during our single earner stage of raising kids.
I am the one consistent human in my children's lives. Nannies, au pairs, housekeepers, tutors, teachers...come and go. My children know I am here for them.
For me, the issue was attempting to get back to work after taking time off. I wish that would be the discussion here. It was not as if I went off to some cave for 7 years. What I learned and experienced that time with my kids only enhanced me as an employee. I also worked hard to keep up with industry tends, attend professional group meetings and took CE courses. Through networking, I was able to find a company to hire me part-time and have been back at work full-time (for another firm) now for 7 years.
3
@Can
You sure have to take a lot of counter measures to defend against the future misbehavior of your worker prince!
How about this: let women decide how they want to live. Their children are the concern of all of us so we should all pitch in to help raise them. Paid time off, extensive child support, early preschool, food support, and, most important, a tax overhaul that advantages wage income instead of wealth income.
13
@Can
If being a stay at home mom is a "profession" then that word has lost all meaning.
3
"The American family is once again in crisis"
Even as a political liberal on most issues, I will have to agree. Over half of newborns these days are conceived and born out of wedlock. That means no responsible Dad in the family. To paraphrase the song from The Music Man: "There is trouble in River City, and it starts with a capital B." What that B stands for, I leave to your imagination.
3
Being born out of wedlock does not necessarily mean single parenthood. Lots of couples that live together without being married have kids.
4
@Penseur
The problem is inequality not that women make money working. Women always work they just don’t always get paid for it. With money comes power and men having all the power is what got us into the many messes we are in. I am not saying that women can solve all the problems but not having power or a voice just turns women into serfs that can be dumped and left behind when a better looking serf comes along.
5
Me. Andrews argues that to achieve real freedom, women need to start staying at home with the kids, but proposes no strategies to even begin to make that economically feasible. I'm not sure how she thinks she's defending American families by encouraging them to get deeper into debt or poverty. Her interpretation of marriage and financial statistics is quite creative. It's also demeaning to imply that the economy has worsened for everyone because women have chosen to selfishly have jobs and lives outside the home.
10
The Two Income Trap is real, but that doesn't mean women alone should be the ones to fix it. Payments to parents of any gender or marital status, indexed to income, that enable them to stay home with their kids if they choose to, or apply to higher quality child care or pre-school than they could otherwise afford, would be money well spent.
8
In raising the concern about the two income trap, the author fails to directly address the problem. Pay has not kept pace with inflation and productivity increases. Seems like the author has created a strong argument to address income inequality but based on her political position, can’t even consider it directly.
9
“Why would a woman pay someone $11/hour to earn $11/hour when they would rather stay at home?” Only wealthy asks that question.
Medical insurance for her family
Retirement earnings to protect her own future
Pay for kids’ college
Pay the ever-increasing rent if no home ownership
Pay for the new roof on the home owned
Life requires cash flow and the ability to borrow for the rest of us
18
How dare you tell us how to live. I was a working wife and mother for most of my life and it was choice I made and never regretted. I chose to work although I didn't have to, my husband always earned enough to support the family. I had excellent help and still do, so I don't have to do the cleaning and cooking and the other boring details daily life brings. By all means, stay home and take care of your kids and your house if you prefer. But those of us who made a different choice are not to be pitied. We are the masters of our own ship. We have our own means of support and I have my own, ample, social security benefits. That is the ultimate freedom and don't you dare tell me I need to be at home to clean the house. I have a housekeeper for that.
22
I’m sure many women would rather stay home than work 1.75 jobs on five hours of sleep, which is what they’re required to do now. Maybe the answer is for men to step forward and do their share in the home, rather than for women to remain entirely enslaved in the domestic sphere.
As to the “two-earner trap,” the author fails to explain how the “bidding war” mechanism has worked to create the failed educational and health care systems that are costing families so much more than our parents generation had to pay for the same services. Details please - simply blaming women in the workforce doesn’t constitute an argument.
And of course men are most of the commentators who endorse “broadly pro-natal” policies. Turning women into sub-human baby factories has been a male agenda for as long as there have been humans. Is it too much to hope that perhaps in the 21st Century we might be evolving into acknowledging the equal humanity of women and men?
14
I'm sure someone has said this already, but it's so obvious that this is precisely backwards. Working women did not cause the suppression of wages or the higher prices of middle class goods. Corporate leaders have suppressed wages and sold off out jobs to other countries, conservative guys like Jack Welsh who bragged all about it. Constant booms and busts of unregulated economies make buying houses a bad investment. Also, women have always worked, and obviously have a lot to contribute to every part of society. Women of that certain middle class level were frankly bored playing the June Cleaver role. Helen Andrews is not trying to give up her job; neither was Phyllis Schafley. It was always hypocritical for her to tell women to work for free and hold themselves in bondage so men could feel important.
18
What gets lost in the conversation is the simple fact that one can advocate for a more conservative or liberal social agenda without giving up one’s rights.
Back in about 1972, my mother had several friends over and they were all discussing the ERA. All except my mother were adamantly opposed mostly fearing that their husbands would divorce them and not pay alimony. I asked point blank whether they agreed that “ Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”. All women agreed that this should be so! Most of the women assumed this was already law.
It would be incredible if the ERA could be added to the Constitution in 2020, 100 years after the 19th amendment disallowed discrimination by sex in voting rights.
8
We could also fairly apply the 14th amendment.
3
There are the problems as I see it:
1) Roe set the pattern for women to adopt a male pattern of reproduction in which the act of conception was biologically independent of parenting.
2) The Family Medical Leave Act was signed 20 years, almost to the day, from when Roe was decided.
3) The focus is on women and not children.
4) The pattern of US employment continues to be the traditional male pattern - children are cared for by "somebody else" during working hours.
5) There is little study of who these "somebodies else" are. Are they mothers? What about their children? What is their training? Their wages? What impact on children when they are raised in "institutional settings" from infancy on by "somebody else".
6) Of necessity, all the studies looking at children and families done by women are women who are professionally trained and one can assume, they are not now or never have been "stay-at-home" mothers.
7) Medicaid is available to pregnant women with limited resources who, by and large, are not married. It is a disincentive to marriage.
1
What is the point of this writing? That women should be paid less because men are then deemed less worthy and marriageable? That the inequality of less pay is better for the common good? That women now don’t have the option of staying at home and we should back in time to a day when they had to stay at home because they weren’t given opportunities elsewhere? That we should find a way to take away the need for women to be engaged in the world the same as a man because women don’t really want to opportunities like that? That a woman needs to stand up and parrot Carlson’s rhetoric to make it legitimate? That “back in the day” the world was so much better because people had their predestined roles and society was properly structured to enforce it?
16
The premise is wrong: American families are not in crisis simply because there are fewer marriages. When divorce is easily obtainable, what makes a marriage more special than other forms of live-in unmarried families? When women are not bound to be married by archaic and cruel religious commitments, a freer society with fewer marriages is the natural and better consequence.
10
"...women more likely to want someone with a steady job."
I just want to note that this claim is not true. It's mindlessly repeated by everyone maybe because that's what women say publicly, but their actual behavior is different. Maybe it was true at some point in the past. In the modern era, women prioritize good looks in men, not a steady job. Things have changed. The majority of today's "incel" men (involuntary-celibate men) are employed and make good money. I wish someone would talk about that.
4
@Eugene. I disagree. Women do not prioritize looks, they prioritize partnership - men who will behave like responsible adults and loving companions. The ability to keep a steady job, some basic grooming, and being enjoyable company are all indicative of that. Incels come across as misogynous, baselessly imperious, spoiled, obnoxious children. That's why they dont find mates.
8
@Eugene
No woman want a kind and decent human being to partner with not be controlled or be some kind of trophy that has an expiration date.
3
"The liberal journalist Judd Legum tweeted that Mr. Carlson was “arguing there’s a moral responsibility to pay women less than men” and called for Red Lobster to drop its ads on his show, which the company did a few hours later."
Is it really in the national interest to see ideas put forth, discussed and debated in a national forum, or to see shows punished for introducing ideas unpopular with certain interest groups?
Shouldn't all Americans have a moral responsibilty to support free speech--even speech to which we object--when there are so many avenues besides one episode of one show in which to counter those ideas with better ones?
The “winner take all” capitalist mantra seems to apply in America until men are harmed by female winners.
20
I don’t understand your comment? How are men harmed when women win?
1
Any piece of journalism, however professionally written, which makes that bloated hate-meister, Tucker Carlson, out to be a hero, prophet, or victim has to have gone off the rails -- somewhere.
It's just a question of: Do I have the time to pick it apart? Or should I go back to watching the NBA Playoffs?
16
I find the accompanying photo to this article unflattering and upsetting. The woman depicted does not appear happy or satisfied. This does not speak well of the women's movement.
1
The socially conservative women do what their husbands tell them to do.
9
Yes, like vote for trump. And we should further empower such women?
5
"Conservatism" = FAILURE & HYPOCRISY. Stop this charade that's chronically dissonant with people's reality.
6
Boooooo, I don’t like it!
As a woman who grew up in a Native community in which every mother I knew worked (because they had to), let me just say that there's nothing more annoying than watching upper middle class white people argue over "feminism v. family."
We have been let down by both of these groups. Working class women of color have long been shut out of the discussion on both sides. Our mothers were excluded by Ivy League-educated feminists who complained that they weren't "fulfilled," even though they were married to wealthy, educated white men men and had a First World standard of living while our mothers worked low-level, back breaking jobs to put food on the table and clothes on our backs. These women have never been included because of the racism and classism of mainstream feminism. And before all of you on here lose your minds, I want you to think about - and count on one hand - the number of poor, uneducated, working class women of color who could be counted as a "feminist." I'll wait.
Which brings me to Helen Andrews, whose white, upper middle class, malignant hypocrisy outlined here is merely a regurgitated complaint so stale in 2019 that you have to scrape the mold off to get to the point. So let me address fiction of this piece: Socially conservative women, just like their feminist adversaries, are in it for themselves.
Poor women, women of color, etc. are on their own. Until you bring everyone to the table and address all of the underlying issues, you're just posing.
16
I thought I was reading some clever, elaborate joke and kept waiting for the punchline at the end. It never came. Huh? Oh wait - that’s right, we’re living in the era of Trump. It’s a clear to me now how someone can still believe this kind of dribble.
12
" By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else. Pressing the brake on the trends set in motion by the feminist revolution would leave women more free to follow a diversity of paths. "
Orwell had a word for this: Doublethink
9
A classic conservative column with arguments based on false premises. The reason conservative women aren’t making themselves heard is they live with misogynistic husbands who they don’t want to anger.
6
If you want to strengthen the family unit, why do you select as your leader a man who has children by three different women? Conservative women who voted for Trump, not liberal women.
Maybe no one wants to lead this movement because they're embarrassed by all the hypocrisy.
19
This is lipstick on Trumpism. The shade is “Think Tank”.
8
Intolerance and 19th century views on social arrangements are no more appealing when coming from the lips of a woman than they are from the lips of a man.
11
The conservative women? They are at home, barefoot, talking about the liberal women trying to take the planet back from their narrow-minded conservative husbands.
Change is good
9
Phyllis Schlafly? Really? Because the future of our country should rely on uber religious sycophantic nonsense?
No abortion. No welfare. No whites mixing with ethnicities. No unions. Corporate profits above the social good. Women stay at home and stay pregnant because overpopulation isn’t real because heaven. Jesus Jesus Jesus. And all will magically be well. And don’t forget about big, bad, evil COMMUNISM!
Oh yeah, and all this pro family anti feminism nonsense came from a lawyer, politician, ceo, editor, and on and on. Give me a break.
Let’s move forward and hopefully sweep this pathetic attempt at a counter-progressive ideology under the rug once and for all.
14
Why would anyone imagine that a "socially conservative" woman, which basically is a euphemism for "evangelical Republican," do anything else but "stand behind her man"? She's the "better half," the "civilizing force," the—my favorite—"helpmeet."
After all, it works for such a woman because she can check her brain at the door and let the man do the thinkin'. Because of that, like all "socially conservative" people, she has no problem imposing her social and religious views on the rest of us women, which boils down to this bedrock precept: have babies or we'll strap you down and make you breed.
It's traditional, it's comfortable, and it's flawed, but it's so heartily embraced (is it desperation?), so tightly clutched, that I can only feel a sense of wonder and pity at a woman like this, and know, fundamentally, that she and I have absolutely nothing substantive in common: The rights I would fight to make sure she has, she'd deny me with a sanctimonious smile.
Oh! Gotta run! Gotta get ready for church!
9
News flash Helen: not all women want a husband and baby, some of us don’t want to have sex with men at all. The funny thing about feminism: it gives women choices, and the room to define who we are. So why don’t you stop defining me? I have no interest in “a husband and child instead of a few more cents on the dollar.” You do you, and I’ll do me. Here’s a thought: stop trying to lecture people on your internalized misogynistic stance. If you think marriage and kids are the be all end all of women’s purpose, maybe that’s your purpose, but not mine.
17
Being a mom is the best part of my life, and my marriage to my guy of over 40 years is close. I also have enjoyed my work career and volunteer contributions. But I am with this commenter all the way. Feminism = power, whatever our chosen path.
6
Denizens of the evil corporate child called the American Enterprise Institute create false fights, rationalize blame-games and offer twisted logic, false and exploitative "solutions." It's ugly.
5
This is the second article the New York Times has published this week on, essentially, the evils of women being “forced” to work. The other day it was about highly educated “greed industry” professional women whining about only being able to work part-time because they had to stay home and take care of the kids so their husbands could work 80 hour weeks to apparently make the payments on the latest BMW. Or they decided to throw away their Ivy League education once they discovered the joy of changing diapers and a 7-figure income. A rich white women’s problem, and choice.
I am old enough to have been told I shouldn’t go to engineering school because I would be taking a man’s place and I would just quit working when I got married and had kids. Notice that was presumed to be the path in life I was supposed to want. Now these women are proving those predictions correct: they are taking up spots in exclusive schools then dropping out. Why did you bother and what do you say to the person (possibly from a not-so-privileged background) whose spot you took?
I am furious with both of these articles. I guess it’s just the Republicans trying to convince us how much happier we uppity women will all be after they eliminate contraceptives and we are back to being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. Does the NYT have to be complicit? Excuse me while I go burn my bra.
13
I looked Helen up. She sure writes and works a lot for a woman of child bearing age. Shouldn’t she be marrying one of these wage earning men and raising some children? She’s probably taking a well-paying job a family man could be doing. Tsk tsk Helen. Here’s your apron.
22
My partner asked me: "What's in the news this morning?" "Oh," I replied, "somebody is opining that if only women would drop out of the workforce and have more babies, that men would suddenly make more money and everyone would be able to get by on one income." "How?" was his reply. The author didn't answer that question, did she? Which companies are suddenly going to start offering stable, lifetime jobs with benefits, which pay a minimum of sixty or seventy thousand dollars a year, to college-educated men in their fifties? And why would I stop working? What if he dies or becomes disabled? Who would support us then? This is one most unrealistic, unpragmatic opinion columns I've ever read. My former husband left me with a six-year-old to care for by myself, because he was tired of family life. He has a PhD, so lack of education wasn't the issue in his inability to find a steady job, but the dearth of decent employment opportunities in academia certainly was. And don't try to make us feel guilty for not studying medicine, finance, or IT. Not everyone is cut out to work in those fields, and our society refuses to acknowledge that. Thank goodness I had skills & was capable of supporting myself & our son, because our divorce awarded me nothing - no child support, no alimony. And even though I am college-educated, fluent in a second language, conversant in a third, & worked steadily, I had to move in with my parents to make ends meet. Get real, Helen Anderson.
29
Perhaps Ms Andrews should start to answer her own question by looking at those conservative legislative districts that continuously elect men to represent them in Congress. Continuing to elect conservative white males with an expectation that they will address social needs is an exercise in futility. Get real here.
15
I cannot find much background on this woman. Is she only 31? Did she go to Yale? Does she have white prvilege? I lived through Schlafly, there was so much sadness in those days. My mother, born in 1927 was an opioid addict and alcoholic, a frustrated woman, angry and probably mentally ill, who wanted more but was totally held back by her timeframe. I don't think the author has any idea what it was like to be a woman in the 1950s. No mention of women of color? No mention of poverty? I can tell you what it was like just by the Barry Sadler line "hate your next door neighbor but don't forget to say grace" I don't want my granddaughter to have to go back to that time. I want choice. Also, change is good and 'conservatives' should get over their longing for a time that never was.
17
First, the dirty little secret – which, even here, you continue to bury – is that the two-income “trap” is, for the most part, a product of US progressive taxation...
That is – for the first $25K a family of four earns, you all load it up with credits to where its earning power practically doubles...
But for a family actually earning $50K – and then trying to increase their standard of living by having a second spouse take a $50K job – a different matter entirely...
Might as well stay home...
Federal, state, FICA taxes take – on the rough average – about 30% of the next $50K...Losing the Obamacare subsidy is tantamount to taking another 30%...
Now add to that the costs of commuting, clothing, and child care – lucky to see $5K in additional earning power out of that $50K...
Second, go read what a right-wing paper says about how a right-wing country is addressing this:
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/04/27/report-hungary-counters-europes-demographic-winter/
Even what’s being talked here – whether by men or women – pales vs what’s actually being done there...
What entirely escapes me is why – as part of Making America Great Again – we can’t fuse the social agenda of our left with the economic agenda of our center...
As far as the religious agenda of our right – I’d be content to leave them be, if they’d accord me the same courtesy...
But if they’re the only army defending my economic interests – you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want...
2
Why is the conservative definition of "family" a heterosexual couple? For the tens of millions of us who, at one time or another, are part of a single-parent household, "family" means love and shared sacrifice.
The societal ills bemoaned hypocritically by conservatives are largely economic and/or discriminatory. Conservatives might see the real causes if they simply looked in a mirror.
13
I have always considered Shafly and her ilk to be jokes and traitors to womankind. This essay proves my assumption. Quoting a misogynist like Tucker Carlson is a clear signal as well. If this is the best conservatives can do liberals have truly won the social arguments.
30
@diane wolfe
Diane, also, don't you feel sorry, as I do, for Tucker Carlson's daughters? Whenever I hear any of these guys like Carlson, Santorum, et. al. speak about women, marriage, family I just cringed for their daughters' sakes.
5
This article and writer are just one more example of wanting to keep women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I starred in a TV series in the late 1960s written mostly by men who had my character in the kitchen setting the table or washing dishes in every segment. If you think women are willing to go back to that limited view of what women want and are willing to settle for, you are grossly out of touch. We have so much more potential and aspirations. Do you really think having a young child under each arm and watching them play in a park is preferable to having a vibrant and challenging career that is rewarding and fulfilling? If that’s what you want, go do it but don’t tell the rest of us to do it because we will not do it, E.R.A. or no E.R.A.
16
So, Ms. Andrews is bemoaning the lack of young conservative women to continue the attack on women's rights to First Class Citizenship. This editorial illustrates the moral bankruptcy if the "Conservative Right." They pray in their churches and then elect a corrupt man who treats women as his sexial playthings and is a fascist as President. American does not need Ms. Andrews' brand of hate.
14
Maybe men are leading the charge because conservatives believe women's "place" is to be submissive, not to lead.
Phyllis Schlafly was a hypocrite. She insisted that a woman’s place is in the home, but she was willing to make exceptions for herself. She was a lawyer. She ran for Congress (and lost). She wrote books. She started an organization called the Eagle Forum so she could wield power for life as its chair and CEO. She was ferociously ambitious, but she didn’t want other women to succeed. She was also loathsomely belligerent and vicious.
The last thing we need is another one like her. Ugh.
30
Whether Ms. Andrews likes it or not, in this era "conservative" means racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and disdainful of anyone "other." In this context the answer to the question asked by the headline is: who cares?
16
I did my best to pay attention to what you had to say until you quoted Tucker Carlson — bye bye!
17
Yeah, quoting the guy who was recently found to have publicly called women "primitive" isn't a high percentage play.
7
You lost me and any capital you might have brought to this discussion the moment you equated same-sex marriage to the decline of the American family. Just because you long for Pleasantville doesn’t mean the rest of America agrees with you. It’s 2019 not 1950.
17
Hey, tell your menfolk in Washington that if people make a living wage and had affordable housing, many mother would LOVE to stay home and raise their young children.
10
so, in a way, this article suggests that women should make less or even stay unemployed so that they would feel more inclined to get married. Boy, it is as dumb as advising women to not get higher education so that they can find a husband because men don't want a woman who is more educated than they are.
15
Oh yes, let’s go back to the 50's when life was grand and America was great. Oh, good campaign motto for someone—Make America Great Again! Men were men and women were women (who knew their place), gays were in the closet, the world was white, and we didn’t have to think about nasty things like white privilege and climate change.
Ah for the good old days.
15
I note that the author of this absurd op-ed appears to have a career she is proud of. I am a working woman as well and worked during my early parenting years. I always tell young women: never quit your job. Phyllis Schlafly was the boogie woman of my youth. I canvassed for the ERA and it remains bewildering and tragic that it did not pass.
17
They are home taking care of their kids.
2
On 26 April, deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein said that "in journalism — the rules of evidence do not apply."
On 27 April, Helen Andrews proves him right when she writes, without a shred of evidence, that "By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else."
5
Years from now the Schlafly name will bring up images of a good beer made in St. Louis.
3
This is one of the most cockamamie pieces I've read in years: What exactly is Helen Andrews trying to accomplish here? "Socially Conservative" women? Code: White Women. First though, she fails to do the most basic of concepts; provide her working definition of what constitutes a Socially Conservative female?
What is *the* American Family? What is the definition?
I am an American family- of one. Do I not matter?
12
It's hard to know how to comment on this column, since it does not seem very logical and makes lots of assertions without real evidence.
5
Gosh, I never realized women need a new Phyllis Schlafly to set us back 50 years. Frail lady brain and all!
17
This article is just a long, incoherent case for “the ethical obligation to pay men more than women.” Come on conservatives, do better.
15
This essay fails to mention that modern Conservatives are obliged to be Deplorable. Can't be Pro-Family when you're awful.
4
Where are the women today fighting for women and children and families - ummmm? Everywhere but the GOP.Hillary Clinton has spent her entire career advocating for women and children. Liz Warren has spent her entire career fighting for the little guy and trying to protect consumers from big corporations. All female dems fighting for more secure healthcare protecting children and families from financial ruin.
The GOP had Sanders lying everyday for a man, Conway losing all credibility for a man and Nielssin locking kids in cages for a man.
Please! Feminism does not look down on stay at home moms and quite frankly their kids aren’t always better off. Talk to a kindergarten teacher. They unequivocally recommend structured day care b4 school.
We have demolished unions and the $$$ went to the top. Women in the lower middle class were already working except they were getting dumped on everyday.
And wasn’t Schafer a lawyer AND worked at AEI?
11
I would definitely like to my conservative neighbors back, creating fact-based policies that support the happiness and safety of families. We need their voices and perspective.
Unfortunately, what we have instead are conservatives who have been dragged into a cult of racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and misogyny.
8
Here are some pro-family pro-marriage policies for you: universal pre-K, paid leave after child birth, public day care, and a higher minimum wage, and yes, equal pay for equal work. The good old days this writer seems to long for were not pro-family, it was a time where women were subordinate in the family structure, a time where it was widely believed that women should be paid less than men because men needed to support a family. I presume this writer is expecting equal pay from the NY Times for contributing this silly article.
14
Phyllis Schlafly was a terrorist. To see claims to the contrary by someone who professes to care about American families is laughable.
9
Perhaps the present “crisis” of fewer young people committing to cultural xenophobia, expressed as a failed movement to restrict women’s rights, exclude the vast LGBT community from marriage rights and promote homophobia in general, is fanned by advocates, like this writer, who come across as such historically dishonest, tone-deaf con men (and, occasionally, women). We should applaud American women's resounding rejection of the disgusting distortions of conservatism represented by Schafly — including her repeated suggestion that all homosexuals are secret pedophiles and that empowering the oppressed is a form of evil, as well as the racial exclusivity of her movement.
10
My “middle class” mom, born in 1923, went to work as a young adult, stayed home working like a dog doing housework for a few brief years while popping out five kids, and then left my abusive dad and went back out to work to support said kids. No child support.
I’m not sure what halcyon pre-feminism time the author is talking about, but my mom would laugh like a drain at this ridiculous essay. Conservative? Clueless.
20
I can tell you where all of the socially conservative women are....they are pushed into careers because of the dearth of men who make a decent living AND want to settle down. They tend to be just getting by or slightly better in lower wage "female" jobs. Men who used to be encouraged by late great companies like Kodak to settle into family life in their 20s are now more than happy to have sex with all the women who were "liberated" by the sexual revolution. Men now assume women should carry their weight financially, and courtship and chivalry are dead. My father always told me the women's libbers would give men everything they ever wanted: sex on demand, no accountability, no breadwinner responsibilities, no shame. He was right. Phyllis Shlafly was right.
1
So should the author of this article give up her job or does she not have the courage of her convictions?
7
How in the name of Elizabeth Cady Stanton is forcing young parents to borrow against their retirement and shouldering the burden of “budget neutrality” in order to get paid family leave good public policy?
Ms. Andrews, let me spell it out for you: Two-income couples who are well off can do that; few others can. And — voila — once again conservative policy ties virtue to affluence. No wonder women and young people are deserting the Republican Party en masse — only in this case, it’s the ship leaving the rats.
12
So lots of worry about the “optics.”
Lots of worry that no women popped up to provide Tucker Carlson with “cover.”
The whole article is a lament. Where are the conservative women... well, not thinkers. Definitely not thinkers. That would not be okay. The conservative women agreers? The conservative women cheerleaders, maybe? But not the kind who show their legs!
Well gosh Helen, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe they are at home practicing joyful submission and not speaking to strange men or venturing out in public without the permission of their father or husband. Speaking of... you have permission to be talking in public, right? And you are not getting paid for this article and this destroying the social fabric, correct?
It seems like a real conundrum for conservative women - correcting the optics that make them look like they don’t have free choice and are not aloud to speak in public - while still being silent and obedient. It’s like trying to find an attractive spokeswoman for purdah or a great female author to support the Taliban’s stance on female literary...
14
"When mothers started entering paid employment in large numbers in the 1970s, it led to a bidding war over middle-class amenities that left everyone paying more for the privilege of being no better off than before.
I read that a couple of times. And indeed, the author is trying to blame high housing and health-care costs on women going to work. This is, of course, backwards--so precisely and perfectly so that it's almost admirable. You have to work hard to get things that wrong.
It's depressing that the Times published this. The writer has a decent prose style. That, and a "conservative," anti-feminist, anti-logic, anti-evidence viewpoint are enough to get her over the bar, I guess. The overton window has widened so much that the brains of the Times's editors appear to have fallen out of it.
12
Under His Eye.
6
The presented world of weak women incapable of making their own choices to work or not, of underperforming men who are deprived of marriage, is an exercise in stupidity.
There may be some truth: if women are given the freedom they deserve, they out perform the men and find the losers unattractive. Here's a thought, though. Maybe the men could also equip themselves to compete for jobs which often require more than a shovel, rather than seek relief in voting for a candidate who promises a revival of grunt-work.
Here's a revealing quote: "By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else." Poor, sad, mindless creatures suffering under the curse of fair treatment.
9
What a surprise all the leftist women hate this article.
No every woman is poor or feels victimized by their spouse, get a life.
There are many of us that ARE socially conservative and have no issues with many of the constructs here.
2
Oh Helen, you are the voice of white female privilege, not equity feminism or even simple commonsense. Economic justice for families means pay equity for women and a support network for single working parents. What you are asking is for more for people like you, who already have the biggest piece of the economic pie.
9
Gee, anyone else notice that this argument rests solely on the idea of marriage as between a man and a woman?
7
The answer here is high taxes for the rich and more support for the Middle Class but you won’t here that from the charlatans in all the right wing think tanks. A very long, boring and pointless article.
8
Feminism has been highjacked and weaponized against us women and most of us don't even see it. The political elites are using feminism against us to achieve their globalist goals. A movement that once was so noble has been corrupted. MODERN FEMINISM has made servants of us--we are merely seen as GDP boosters now and nothing more. Wake up, women!
www.womanreturninghome.com
2
What a load of utter nonsense. This largely incoherent argument is wildly out of touch with reality, and attempts to normalize a dangerous view that American women were better off when a political field dominated by white men (still the case today) were consistently in the position of denying basic rights to women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities whose lives seemed to inherently have less worth and who deserved less self-determination. It’s a familiar narrative—that our society’s “traditional values” have fallen from some former glory that made us all better off, and actually heeding the advice of those less empowered groups is a folly. No. Show me some data, not a random speculation based on one outrageous point of view. And then, most importantly, answer me this: what do those most vulnerable groups in our society have to say? Until then, this backward thinking goon has no place here.
8
Who will take up Schlafly's bigoted crusade against LGBTQ people? Because that's her legacy: the theocratic politics of hate. All the two-income trap issues will be addressed by Kamala Harris (LIFT Act) and Elizabeth Warren, not by the conservative hatemongers.
8
"The mass entry of women into the work force is one reason for this financial insecurity." This is the most egregious example of victim-blaming that I've seen since South Carolina senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman blamed the murder of blacks are there attempts to vote and participate in government.
13
As long as we're going to dip into the oh-so-wonderful past where women stayed home while their husbands worked, and where an ultra-conservative hypocrite like Phyllis Schlafly can gad about the country advising other women to stay home, why not go all the way back to the really wonderful past when, whenever a white man wanted some more land for him and his family, all he had to do was go out and slaughter a few more Native Americans and take theirs?
6
Am I missing something
The new society make up? Children?
Check out all the businesses registered address in any condo residence. People......boys and girls....are working from home. My Pilates instructor's home based husband consulates on "gym?" management and is primary care for their new infant. My thirteen year old neighbor Mom consults with Fortune 500 clients while in the swim class parking lot. Work changes and so do families, and children, are still loved by all.
Stop worrying.
Jon
3
Helen Andrews (@herandrews) is the managing editor of The Washington Examiner magazine.
In December 2018, the Washington Examiner published a story with the headline, "MAGA list: 205 ‘historic results’ help Trump make case for 2020 re-election". The story listed numerous alleged accomplishments of the Trump administration with no fact checks. The list was given to the Examiner directly from the White House for publishing, and there was no reporting rebutting anything. Shortly afterward, President Trump tweeted the story twice.[23][24]
2019 Muslim prayer rugs story
In January 2019, the Washington Examiner published a story with the headline, "Border rancher: 'We've found prayer rugs out here. It's unreal'." Shortly thereafter, President Trump cited the story as justification for a border wall amid the 2018-2019 federal government shutdown. The story in question cited one anonymous rancher who offered no evidence of these Muslim prayer rugs, such as photos. The story provided no elaboration on how the rancher knew the rugs in question were Muslim prayer rugs. The author of the story formerly worked as press secretary for the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform. Stories of Muslim prayer rugs at the border are urban myths that have frequently popped up since at least 2005, but with no evidence to substantiate the claims.[25][26][27][28][29][30] The Examiner never released a clarification or retracted the story.
13
The notion that housing and education are so expensive because of the evil feminist movement making it easier for women to succeed is the workplace is ….
It's really hard to find a word to express how inane that is.
12
I found this article at best newsworthy about what Conservatives are thinking in regards to family and the economy. Notable, Helen Andrews references Senator Elizabeth Warren, and the AEI partners with Brookings Institute to do a study. At worst, this article glosses over the fluidity of life American families, and in particular for this article, the lives of women. In brief, I will share part of what I know about three working women, single parent. One women is a member of the working poor. She raised three children on her own while her husband served a long jail sentence. The second women raised her son alone because her husband ran off with another woman. The third woman raised her son alone because her husband enjoyed drugs more than family. Nothing in this article addresses the realities these women and families experienced.
6
"Women were responsible for almost the entire increase in labor force participation between 2015 and 2017."
I don't think so. After all, if an employer decides to hire a woman rather than a man, it's not the woman's fault that they did so. Maybe there were more women applying. Maybe the women were better trained. Maybe the women were willing to work for less pay. Maybe the women didn't act entitled to the job just for showing up for the interview.... Etc.
"Isn’t it time to focus on helping male workers specifically, their wages and their industries? "
Um, yes. Ms Andrews could start by promoting labour unions.
She could also do some research into where those male jobs have gone. At least as many of them have gone to machines as to foreign workers. That trend to machine production is accelerating, and invading service industries.
And that's why hand-wringing over the death of the American Family is beside the point. Decisions and policies having no explicit family or gender agenda are major drivers of social change, and always have been. A small but instructive example: the bicycle, which enabled young folk to escape their chaperons, and so changed the rules of courtship and marriage.
5
There's a much simpler solution to the childcare and family dissolution problem but many Caucasian Americans are not as aware of it as Asian, Hispanic and Black families are. That is to live near your parents and leave your kids with them. Yes it requires someone to move (usually the grandparents, as they retire around the time their grandkids arrive); more importantly it means you have to maintain healthy relationships with those parents as you start becoming parents yourself. Both parents can work as hard as they want reassured that people who raised them are looking after their kids. It's better for the children, the elders and the parents who don't have to be anxious about day care. The seeds of decline of the family began with the rise of overly individualistic Anglo approaches to the dissolution of extended family relationships and in my view have nothing to do with gender. It is only because so many Anglo Americans, especially in the educated classes, are completely blind to the benefits of extended family relationships, that they have turned the issue into a gender war issue while creating a generation of grandparents aching to see grandkids wasting time hanging out with other such grandparents on pastures designed to take them out of society instead of passing on their accumulated wisdom and great love on to the next generation. What a terrible waste of wisdom and love.
4
what the world does not need: rich white women urging other women to give up their right to equal treatment under the law
1049
@BarbT That's actually not what the author wrote but I admire your verve.
6
1950 called, they want their Essay back.
Seriously.
16
Glad to see a conservative outlet like the Examiner throwing in the towel on Trump and the Republicans endorsing the sensible policy analysis of Elizabeth Warren.
6
Maybe women like the progress they’ve made, just fine. Thank you very much.
Perhaps women are a little wary of a world where 80% of them are married with kids before the age of 30.
My mother and grandmother lived that and they thought that system was very limiting.
I did the career thing and stayed home with my kids and worked again.
None of it is 100% easy and there are choices and trade offs.
However, I would fight to my dying breath the idea that a man should be paid more than me for the same job or get a job over me for which I am better qualified.
Justice, fairness and freedom is more important than building a tidy Ozzy Harriett illusion.
8
Shyama Golden's artwork is fantastic.
The image of Rosie the Mommy Riveter sporting a 5 carat diamond while holding her baby close in a sling is so over the top. Rosie's hairstylist has given her a $275 cut at the very least and her worker-bee chic blue denim shirt must retail for at least $85 and how about that sling... $200. Manicured rose fingernails and diamond ring... not sure the cost of those as I am of the working poor and have never been to a nail salon or Tiffany's.
Rosie must have been provided with ear protection for her and her baby because the only way to get those bicep guns in today's workforce is to handle a jackhammer all day. I have only seen guns like that on people in the 1% who have the leisure to visit a personal trainer at least 4 times a week. For the working poor guns like that come with a beer belly and an aching back.
And yes behind those eyes is a wisdom.. a love of Pushkin and Pablo Neruda. She is is the Greek Ideal. The perfect human.
6
It is not that the author of this piece has not raised interesting questions. It is that she ignores the most basic cause of the problem she raises: the "two-income trap" is not due to more women being allowed into the workplace. It is due to conservative policies that have transferred so much wealth to the uppermost tier of our society that the jobs that once supported a family no longer do. As Abigail Disney complains, it is just unconscionable that the CEO of Disney makes almost 1500 times what the average Disney worker makes. This was not the case back in this conservative writer's nostalgic past, when one man could support the family. This is the underlying structural problem that needs to be addressed.
12
Helen Andrews sees an opening and throws her hat in the ring for a position as the next Schlafly.
She does good job of it, too. Mangling facts, using language to imply the opposite of reality. Ginning up monstrous liberals where none exist, and crediting them with the ability to create nefarious poilicy at will.
That alone disqualifies her as a serious person...have you SEEN the Democrats lately?
If Keystone Cops weren't really old and occasionally funny, they would be an apt metaphor for the dark forces Andrews invokes to spur her wacko arguments.
Its not her doing, I know, because Andrews would never be (has never, as a 'journalist', been) so forthcoming, but the desecration of a social icon from a former war is appropriate.
Take an image of a woman newly acquainted with her power, technical skill, independence and economic might, and put a ring on it.
This is family support?
Not in a country in which the ruling elite are mesmerized by money and money alone.
5
I do not understand why conservatives are devoid of empathy. Are they born that way? Are they just incomplete people, like Trump?
I am serious. If we do not address the development of character, the establishment of a civilized and rational culture, dysfunction will take over like a disease.
We can see it now, and it is worrisome.
6
This philosophy completely ignores the fact that a lot of MEN 25-34 don’t want to marry. I dated many me like that!
3
This is my definition of a feminist stance: do not overestimate the importance of men. The writer of this article vastly overestimates men and vastly underestimates women.
1
My suggestion is to do nothing. Let the free market and individual choices work things out.
1
These things are not under our control, as history shows. The idea of "family" behind these random observations and speculations is some vague combination that partially existed in America for a while (in symbiotic relation with a starving world.) The sexually intimate and procreating human unit is an accommodating social form under the winds of technology (the engine of social change.) Anyone preaching to reshape, improve, recover "marriage", "the happiness of the American family", and so on, lives under an illusion and (beware) often is an illusion salesperson too. Don't buy it.
1
So, if I do not desire to marry, am I relegated to being homeless and no means to support myself? According to Ms. Andrews, I am the problem.
Should I wait underneath the bridge in my tent for my prince-charming-to-arrive to provide for my basic necessities? If I go out into the workforce (according to Andrews), I've defeated my purpose in life; marriage.
I hope this offering of the NYT "Diverse Voices" is its last;
it isn't going as intended. Diverse Voices is one thing- poor writing is another.
7
American women are trying to have it all and all at once. Try to slow down. Try not to move away from your immediate family. Bringing your children up close to their grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins makes life much easier. Have your children before you start your careers. You will have more energy.
3
Have your children before a career? Exactly how young are people supposed to be when they marry and procreate?
2
THE ERA'S TIME HAS COME! With the demythification of global climate change being horrifically destructive floods the US's Midwest, South and Northwest, the number of people relying upon FEMA for relief from natural tragedies has grown enormously. Now it is time to use that political reality to get conservative women (a contradiction in terms for the most part) to support the ERA. It is the way forward for women!
Sorry Ms. Andrews, but families come in many permutations these days. Why is it people feel the need to regress back to the "good old days" of the 1950s "Leave it to Beaver" family mentality? Folks, this is 2019, and although things aren't perfect, we've come a long way baby. Where have you been all this time Helen Andrews?
5
If women in "women's" professions (as she calls them) like teaching and nursing are allowing women to make more than men make in "men's" professions, there's a simple solution - men could compete with women for teaching and nursing jobs. The fact that they don't is a choice men make, for all the usual idiotic reasons. To argue that the data prove it's a reason women should stay home and raise the kids is the sort of twisted, motivated, cherry-picked interpretation of stray data that one encounters regularly on right-wing outlets. There's no intellectual integrity to it, just an obsession with justifying tribal cultural norms.
5
If the author believes that 2 incomes is a trap perhaps she should come out to real world and see how well 1 income will provide for a family.
4
Many young people are not marrying today because they just do not have enough money. They have college debt and other expenses that they must pare down and cannot afford a home or other expenses that are incurred with married life. Their salaries are just not enough for them to support a family let alone themselves. They are struggling.
Also, many married couples would love to have more children but know they cannot afford to support them. It is even difficult with a two income family. This is so unfortunate when you want more children but know this is not feasible.
4
Having more children means whst? That's a personal evaluation. In reality 1-2 kids works for most people and does not stress the globe.
Socially conservative women don't need to fight, with either fist or tongue. They already know what's right. Abortion isn't one one of them. See the artwork to understand their stand.
1
Nice. Blame women seeking balance, education and opportunity but a give a free pass to the male oligarchs who systematically shipped manufacturing jobs overseas, exploded income inequality, and destroyed the the labor unions which had allowed a single income family to thrive in middle America.
Phillis would be proud.
4
This piece presents a convoluted argument to what your agenda seems to be - keep the little woman at home making babies for the good of the family and society. Gosh, how Ozzie and Harriet such a notion is!
Most married women I know made the "choice" to work starting back in the 1970's because two incomes became necessary when wages started to lag for the average worker. Most divorced women with children had no option at all but to work. And the situation hasn't changed, except now many younger women are choosing not to have children, knowing they cannot afford them in our dog-eat-dog, tattered safety net country.
As for pining for a new Phyllis Schlafly, perhaps you yourself might consider stepping up and taking her place?
5
Just a reminder that the happiest countries on Earth are highly egalitarian.
6
The American family needs defending? Defending from what? What is chipping away at the family?
This is a familiar conservative tactic - “get them fighting amongst themselves”. The real issue is not that women are taking mens’ jobs, it’s that stagnation of wages has removed the option of a single income family for most of married America.
And wage stagnation is not because the economy is shrinking: over the last 20 years GDP per capita has increased 30%. Median household income increased only around 11%.
So where is all the missing cash? Most of us know, but your job as a member of the conservative propaganda machine is to try to distract us from that by blaming working women. Freedom is slavery!
You want to know what the American family is *really* up against? Look in the mirror, lady.
5
Fight? I really don't consider it a fight. The good old days were never good. The "Make America Great Again" is based on a nostalgic: "we want the culture back like it was when we were safe children and daily life was predictable and a strong father-figure took care of us." Life was never that way. The strong father beat the living stuff out of us and called it "tough love" naively thinking that it would make us better human beings using violence. The mother begrudgingly took care of us as her duty because "that's the way things were supposed to be". What a farce! We can never go back...
4
The article answers the question before asking it. The people advocating for families now are either Democrats, or strongly religiously affiliated people who are secondarily political. The secular conservative figureheads are just flat-out sociopaths whose only interest in children is possibly as jewelry.
3
If the women's movement has been so successful, why are so many women struggling in the work force today. The women in charge of the movement in the beginning talked a good game but really only wanted to fatten their own wallets. They fooled many at the start and are still pulling the wool over the eyes of many,
1
Just what we need, another highly visible, politically active, financially independent woman telling other women to stay home, be quiet, and let Hubby pay for everything. That'll fix us.
/s
6
Thank you to Helen Andrews and the NYT for this article with so many things to consider.
1
"Where Are the Socially Conservative Women in This Fight?"
Barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen where you think they belong. /s
5
“Where Are the Socially Conservative Women in This Fight?”
They’re at home taking care of the kids and staying out of men’s affairs, as they should be.
2
Democrats are picking the right spokespeople for the anti-family movement. According to the Annie Casey Kids Count Foundation, 65% of African-American children are in single parent homes. Stacey Abrams isn't married either, so I am sure she can relate to the anti-family movement. Democrats are the champions of single parenthood. They can pay for it by taxes on two-income households. What does the high % of single parent households in African-American communities say? Will African-American men jump at the chance to vote for a female African-American candidate, when they seem so reluctant to marry them? Who knows.
What backwards thinking! Countries in which women are the most equal are the happiest and most prosperous.
5
Liberal women can also be socially conservative. Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore are two great examples. They are and were more conservative in the traditional fairness and decency sense, than most Republican women these days. Social conservatism isn't a bad thing, it's just been too long aligned with ignorance and hate.
2
I can tell you where they are, following lockstep with their husbands. Socially conservative women in my experience are worse then the men.
5
It’s always been the case in societies all around the world that men who are unable to make enough money to support— or more accurately co-support — a family, are likely to remain unmarried.
Thanks to Republican corporate centric values, we now have a country where that is true for more men than ever.
In fact, Republicans gave lip service to the “traditional family” as their policies destroyed it.
But, in Republican World, that is probably the fault of Republican women.
3
Please. Phyllis Schlafly was the biggest hypocrite. She had a prominent career center stage with domestic help and childcare; all things she wanted to deny other women.
Maybe marriage has outgrown its usefulness. It was created in the first place because through most of human history women were denied access to everything and were little more than property and a brood mare. Sorry, but the genie isn't going back in the bottle.
12
You do understand that people form family units with and without state sanctioned marriage, don't you Helen Andrews? Do you understand that people of all nationalities, religious and non-religious aspects, and all different colors form family units without marriage and those units often last longer than religious or state condoned marriages?
It appears the problems that you've listed have more in common with outdated moral laws and religious paternalism than with the fact of economics and varying laws from state to state.
I'll contest your published article that Phyllis Schlafly was anything more than a scare monger who intentionally set the USA females from achieve actual equality up until this time. She helped to insure that Anita Hall and Christine Blasey Ford were treated as 2nd class citizens in Congressional Hearings. Phyllis Schlafly, and others like her are the reason women earn less than a man for the same work type, the reason why women have to endure 'man-speak', and why there are fewer women in the STEM program.
I suggest you live in a country for a couple of years where male/female equality is nearly ideal because then you will not only see this entire article is just more of the same arcane rationalization that is rapidly making it more difficult to believe the USA is any different from other backward looking countries.
6
Right-wing "conservative" corporate think tanks and media PROPAGANDA weaponized feminism against women. It's a Republican party policy: women bashing and undermining.
2
My sister dropped out of high school pregnant, married the guy, and has 8 kids with him. Now, 35 years into this non-modern arrangement, he wants to leave. She's pretty sick of him, too. But she's terrified to leave the marriage because her skill is mothering. She doesn't know anything else, and, at 52 years old, is so profoundly convinced of her inability to learn that she's unable to picture an independent future. Her dependence has been reinforced by her fundamentalist religion, by her bullying husband, and by her chosen conservative media.
We need to remember that the economic statistics represent more than trends: they contain a world of limited options, closed futures, and squandered opportunity. She would hate me to say so, but she is a Fox watching adherent to the most common for of victimhood feminism.
656
I am sorry for your sister. And I agree she has been brainwashed (much as I don’t like to use that word) by her religion and Fox News. Here in the south there is a lot of that going on. Hard to get folks to come up for air and even try to consider another viewpoint. We wanted a separation of church and state but in the south it is all one thing.
87
Perhaps it would be best not to have children unless one partner can afford to leave the paid workforce until the youngest child is in first grade. The way the tax code is stacked against workers, the second wage earner doesn't really bring that much home after the government takes its cut and you have to pay for child care, transportation, work clothes, work meals, etc. from what's left of your pay check. And no, the solution is not subsidies from government paid for by taxes on other citizens. There are already more people alive than the Earth can support at even a lower-middle class standard of living without becoming a complete ecological disaster, so how can it possibly be good public policy adding to the burden?
2
We really don't need any more people. We should have a population decline. With so many poor and struggling people in the US it is apparent that there is not enough for all if we intend to have super wealthy overlords rule us and an expanding population. We can't even afford healthcare for people as it is.
3
This opinion piece is much more interesting if you replace the word "women" with the word "workers". The 99.90 percent have been losing the class war counterattack on New Deal progressivism since the '70's . Let's all try insisting on income equality and then we can see what individuals free of economic fear really want to do with their lives.
8
Aristotle would evaluate a thing according to its "telos"- its purpose or goal. A good knife is one that can cut; if a knife cannot cut then its not a good knife. Women have thrived, despite the feminist points of view, over the years and done quite well. Those who embrace the feminism movement turned left when they should have continued straight ahead. By saying "we want what men have", equal rights, equal pay, equal everything, etc. gave away some of their power to embrace "sameness". One might say that by strengthening the family the good of the nation and the good of everyone was strengthened & furthered. The telos of this effort was a good one. The feminist woman asks "what's in it for me?" Which is perfectly reasonable- but very different from "what's good for the family". This is where conservative women are today- still strengthening the family. For those who have ever raised anything (kids or animals) it's well known that in order to breed you need both male and female.
"The foundation of every other political good" is not the family, although the family is important from a cultural standpoint.
It is financial security.
The Republicans, for whom the magazine Ms. Andrews edits is a biased mouthpiece, have hacked away at that very security since Saint Ronnie. They have singlemindedly pursued policies - trumpeted by media like the Examiner - that benefited the wealthy and the corporate at the direct expense of the middle and lower class. Today's historic level of income inequality is not enough for the "conservatives". Their unrelenting attacks on health care and the social safety net, their attempts to privatize Social Security, to destroy the environment for the benefit of corporations, the massive tax break for the rich and the concurrent catastrophic increase in the national debt which the middle class (not having gotten their tax breaks in perpetuity, unlike the rich) will have to pay for, the refusal to support legislation on a living minimum wage, on quality childcare or education, their permission for corporations to drop worker benefits and protections in favor of the profitable but insecure "gig economy" - all this and more have destroyed financial security for all but the very rich.
When the GOP can no longer ignore the problems they have created, they use shills like Andrews to blame the victims of these policies. The token woman gets to say that working women have caused the financial and social breakdowns we see now.
67
"When mothers started entering paid employment in large numbers in the 1970s, it led to a bidding war over middle-class amenities that left everyone paying more for the privilege of being no better off than before."
A lot of headed in the wrong direction notions in this piece, but its the above where I find the whole of the problem of the 2-income trap best explained, but wholly ignored.
Its that the costs of living keep going up, while workers are simply not earning more, in their purchasing power, then in the 70's. That's the whole of the problems.
More workers, more efficiencies in the systems of production, more output, more access to everything, has not resulted in the promise we all learned (back in the day) in Economics 101; cheaper prices. Efficiencies, and higher rates of production has not decreased prices, but in fact raised them ahead of the purchasing power of workers.
Basic costs of goods (bread, milk, etc) are still high. A gallon of milk is often more then a gallon of gas. While the costs of the larger assets (houses) still climb, or remain high enough to keep potential buyers off.
Meanwhile, taxes on this major asset (homes) for most people is strangling them, with little ROI! While the wealthy accumulate wealth that is not taxed! (enter Sen. Warrens wealth tax!) with greater ROI for them!
Its not women in the workforce hurting us - its how wealth is shared, or rather not shared in the workplace! Executives getting the bulk, workers getting pennies.
59
It turns out that all over the world when women are given the economic and cultural freedom to choose if they marry and/or have children they are often making their own choices.
For example, in the Scandinavian countries including most of the Northern Western European countries which all have universal healthcare, extensive paid family leave, maternity leave, humane work hours/schedules, subsidized and even free daycare, including in some cases bonuses for having children, etc., etc., YET, these most pro family formation and sustaining countries in the world, all of them have very low marriage and fertility rates, significantly below replacement. Also, in these countries husbands take up more of the childrearing and domestic chores the in the U.S. So, why are their marriage and fertility rates so low in such a utopian family supportive environment?
One of the other things that all these countries also have in common is that they were in many ways on the forefront of female empowerment. I propose that the not just equal rights but equal female empowerment (there is a difference) is at work here, and increasingly so in the U.S. It turns out that many women do not want families, and if given the choice will choose not to. I think we should celebrate those women as much as we do women who choose to have families, the ultimate female empowerment is to celebrate all women and their choices, right?
6
The entire premise of this article is wrong. The American family may be evolving, but it is certainly not under attack. The changes in family structure (e.g., gay marriage, blended families, etc.) and additional options and opportunities available to women are all for the better.
7
My daughter, aged 30, has a impressive education, an amazing career, stock options, a retirement plan, significant savings, a house, rental property, time for travel and friends, intellect and beauty.
What she hasn’t come across is a mature man within five years of her age, who is himself committed to thinking about a marital future ( because he will have the “ pick of the litter until age 50,” is not threatened by a woman more successful and making more money, is as motivated as she is, and shares her interests.
She can choose to marry or not. She and her friends, with the exception of those who met their spouses in college, have found they do not have to settle. And why should they have to in this day and age?
As far as kids are concerned, these young millennial women appear content to go it alone or adopt. They know it will not be easy, but many of them were raised by mothers who settled for a man to marry, stayed home to raise the kids, was divorced, and ended up being a single mom anyway.
These young women are not willing to give it all up unless they meet the person they feel they can have a satisfying life with on all fronts...and why not?
Sorry, Ms. Andrews, but that genie will not be put back in the bottle whether or not a conservative woman emerges to tell these women differently or not. Times really have changed.
114
EXACTLY!!! Women now have the economic freedom, through increased education and professional opportunities and ability to make their own healthcare choices, to forge their own paths without relying on marriage. I don’t see why that’s a problem.
547
@HVO The GOP seems to think women doing anything because they want to is a huge problem. They are especially agitated by the idea that women might control their own reproductive choices. They are working hard to elevate the rights of even the earliest fetuses above those of women, not by persuading others that their views are valid, but by enlisting the power of the state to force their values onto other people. The belief that others must define and control women remains strong throughout society, unfortunately.
18
Not much new and the article ignores a real data point. Two parent families with children are now only18% of households in the US.
Women are working for two reasons: first because they can and second because a single income for the bottom 70% of all workers in the US is insufficient to pay the bills. Wages have stagnated for almost 40 years for the bottom 70%. This has nothing to do with red herring of feminism or the red herring of conservative family values.
As to women, my wife is an example of the expanded opportunity with her STEM PhD from 35 years ago when they were rarely awarded (she was the first in her department). The attempts by the anti feminists like Schlafly to roll back the clock and oppose the ERA are an anathema to her and her fellow scientists. The ERA is still needed given the still existing invisible and legal barriers. Passing the ERA would have no effect whatsoever on any woman who wanted to take a different path like being a stay at home mom or as some of our friends have done, worked and then stayed at home. Sorry, the conservative attempts to go back to the 1950's should be staunchly opposed by all professional women everywhere.
71
By all women, period.
6
Oh there again arises that pervasive feeling that things used to be better. Yes, an average white man once could work a job and provide for his family, when the rest of the world had no significant industrial base. Or, own what was largely a land grant farm, on land taken from indigenous peoples, and he, his wife and children could rise together and work from dawn to dusk to make it work, unless they owned enslaved human beings, but somehow only the man had a job.
Nostalgia is a trap, that leads folks to forget about the past rampant institutionalized racism, and the exploitation of marginalized groups that enabled this fallacy. Helping families should be a priority, but it can only happen if we address education, the socialization and over-criminalization of young men and mass incarceration, the failed war on drugs, income inequality, and our health care system. The problem is that this sounds like helping people, and conservatives call helping people a handout. Too bad that people make families. If only everyone were rich, then conservatives would bend over backwards to help people.
72
@Darrell
God-fearing conservative Republican-types donate far more time, money, energy, and other resources to help the needy than Progressivists/Democrats, who expect the government to do it.
Citation?
4
The American family does not "need defending." Poor people need defending. Marginalized people need defending. People whom the GOP has cut out of the safety net need defending. People who are arriving in this country, fleeing violence and seeking asylum need defending. Women who have been raped in war need defending. The family is just fine, thanks, and the government should not be meddling in "the family, "anyway. Public education needs defending. The environment needs defending. Freedom of speech needs defending. "The people" need defending against the sale of military weapons to people with no background checks. The public needs defending against corporations who claim "personhood" and then don't pay taxes. Don't talk to me about the family.
70
I think many thinking and caring women have left the conservative movement because it was put on the back burner by Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party has co-opted so many diverse groups that they no longer stand for anything but greed.
I think, and I am probably in the minority, that the Republican Party was lost when they gave Nixon a pardon. That led to Clinton getting a get out of jail card for lying under oath and finally to the disgrace we now have in the presidency. If the President is not accountable everything falls apart.
4
I was raised by a stay-at-home mom. I loved it. But I found out years later that she didn't (even though that was her goal in life). Thankfully, my father was devoted to all of us - but he suffered too. He had enormous pressure to provide for the family - including putting two kids through college. When I lamented to my mother years later that I never had children, she said to me "Honey, it's not that much fun."
12
@JoAnne Kudos to your mom for being honest. However as a single mom and sole support raising a son I think a big part of why it is not fun is the lack of support even for stay at home moms like your mother. My married women friends all assume the lions share of day to day childcare, even if they work outside the home. It can feel burdensome with no support from a coparent or society. The only way to break this cycle is to provide better supports for families regardless of how they divvy up childcare.
3
No, the American family doesn't need defending. The flag and apple pie are alright, too.
4
Someone has to work full time if there are going to be healthcare benefits in the household. If we can somehow get this country to recognize the benefits of single payer and the flexibility it would provide we could solve a lot of problems. Part time work, job sharing, etc, especially for parents with young children or older workers nearing retirement could options that are simply not available to those groups now. As technology continues to improve it will make many jobs obsolete, just as it has been doing. When so many people no longer have a clear path to a sustainable career that pays a living wage, social disruption like the writer is addressing is inevitable. There are many paths to bringing in enough money to pay the bills. In the long run, lack of healthcare benefits is everyone's Achilles Heel. It is the 800 lb gorilla in the room that must be addressed or we're going nowhere
6
It doesn’t take an activist to realize that increasing family income will eventually drive up cost. More, better, faster,etc.. I then conclude that people expected or should have expected this modern day situation and accepted them at the beginning. Is the writer simply the minority unhappy with the majority situation?
2
Up until the invention of the birth control pill, few females had any choices, except to not enter into a relationship with a male. In much of the world, that is not an option, as family cultural and religions force most women to marry someone the family chooses. Growing up like most women did, my best friend's parents were good Catholics, where even though the mother, and father had college degrees, they still had 9 children, She started a greenhouse to put all nine children through college. Out of the 9 children, she had about 5 grandchildren, as the education of her 4 girls, and 5 boys did the job. Many Catholic women in America, went ahead, and didn't have very many children. I put myself on the pill, at the age of 20, while working in New York. I assumed most women would follow suit, and limit their child bearing to two children, for not only the cost, the investment of time in raising many children, but the environment as well. I graduated in 1966. The population in this country then, was 201 million, and the world, 3.4 billion. Now in this country, it is 330 million, and in the world, it is 7.8 billion. Most of the world's problems, including poverty, and climate change, because of carbon emissions, are directly related to population, as it is a driver of climate change, as all the people want to live in a modern world. Better a female, who decides on her own, not to have children, or even get married, as those are the ones saving the planet.
14
One woman’s orthodoxy is another woman’s engine of oppression! The point of the ERA was to create equal opportunity and a level playing field. Ms. Andrews is certainly welcome to her personal views and choices. She should not presume to impose them on the country as a whole. The success of promoting individual rights for woman without an ERA evidences the common sense and practicality of giving all folks equal opportunity to make choices for themselves, in the true tradition of American freedom and democracy.
9
What's wrong with marriage/birth rates declining? People of all genders should have equal career/life choices. If kids are born to parent(s) who choose/need to pursue a full-time career (no parent home at least part-time), let's face it: these kids are not being raised by a parent, but usually by hired help... nannies or in daycare centers, (essentially, institutionalized settings where kids are forced, for at least 8-10 hours a day-most of their waking hours- to be with other kids who don’t necessarily like them, & adults who, probably, don't love them. Babies, pre-schoolers, & older kids (kindergarten- high school) spend most of their waking hours away from parents who love them. (Older kids need oversight & love, as well.) The reality is: There's nothing more important than the physical safety and emotional caring of children. Adults considering having kids may mean well, but if their kids don't have a loving parent with them AT ALL during the day, the kids are the losers. So, if all adults in a household CHOOSE to pursue a career, maybe the best thing would be not to have kids. With the socially acceptable lifestyle choices available.... being married, living single or living together without marriage, why should people feel compelled to have kids? Let people pursue careers without producing children who are growing up without at least one loving parent with them at home. Having kids is a choice.
5
As someone raised by a single mom, I was not a “loser”, although I didn’t have a loving parent available more than about 4 hours a day. I learned self-reliance and independence and turned out fine.
3
There is a lot of outrage in these comments but not much response to the two empirical assertions made. Firstly, that two income families are a structural 'requirement' of capitalism more than they are the outcome of feminist social movements, and secondly that there are gendered preferences (whether socially or biologically based or both) on child care.
Those seem defensible positions. For example most leftist movements in the early 20th century were opposed to the 'exploitation' of two incomes families.. As to social preferences on child care - yes men and women can / should 'reform' their preferences on this but such changes are rarely easy or rapid and may bump up against genetic coding as well as social brainwashing.
Finally, most NYT readers needn't worry. The upper middle classes are not the target of "conservative women". Most upper middle class persons have access to cheap child care and they are also unlikely to go without a spouse.
4
Ms. Andrews advocates delaying retirement benefits to fund family leave? What can we have both: equitable retirement benefits AND equitable paid family leave? Any thing else isn't feminism. It's exploitation, especially since the women will most likely be the ones applying for family leave - which will come out of their retirement benefits.
5
Interesting article. It shows that there are many different ways to view a problem. In our marriage my wife decided to stay home with our children. That decision was aided by a large difference in our earnings potential but it was a choice and involved changes in priorities in her life. Our kids turned out very well and our marriage has survived the years because all things being equal my wife took on a large risk as divorce or my early demise would devastate her financial future. We also had to endure a worse position in the competition for middle class things such as housing in the best neighborhoods to get our kids into the best schools etc. Our retirement also is based on one 401k, one full social security benefit (with a spousal benefit) rather than two. These are the issues that need to be addressed. It is great for children to have a parent who focuses on them but we need to protect that parent in terms of income, healthcare and retirement security if that parent is cast adrift by divorce or illness, disability or mortality of the earning spouse. In our day there was much discussion of supported childcare, equal pay etc but very little for programs that would benefit my spouse which we had to cover as best we could with the kinds of insurance that was available. We need these types of discussions. We need to be open to them as well.
15
Thank you. Your comments about the of risks your wife took on are very real to Generation X ers who grew up in fear of divorce.
2
Andrews describes a problem (the high cost of raising a family) but fails to name crucial parts of the solution: economic justice (higher pay and pay equity) and higher taxes to pay for social stay-at-home policies. This is typical. Conservatives love to tell other people how to live and hate to pay for anything.
24
Perhaps socially conservative women don't want to be associated with the men who are "leading" the Conservative movement. Unfortunately, they along with all other women, are being thrown under the bus.
11
Oh, this was hilarious. Thanks for the laugh, Helen! I needed that this morning.
Perhaps a replacement for Phyllis Schlafly hasn't come forth (thank you, Lord) because women have figured out how to do what works for them? The traditional model of - get married to a "good enough" man, pop out a couple of kids, subjugate your needs to your family's needs, take a dead-end job because that's what's best "for the family" doesn't work for all women. Or, maybe, I would posit, most women.
I am a working mother with a husband and I am very much in the minority when I think of the families I know. I know single-mom families, single-dad families, two-mom families, two-dad families, married-couple-with-no-kids families, etc. I know a lot of mostly-happy people who have found a model that works for them. Helen, if you are not happy, maybe it's because you are spending too much time worrying about what other people are doing and not enough time minding your own business? That would be my guess. Just a suggestion, though.
23
No, I don’t want to marry someone who’s sitting on his mother’s couch waiting for the local coal mine to re-open. Is something prohibiting men from seeking employment in “female dominated” industries like education and healthcare?
28
I saw no mention of raising the minimum wage or doing something about stagnating wages, the burden of student loans, lack of health care which children absolutely need, support for good public education which requires paying teachers and child care workers. It's great to believe women should stay home and breed and raise children but again a conservative ignores the fact that raising healthy, educated, confident little humans requires investment of money something best done by the government. Expecting people to do so in the absence of a support network is fantasy. Especially when if they do you(conservatives) argue they made bad choices.
17
One reason some women have to work while they have a family is that unfortunately many men no longer accept the responsibility of being a family man. They fail to contribute in any significant way and actually depend on the income, and often earn less than their wives. I am not suggesting that women shouldn't pursue work and careers, quite the contrary. I am merely saying that many men no longer accept the responsibility of providing for their family in the best way they can, even if it means taking on the role of the stay at home parent fully. I see this too often. Men leaving their working wives to take care of everything while they pretend to act as responsible men. Maybe I'm old school, but either find a second job or take on roles traditionally assumed by women. Either way is providing for the needs of your family. It is not only women who have "abandoned" tradition. Men still need to be a "man."
6
Thank you, Frank. I appreciate this more than you know.
I am a woman. I always find it curious that those who place such a supposedly high value on "science," reject the obvious and well-documented fact that men and women are different.
As in other species, women are the nurtures and men are the defenders and often providers. Why should this be shocking to find in the human race? And what benefit is it to go against our natures and put everyone out of place? How can this result in happiness and well-being?
Everyone should be free to do as they choose, and if work and/or childlessness makes you happy - by all means you should be free to do that.
But we know, again from science, that married couples - with a parent in the home - is the best possible arrangement for children's health and well-being - shouldn't that be the goal?
5
It's simply out of fashion to assign essential qualities to any category of person. Gender and race essentialism are very thin ice to support public policy. Better to treat all equally so that none are artificially limited by membership in a group, even if this requires withdrawing some cultural support for people who fit the categories neatly.
4
What if neither spouse wants to stay home? Taking care of little kids all day is miserable for many people, socially isolating and intellectually stultifying. Is it better for children to be raised by unhappy parents who feel they're sacrificing what could be the most productive years of their lives (and permanently damaging their future prospects of a thriving career)?
5
Good article.
I suspect that there are a number of socially conservative women who will soon become more visible. Part of what is hindering them now is the repressive shaming that the left media immediately impose on any conservative woman (or conservative man, for that matter: see the attacks on Tucker Carlson).
Ironically, in the longer run, socially conservative women are being galvanized into action by the appalling efforts to expand and facilitate abortion to the end of the nine months of pregnancy. The arc of history (and medical advances) is bending away from such laws, and conservative women will be in the vanguard on that issue.
Unless we invent an artificial womb that can nurture a 22 week or less baby, the medical advances won’t put a dent in abortion numbers. This worry about late term “until birth” abortions are also another argument that simply is another over the top false narrative created to control a families medical options. If you are willing to spend billions more on late term babies who will have little or no quality of life while forcing women to face agonizing and long term consequences of parenting and paying for care of such children, then step up to the plate and support a vast single payer health care plan and subsidized family leave programs.
13
I have some ideas to help the American family. 1. Make going to the doctor cheap. 2. While we are in the subject of going to the doctor, improve education so that there aren’t so many people who think that getting a measles shot will hurt them. 3. Improve education to help children get into college, also help unskilled workers get skills so they can get better jobs. 4. Fix the opioid crisis. 5. There are a lot of people in jail who might have kids. They might be minor drug offenders. If someone got caught with a little weed, let them out of jail, help them get a job. 6. Stop all the pay day loans and general legal loan sharking going on. 7. Get big employers to pay people more. 8. Let people have vacations.
Helen Andrews acts like these things don’t exist and the biggest threat to the American family is a wife with a side hustle. As far as I can tell the American family gets the most valuable help from a Japanese lady who teaches people how to talk to the things you throw away.
22
It's really quite simple. In the 1980s "employers" discovered that women could be paid far less than men for the same work. This segued nicely with the nascent feminist movement for those women who chose to work.
Now women were competing with men and offering the same for less. Suddenly, men had less bargaining power in certain industries. The corporate right seized on this and pumped money into anti labor politicians, Reagan and company.
The 'family wage' was something unions had fought for for generations and finally won in the 1950s. Remember, the oligarchs of the late 19th century fought hard to keep children in the workforce. Women worked in mines alongside men in the 19th century. Allowing women to stay home with the kids and the kids to go to school was a huge win for families -- brought to you by organized labor.
Once women were back in the work force it was now easy to deconstruct all the labor progress by, in industry after industry, pitting them against men. And quite honestly, women are more durable, more flexible, and more reliable from a purely utilitarian standpoint of your average plutocrat looking at workers as units of production.
From there, it was not a long stretch to where we are today. Capital cares not a whit for families, and Milton Friedman told corporations that they had no social responsibility beyond the bottom line.
Enter Charles Murray to tell us it was all about poor morals and a lack of church going among the lazy lower classes!
11
I grew up in a family with a strong father and a strong mother. I and my siblings were direct beneficiaries of my parents' strength, and their openness in leaning on each other. I saw each of my parents stand up for their beliefs in the face of scorn. I learned about 'feminism' at an early age, just as I learned about the folly of racism: the core teaching is that all people should have equal opportunity to stretch, grow, and deliver an improved world to the next generation.
As a society, we were close to achieving that, until the conservatives became panicked over losing some vague position on society's stepladder.
We don't need another Schlafly. But, if some feel we do, I would ask Andrews what she is doing about it - or is she just another conservative mouthpiece bemoaning the loss of a mythic Xanadu? Whine, moan, complain; but never a step to action.
Ahh. The smell of the politics of 'no' every morning.
10
Tucker Carlson's statement that “In many areas, women suddenly made more than men..Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t” is yet another example of a man telling women what they *should want.* (sigh) How about asking us what we actually DO want? Choosing a marriage partner involves so much more than a spreadsheet calculation of one's future earnings. For example, does a potential husband value education the way you do? If he makes less money, is it because he lacks ambition or that he has chosen a "people helping" profession (teaching, social work, etc.) that comes with a traditionally lower salary? Choice of profession will also impact the income levels of the people you actually get to meet, so that could limit the scope of your choices as well. Is the lower-earning potential husband spending every extra dime he has for fun, or does he have the self-discipline to save for the future? How do those habits match up with a woman's personal values and priorities? In short, correlation is not causation. And even if it were, do we really want to return to the days that women needed to be married to survive?
8
Someone needs to blast this woman out of the early 20th century.
Historically, most married women did NOT just stay home and survive on one paycheck. Their working lives were dictated by life stage and need. People used to work on farms or produce textiles and other goods in small shops and homes. Rural women always worked on farms and in home-based production. Industrial capitalism changed the nature and locale of work for all. It brought women out of the home to work, always at a fraction of what men could earn, and with most skilled, well-paying jobs closed to them.
Bourgeois women lived off of the men they married, perhaps. But most women in the west never had the privilege to stay home; their wages were desperately needed for family survival.
There was a brief window following WWII that allowed women from the working classes to stay home with children while they were small. But even then poorer women still had to work. In those days, government social programs were at their height. Wages, pensions and secure jobs - without the need for college- were decent.
So bring all that material security back, control housing costs, eliminate debt, and boost wages, and maybe more people will marry and have children. Of course, women, being humans, might want more than such a limited social role. Socialism would be needed to support those whose men abandoned them.
Why conservatives care so much about people's personal life choices has always puzzled me.
23
A woman who does not work, and does not have the career experience to get a new job if she needs one, is a woman who will be wholly dependent on her partner. A woman who is dependent on her partner for food and shelter cannot leave when that partner becomes abusive. Until society is radically reorganized so that the right to a roof over one's head and food on one's table is divested from one's ability to earn a wage, workforce participation is the only way to ensure one's independence and autonomy.
18
Yes. That is the bottom line.
1
This is the crux of so many of our problems. Will we ever be able to shift away from serving the GDP? When will the economy serve people instead of the other way around?
"“Access to paid leave has been shown to promote labor force attachment, especially for women, which is vital for economic growth.” In this fixation on economic growth, even when it means nudging into the work force women who would have preferred to stay home, all sides of the political spectrum are in agreement...'
1
First, a woman who overcomes the barriers to living her life the way she herself chooses to and tries to help other women do the same is, by definition, a feminist. That, I believe, made Phyllis Schlafly a closet feminist whether she acknowledged it or not. She happened to be a feminist who thought that certain other women who wanted different choices than hers should not have the same privilege of choice that she claimed for herself.
Second, I see nowhere in this essay any treatment of the economics that have prevailed since Reagan that have kept and still keep many people from living their lives the way they choose. Many of the ills Ms. Andrews decries have nothing to do with how many women are in the workforce and what they are earning. They have to do with the stagnation of wages and benefits that have given the lion’s share of benefit from a well-performing economy to the already-wealthy. And the already-wealthy are still making sure their government and the rules it tries to impose serves only their interests.
Third, why has anyone concluded that the marriage rate has fallen because women earn more than men? While that’s a convenient (although inaccurate) suggestion to “scare men straight” a la Jordan Peterson, the factors feeding the low-marriage trend are myriad, one of which is that women are often no longer enamored of the trappings and traps of traditional marriage and want different relationships and family arrangements than their mothers experienced.
18
Why not look to Europe? I guess that’s a dangerous thought to the anti-socialism crowd. My British sister-in-law’s get 6 months paid leave for each child they have. Fathers also get generous paternity leave. My Belgian friends enjoy generous benefits for their family, IN ADDITION TO a strong social safety net and single payer health care.
We need to stop bickering about socialism and LOOK at what has been working for decades in Europe.
9
"The American family is once again in crisis. The statistical bellwether this time is not family breakdown but failure of families to form in the first place."
Exactly.
The kids today are looking at the deck stacked against them by conservatives, GOP'ers, (aided and abetted by the Ds at times), and now supercharged by Trump, and ask themselves why on earth they would try such a thing?
They have all witnessed what happened to their 40/50 something parents' jobs in the 90's and 00's, that being downsizing, right sizing, being 'transformed', new paradigm'd, and generally driven out of the economic mainstream by 'change is good' thinking regardless of the cost or the toll on America as a whole.
9
I am 70. I worked on the ERA campaign as a young mother. Now I have a daughter, two daughters-in-law and three granddaughters. It is beyond sad that people like this conservative woman are still undermining women’s best interests. Women deserve and need pay equity. Women deserve and need paid sick time and paid maternity leave time. Women deserve and need reproductive freedom. Women needed all of these things back in 70s, and certainly need them now.
20
It STILL continues to amaze me how, compared to the rest of the western industrialized world, so many Americans(and its government) continue to be so behind the times on a subject like this and cling to the long outdated notion of returning to a time 150 yrs. ago.
12
The hatred directed in these comments at this woman merely for trying to speak a shred or two of back-talk at the feminist revolution is itself some kind of social indicator. Those of us concerned about the enormous marginalization of young men without college degrees in this new American dystopia are without a voice in this new society, but I have seen it happen, and it's not pretty. And no, I am NOT a Trump Republican. He has done more damage to that party than it has done to itself, which is plenty. Even so, this woman has something to say and I thank her for saying it.
5
Thanks! I think what you are saying is that we need to focus a lot more attention on class inequity. Young men should not be sacrificed to corporate profits.
The treatment of those young men (by whom?) are not the consequences of feminism. That would be a different article.
3
I suspect the reason no woman has continued the work of Phyllis Schafley is because, generally speaking, things are better for women now than ever before in US history. Why go back when we still have a long way to go?
10
I’m exhausted by the ceaseless, unquestioned assertion that 1) all family formation is good and 2) changes in families are all bad for society as a whole. There’s no need for an article such as this to be written without discussing these core assumptions.
9
Things have changed since the 1970's. The conservative party is no longer women, gay, black or hispanic friendly. It is overwhelmingly white male christian and intolerant of others.
I wish like you that someone like Schlafly could lead conservative women, but we already saw what happens when conservative women stand up and want their voices heard. "Blood coming out of her whatever!" President Trump takes on Megyn Kelly. That's what happens. There's no place for women in conservative politics. It's not about the voice it's about the destruction of conservative diversity.
8
I recall the '40s and '50s. Americans led a much more frugal existence. Houses were smaller, often heated by coal (shoveled by Daddy). Daddy, lunchbox in hand, carpooled to work. Kids carried their lunches. Junk food? no way. Folk did not eat between meals. Vacation travel, very rare. Audio system? That would be the barroom upright Daddy bought for $10. Flour came in cotton bags brightly printed for-re purposing as as curtains or garments.
The one-paycheck family is still, a possibility, but no one wants to go there
10
It's absurd to reason that subsidized childcare hurts women or forces them into the workplace. The problem is an economic system that makes most of us paupers while lining the pockets of the ultra-rich.
If we didn't need two incomes to maintain a family more parents would stay home. Subsidized childcare, Medicare for all, free college, forgiveness of college debt, and a progressive tax structure are all programs that would strengthen families by reducing their financial burdens, allowing one parent to stay home and care for children during some portion of their working life.
Retrograde gender politics is not the answer. Schlafly, a gifted organizer and ambitious woman, spent her career urging women to stay home--a role she utterly rejected for herself. More freedom is not less freedom.
13
Ms. Andrews consistently uses and cites language that is meant to be gender neutral, but in her mind, is only about women:
If there's a "two income trap," why is it that the woman's income is the problem?
If marriage has become more rare, why is it that we're questioning women's motivations and not men's?
If women "even with hired help" spend as much time on household chores as their predecessors, why is it that their partners aren't picking up the slack?
If Patrick Brown's article argues for public policy to make it easier for "one parent to stay home," why does Ms. Andrews think that it should be the female parent?
If Tucker Carlson thinks that men making less money makes them less attractive to women, why is it that we should cut the woman's pay to return to old disparities instead of encouraging men to seek better employment?
And yes, I am aware that my questions assume a level of heteronormativity. This is only because I'm quite sure Ms. Andrews assumes the same.
17
No wonder there are not so many women who support the author's ideas. Basically, what he is proposing is to hold women down, making them totally financially insecure in order to guarantee the financial security to men. Why would women want to support such arrangement, that designed to force them in marriage in order to survived? The author claims that today situation makes everybody miserable, totally forgetting that we had the situation he proposed before, and clearly women were miserable, otherwise why would they went to have jobs in such big numbers when they were giving opportunity? And with such low employment rate it is difficult to make argument that it was women's fault(!!!) that salaries went down. And if the need for marriage is so strong for woman, you think they would overlook the such defect as lower salaries of men. After all, they could do housework and babysit as well as women. Why should we lower salaries for all women in order to force them to do what some of them don't like. Why not allow men do the 'women' duty if they are not breadwinner in their family? Equality should allow them do it just fine. Why should we go to the old model that was not working for many, instead of explore new reality and develop the strategy that fit this reality without denying equal opportunity to men and to women?
8
If the traditional women's role had been treated as of equal POWER as men's careers were AND financially valued, then then one parent might feel empowered to stay home and do all the things that make a family a specially supportive human institution. Instead women for millennia were brought up to subjugate their emotional needs to a grumpy and many times abusive, unhelpful man. In the best of families this wasn't the case. If we want to combine staying home to take care of children, elders, homes etc with another person who is working we, as a society, need to start teaching men or whoever works to communicate and know feelings and understand the great unrecognized value of the very hard role the homemaker has and not just by bunches of flowers.
We need to encourage job sharing so everyone can earn money if they want to since ,honestly, money is respected a lot more than mothering and we should teach men as well as women to genuinely honor the role of caretaker.
4
It is interesting to me that this article is written from the point of view of conservative culture wars. The fundamental problem underpinning the loss of the traditional American family structure is low wages and a culture that values money above all else. Blaming this on feminism is ludicrous. The traditionally male, good paying jobs didn’t go to women entering the workplace. They went to China or robots.
If you want to allow people the freedom to be in a traditional family structure, support a living wage, take money out of politics, and vote for the Democrat.
34
Ah yes, let's blame women working for the current economic inequality and wage stagnation in our country. Perfect. It has nothing to do with policy, tax structure, health care, rising housing costs, nope, can't solve any of those problems, let's just take women out of the workforce.
Also, am I the only person who still knows people who are stay-at-home moms? Because I know a number of them. They are not wealthy, but their families make do with less so that they can stay home while their children are young. And they are liberal, so I don't know what this article is about.
31
One of the many elephants in this room is that in the United States health care and retirement contributions are tied to employment. When these things are separated (as they are in other first world countries), fathers and mothers can reduce their work hours outside the home without losing health care, and without worrying that they’ll end up impoverished in old age. As it stands now, it is simply too risky to leave the full-time work force if you have a decent job. This is especially true for women because our paychecks are lower, which means our retirement contributions are lower too. Maybe that's why the conservative women are quiet - because part of the solution is universal health care.
23
Divorce. Death. Lost jobs. Economic downturns. What woman wants to be the victim to those possibilities? And as others point out, June Cleaver was never reality.
My Mother stayed at home and hated it. Her mother worked outside the home and put off marriage so she could keep earning (and she ordered birth control from Germany once married and yes it was illegal but no one read the German on the packages). My other grandmother worked in the family business and had her own bakery before she married. So much of what is projected is fantasy.
I see neighbors who are staying at home and both they and their kids seem out of touch with a larger reality. It diminishes both their futures.
11
A lot of the issues around this problem could be solved if we would give up referring to the work of child rearing as “working not at all,” to quote this article. Child rearing has incredible value and is a tremendous contribution to a country’s well-being. We need to find a way to compensate people for that work. The traditional mindset around this issue has not yielded any useful results. We must start thinking differently. Another concept to give some thought to? Perhaps what we now call “part-time work” could become the norm - for everyone. Surely it must be clear to all that 9-to-5 does not constitute work-life balance in any way.
8
What it boils down to is another example where the masses work their tails off while the few reap the economic benefits. Growth sounds great until you realize the price tag is the most stressed out generation going. And for what? So the Koch And Walton families can grow their pile of money higher yet?
During the entire time this was happening, the percentage of wealth and income at the bottom went down and the amount at the top soared.
That’s the problem with Social Security funded family leave. Why can’t we reach into the pile of money accumulating at the top?
17
Wage stagnation and increased costs are not the only think harming today’s families. The tax code is based on the family income structure of the mid-20th century: A single income (the father) and a non-income earning wife. For today’s families needing two incomes, the reality for the last 40+ years, the increased income is treated as affluence based on the outdated standard. The changes from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 also are increasing the pain. I think of my neighbors, a married couple approaching their 40’s with two children in middle school. They lost so many exemptions and deductions they almost saw no refund at all from tax year 2018. They expect to change their withholding for tax year 2019 to account for the wife and mother moving to full time employment. As for me, a single, childless man in my early 60’s, I have been able to postpone the impact of the new tax code, but will not be able to avoid it: My federal income taxes will increase 20 to 25 percent unless I stop working, which is practically not possible. (I feel we are being punished for being in a “blue state”.) I shudder to think of what my parents (from the Silent Generation) would say about our country today.
9
Sorry -- what I see here is a polemic for procreation which given all of the problems of an already over-peopled planet I cannot support. Along with the investor and consumer economy.
Having endured (and remained single) - dating, the problems of pleasing the male of the species, all kinds of rejection and rejecting -- yes, women need to learn (and it is learned) how to conduct relationships successfully -- you can tell I still think singleness is "my fault."
Yes, many people need to be paid more. Many people need to want less?! All those nice things to experience (buy) -- pushed thru-out society. Try t travel on a shoe string without ending up in the top bunk in a hostel -- not possible for me -- did it once - bottom bunk. So despite being middle class maybe I really am poor -- and terrified of the investor economy.
5
I was born in 1958 and for the first 14 years had a stay at home mom who was raising me and my three siblings. My dad was an engineer with a good job and we lived in a nice suburb. My mom went back to work because cost started accelerating due in large measure to the early seventies oil crises and other inflationary issues beyond what my father’s salary increases could keep pace with. This circumstance was true for most of my peers. The author has the facts backwards, the need for two incomes now is not because women entered the workforce, women entered the workforce because two incomes were required to maintain the obligations my parents had committed to and have remained so ever since.
26
I was born in 1960 to a family in a similar economic situation and my mother did exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons. I’d also say she liked working as we grew older. It gave her something productive and fulfilling to do. And she was quite good at what she did too.
6
What about the way a SAHM and breadwinner arrests a child's development?
My extended family has suicides on both sides, one of them by a teenage girl and another by a failed Wall Street male in his 50s.
I have no interest in subjecting my children to the emotional traumas inevitable with sentimentalized motherhood and self-absorbed breadwinner fathers, where the parents are more like children than adults.
I want my child to have two actual adult parents. I'm female, I have competed in the marketplace developing a productive career when I can readily provide half the income of a family.
My goal now is to get rid of the federal tax and benefit subsidies to sole breadwinners and SAHM. (Income splitting in the tax code and payroll taxes levied in individuals but distributed based on marital status; its a 1x taxes for 2x benefits for the SAHMs and their husbands). Virtually all of the ginormous federal debt can be traced to these costs shifted to future generations by selfish SAHMs and their husbands.
No more emotional or financial costs to children of their parents not being able to function as adults in the political economy and in adult, responsible marriages.
7
This article is very misguided and is outright wrong. It is blaming the result for the cause - it's just not true and there is no evidence that more women in the workforce = dissolution of the family. Economics is a primary cause of younger people not marrying, yes, but the women in the workforce have not been the reason for the economics of the day. Manufacturing jobs have gone away because its cheaper to buy from countries overseas, technology has changed over the last several decades and because historically manufacturing jobs were primarily given to men who could command higher pay. Perhaps we need to fix pay disparities between men and women in order to fix the problems with families.
And more importantly, shouldn't this be about allowing flexibility for women AND men with regard to careers? Shouldn't both women AND men be offered the same family benefits e.g. post natal leave, etc. By tying family duties to women only, we continue to blame women for the state of families. And we perpetuate disparities in the workplace which is really the issue we should be addressing.
If this writer were really interested in improving families, how about supporting more women in leadership positions to address the still too common malignant attitudes of male leaders that women cannot lead as productive a work life because of they have children.
13
It is unfortunate that this article is written from a conservative viewpoint. Many of the points raised would be much more impactful if raised from a liberal point of view. There are important points raised that really transcend the liberal/conservative dynamic. One point is that pay would be higher if there were fewer people in the work force, and if one of the two parents from each family stayed home, then the single working parent would be better able to support the family.
Yes, women should make as much as men. Yes, women should have the same opportunities as men. Women should have the opportunity to succeed in whatever field they choose.
But we also need to support women and men who choose to stay home and raise children. In my view, society should provide financial support for this choice, and society should provide continuing education for the spouse that chooses to stay home so that when the children are older and more self-sufficient, the spouse that stayed home can enter the work force and build a productive career.
4
I am a conservative woman and the women's movement did not help me. I found that some of these women were only interested in feathering their own nest and tearing men down. They did not help me with my career and I preferred working for a man. They encouraged me and assisted me in my career advancement. Maybe it was jealously on the women's part or they felt threatened. It might have just been the women I encountered but I have spoken to others who have said the same thing. Women should be helping other women as everybody benefits in the long run.
3
@KMW
As a liberal woman radicalizing in her old age, I’m sure we agree on almost nothing.
And yet, I’ve had the same experience when it came to working for other women, regardless of their stated support of women’s rights.
3
Sadly, a well written article that questions current group think is vilified by many of the readers. Such closed-mindedness solves nothing but rather perpetuates the mess we're in.
3
How this article could be 'open-minded' If it calls for return to the old model, that was already rejected by many women when they had the opportunity ? What is so open about that?
8
The irony in this piece is that it was written by a woman with a career. I wonder if Ms. Andrews would be willing to step down from her position at the Washington Examiner to practice what she preaches?
Don’t step on my rights, Ms. Andrews. I’m a 35-year-old career woman in a male-dominated field. I’m proud of what I’ve done. Perhaps you could help us, though, by applying your otherwise admirable desires for more paid leave and child tax breaks to gay couples, stay-at-home dads, and single mothers and fathers (including single mothers by choice with careers). Perhaps you could consider using your privilege as a clearly intelligent, powerful woman with a voice and career to improve workplace equality, wages for people not in the one percent, and health and childcare in this country.
And by the way, let’s stop with the lionizations of puritanical figureheads whose brash voices are mere coverups for shame and bigotry.
23
One of the problems is that while gender roles have become freer for women the same has not happened for men at the same speed, so they're still struggling to catch up.
I don't think going back to the past, with rigid gender roles, traditional marriage, and unequal incomes based on gender or sex is the right solution. We'd end up with the same issues and problems that prompted the feminist revolution in the first place, such as individuals feeling forced to stay in loveless or abusive marriages, becoming destitute after divorce or widowhood, or simply feeling obligated to marry in the first place.
We need to make sure that men have the same choices that women do. Although the numbers have been increasing, it is still unusual for a man to choose to stay home with the kids, or for a couple to share childcare. It really shouldn't be a big deal for a man to earn less than his wife, work fewer hours, or stay home to take care of the kids, and we need to stop marginalizing those who do. It may be true that more women would still choose to stay home than men, but it should be an option for everyone.
It would also help if taking care of the children was a shared national priority instead of treated like an expensive individual hobby. Putting more emphasis on child-friendly policies such as universal healthcare, more flexible family leave policies, and subsidized child care would make having and taking care of children a more attractive and viable choice.
11
You conflate social choices with capitalist mandates. The two income trap you refer to is primarily driven by the investor class soaking up the available resources while the working class scrambles for the crumbs. Policies that redistribute wealth would do more to free all of us from predetermined choices than would a return to gender role expectations keeping women at home.
14
Reality Check:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, in 2014, 47.6 percent of women between age 15 and 44 had never had children. Ultimately, one in seven American women never give birth. That's 23 million women.
Let's stop assuming that being female is synonymous with breeding. When you do, you are making millions of people invisible.
847
@Amy Luna
That’s a weird stat. Women in that age group are still, for the most part, able to give birth. A more meaningful statistic would be the percent/number of women over 45 who never gave birth.
25
@KarenI gave you that statistic...one in seven or 23 million women. Also the 47.6 percent stat is not "weird," it's very meaningful. At any given time, close to half of adult women between 15 and 44 are probably not parenting. To create policies that assume all adult women are parenting at all times is not reflective of reality. And the part of parenting that is female-specific (gestation, birth and lactation) only accounts for the first few years of a child's life. Otherwise, males are just as responsible for parenting responsibilities as females. No need to create sex segregated policies regarding parenting responsibilities that have no sex.
83
@Karen I gave you that statistic...one in seven or 23 million women. Also the 47.6 percent stat is meaningful. At any given time, close to half of adult women between 15 and 44 are probably not parenting. To create policies that assume all adult women are parenting at all times is not reflective of reality. And the part of parenting that is female-specific (gestation, birth and lactation) only accounts for the first few years of a child's life. Otherwise, males are just as responsible for parenting responsibilities as females. No need to create sex segregated policies regarding parenting responsibilities that have no sex.
14
Has there ever been such a thing as a traditional family? The wonderful thing about nostalgia is that we only remember what was good. As a grandmother, I remember the good old days of daddy working and mommy raising the children. I also remember women getting married because that is what society and their religion expected of them. I remember women staying in abusive relationships under the same obligations and because there was no way out for you and the children you had, or were expected to have, because there was no way for you to leave and take care for them. They had few choices in a world that shunned divorce and most were not even joint owners on their homes.
Then came the ERA and women were told they had a choice. In a conservative, patriarchal society, has there ever been a more scary word than choice?
I am very fortunate to have a wonderful relationship with my 20 plus year old grandchildren and many of their friends. Some are in college, some are not. Some have discovered interests in fields they can pursue, others who haven't as yet found a life goal see no reason to chase a dream that will put them in debt for the next twenty years. Marriage is for children and they don't want to bring a child into a world where racism, sexual bias, sexual assault, a hardly existing safety net, college they can't afford, stagnant wages and a plutocratic government, etc., that is systemically destroying the planet itself. Who can blame them?
19
I have a surprise for this writer: The Leave-it-to-Beaver lifestyle she is longing for was largely a fiction for a lot of women, even in the 1950s.
And if the "two income family" is a trap for women who want to have children and stay home, conservatism, generally, was also a trap for women when their husbands died or abandoned the family and they were left with no money and no pensions of their own.
She worries about the men with no job prospects, but the reality is still that the better-paid jobs (in construction and trades for example) are male dominated while lower paid jobs (retail, daycare workers, homecare workers) tend to be occupied by women.
There are of course women with high-stress professional jobs ... just like there are men with high-stress professional jobs. But these people are pursuing these high stress jobs with higher incomes because they **want** to, for the most part.
The answer is not to go back to a system where women needed to "marry up" to professional guys in order to be able to enjoy a middle class lifestyle. That is a recipe that leaves a lot of women vulnerable and can lead to disaster in a lot of cases. Personally, I would rather have my education and my own career. That provides me with security, thank you very much.
23
Let's forget all this "It Takes a Village" nonsense. Children come into the world and become productive adults not by accident but because of specific actions their parents take. Therefore, let's incentivize people to invest more in their children. Once kids reach 21, their parents will receive a rebate of 10% of the income tax paid by those children. Conversely, if those children end up in jail or on the dole, their parents will pay the government 10% of the imprisonment or welfare costs.
1
that is really a great incentives to have kids, when you can not predict the future, and considering complexity of human nature.
2
@yulia
It's a very bleak view of the world if everything is random. If the risk is too great for you personally, then don't have kids. Conversely, those who have already demonstrated they are net-contributors to society should be subsidized to create copies of themselves.
Ms. Andrews, "By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else. Pressing the brake on the trends set in motion by the feminist revolution would leave women more free to follow a diversity of paths." As a women, I would 100% disagree with your evaluation. Thank you sisters who never listened to people like Schlafly, and now Andrews. Keep fighting. It isn't easy to gain equality and our vision of what it will be, can't be based on the past.
12
This article is written from the perspective of white, upper middle class conservatism. When we consider that conservative policies have forced poor and working class women to work, rather than receive aid that might allow them a few years to stay home and focus solely on parenting, the hypocrisy of this piece is laid bare.
965
@Jasmine Armstrong. We need better pay not aide.
7
@Jasmine Armstrong--To rephrase your comment: I don't think you can blame conservative "policies" for forcing women to be mothers of 1 or more children. In most cases pregnancy is a choice in our country and I don't want to subsidize it with parental leave/childcare policies which use tax dollars. If you want children, great, but you pay the cost. I contribute enough taxes supporting public education.
12
I heard Phyllis Schafley speak about the ERA more than 40 years ago at Marquette University. I was struck then by the depth of the hatred and venom she brought to her cause and her utter contempt for feminism. I remember it like it was yesterday. No, America does not need another Phyllis Schafley.
1161
@runswstilettos I remember as well. I agree with you 100 percent.
77
@runswstilettos But she would fit perfectly in the Trumpublican party.
96
The author sneaks in a dangerous pro-big-business argument: that the economy needs to grow at the increased rate that a faster increasing population will encourage. This is wrong. It will lead to a more rapidly warming Earth, more crowding, probably a slight diminishment of individual earnings (diminishing marginal utility of labor), and not benefit the average worker one whit, since GDP per person will go down slightly, not up. In this era in which the capitalists have captured the government, a disproportionate share of the increased GDP will flow to the top 10%, making the average worker that much more worse off.
Why is this extra GDP growth based solely upon rising population, rather than rising income per person, deemed essential? It supports stock prices. The value of stocks is directly related to the assumed future earnings growth. The faster earnings rise, the more valuable a share of stock is. Without growth in earnings, or very slow growth, stocks essentially become perpetual bonds. There is a fear that this could lead to economic and then social instability, but the current trends of income inequality and global warming also lead to social instability.
The innovation we need is a vibrant low-growth economy, in which increased quality of goods and services supplants increased quantity. In which most companies are very slow-growth cash cows. In which the population of the advanced world and ultimately the entire world is flat. A world of less warming and pollution.
6
Your article addresses issues for privileged, wealthy, white women who want to castigate feminists while reaping the benefit of their efforts. The majority of middle class and poor women are still being told to subjugate their choice and identity to men. Some live lives of quiet desperation as they forfeit their public voice. They are not cowards or shirkers. This may be a stereotype but I see women as generally having more compassion and empathy than men. These qualities are particularly lacking in the era of Trump. However, the Republican Party will always have room for ambitious opportunists.
6
There is a very simple answer as to why there are few women who are espousing the views of Phyllis Schlafly today. They have progressed, found their voice and taken up the cause of human rights that the ERA embodied. Ms. Andrews who writes for a conservative paper should be smart enough to know that her views put her in a small silent minority of women who have chosen to embrace a 1950's vision of their roles. Not too difficult to figure out, unless you work for the Examiner.
10
The author relies on the premise that having children is a public good.
I think that is debatable in and of itself. We as a society have much more pressing needs that creating another generation of use resources and further defile the planet.
7
I find this story offensive, and I was around when Schlafly started her movement, which was hateful. I am proud to be an independent, childless senior woman. That is the way my life turned out.People who brand us as sinners or selfish need to get over it. Actually, there should be room for all kinds of women. There should be more acceptance of this rather that pushing this issue into polarizing politics.
14
where to start? the author analysis omits several important points, with the following only being a couple of them.
1. In about a third of American marriages, the wife earns more than her husband. I earn more than 2x my husband's salary. The same is true for my conservative Christian coworker.
2. The weakening of our unions has directly contributed to the erosion of men's earning power.
3. increasing the minimum wage and affordability of child care would absolutely help. Child care cost more than our mortgage when our 2 kids were little, and that was for 3 days a week only.
I think the author is blaming women (as usual) for the state of the family, such as it is, but trying to be less obvious about it. I don't she gets at all what it is that families struggle with.
10
This article takes real statistics and by sleight of hand turns them into policy nonsense. Sure most women are in the work force because they have to, not because they want to. Sure there there are societal impacts of women earning more than men. Is the problem that we’re paying women too much?? Is the problem that no one cares enough about raising wages for men?? (I haven’t noticed a massive conservative wave of support for unions or raising the minimum wage.)
The target here seems to be social services that help women who work, such parental leave or day care. It is not true that such measures are forcing women into the workforce. And if you’re concerned about some corresponding benefit for stay at home moms, you can start by getting the small-government conservatives to pay for it. The private sector sure isn’t going to do it.
If you want to go back to the sources here, the main problem is that—statistically—labor hasn’t been getting its share of corporate growth since the 1980’s (an accelerating conservative-fueled trend). That’s what’s forcing women into the work force. Helping people to deal with the consequences is not heavy-handed government. If conservatives really want to help raise wages, they’re welcome to join the party.
8
In 1983 I, a male, didn't have a steady job, and married a woman with a good salary. Accordingly, when we had a kid, I quit the low-paying job I had gotten and stayed home with him, free-lancing until he was old enough for me to go back to work. My salary caught up with my wife's after about 20 years; it was never a source of contention. Articles like this make me feel like I'm living on a different planet.
13
"...give new parents up to 12 weeks of paid leave in exchange for delaying their retirement benefits by weeks or months. The plan has the benefit of being budget-neutral over the long term, because parents borrow against their own retirement benefits..."
One of the all-time stupidest ideas: This is like payday lending, but so far in the future that issues like divorces, allowing the lower wage-earner to switch to the other's social security income, and what to do when someone who took off 3 years for 3 kids goes on social welfare programs are pushed off to someone in the future figuring out what to do.
Of course the biggest problem is that lopping time off one's own Social Security is FAR more expensive to the individual's future retirement than it appears on paper - and young people are not going to fully understand the consequences.
This is NOT budget-neutral for the individuals making such choices.
14
You won’t get more women in this fight because they don’t buy into the brainwashing anymore. Those days are gone. Thankfully so is Schlafly.
16
I do enjoy the delightful irony in that this opinion piece which urges us, as a society, to have women return to the home, from the workplace, is authored by a woman who is employed as the managing editor of a newspaper.
18
I don't understand the your aim throuhg the article.. except the title..
Women needs to be women and needs to be as independent as men with their own perspective.
Let's start with all this abortion and work life structure first.. with zeroed on high morals..
How can women be socially (your definition) when they still support this brand of GOP & Trump ?
2
Hopefully no one does "step up" to take up this sad mantle.
9
Article Synopsis: children are the responsibility of their mothers only, it’s women’s faults that their success causes men work less, marriage rates are down because some women earn more then some men, women need another saviour because they’re too dumb to make their own choices, nothing has changed since 1950.
No discussion of the inequitable social norms that perpetuate this situation or the role that men and women both play in it.
Wow. No insight whatsoever.
13
[[Where Are the Socially Conservative Women in This Fight?]]
I think they're probably all six feet under because they were bored to death by this discussion.
4
Conservatism as an ideology does nothing to "defend the American family," and is fundamentally opposed to family values, and opposed to children growing up in happy and healthy family lives.
It's conservatism that ripped children from their parents and threw them, unattended, in concentration camps. It's conservatism that demonized 'welfare mothers' and dismantled the social systems that could provide kids at all economic strata with a secure and supportive family life. It's conservatism that denies children loving families because the parents who want to adopt them are same-sex parents. It's conservatism that wants to force women to bring children into the world, whether those women consent or not, and it's conservatism that then denies that unwilling and unprepared mother any assistance in providing that child with a healthy family life.
It's conservatism that erects monuments to traitors who waged war on their own - OUR own - country to preserve the practice of destroying black lives and families through chattel slavery.
Conservatism is an intellectually and morally bankrupt ideology that destroys lives and families, is rooted in short-sightedness, selfishness, fear, and hate, and has literally no benefit to any American except terribly wealthy criminals.
11
An “innovative thinker” is not someone who realizes that being a stay at home parent is hard...
1
Men are leading the charge because it's all about control of women and many women, even many of those "socially conservative" women, have awakened to the realization that that is so. Sorry, women are not stupid.
11
The American family is not the property of white, Christian Republicans whose women work at home while the men create jobs for white, straight males. Families come in all colors, religions, nationalities, working arrangements and sexual preferences. They love each other as much as conservatives do.
Conservatives have demonstrated their values with their support of the current president and the rampant corruption in conservative institutions across every sector of American society. They have no moral authority. Unable to lead, they should just step out of the way.
13
Phyllis Schlafly was an utter hypocrite--a woman of immense ambition, education and wealth who made a very visible career out of telling other women they should go home and shut up. Corporations and businesses hired women at the dawn of the women's movement not because they thought it was morally correct--but because they could save money by paying women less than they paid men. If young people are delaying marriage and having families, maybe that's because they're too strapped with huge college debts to plan any other future for themselves. And if men are the spokespeople today for wanting women to shut up, go home and raise kids, maybe that's something that men want, not women.
Oh, and this: The real subject of the "mommy wars" and this piece is, "What Will We Do About Uppity White Women." The point of all this is and has always been for educated, middle and upper class white women to second guess themselves and their choices. Women of color work. They raise kids. They always have.
14
So, pay women even less so men will appear superior, and let families borrow against their social security to have family leave? MAGA.
8
Ms. Andrews - "The American family needs defending..."
No it does not, because it is not under attack. The Ozzie & Harriet mold of nuclear family, with 2 children, a boy with an adorable messy butch cut, skinned knees and a slingshot in his back pocket and a girl in braids, training to be a little Mommy just like her big mommy, may no longer be the one and only family norm. But it is not under attack.
Except in your mind, because you want there to be ONE and only one family norm, the one to which everyone must conform, the one you define.
"nearly everything that Schlafly warned that E.R.A. would bring about has been achieved by other means, from coeducation at military academies to gay marriage."
Here we go again, people enjoying the freedom to make their own decisions, not abiding by your rules. Women free to enjoy the military? Anathema! Two people in love and choosing to marry though of the same gender? Anathema!
Ms. Andrews, I ask you one very simple question. Why do you oppose personal freedom?
13
Ms. Andrews - "The American family needs defending..."
No it does not, because it is not under attack. The Ozzie & Harriet mold of nuclear family, with 2 children, a boy with an adorable messy butch cut, skinned knees and a slingshot in his back pocket and a girl in braids, training to be a little Mommy just like her big mommy, may no longer be the one and only family norm. But it is not under attack.
Except in your mind, because you want there to be ONE and only one family norm, the one to which everyone must conform, the one you define.
"nearly everything that Schlafly warned that E.R.A. would bring about has been achieved by other means, from coeducation at military academies to gay marriage."
Here we go again, people enjoying the freedom to make their own decisions, not abiding by your rules. Women free to enjoy the military? Anathema! Two people in love and choosing to marry though of the same gender? Anathema!
Ms. Andrews, I ask you one very simple question. Why do you oppose personal freedom?
5
Like it or not, this viewpoint deserves to be heard. Thank you, NYT, for passing the microphone around—albeit briefly—to ensure diversity of thought is provided by one of the nation’s premier media outlets. To those opposing this viewpoint simply on the grounds it does not mirror their own, I hope you are never met with yourself as a critic when you next express a viewpoint.
1
While I haven’t read every comment, the majority have included thoughtful argument, quite different from the knee-jerk rejection you suggest. You may not agree with or accept the points made, the conclusions based upon other reader’s experiences, or the statistics cited, but hopefully you will differentiate between reader’s arguments and the inability to tolerate what doesn’t “mirror” their views.
2
I rejoice in the fact there isn't a modern day Phyllis Schlafly.
17
being the center point of a family should be a choice - for both parents. or current system doesn't make it so.
2
Staying home exclusively and taking care of children is boring and unfulfilling. It would be better for both men and women to have jobs outside the home and to split child care and housework. A part time work week with full time compensation so that both mother and father could be home half the time would be ideal.
5
Ms Andrews make a critical error in her otherwise thoughtful editorial. By only focusing on childcare, she misses the larger caregiving issue confronting all families. There are at least two points in the life cycle when daily support is required - when we are children and when we can no longer live independently. She incites intergenerational warfare when we really need policy to support ALL caregivers. The diversity of American family needs for time away from the workplace is complex. she does us a disservice by not thinking more broadly. Caregiving is a feminist issue, a LGBTQ issue, and an equity issue. Shame on her for politicizing this universal conundrum.
6
Raising children is a productive investment in the economy and like other forms of productive investment entails a lot of work and financial resources. If want this investment to occur the work needs to be compensated in some way.
1
Real conservative women do what their husbands want,that’s why no one raises their flag.
8
The author suggests that we should focus on male employment and wages so women can start lining up to marry them. Seriously? Should the women who then get to stay home be waiting at the door, lipstick freshly applied, drink in hand for the lord of the manor?
The problem is not that women are in the workforce. The problem is that wages have not kept up with major expenses. Women in low-paying jobs, working a shift at Wal-Mart and paying for child care are not living the American Dream.
Corporations and stock investors are earning record profits because shareholders, rather than employees, are prioritized and this has been the case since the 1970s.
Marriage is not a panacea for our ills. We will never return to the days of Donna Reed and Leave it to Beaver. Thank goodness.
Corporate greed is the issue. It is just so difficult for most Americans to earn a living wage. Focusing on male employment is absurd.
12
Helen Andrews points are thoughtful and worthy of serious dialogue. Unfortunately, they are sufficiently subtle to be misinterpreted by identity politics tribes. They have buried feminism in its constructive forms (those based on inclusion of the genetic code resulting from haploid evolution) with gender games.
1
This article is absurd and insulting to women in the 21st century. It complains about women being "imposed" freedom and equality by feminism. It complains that women have equal access to the workplace as men do, and as a consequence the "family" is suffering.
These are all dog whistles with one single purpose - to roll the clock back to the "good old days" when men ruled the house and women's role was in the kitchen - sorry, in the "family".
I am a man, and I am profoundly offended by this retrograde thinking. I work with brilliant, highly educated women every day. Their contribution to global business, science and politics is huge and one can only wish that it will get even better.
To the "conservative" woman who wants to protect the "family" from this terrible onslaught of freedom and opportunity that has been "imposed" on women by the evil feminists, I say only one thing: vote for politicians who will support longer family leave, flexible hours, free or subsidized day care, and all these other policies designed to make it possible for a woman to fully realize herself AND also have a family.
Going back to 1955 is NOT the answer.
1358
@Andy. Well stated. My thoughts exactly.
73
@Andy Not following why men are not advocating taking equal responsibility for their children, in all aspects. These massive and dysfunctional programs you describe are just subsidies to men not to do this.
What needs to happen is to get rid of the massive current subsidies to sole breadwinners and SAHMS. They pay 1x taxes for 2x benefits in the income tax code and in Social Security and Medicare. Most of the ginormous (and growing) federal debt can be traced to these unfinanced subsidies.
These massive subsidies (both the current ones and the ones you propose) are defense mechanisms by supposed "adults" (sentimentalized rather than authentic mothers, emotionally unavailable fathers who can't manage to negotiate a work/family balance in marketplace, even when their wives are bringing in half of the family income).
They are are shifting financial and emotional costs to their children by not facing the need to form and maintain adult, equal partnership marriages.
21
@Andy
Helen Andrews is the editor of the Washington Examiner. As Jesus said, by their fruits you shall know them. Her little magazine is also absurd and insulting, and full of dog whistles promoting numerous right wing causes, some of which include the oppression of women.
113
Good God. The answer is not to limit the opportunities of women so men are better off. The answer is to raise young men who change diapers and do laundry, thus creating a space for women to aspire to something beyond domesticity. In modern marriages where this is the norm, the two-income family seems to function pretty well and produce well-adjusted children. What’s all this hand-wringing about??
14
Warren's original thesis held that two income families over-reach in expenses, lose flexibility in terms of raising children, and less likely to bankrupt than one income families - because the latter lives strategically and can develop supportive social networks.
The argument that: (a) Warren's explanation coupled with (b) men dropping out, and (c) women not marrying - should result in government funded subsidies is nonsense.
Is the author suggesting that men cannot make better choices, become good providers? Are they now victims of China and bad teachers? To suggest that public spending is needed to remedy the problem men have, prevent women from making equal pay, will magically marry and produce stable families - is just a right wing fantasy.
This is the kind of nonsense that lies at the core of this article.
Men have dropped off the grid for a variety of inter-related reasons, but independent women who pay their dues, get educated and experienced, and want to marry someone who is their intellectual and economic equal - is not a cause of men's decline.
The reason is the right is corrupted is its unabashed interest in feeding at the public coffers, for constituencies that favor them as a knee-jerk response (white men).
Please hear this: if white men are having trouble competing, staying off drugs, raising good families - I want NO public policy to pay women less, or subsidize their choices about having children, or any other social engineering.
8
This article is infuriating. Like Schlafly, the writer is trying yet again to force toothpaste back in the tube. Stop, please stop, trying to force behaviors and ideas on others. We are in a world that has found that heterosexual marriage is not a panacea. Live with it. It does not take a man and a woman to raise children. Today's successful families do not look anything like they did fifty years ago. In fact, I'm not sure I knew of any successful families, if the happiness of all the members was a criterion. Most of the "middle-class" mothers in our little town in the 1950s were alcoholics and either neglectful or simply absent in their minds. they had bridge clubs or garden parties. They did not really know their children. The exceptions were, great shock here, folks, poor black women who worked steadily at poor-paying jobs looking after the children of these women, in order to feed their own children. My drunken mother slept while an underpaid "nanny" taught me to love and explore and be good. At the expense of her own child. Let's try now to help people solve their problems their own ways. Listen to what the families say they need, not what you decide they do.
12
With the abomination known as the Trump Family being showcased daily as the American example, perhaps conservative women can start there by taking out the trash.
Plus, if conservative women dumped their conservatism, they’d find a whole spectrum of thriving non-conservative families and many socially progressive ways to strengthen millions of other families. But conservative women are conservative because they don’t care for people and programs like that.
In other words, please.
12
Let's keep torturing our issues into the liberal/conservative paradigm and wonder why we can't find solutions. It's so tiring to read articles like this and wonder if those holding true and fast to conservative identity realize this isn't something that gets you anything.
In the age of Trump it should be clear that Republicans were always only saying things to sucker voters into supporting the agenda of the wealthy. They only "cared" about abortion because it stole away Catholic voters from Democrats. They only "cared" about family values because it appealed to rural communities. They only "cared" about fiscal restraint because it could hide policies to deny minority assistance. It was always just a scam.
It should be clear by now that the wealthy have us exactly where they want us believing that we are only worth what they say we are worth. As profits remain huge for many of these businesses and our national debt increases, the question of this article should be why hasn't this money made it down to the average working stiff? This isn't about liberal or conservative - it's about wealth. You can laud figures of the past who were able to frame the arguments on the terms the writer enjoys or you can understand that time is dead.
It was always supposed to be about society and what makes a healthy and happy and productive one. Conservatives, by nature, don't want to accept that societies change with time and the remedies of the past may be relics in the modern world.
9
Helen, let's see what you do once you and Tim have your first child. I presume that you'll give up your important position as managing editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine to care for your family. After reading this article, it's clear that you will feel obliged to offer such a well-paying job to a worthy man who actually needs to support his wife and growing brood. Obviously. I'll keep my eyes posted on your social media account for your move entirely into the domestic sphere. I presume you'll at least update there even if your professional voice disappears. That is what you're recommending for all women, right? I'm pretty sure your goal is to move women out the workforce so men can earn more and families aren't priced out of the middle class life. That means you too. Let's hope after a decade + of laboring in your home for no actual money or social security benefits that your marriage remains strong so your one financial lifeline and access to healthcare benefits doesn't drop you for someone else. A decade of not writing such unhypocritical pieces like this means you might not be able to get a job, or at least not one nearly is interesting as the one you currently have. Well, no choice if you want kids. Fingers crossed!
15
"If you asked the women in the David Autor study — the ones in places where the wage gap widened but marriage rates went up — which they’d rather have, a few extra cents an hour or a husband and a child, what do you think they would say?"
The above excerpt pretty much sums up the entire dismaying piece.
Ms. Andrews' central thesis is:
- Men have fragile egos. Men simply can't handle the existence of intelligent, accomplished women.
- Because so many men have these fragile egos, they refuse to marry women who are accomplished or intelligent.
- Equal pay for women further bruises men's egos and makes men not want to marry women.
- Therefore, equal pay is harmful and men should earn more than women.
- In sum, women should keep quiet and assume that "father knows best."
Did it once, even once, occur to Ms. Andrews that:
- women (like all human beings, regardless of gender) don't automatically see marriage as the ultimate end goal of a good life; and
- if pay gaps (I can't believe this is a serious argument) help make women more "marriage-worthy), the problem lies with MEN?
Ms. Andrews. It is 2019. I don't know what circles you travel in, but in our progressive circles (which you treat with such disdain) we may have a ways to go, but we generally marry men or women (depending on our sexual orientation) who are smart and productive and engaged in the world. And we have strong, thriving families.
Sorry things aren't working out so well in your world.
11
This is really just nonsense. In fact, it is conservative policies that made labor cheap, destroying unions, and moving formerly unionized jobs (like meat packing) from cities like Chicago where unions were strong, to places like Iowa. Or that decentralized the manufacturing or jet planes to avoid the strong machinists union. So now a conservative columnist wants the focus on wages for me. Great - you are 40 years too late - and those you write for have no interest in rebuilding the economic status of the American worker.
By the way, you really do reap what you sow.
8
Phyllis Schlafley was a mean spirited woman who hated other women. She was a parody of what it means to be a woman. There is nothing more pathetic than a woman who hates other women and slobbers all over the wonderfulness of male leadership. This is particularly sick in the time of Trump, a man without a single redeeming characteristic. Andrews, like her role model Schlafley, is the kind of woman who has a career where she dedicates herself to keeping other women in their place. She thinks that other women should stay home, but not "exceptional" women like herself. What she can't even imagine is a family where spouses are equal contributors to the family in every sense and where neither partner is responsible for all the income or all the household and family maintenance. In a few days my husband and I will celebrate 50 years of that kind of equitable life with no desire to ever live the life that Schlafley and Andrews want to inflict on other women.
23
The author seems disingenuous. We once supported mothers with Welfare until Reagan demonized the “Welfare Queen.” Remember that? We could pay mothers in cash to help them raise children, but the right denounces this as socialism. Meanwhile corporations will do whatever they can to increase their own market power and decrease the share of the economic pie that goes to labor, whether women work or not. If we had a social democracy that helped people meet their basic needs and protected us from companies making us work longer and longer hours for less and less in wages, then we would have the freedom to marry, raise children, and work less. But of course, the Right will instead present ham-fisted nonsense solutions, like just “let women go back into the home.” The Right has gutted the idea that a democratic society should care for its members, and now they look around and ask “why aren’t we happily raising children?”
12
I want to know where the socially-conservative women are in the fight against the misogynistic, pro-corporate president whose anti-environment policies will make the world of your children impossible to live in? I've been waiting for your voices for two years now.
13
Feminism convinced girls/women that selfishness, materialism, and independence, which have made women (and men) lonely, detached, and miserable, is preferable to the selflessness, maternalism, and interdependence that made women (and men) bonded, fulfilled, and happy.
That wasn’t feminism. That was commercialism, the necessary underpinning of capitalism.
5
The American family needs defending, yes, but from Republicans.
10
husbands and children aren't all they're cracked up to be ... the author disregards the growing cohort of young women who have happily chosen a rewarding career over changing diapers and cleaning house all day.
10
Liberals have been fighting for women consistently and if a woman doesn't want to get married or wants to leave a bad marriage, she should have the financial independence to do just that. Women shouldn't have to stay in abusive relationships because financially they can't get out.
Instead of fighting for women's rights,conservatives have been fighting for lower taxes, increasing wealth disparities, and for fewer social services and workers' rights like paid family leave, the kinds of thing every other developed nation has. When they say they are fighting for family values, what they are saying is that they are fighting for white, straight, cisgender, christian's right to force their ideas of what a family should be on everyone else.
You give away tax breaks to the wealthy and then blame the poor when they can't afford to get married and refuse to support them with paid time off, free quality pre-school, universal health care, and a livable minimum wage. And then ]you lock up black men, taking them away from their children and destroying black lives and children's futures. You called it the War on Drugs but it was really a war on people who vote for the Left. https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richard-nixon-drug-war-blacks-hippie/index.html
Conservatives destroyed black lives in order to maintain power. And now they are destroying immigrant lives and ripping apart families at the border and putting kids in cages. Traditional Family Values indeed.
13
@4DSpace Hear hear! I have always wanted to ask Conservatives who harp about "family values" just what sort of values they are talking about.
2
I worked at a private preschool years ago and the location director one day told me that many of the working mothers would have preferred to stay home with their children but needed the money. Years ago a family could exist on the husband's salary; but with the cost of living skyrocketing, it is really only possible for wealthy families to have a stay at home mom. It is unfortunate that a woman today must work to help support the family. As a friend of mine who did stay home with her children and put her career on hold, no one will teach your children the values that are much needed in society.
2
Those reading this online should know that the print version’s headline is, “Who will Defend the American Family?” I wonder what headline the author had in mind. What concept did she pitch? The need for a charismatic woman to advocate for children and working families? I can think of four female senators running for president that she could support.
241
Yes! So glad someone pointed that out. so many comments pitting liberal vs conservative miss the fact that the author cites Elizabeth Warren's book as a source of truth about this issue. Not every issue is Dem vs GOP.
16
@Jackie. Yet somehow I doubt that Helen Andrews will be voting for Senator Warren if she is the Democratic candidate in’20.
28
@cjyoung, thank you for sharing the print headline and putting forth the thoughtful question about the differences in headline and author’s intention. As a digital reader only, I find this helpful.
9
This column seems to adopt a principle of modern conservatism as it's currently practiced and for which Donald Trump is a natural prophet: That life is a zero-sum endeavor, and any gain for one group must necessarily be a loss for another. The author says, "By making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else." and later in the column, "Subsidizing day care does disadvantage parents who want to stay at home, by its nature." There is no vision of a global benefit for our society as a whole.
It was recently reported that the United States is one of the most stressed countries in the world. This constant pitting of one against another has to be an important cause.
Maybe there are fewer conservative women speaking out because another principle of conservatism seems to be that women are inferior and should just stay in their lane.
9
The original American families were communities like the Navajo, whose kinship practices were forcefully undermined by the Anglos who eventually occupied their lands. I pick the Navajos because their way of thinking about the family is considered matriarchal. And their concept of female power is celebratory of fecundity rather than controlling, as Christianity has been preaching since the establishment of that church. So spare us the nostalgia for the authentic American family.
8
The very same conservatives (including women) that oppose affordable public universities, universal health care, Medicare, Social Security, taxes to support public investments of any kind, worker rights and living wages dare to claim that "by making it easier for women to pursue success in the workplace, we have made it harder for them to do anything else." How can anyone so articulate and intelligent be so mixed up as Ms Andrews....who seems also to have a lucrative and rewarding career of her own? Most women worked all their lives because they had to, as did their mothers, their grandmothers and great grandmothers. This article could have been written 50 years ago. It's as astounding as if someone just published an argument for segregation, or conversion therapy. This is 2019!
17
I first saw Phyllis Schlafly on the Phil Donahue show in the 1970s. A young woman who had been propositioned by her boss was one of the other guests. When asked about the young woman’s plight, Ms. Schlafly responded by excusing the boss because he was a man and couldn’t help himself.
Believers in “equity feminism” vs. “victim feminism” continue to ignore that fact that feminist activism is often a response to actual victimization. Victims may believe they are victims because they are, in fact, victims.
590
Yes! And is inequity not clearly a form of victimization? Such senseless hairsplitting from those who want the benefits of feminism without honoring the simple, powerful term
40
“Women want equal pay for equal work ... but they also want men they can marry.” I married. He cheated repeatedly. I threw him out. I remarried. He cleaned out the bank account and left.
Men we can marry? Many of us are doing just fine on our own, thank you.
19
Capitalism is the system this country has chosen for its financial machinery. Its basis is a tug of war classically between land, labor and capital (money to finance any activity). As globalism has progressed the leverage of the first two has diminished - a business can go anywhere (land) and find willing employees (labor). Capital is now unfettered with having to pay a single wage that can support a family in any specific geography. Without leverage it has become necessary for both parents to work. To alter this state of affairs by suggesting that families can revert to the 1950s by changing the "political conversation" is a far cry from any conservative politician's agenda. Capitalism and conservatism have become almost synonymous. Capitalism, like evolution, is efficient and ruthless. It harbors no animosity toward any individual but unless you are useful in it - this explains the very high salaries of CEOs (the only "labor" required) - you can curl up and die for all capitalism cares. CEOs insure very high profits for the owners of capital and that's all that is required. It is not Socialism, it does not protect those not able to compete for the CEOs job. Are we surprised inequality is a major characteristic of America? Can a single wage earner family be "conservative"?
8
Schlafly was just another vile hateful and sadistic bigot of the Evangelical Right, totally divorced from evidence-based reality — and perfectly described by the following quotation:
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." — John Kenneth Galbraith
25
Why are socially conservative men and not women leading the charge to “defend” the family? Maybe it's because social conservatives preach that women are supposed to be submissive, not to lead.
Phyllis Schlafly was a hypocrite. She insisted that a woman’s place was in the home, but she was willing to make exceptions for herself. She was an attorney. She ran for Congress (and lost). She wrote books and hit the lecture circuit. She founded a national organization from which she could wield power as Chair and CEO for life. She was ferociously ambitious, but she did everything possible to keep other women from succeeding outside the domestic sphere.
Schlafly hailed from a particularly repellent group of social conservatives—envious, resentful sourpusses who can’t stand the thought that someone, somewhere, is experiencing pleasure. They seem particularly irked by the thought of feminists enjoying nonprocreative sex. There’s a belligerence and viciousness about these people that keeps them marginalized as role models. Who would want emulate such nastiness?
Over the decades since Schlafly went on the attack against equal opportunity, a few women like Christina Hoff Sommers have staked out lucrative careers for themselves as professional misogynists. Right-wing, male-dominated think thanks reward these female Uncle Toms with money and praise, but they have little real influence. And there are very few of them.
Phyllis Schlafly doesn’t have “many heirs.” Thank God.
23
While I agree with little, Betty Friedan spoke for white middle class college educated woman in the 1960s.
1
What does whether a women chooses to stay at home or go work have to do with being socially conservative?
2
This essay is a critique of capitalism disguised as a conservative's view on social policy. In the extractive/exploitive economic paradigm, men and women are both wage slaves to earn profits for companies' shareholders. Day care and pushing women into the "labor force" are just means to the end of profits. As a feminist, I find it sad that so many women bought into the idea that being exploited in the workforce just like men have always been was somehow liberation. Yes, we need one-earner families in which someone stays home to raise the kids. We are already seeing the social and mental illnesses in youth created by overreliance on nannies and daycare.
2
If conservative men want better wages and jobs maybe they should stop the union busting because corporations and other business leaders could care less. They see labor as an expense, not an asset to invest in and protect. Until that changes nothing about this article means anything.
13
Here’s an idea- maybe more men could step up in the child rearing and household duties instead of blaming women. The family unit has always been in disarray in 1 form or the other, women were just forced to stay in it or were forced into it because of no other options.
19
As a childless woman in my late 30s returning to college, I daily have the opportunity to speak with a slice of today's youth. When the topic of marriage and family building arises, I don't hear from youngsters that expense, stagnant wages, lack of potential partners or equal working rights is the cause for their abstinence. Much more frequently I'm told by these young people that they don't get married and have kids because they don't want to be responsible for further contributing to overpopulation, unsustainable resource consumption, worsening global climate change, and the likely suffering from those circumstances their children would face. Their choice not to get married or have children is one of politics, not logistics.
25
This article is correctly states the lack of financial support for stay at home parents. Where it loses its way is when it tells us that men do not instinctively want to stay at home but women do. The American family is evolving, not dying.
14
There are other modern western nations that have gotten the balance right.
What this article skirts around is the fact that rather than blame women for the problems of the American family and argue against equal pay for equal work between the genders, we need to look at how the middles classes wealth has been siphoned off to the top by a series of bad unregulated economic policies that slowly hollowed the middle class out: from the disbanding of union labor, to housing bust, to the privatization of pensions that has now led to a crisis etc. to the exploding costs of health care and the defunding of public schools.
Changes in policy would go along way to ease this burden.
I find the idea that young families have to gamble on their old age security to raise families as dystopian. We should never have to give up social security for 12 weeks to care for a newborn.
This country has plenty of money and resources, but we just don’t prioritize families the way we do the consumption of material goods.
The truth is that the type of capitalism that thrives in the US is not compatible with family life.
We need a mix of socialist type policies for the health and well being of our families and communities and well regulated capitalism to keep the whole thing going and not make working people have to gamble their homes or pensions for a small amount of time off with their kids. Really out of a 45-50 year working life it is too much to ask for paid 12-16 weeks of time off for a newborn?
36
@Issy
What you are describing is increasing socialism. capitalism works better than socialism.
2
This is a follow-up, completion of my first comment. The Author is engaging in the worst kind of correlation fallacy. While the observed ills may be real, the correlation of those ills with increasing female work force participation does not mean that female work force participation caused them. Let's expand our thinking and maybe we will begin to find solutions. There is no solution to be found in curtailing the, still limited, freedom and autonomy that women have fought so hard for.
21
@Betsy
Increasing the labor supply always results in decreasing the price paid for labor. It is not a matter of blaming anyone.
The fundamental problem with feminism and the changes imposed by the government is that feminists always translated success with cash.
People who are working in the paid compensation world measure success by how much they are paid.
Feminists always undervalued the stay-at-home mon and detested those who made that choice. As Hillary stated with her comment years ago that she could have stayed at home and baked cookies [instead of riding her husband's electoral success into work as his bagman, a promotion to partner at the Rose Law Firm, a purchased Senate seat and the consolation prize of Secretary of State.]
Feminists have done nothing that benefits women.
3
The notion that we are in a "two income trap" BECAUSE women entered the work force and expect reasonable wages, is without any sort of factual basis. The article provides NO proof of a causal relationship, probably because it can't, since none exists.
That alone completely undermines most of Ms. Andrews' arguments.
25
I entered the workforce and marriage at a time when a married woman could not get a credit card in her own name or without her husband's signature even if she was the only spouse working. When I entered the workforce, married males were sometimes paid more than all females and single males because of a wage structure which supported a "family wage." Raising children is work involving time, effort, and one would hope, some skill, skill only compensated if a non parent is employing it. 12 weeks parental leave is not enough to raise a child. Perhaps the work of raising one's own children should be compensated with a national wage.
Many "childless feminists," often decried as selfish by Phyllis Schlafly types despite the reality that Phyllis Schlafly's husband backed her choices, are childless because these women are doing what social conservatives, many of them affiliated with male dominated religions, wanted and indoctrinated them to do - not have children until they could afford to raise them.
Some "childless feminists" were once targeted as "unwed" mothers, who prior to the 1970's, were thought of as "deviant" or "wayward" in a culture where paternity could be disproved by a blood test, but not proved. Males backed each others' plays and if a woman wanted to be a winner, she went along. Neither men nor women are widgets who should be expected to fit into some perpetual motion machine.
Go Red Lobster.
21
@Debra Merryweather
As a childless/child free feminist, I can say that my own life supports your thesis. I heard that message to wait until I could afford to have kids loud and clear. So did my peers. And because the government and society doesn’t provide enough support for women, children, and families, many of us will keep waiting.
11
I was halfway through this and had to scroll back to the top to check whether it was from the archives.
38
Ditto. Or from a paper in Iran or Saudi Arabia.
4
The lives of men and the expectations of what they can do in this world have not been restricted by their gender. Sadly, that has not been the case for women. I didn't think that women would break the glass ceiling during my lifetime, but I'm very happy to see that they have. The "socially conservative" woman has a right to her own choices for her own life, but I would hope that she'd respect and appreciate that society has become more receptive to women making contributions to it in many ways.
13
@eduKate
What seems odd is that you want to take away from the socially conservative woman to give to the feminist.
Manufacturing jobs that fueled the middle class of yesterday left because companies priorities shifted from prioritizing their customers and workers to prioritizing their executives and shareholders. Those jobs left because it was cheaper to make things in countries with a lower standard of living than the US. When jobs that were traditionally male dominated disappear the overall job picture skews female. Teaching and nursing, traditionally female roles, are hard to outsource (as much as they are trying in education) and still provide some level of stability. We need to look at our overbloated health care system that seems to now be designed for maximum profit rather than providing care that people are paying for and need.
20
@Jean S
In the early twentieth century, minimum wages were established and unions formed in the North to prevent Black men migrating from the agrarian South from competing with white men. Black women were welcomed as housekeepers, nannies and light manufacturing jobs, nurses aides and other low wage jobs.
The feminist movement that formed in the 1960's consisted of college educated women who grew up in suburban households with stay-at-home mothers. They did not comprehend that their families represented a historical anomaly of the breadwinning father and an unpaid mother whose contribution to the family economy was minor.
After WWII, America had the only standing industrial infrastructure. There was pent up domestic and international demand for manufactured goods, and pay rose for working men [better for the white men]. There was also pent up reproduction demand as Rosie the Riveter got married, went home and had babies.
Simultaneously, technology reduced the workload for housewives as vacuum cleaners, washing machines and dryers, store bought food, convenience foods, store bought clothing replaced the backbreaking work their grandmothers had contributed to their households. Their grandmothers were essential to the economic well being of the family, in addition to being caregivers.
The model followed today, with a primary breadwinner along with a lower paid spouse who provides care is closer to the historical model.
2
With our planet Earth in the poor condition that it is, my preoccupation these days and for the past several years is about her. Perhaps we are naturally getting ourselves into a better situation by adapting the traditional family ethos to better suit our survival.
6
This is a brilliant piece of propaganda,but faulty in its logic.
Brilliant because--it advocates for the patriarchal values (more money for the head of household men) while "blaming" socially conservative women for not advocating for conservative values...
Faulty because-policies like universal child care and paid parental leave do not preclude policies that would pay mothers or fathers for childcare services to their own children. (Some states, like MA, are already paying family members for some forms of elder care...)
21
The author’s formula that women started working and that drove up prices is simplistic and hardly accurate. In traditional societies women raise children, but do an awful lot more work than that—including growing and preparing food, making clothing, and doing the extensive manual labour required to maintain a household. Modern technology and commerce have left women with less traditional “women’s work” to do at home. But that technology and the labour-saving products and services of modern commerce require income to secure. So women need to work outside the home to earn a paycheque to acquire the products that make modern life possible. Not working is a privilege of the rich. Women who aren’t rich have always worked very hard. They are just working a different way today because our society and economy have fundamentally changed and income is ever more essential to secure a decent lifestyle.
14
If the position needed to be defended, a woman would BE defending it. If only men are advocating for policies that impact women most particularly and directly, the policy should be examined as to whether anyone should be defending it at all. Just as women would never have defended the denial of suffrage or paying women less for equivalent work, because those were not actually policies about which there should ever have been a debate. So no woman with a platform, or the ability to make herself heard -- those "brilliant and articulate" women to which the writer refers -- are not defending the writers values position because they are indefensible.
24
I have a number of objections to the current orthodoxy on policies considered pro women by the left as they smack of an imposition of a new social norm and use suspect data to make points. Things like the wage inequality use overstatement (with the Press as a ready co-conspirators) to ignore cohort age of workforce, choice of a woman to exit the workforce, career difference etc.
However, the Right and Ms. Andrews in a more overt way (though absent from this article) seek to impose a literally historically religious standard of behavior on women's roles and now are couch these beliefs in terms that meant to be supporting the formation of a "traditional family". There is ample evidence to support the idea that there are preferential family dynamics for raising children and traditional families are in fact a good model but they are not the only model. So, the Right use of this model, which re-enforces specific women's roles is wrong.
I would argue that what is missing is a debate on workforce, family, women's rights that issues not from the left or right but from the silent middle. Both Progressives and the Right wing seek to enlist people into their armies adn respective Religions. If you are a woman (or man) that is troubled by abortion, you have no place on the left. Similarly, a person committed to prochoice is excluded from the Right. If you believe in Unions, no entrance to the religion of the right an vice versa. The Middle is unrepresented.
2
This article infuriated me on many fronts, not the least being the supposition that everyone is miserable because they are not married. Why should we go backwards instead of forwards on this? The US needs parent friendly policies (leave, daycare, healthcare for children, if not all) and more income equality so that life is better for everyone. Families come in many shapes and sizes. So does happiness and fulfillment. The goal is financial stability that leads to choices for women and men. If they choose each other, that is another question.
27
Fair to a point. What's the fix?
"Traditional conservative" thinking, which this article uses in part, holds up a mythical past as evidence that we've fallen from grace. Well... in the immortal words of Marlo Stanfield: "You want it to be one way. ...And it's the other way." We are living in the real world, one where wages have been stagnant or hollowed out for 85% of the public, and the resultant economic necessity of putting women's fierce, prodigious skills to the task of paying for the life we've chosen, has undeniably brought us to the perhaps-lamentable state Ms Andrews describes.
Any "fix" to this scarcity (we are, more or less as individuals, but, desperately short in the broad aggregate, of INCOME) needs to address how we got here, and which of any roads we came down, we can explore another alternative (we probably can't 'go back' on many such roads).
The most glaring and no-brainer such routes lies with tax policy and the assertion that "the more broadly aggregate wealth is distributed, the greater the number of individuals making economic decisions with disposable income, and the more resilient, diverse and measurably GREATER that aggregate wealth will be."
And, like almost everything else in public life, the mechanism to achieve this "greater good" will start and end with "genuinely, EFFECTIVELY progressive tax policy, regardless of the source of income/wealth".
Want stronger families? Get more money in the cupboard. Don't worry so much about gender roles.
16
The men you are talking about made more money and benefits in the past because of Unions. Increasing unionization again would make women not have to decide between having a husband and child and having pay equality.
11
I’m a well educated progressive mother. My husband and I both work because we like nice things and want our children to have lots of opportunities to thrive and be successful when they grow up. These things cost a lot of money. Would I love to be a stay at home mom? Yes! But this isn’t so much about values and culture as it is about economic reality.
12
I'm so curious as to how you self-define "progressive". In your short comment there is so much to unpack. Assumptions about "nice things" and "opportunities to thrive and be successful". I wonder if you reflect upon the ways you seem to be literally buying into a system that is built on inequity and supported by self-described "progressive" wealthy people.
Sorry, this 60+ reader remembers Phillys Shafley- and you lost me at the mention of her name. Really? Your answer to these statistics is to blame women for the hard won rights we’ve managed to achieve?
The answer isn’t to cede our rights or pay grades to men, it’s for all parties to evolve in a changing world.
52
I “endorse the basic principle that healthy families are the foundation of every other political good.” I am a full-time parent and housewife. Our family agrees that having an adult dedicated to taking care of the family and household has made all our lives better, even though we must live in a small townhouse and still can barely afford it. But we are decidedly NOT conservative. My husband and I are working on switching places now that our youngest is getting older, but of course it’s difficult for someone like me, who hasn’t paid her dues in any paying company or industry, to pick up where my husband would leave off. I certainly could use an advocate, but I’m too busy to organize a movement myself.
20
It's a different playing field economically today than in the "good old days" of the 1950s and 1960s. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed. Health insurance is punitively expensive. Home prices have gone through the roof in many major metropolitan areas. For many young couples, two incomes are a necessity. not a luxury, especially if one or both partners are paying off student loans.
Many of these couples would like to raise children, but the deck is stacked against them financially. Andrews conveniently overlooks this fact by blaming the expansion of women's rights instead. And she also overlooks the effect of off-shoring and automation on blue collar manufacturing jobs, trends that have severely impacted male workforce participation. especially in rural areas.
Admit it. Many women of child bearing age work simply because they have to. Feminism and equal rights have nothing to do with it. The cost of living has everything to do with it.
29
An informative and eye opening article that is short on at least one factor. Today’s definition of middleclass demands income greater than what one parent can earn on average. looking back 50+ years to my childhood home, three boys shared the same room, one bath, no air conditioning (and in FL), and one phone on the kitchen wall. This was middleclass and perhaps a bit above having income from father’s plumbing business and mother as school teacher. Compare that standard of living to the homes and toys of today’s middleclass. One room/child, multiple baths, high ceilings, central AC, cable TV, internet, phone for each member, gym memberships….
9
Fascinating. The very rich, whose money fuels the Republican party, have gotten richer off of mortgages and other high-ticket items that now demand two-worker families. But the "family values" their party sells to grab the votes of the working poor are dependent upon financial equity, which would take some of their precious money away from them. What to do, Republicans, what to do...?
28
@Betsey Could not resist replying to this factually wrong and intellectually dishonest comment. Mortgages are typically funded by banks which use funds from all levels of depositors. Mortgage rates are determined by money supply and demand with an assist from the Federal goverment agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There is no correlation between mortgage rates and the politics of the depositors. It is the general economy and the zeitgeist of modern living that coerce families to seek two incomes to acquire "things." What is baffling is that 3 readers actually support this erroneous point of view.
Nobody should be having lots of children these days, and the demise of the nuclear family is a good thing. The "good old days" this author seems to mourn never existed for many people. She forgets that fifty percent of marriages wind up in divorce court, and that almost no one gets alimony any more. And you can't get child support from a man who isn't working. Offering to take money from Social Security to pay stay-at-home parents is ridiculous, when you realize that many women who choose to stay at home never earn an income that would qualify them to receive Social Security later in life. They become economically dependent upon one man, and if anything happens to that one man - say, he decides to run off with a younger woman, or has an accident and becomes disabled, or just simply dies young - then a stay-at-home mom and her children are up a creek without a paddle. You cannot force a man to stay in a marriage against his will. We need to stop thinking that marriage and children are the most important things in life for women, because they are most certainly not, especially in this cutthroat economic environment.
38
"Isn't it time to focus on helping male workers specifically, their wages and their industries." this coming from the side of the aisle that's been bashing unions for fifty years.
25
Globally, we must realize that the concept of perpetual increased GDP and economic growth as we define it, is not sustainable. We need a sustainable economy. There are finite resources on the planet and a limit on the number of people it can support. Automation, robotics and Artificial Intelligence are changing the jobs market. We will be employing fewer and fewer people in redundant occupations that can be handled by a machine. We do need skilled crafts people, innovators, and people to service the machines. We are not providing the skills in crafts and trades needed in the future. We saddle our young people with student loan debt, for degrees that will not provide an adequate income to pay of the loans and form a household at the same time. Out of frustration and despair, we have more and more people on the margins turning to drugs; and are overwhelmed by the need to treat and rehabilitate them. We lock up too many people, the funds and facilities used for incarceration need to be converted for rehabilitation. Family planning services need to be comprehensive and freely available. Young people should not be pushed into having children they cannot afford or do not want. Our society has to be fully prepared to help raise each and every child that does come into the world. Women should not have to choose between having a child and having a career. Long term, we need to decide if our society is in need of more F 35s or readily available and affordable day care centers.
8
Part of our problem today is that stay-at-home parents are stigmatized. Our society says it values a day care worker’s efforts more because that worker’s wages contribute to GDP. My wife stayed at home and was the primary caregiver for our two kids, and yet her efforts did not contribute to the GDP. Even so, it’s clear to us that our kids greatly benefited from her care, and we both think that benefit, which may be hard to quantify monetarily, was well worth it.
11
@Eric Holzman - I understand that in some northern European countries that support strong family leave polices, they understand full well the personal/social and economic benefits of enabling one or both parents to devote some time to staying at home with the children. This is the justification for the paid leave rules they enjoy in countries like Denmark.
6
"Where are the socially conservative women in this fight?" In the Trump brigade.
After Trump's boasting about his womanizing in 2016, TIME magazine interviewed some conservative women, hoping to learn that Trump had alienated them and made a Clinton victory likely. Instead the woman were upset about something Clinton said about abortion, and it was obvious that they would either sit out the election or vote for Trump. Apparently they did the latter.
The recent book "If we can keep it" tried to explain the collapse of the E.R.A. and couldn't come up with any explanation but "Phyllis Schlafly". The E.R.A. was really defeated by the anti-abortion backlash just beginning in the 1970s. As with the Trump victory, the media was caught off-guard because they were ignoring an important issue that mattered to conervatives.
8
If conservatives really want stronger families (which I doubt), they should be prepared to do what everyone else does when they want a thing: be prepared to pay for it.
Northern Europe has strengthened its financial support for families (married or not) without restricting who gets to work outside the home.
My Swedish cousin, only a few years older than I am, gave birth to three children -- same here! -- and as of today has seven grandchildren. My grandchildren? Zero.
I'm not insisting that grandchildren are the be-all and end-all -- just pointing out that when society empathizes with the jobs of child-bearing and -rearing, and demonstrates that empathy with policies helping parents take time off without penalty, subsidizing healthcare and childcare, and generally making it easier to parent, 20- and 30-somethings respond by partnering and having children.
It's not brain surgery.
It does, however, require using one's brain.
25
It's incredible that when 1% of a population has most of the money, how a society goes through all sorts of hoops to survive. And with 8 billion mouths to feed, I have a feeling that Mother Nature is giving many subconscious hits to slow down in the baby department.
20
"When we make it easier for women to succeed in the workplace, we make it difficult for them to succeed anyplace else." (??) Have you looked at the economics of life in the United States of America in 2019? And going forward, are women designated to form married families and populate those families with babies and therefore live happily every after? I don't understand this goal of women tethered to men in economically dependent status.
23
Kuddos with the NYT for publishing this article! I am a liberal Democrat with an ivy league degree. I am also the married mother three young adult children (two daughters and one son). In no way would I be considered "conservative"; I am very pro choice , anti death penalty, support gay civil rights and an avid NYT reader:). And I know that most women would choose to be a stay at home mom when their children are young and want husbands who can support this. This fact can certainly involve some unpleasant compromises. Yet, it is helpful when talking policy if there is some honesty and openness to what people really want rather than what we wish they wanted.
12
As someone who was raised in the shadow of Schafly (St. Louis, 1980s) and who has been fortunate enough to be a stay at home parent I believe that the two income trap is real but I don’t think this is about re-empowering males with economic incentives. It seems to me that income inequality across all sectors and the absence of paid family leave are the real issues today. Add to that skyrocketing healthcare and education costs and you can see that gender roles should be a factor only in the sense that women need to be paid equally and more respected for their contributions regardless of whether they are at home or at work. Being a stay at home parent is indeed hard and one area where social media has been a godsend. Working from home is so much more a real possibility but the wages for that kind of work - such as writing - have plummeted. An important issue is being presented here, but alas, quoting and defending Tucker Carlson underscores how concerns about the changing nature of the family unit quickly put women right back under the thumb of the patriarchy. Which might be why you can’t find any women to carry that flag. Elizabeth Warren, not Carlson, is the voice of our future and represents real hope for our families. She’s the one you are looking for.
44
I get your point, but why are you equating equal rights for women with the failure of public policy choices to support families? It reads like a wonky "blame the victim" treatise. If women did have equal rights and, even more, true equal treatment in the workplace and society generally, maybe the family unfriendly social outcomes you describe would not have occurred. In sum, I think you are aiming your critique at the wrong target.
39
Hmm. So it's OK for women to marry for money (i.e only "employed men"), but men are expected to marry 'not for money' (unemployed women)? what would be the motive for men to marry unemployed women who they then have to pay for?
14
@Barry
I would imagine men would want to marry unemployed women for the same reasons they have done it for centuries- Someone to bear and raise your children, store and prepare food, buy/sew/mend clothing, do laundry, clean the house, keep social calendars, care for aging/infirm family members, plan vacations, often do all household budgeting, provide emotional support for all those who live in the home, walk the dog, run the errands....
I’m three-quarters of a century old and am sad to see that the anti-feminist philosophy of Phyllis Schlafly still has an appeal to some women. It was disappointing then; it’s disappointing now.
65
@Ameise
And, even sadder, that the NYTimes would chose to run this article rather than one on the Equal Rights Amendment now that it only needs one more state to ratify it.
5
Are there not many programs in Scandinavian and other European countries that help young mothers stay at home with their children? I think this writer doesn't address existing models. Why does any policy on this issue have to be specifically "socially conservative"? Why is simple reasonableness and practicality not sufficient?
29
Maybe the problem here isn't that women entering the work force. Maybe it's just good old capitalism behaving predictably in the face of a lack of sufficient regulations and worker rights and protections. Is it women's fault that businesses choose to pay as little as they can conceivably get away with, which in today's world has shrunk to frequently less than a living wage even for a single person, despite the conservatives' constant refrains about trickle down?
You seem to be conveniently forgetting that before women were allowed into the work force, it was even more difficult for them to do anything other than stay home and fulfill the roles set out for them by others than it now is for them to do anything other than work. A person who ernestly wanted more choices for women would not glamorize the delay of women's equal rights and protections under the law. And all this is completely leaving out the fact that going back to the model that you seem so enchanted with would continue to limit men's choices as well.
Just because every aspect of society hasn't fallen perfectly in line, doesn't mean women coming into the work force was a mistake. It only highlighted problems that already existed for the family. The solution here isn't to go back, it's to continue moving forward. Empower all workers with lengthy paid family leave for both genders, legislature better worker rights and protections, increase the stagnant minimum wage, grant universal healthcare.
33
I hardly know where to begin with this crazy town article. Fortunately, most of the comments I've read are sane... and at times quite brilliant. It has made me remember my early working life and juggling the care of children. I moved often in those days because of my husband's job; we struggled; and it should be better than it was for our pioneering generation in the 70s. But seriously, this article goes back to "keeping women in their place" thinking. After one early such move, leaving a teaching job to live in NYC while my husband was in grad school, I went to an employment agency (remember those?). I had a Masters Degree and was asked how many words per minute I could type. I was told I could be a receptionist and work my way up to executive secretary. That was the career path offered because of my gender. It took time, effort and networking to overcome such backward thinking. We can't go back there. The thinking in this article is just what Republicans want though. The current GOP suffers from unrealistic nostalgia, a vision of America that is exclusive of most Americans, and moral hypocrisy.
60
It's a good bet that those who preach loudest about "family values" are the last ones who should raise families.
35
@JMG
Perfectly said.
What a conservative--not. This boils down to picking winner and loser industries, just as usual. The only difference is that the emphasis is on labor, and specifically, those industries that employ male labor, rather than on investment. But the fact remains, rigging the outcome is not the best way to run a market economy.
6
When the sexual-lust weans after the first year or so of marriage, the real work begins. Marriage is excruciatingly hard. It becomes even harder when children come along. Women who chose not to work many times find themselves late-in-life with a spouse who no longer wants her. She's left with half of the assets and debts along with being forced to try and start over in mid-life or later. The husband has his career and two years later, after paying a pittance to his ex-wife, he's better off financially along with a younger woman. I agree. There are fewer marriages in low wage or no wage income groups. And, you'll find few UNmarried men in high income professions. Many of these marry peers who are also professionals with high incomes. What this tells me, women once HAD TO GET married to financially survive. Now fewer men have the money to buy a wife. In my life time, the Phyllis Schafly era, a woman wasn't allowed to have a credit card in her name without her husband’s permission. More flexible work hours, equal pay, a four day work week and more vacation days would go a long way in making American family life happier, no matter what the Family Unit looks like. My husband and I will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary in June. I'm glad we stayed married and enjoying our retirement years. While I could have stayed-at-home, I kept my work skills up. Today's women have more choices and they are choosing NOT to get married.
55
Enjoyed reading this op-ed very much and hope to read more about the changing American family life. I don't think we can say this change is bad or good at this point, but it is definitely changing the way society is structured. One of the things I worry about as a gen-x wife and mother is the deterioration of public communal life and what it will mean for my children. I know that marriage and family was key to this for centuries as folks attended church, public school, baseball games, open-air markets, etc. I see a remarkable lack of interest in the topic of family life and can't help but think of the Marx I read in college when he discussed how capitalism would eventually destroy the family unit as each member would be seen for their economic value. So many millennials I know seem pretty content if they can afford Netflix and Amazon and cheap goods. I am not judging them, but I wonder how you organize a society around expensive housing, insecure jobs, but an abundance of streaming content.
20
@momma4cubs As an older millennial with one child and a second on the way, I’m not sure your perception fits with what I see in my peer group. Many of us are married, often to a person we met in university, many have one or two young children, and we gather at playgrounds, farmers’ markets, drop-in centres, libraries and schools, as well as in each other’s homes. My personal experience is certainly not universal, and I’m not sure how it translates to people a few years younger, let alone the American context, but I at least feel deeply embedded in a supportive community.
Among the things that make that possible are proximity (I live in an older, dense neighbourhood, where we can walk to any one of five nearby playgrounds), a strong community around our local school (which also hosts a daycare centre), and employment standards that let both parents have time with their children while still working. It’s not perfect - and it’s far, far less perfect for people my age who aren’t earning professional salaries and/or didn’t meet and commit to their partner early on. Nonetheless, I think that given public policy that focuses on income security and affordability as well as sane employment policies for both men and women, and building neighbourhoods that make it easy for residents to get outside their homes, people will create communities.
2
I only wish that the feminist movement understood that they have been and continue to be used by people enthralled with economic growth, the gdp and an increased tax base.
Elizabeth Warren made excellent points in her book and as the author makes clear, this torch will not be carried by the economic interest centered conservatives. Things have shifted. This is the topic for a political party concerned with quality of life for families. Clearly not a real GOP goal.
A partner at home decreases the work force by more than one. Less meals out, more caregiving for aged and children, more stability for neighborhoods. Even a vegetable garden. All sorts of ways quality of life can improve unrelated to increasing GDP. The women’s movement has been used.
This has nothing to do with equal pay for equal work or opportunities for education.
11
The author notes that new family formation has plummeted. This is true. But she fails to mention one of the largest proximate causes: student debt. I'm a teacher nearing retirement and make a point to get to know our new young teachers. I constantly new young female teachers lamenting that they will "never be able to afford to have a kid," or that they would like to have two but can't imagine even being able to afford one with the student debt they are carrying.
36
@Keith Orndoff -- Student debt is certainly a problem. But it wouldn't be such a barrier to childbearing if teachers were actually paid a decent wage.
13
@Keith Orndoff
Student debt is a choice. I paid for every penny of my college education waiting on tables. I lived at home. It can be done.
1
@Philpy What year did you graduate? Four year degree? Did you have scholarship or grant aid? I went to college in the 80's. It was expensive, but doable with very modest loans, working minimum wage jobs as possible, and mostly, by my middle-middle-class parents tightening their belts a great deal for those years. In contrast, my mother went to college in the '50s, and was able to pay her tuition via summer jobs, with bits (not much) of parental help. Now - I teach college, btw - the situation is completely different. Costs have truly skyrocketed, largely because we as a nation have decided education is a personal luxury rather than a common good, and have decimated support for our public colleges accordingly. If you didn't go to school quite recently - and having been a waitress, I doubt you could have done so and paid for it waiting tables - you are comparing apples and oranges. As for "choice" - well, yes, it is a choice to take on debt to go to college. However, it's made very clear to young people that they probably won't get anywhere in life without a degree. A bachelor's is now serving the purpose a h.s. diploma did 50 years ago. So - ??
10
Some of us old enough to remember the 'Father Knows Best' era also remember that senior executives did not make such disproportionately high incomes, compared to the average income of employees in their companies. That manufacturing had not been outsourced to countries where labour rights were next to non-existent. That business leaders had not done their utmost to transform their labour force into short-term, benefits-less, pension-less, low-wage precarious employment.
Blaming the entry of women into the workplace for all these changes is letting North American decision-makers (most of them male) off the hook. Remember how for years, they denied that manufacturing was being moved to Mexico, China etc. etc..and then, all of a sudden, 'yes, of course, our factories are all there.' ?
83
Maybe we should look at young women who grew up with the results of their fine breadwinning dads who decided to divorce their fine stay at home moms. How many of this generation have had to watch their families dissolve and their mothers return to a workforce to survive? Women lose when their husbands leave them. Maybe we should look at the behaviors of men. You are allowed to leave your marriages, and when you can't get the job you supposedly deserve, you are allowed to wallow in your pathos? And you wonder why women chose work??
70
Exactly. I always told my girls they need to be able to support themselves throughout their lives. Maybe their marriages will last, maybe not, maybe their husbands will remain alive maybe not. It is better not to rely solely on one person to support the family, for many reasons. The USA needs a better family leave plan and decent childcare.
16
@Jodi Harrington ?? "Maybe we should look at the behaviors of men? You are allowed to leave your marriages..." Yes, divorce is caused by men. Most definitely. On the flip side, if you told women they were not "allowed to leave your marriages," where would you stand?
It's not a win/lose game based on gender. Men are not disposable and neither are women. And if one chooses to "break the glass ceiling" then have at it. Power! Money! Sales!
I want my MTV!!! Custom kitchen delivery!!!
4
The problem with Ms. Andrew's argument is the same as the problem with Ms Schafly's. You define the problem in such a way that the solution moralizes & coerces. I agree that not everyone should be in the workforce at every time in their lives; society is richer not just with more solid families, but with more respect for non-economic values. What we need are wider options for individuals, not just women: gay & straight husbands, adult children & grandparents as well as wives. The problem is money, not gender roles. If salaries & profits were distributed & taxed in a remotely fair & sane fashion, all our lives would be richer in possibilities.
940
@Martin "...If salaries & profits were distributed & taxed in a remotely fair & sane fashion..."
Who decides, Martin? Do we let individuals decide what is best? Or the coercive power of the state?
5
@Martin
What a sad remark -- as though happiness is a function of economics and not relationships.
6
@Martin I agree. The stagnation of workers wages and the disappearance of the middle class are the cause of the "two worker trap", not women having equal rights.
66
If the American family is in crisis, (an assertion Andrews makes, not I) it is not due to the hard won victories of feminists but to the reactionary and punitive policies of the conservative movement and their political wing, the GOP.
85
@Dee
Except that none of the "punitive" policies (?) has prevented girls/women from graduating from high school and college at higher rates than men, enjoying higher rates of employment than men, lower rates of suicide, and out-earning men in 18-35-year-old age group. Feminism gave women what they thought they wanted. Now women are miserable.
My friends, most of who work and are in a marriage, love being productive and performing well and getting accolades for the skills they are sharing.
Staying at home with children is not as glorious day-to-day as our society would like to have the women believe. Society puts much greater worth on those making the money and having the power.
What needs to happen is for our culture to begin evolving into a non paternalistic society where the men take equal responsibility for the well-being of the family unit.
25
As with so many, many ways msm smugly and dismissively examines what it considers to be some sort of cultural virus, widely diverse Americans go about their daily lives quietly and productively. Multitudes so evidently invisible to screeching, Twitterverse activists are those who honor and cherish what holds our country together, and do so proudly out of the garish glare of leftist spotlights.
I think this article is too heterosexual. What about lesbian and gay couples? I identify as a lesbian and when women are dating women, it does not matter who makes more or less. Straight women who do not choose men because of their lower income probably do not understand love in the first place. We need more articles that discuss these issues with more than heterosexuals in mind.
10
@Jamie Mendez
Look at the second paragraph.
Sadly and infuriatingly, Ms. Andrews belongs to a group of people who believes that your relationships (and right to marry) are negatives that society should avoid.
Ironically, people like Ms. Andrews decry the decrease in marriage rates and the breakdown of "family."
And then they fight tooth and nail to prevent LGBTQ Americans from doing just that - marrying and having families.
So you are correct. The article is too heterosexual. And it is "too" all kinds of other things as well.
We need more articles from individuals who are not interested in bringing us back to 1952 - when America was only "great" for a few select groups.
19
@Jamie Mendez
Heterosexuals are the majority and always will be. Must we think about LGBTQ issues all the time?
@Jamie Mendez You are invisible to Schlafly and Andrew's conservative theological lenses.
2
Unfortunately, any rising conservative female will rise to the fore only if she is anti-abortion and pro-gun because apparently few other issues matter to Conservatives. Meanwhile, only conservative males who are proponents of the the same obstructionist, 19th century views make it to the top. Both positions are losers to any thinking female or male. Which is likely why the GOP as it is now known will-deservedly- disappear from our radar in short order.
27
@Robert Don't bet on it. The GOP will not lose its plutocratic money stream easily, and the money fuels the fearmongering so effectively brainwashing the American electorate.
1
Typical conservative claptrap. The real problem is clear. It's wealth and income inequality. The mangers of businesses are not paying workers enough. They are keeping too much for themselves and other wealthy shareholder.
From 1948 to 1979, worker productivity rose 108%, and hourly worker compensation increased 93%.
From 1979 to 2013, worker productivity rose 64%, and hourly compensation rose just 8%.
The difference?
From 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation increased 937% while worker pay increased just 10%.
If worker's pay had increased with their productivity, they would have a choice, one income or two.
60
@Len Charlap The Reagan Restoration has the American Experiment on life support. And the oxygen is running out.
9
@Len Charlap
Completely ignoring what really happened to the work market. That second time span represented a huge shift in employment. Traditionally well paying blue collar jobs, like manufacturing and the trades decreased, especially manufacturing. They were replaced with retail and other low paying jobs.
The shift to foreign sources also meant that American based businesses had to compete on price. Out the window went things like high profits, job security and defined benefit plans. I know. I've lived and worked through that whole time.
2
@Mark - Balderdash! Profits are at an all time high. Just look at any graph that shows the percentage of wealth or income taken by the richest 10%, 1%, 0.1% and 0.01%. Not only did the rich get rich, but the richer you were the faster you got even richer.
Here is one such graph:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonhardt-income-inequality.html?searchResultPosition=1
2
Doesn't this all go to the freedom to choose? Both women and men should be able to choose their futures in this country. I found the whole let's bring back Schafly argument to be without a strategic foundation. Waving a few selected statistics about how things have changed was not moving, to me.
If our goals as a country are to support families that raise a healthy and educated next generation (an imperative goal), let's implement policies to support that. Financial support for families. A 32 hour workweek. Reduced taxes on labor and increased taxes on capital (hey, nothing crazy here, but just undoing some of the damage done over the last 40 years). More money spent on educational benefits and less on defense. Make the choice to have a family easier.
I hope that as our workforce become more homogeneous then the acceptance of those who have taken time off for family will go up. one can dream.
19
Just a second! There are more women than men working and pay is becoming more equal therefore there are fewer men making more than women and so women should choose to be paid less so they can have husbands and children?!!! Really?
How about this instead:
Let's continue to push for equal pay for equal work and support families through paid parental leave for both men and women and robust early childhood care and education. This will lead to a more educated, motivated and productive workforce. With the efficiency that we could reap from those results, let's invest in rebalancing work and family life to encourage Americans to work hard but only for 40 hours per week and then go home to enjoy a high quality of life with their families. That sounds like a much better deal than keeping women underpaid so that marrying a man with a steady job becomes more attractive.
This whole article reeks of retrograde misogyny and stale nostalgia for the imagined post war baby boom.
52
The Independent Women's Forum, when they were prominent, were an oxymoron. They weren't independent, but related by family ties to prominent conservative men like Dick Cheney. They didn't act independently either, but functioned as female spokesmodels for the men's causes. They were just another astroturf group created for the Reagan era. Why cite them now?
17
I do agree that children are better off with a full time parent, at least until they start school. But why assume it must be the mother who stays home? Men are perfectly capable of raising children; gay men do it regularly. And how about having a school day that is as long as a work day, and includes recess and homework time? There are plenty of ways to give children what they need that don’t rely on Mom being a housewife
23
I would love the option to stay home while my children are young, but of course, two incomes are necessary for survival (and to head off the “just downsize!” cries from Boomers, I do mean survival.)
The kids are only young for 5-15 years, depending on how many you have. A woman’s working life lasts 40-60 years. I can’t spend those extra decades vacuuming. I would prefer to work before kids, drop out, return half time until the youngest is in high school, then work full time until retirement.
BUT - social conservatives would never help me to that goal. The author glosses over what social conservatives are all about. Social conservatives don’t want more power for workers or more money for workers - the kind of thing that would let my family make that choice. Social conservatives are about one thing only: the power of men over women.
So of course social conservatives hate the very thought of women earning their own money. They hate women getting degrees. An uneducated woman with no work history has no power. She has to scramble to please her master, because if he wants to drop her or replace her, she will be in desperate poverty. She has to put up with however her master treats her, because he houses, feeds and clothes her, and she can’t easily transfer to a new master.
Oh, are you creeped out by the vaguely S&M language about “masters”? Go to a conservative evangelical church. You’ll hear it every day. They keep it out of the editorials they write for the times, though.
40
@Glen
I work as a church librarian in a mainline Protestant church. I notice that a popular writer is a speaker named Beth Moore. Yet her denomination won't ordain her as a minister because their theology teaches that it is degrading for a man to be under the authority of a woman. This attitude probably also accounts for their otherwise irrational hostility to female candidates for office.
5
Listened to a very interesting podcast with the Roaming Millennial yesterday with Sam Harris and she mentioned why more conservative women aren't leading the charge.
It comes down to how much pain and misery women want to endure at the hand of the AltLeft by exposing themselves to politics.
Who in their right mind would want to enter politics if you spend 10 minutes reading the comments on Twitter for either Melania or Ivanka Trump?
Seriously?
Women who have conservative chops for politics possess the same skills that women in the media have..so they can make 10x more money and have 10x more influence by getting a spot on CNN or Fox than they can being 1/435th of the US Congress.
Now for your homework assignment. Go to the two Trump women's Twitter accounts and look at the comments for even the most innocuous of tweets they've sent out..or look at the NYT comments for when any story appears.
Now answer this question. Would you want your own daughter subjected to that?
1
Guess they’ll need to develop thicker skins a la Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren.
4
Have you read some of the comments on Chelsea Clinton’s Twitter feed? How about Hillary Clinton? How about Michelle Obama? To pretend that all of these Twitter attacks are just at conservative or Republican wearing is false and ridiculous
4
Socially conservative women are busy supporting Donald Trump, which is about as far from "family values" as you can get.
25
Grrrr.
I grew up in that idyllic age, where women stayed home and men got paid way more than women on the grounds that they needed to since they had families to support (which conveniently overlooked the fact that there were also women with families to support; besides which, it smacked of the socialist mantra 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need', though they'd have been shocked to be told so) That was the 1950's.
An astonishing number of these stay-at-home women drank.
An astonishing number of these women who were victims of domestic violence, had nowhere to escape to.
Before you start constructing a social/economic structure that would promote more marriages, you'd better think long and hard about the safety features that would have to be built in.
683
I agree completely. And I note that both Phyllis Schafly and this author had/have passions outside the home. Funny that they like to critique other woman for having the same...
173
@O Bruno
Schaffley was also rich giving her freedoms poor women didn't have.
113
@O Bruno
Thank you for this comment. I have always thought that about Phyllis Schafly.
43
The rules are:
1 - Graduate.
2 - Get and keep a job.
3 - Get married.
4 - Have the number of kids that your family can afford.
6
Oddly enough, the one topic you've avoided discussing in this grand exposé on the American Family is why you think marriage is so critical in the first place.
So, why is it? Marriage rates are falling... and that means what, exactly? Why is it such a disaster than people between the ages of their mid twenties to mid-thirties aren't getting hitched?
I suspect the reason it's such a catastrophe to this author is simply "Because marriage is Good." And if tradition is your only argument, don't be surprised when younger generations ignore it entirely.
19
Women in America are historically color aka race separate and unequal.
Socially conservative white women voted 54% for Donald Trump in 2016.
While socially conservative black women voted 95% for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
12
Phyllis Schlafly was a hypocrite. She was married to a very wealthy man which allowed Sc;hlafly to hire help to raise her children and take care of her home so she could fly around the country and spew her lies. The women who supported her were basically in the same category.
What did any of them know about "having to work"? Most women then were forced to work because they were either divorced, widowed or single moms.
Some of Schlafly's arguments were specious at best. For instance if the ERA was adopted women would have to use the same toilets as men. Horrors. On buses, airplanes or trains both sexes use the same toilets.
A bunch of rich women who had hired help taking care of their children, their homes telling other women without their means how they should live.
The ERA Amendment failed in some States because of lies told by Schlafly.
It is up to parents to determine what works best for their families, not followers of Schlafly. Some mothers want to stay home, some would prefer to work part time, some full time. It is called Choice for some and for others no choice because of economic circumstances.
We have gone backwards in many cases recently. Let's not go back to the 1950's.
Young women and men mostly make their decisions to get married based on emotion not economic realities. Some choose to have children, others do not want children. Some couples adjust their wants and needs and live on one salary so they can stay home. Keep out of private decisions.
24
"Where Are the Socially Conservative Women in This Fight?"
They're too busy raising their kids (possibly home-schooling them);
protesting against access to women's healthcare at Planned Parenthood;
fighting against civil rights for LGBT people (and for the right of cake bakers to discriminate against them);
attending MAGA Trump rallies;
going to gun shows and writing checks to the NRA;
complaining the nurses don't work hard and just play cards all day;
watching Prosperity Evangelical preachers beg for more money for their churchs;
and listening to lies spewed by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Anne Coulter, and the rest of the Rightwing Media Cabal.
No wonder they have not time left to devote to things like fighting for things that would actually help improve their lives!
25
This is the most wrong-headed op-ed I have ever read in the NYT. There are so many things to point out but I just discuss one. Do you really believe it is fair for women and family to pay for universial family and child care programs by taking away future earned social security benefits. It is absurd! US is the only modern industrialized country that does not provide paid family leave and some form of universial early education. How do these other countries pay for it? Through taxes on everyone because everyone benefits from this investment in children and families. It is that simple!
21
Here's an idea. The old patriarchal paradigm is dying and rightly so. Marriage was ownership not partnership. The old conservatism held women in thrall while convincing them it was for the good of the children, effectively keeping them as breeding stock for their religion. And that is from where this all stems, religion. The non-religious 'Nones' are growing in numbers, finally. Once the right wing conservatism has been locked in a cupboard, the birth rate will normalize and populations will drop back to sustainable rate. This is a good thing.
17
Your remark on Tucker Carlson brings up an inevitable snag in male-female debates.
You write that Carlson said that:
"Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t.”
You assert that Carlson then said:
""low marriage rates caused "out-of-wedlock births and the 'familiar disasters that inevitably follow — more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.'" ""
This is an assertion, and in normal discourse, the next step would be for someone with an opposing view to debate the claims.
On female topics however, something else frequently happens when the discussant is a man. The Carlson issue is a good example.
What in fact happened is that:
"The liberal journalist Judd Legum tweeted that Mr. Carlson was 'arguing there’s a moral responsibility to pay women less than men'".
Forget that Legum is a man, and that he twists Carlson's argument, thus avoiding the subject.
Accordingly, the debate is now about the latter's style's being unacceptable: he said something you can't say.
Similarly, "mansplaining" speaks to avoidance of the topic.
So does the current Biden-Hill exhumation: the issue after all was Clarence Thomas.
That is, we have now shifted from talking about the issue, to talking about how A MAN is talking about it.
From talking, to talking about talking.
No wonder we don't get anywhere.
6
In all sincerity, I apologize for any comments I might have hastily made in the past about the timidity of the Op Ed page.
Only the bravest of editors would published a column which cites Tucker Carlson as a positive authority on women and marriage.
At first, I thought piece was meant as satire--is there anybody in Amierca, other than reactionaries infatuated with their (mythical) Golden Age of Familes, who thinks we need a new Phyillis Schlafly? Wasn't one Phyllis Schlafly enough for all our lifetimes?
But then, as Helen Andrews went on to quote what seems like every nostalgic right-wing academic who has access to a word processor, I realized she was serious. Andrews, along with the people she quotes (especially the sociopathic Tucker Carlson), actually believes we can turn the clock back to the Fifties, when men brought home the bacon and women cooked it to order.
I'm only surprised the headline didn't read, "What's Wrong With Barefoot & Pregnant?" But perhaps that would be carrying editorial courage a step too far...
19
And what, precisely, would a socially conservative woman “galvanize” others to do? Enshrine men as their masters? Vote yes on Gilead?
10
"Socially" You mean they are socialist? I find it hard for any woman with common sense would vote against themselves.
Helen Andrews, you got it all wrong. The need for two income families is not because women have been entering the work force in great numbers. It is, in part, because of a decline in organized labor. Unions were once the force behind a decent living wage. And so it is capitalism and the forces of cruel conservatism that are undermining our society. Oh and by the way, I don’t think women of any political stripe want to go back to the “barefoot and pregnant” model that your thinly veiled essay proposes.
19
@Kathleen C. Gnazzo
Finally a word from someone who understands that the problem is not feminism but capitalism as structed by the conservative movement. In a winner take all society like the US has become women have to work. The corporate model of paying executives over a hundred times what the worker makes is depriving families of money. I worked for years while raising children to have health care. Conservatives don't care about families, they care about their single bottom lines.
8
We are more than economic machines. We are Homo sapiens, not Homo economicus. An early name for the modern feminist movement was “women’s liberation”—meaning freedom to make choices that empowered not just our pocketbooks but our spirits.
America has the amazing capability to take concrete steps to achieve human liberation, but we frankly fear it. We fret over single women’s reproductive actions by preventing abortions and punishing single mothers with lack of day care. We worry if she can stay home to care for children. We are legally obsessed with her reproductive organs and functions.
Stop being judgmental about her decisions. Seek to understand them. Support them. That is the path to achieving equal rights. It’s not your idea of equality that's important, it’s hers.
4
Is the "two-income trap" really all, or even mostly, the result of more women entering the work force, or is it more easily explained as a response to the increasingly weak position of working people in America – that, of course, being a long-term conservative dream. It's disingenuous to focus on feminism as the cause of wage stagnation in America. What about the war on unions; the growth of the so-called sharing economy, in which employers are relieved of all responsibility for the wages, health, and mental welfare of their employees, all in the name of efficiency and convenience for the consumer (for which we can read higher profits); the shipping of jobs overseas to countries where much lower wages are the rule? Of course more women have entered the workforce – many because they can, and want to; many others because they must, whether they want to or not, in order to make ends meet for their families. How about ensuring a living wage for all who work; then women (and men) will be free to make their own choices about child care and family life.
8
Phyllis Schlafly was fighting for a time that existed in a few years in the 1950's. That window of a stay at home Mon and a single income Dad disappeared in the 1960's and 1970's. As my Mom told me (she lived through those years), sure you could stay at home as a woman but you had nothing, no money ,no life. Isn't it funny how everything Phyllis fought against became main stream life today. Guess you lost Ms Schlafly.
13
Are you referring the the socially conservative women who fought against the enfranchisement of their sisters decades ago?
The socially conservative women who fight today against the right to their sisters' bodily autonomy?
The socially conservative women who quote Saint Paul when arguing that women should submit to their husbands as the flock submits to Jesus?
There is a reason that women aren't making arguments for socially conservative views - most of those views are profoundly misogynistic.
29
One of the biggest reasons for the problems the author legitimately cites is the radical redistribution of wealth to the very top, who aren't even happier for possessing it. In an era of automation, that will only get worse -- and it has especially hurt industries that white men without college degrees depended upon.
In vain, I await a conservative movement that will propose solutions for *that*: a radically redistributive tax structure and the rebirth of unions.
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/23/11704246/wealth-inequality-cartoon
7
All it takes is one false argument mixed in with a bunch of true arguments to lead one to a false conclusion.
The author has used good data to back up her very valid argument that when men don't earn money, then women don't want to marry them. But her conclusion that feminism is to blame is wrong. Feminism isn't to blame for the fact that coal mines are shutting down, or that manufacturing has moved overseas.
The unspoken fallacy she is promoting is that there are certain types of work that are better suited to men or women based on stereotypes of gender preferences. There's nothing preventing men from working as nurses or kindergarten teachers. Nothing other than their own lack of education and their own biases.
The problem isn't feminism. The problem is the strict adherence to gender norms that conservatives hold so dear. You can't have it both ways. The author says she is in favor of equal pay, but (without stating it overtly) she is also against any change to gender norms dictating what kind of work men and women should do.
She also ignores that it is this very conclusion - that feminism is to blame blame for the fact that women don't want to marry a loser with no job - that leads to incel violence against women. The author will have no trouble finding young men on 4chan to agree with her argument. I'm sure she also believes it is the god given constitutional right of these men to own as many guns as they can get their hands on.
18
I would never have guessed that liberal or radical feminism is the cause of end-stage vulture capitalism's financial looting and inequality set in motion by the Reagan Restoration. Thanks for the enlightenment.
23
The author argues that; "women who would prefer to raise their children in one-breadwinner families like the ones they grew up in." Women today or traditional child-bearing age were born between 1979, and 1999, when one-breadwinner families were already mostly a memory.
15
@LL - I started school in 1949. My mom stayed at home when we were young. But then she went to work. Even back then not every woman stayed home full time.
2
I’m not sure women are working just to keep their families afloat, especially for the relatively well off.
When I got out of school, I knew I wanted kids, and my husband and I wanted to save some money towards that goal. Because of that I took a call centre job, in business, that paid far more than anything my friends were doing (ie. grad school, internships, paid work in design, journalism, social work, even acting).
Now you might think that that track led to these people making more money in the long term, but it didn’t — not overall, anyway.
Do we have an economic problem hurting marriage — yes. But we also have a cultural one, one that says that the “good life” is about experiences.
This is the outcome of “find your passion” and “do what you love.” Think about how different Jordan Peterson’s message of “finding purpose by taking on responsibility” is.
Some of this, too, is women not wanting to end up depending on a man. So two lower earning careers, dependent on government daycare, seem more ideal than one dynamic career (for the man) and one longed for and loved life as a stay-at-home mom. That’s why feminism is pushing for subsidized daycare.
I see how hard this is. I’m a stay at home mom, and I think my choices have reaped the best possible outcomes for my family. But yet I don’t know what to advise my teen daughter. She has a 93 average and every door open. It pains me how she limits herself, and how attached she is to her boyfriend.
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@C: I appreciate your comment, and I wish the very best for your daughter in the coming years.
I think what is becoming exhausting and sowing bad feeling are megaphone voices on both sides of this issue telling people "this is the way it should be done. THIS is the right way." I'm doing it wrong if what I want most is a career, I'm doing it wrong if I want to make caring for my household and family the center of my life. I'm too traditional- I can't possibly be anything but a doormat. I'm not traditional enough, therefore suspect and shrill and selfish. How about encouragement and acceptance of all the different ways different situations might be managed? Honestly, I'm sick and tired of being told. I'd rather spend that energy on finding my own best solutions.
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@Barton - In my experience, there are few families today who live an either/or life. That is, where the woman either stays home till the kids are grown, or who works full time. Many, including me, did everything from staying home with young children, to working part time, then to working full time, depending on the needs of our families and the available opportunities. I also went to grad school once my children started school AND worked part time. We can do it all. We just can't necessarily do it all at the same time.
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@C
I stayed at home until my two children were in school full time. I felt as if my brain had rolled under the refrigerator and would never be found. I loved my children and wanted to be the primary influence in their critical developmental years, but I was bored to tears, literally. I was depressed and so where friends who made the same choice. Stay at home parents need social support as do working ones. Yes, it does take a village to raise a child.
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Could someone please explain to me why it’s always *women* (and the little girls who grow up to be women) that are expected to make all the sacrifices “for the sake of the family”?
Traditional marriage has always been a raw deal for women. It’s only in the last few decades that we’ve had so many opportunities not to engage.
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Re: Conservative Women
Where are they ? I had to take a second job to make ends meet for my family and trying to getting the money to send my kids to college.
No time left for politics.
1
I don't believe that conservatives actually care about families, or that conservatives actually believe that women should be stay-at-home mothers.
If being a stay-at-home mom is so great, then why do conservatives insist that welfare payments be dependant on work requirements? How is that helping poor moms to spend more time with their kids? How can you deify mothers on the one hand, and on the other hand spout off about the "dignity of work" as Mitt Romney did? Mrs Romney seemed to feel totally dignified without it! Just admit that the outcome of conservative policies is to punish poor women, rather than helping them raise families.
Also, the author unsurprisingly does not devote a single word to a major cause of the breakup of black families - mass incarceration. If having a father at home is so important, then why did conservatives spend decades taking black men away from their families?
So now lets look at some left-wing policies. How many more women could raise their children full time if they had a universal basic income? What if health insurance was guaranteed by the state and not tied to employment? And what if the minimum wage were actually livable, how many more dads could support their family? Clearly, it is actually the left who cares more about making families stronger!
But sure, who are you going to believe, this conservative author or your lying eyes?
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@Britta
You make an incredible point, about work for welfare.
Most single moms, and lower income couples are deeply struggling to keep themselves and their children off the streets. And the constraints of the work for aid, is not helping the children. Nor is it helping the parents...who often must take jobs that don't serve the family needs, or further their school, career/work goals.
Dignity of work, is a cliche and as you mention gets to the heart of the hypocrisy of the Conservatives and their Family Values propaganda. What about the dignity of raising children?
What about the children? Its a question not on the Conservatives radar.
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Using “Social Security earned leave" to cover parental leave, just shifts the costs to families from one end of a working life to the other. Many women who struggle to raise their families by themselves could look forward to reduced SS payments when they are aging. What a nonsensical, conservative idea.
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But the cat food manufacturers would love it!
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The two earner trap has several roots:
#1 women suddenly woke up and found that marriage was not a lifetime contract. When the husband discarded his wife (and kids mostly) for a younger model, the wife was left high and dry economically. So women realized they needed to own their economic stake.
#2 When a man controlled the money, he controlled the wife.
The era of the one-income couple plus kids was also the era when men were not prosecuted for domestic violence.
#3 The unfunded Vietnam war caused huge inflation (18% per year !!) and that meant that the wife had to work to pay the bills.
#4 Creeping globalization took away the easy profits of post WWII capitalism when America had all the industrial capacity and all the gold. This meant that industrial laboring jobs were exported overseas which decreased the economic value of working class men.
#5 Corporate greed in the stock market casino means that no one can work a 40 hour week and survive. My Dad worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and no weekend time. GONE !!!
THEREFORE, the two income family has deep roots that cannot be overcome by a Phyllis Schlafly.
Economics rules: children used to be an unavoidable consequence of sex. They were also an economic asset for a farmer or small craftsman. Now they are an economic liability for most families.
The answer for individuals and families is birth control.
Capitalism will have to morph into something less greedy.
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The problem for strong-willed, assertive women in the "social conservative" movements tends to be, that while they'll certainly never die poor, that very personal strength causes them figure out the feminists are right.
8
. We will adapt and we will get to where choice is not a burden but a liberty. Child care, preschool, pay equity, service amenities to accommodate not enough hrs. in the day are directions that 3rd, 4th.... generations are wanting for and their needs in our society must adapt to. Home/family entrepreneurship works as a choice but diversity of other choices do as well. There should be room for all. To be honest with you I hope that family size keep on a downward trend. 7.7 billion of us and growing....while other inhabitants of earth or on the brink of extintion as we will if we don't deal with the probelm inherent in too many of us.
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I think the feminist movement has always been incredibly naive about glorifying work. It’s called “work” for a reason, most often ugly, dull, and unfulfilling (except for a luck few). Until women have more realistic picture of the world of work and careers, they are likely to continue to be disappointed by life.
@Greg please take on the work of being a full-time stay-at- home parent before you suggest that women don’t know what ugly, dull, and [often] unfulfilling work is like. I’ve stayed home as a mom and I’ve held jobs ranging from minimum wage to well-paid professional. Being a stay-at-home mom when kids are age 5 and younger is by far the hardest and most mind-numbing work - and it’s 24/7/365, even when hubby ( or wifey) gets home to help out. You say women are naive about work outside the home; you seem to be totally clueless and naive about what being a full time stay at home parent is like. Soul-numbing, back-breaking, mind-destroying, grinding work (the only time I’ve ever had near-crippling back pain was as a stay-home mom.) Those gooey, sticky, snotty kisses and giggles are sweet and rewarding (when they’re not suffocating) but they come at a high,high cost to the person who earns them. I’m glad I was able to do that work, but the idea that it’s easier than other work is laughable.
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@Sara W.
I’ve been a stay-at-home dad too. I know what it’s like.
@Greg You want to see "ugly, dull and unfulfilling"? Try being a stay-at-home mom.
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"defend the family"? Seriously? What decade are we in? Defend human rights. Defend children's rights. Dismantle patriarchal assumptions about women as passive, subservient, lesser, marriage-dependent beings. Start taking rape seriously.
The nostalgic dream world that the author wants to defend was supported by the notion that women belonged to men in a marriage--hence there was no such thing as "rape" within a marriage since it was the husband's "right" to take what he wanted when he wanted. Domestic violence? "Just keeping women folk in line and, well, you know how women are..."
NO. I am not going back there and I'm not re-creating that world for my daughter without a fight. Even Schlafly wanted more: she expected an appointment to the Pentagon from the Reagan administration and she was overlooked. She had done her service to shove the country backward and she was thanked by being overlooked by the very people she built up.
The world that the author wants to recreate was based on a concept of women as chattel. There is no way around it.
Women's rights are human rights. Women have been and are systematically denied these rights based on false gender stereotypes that society works hard to portrait as "natural."
Successful families come in many forms. Human rights, children's rights, environmental rights and the common good. Fix that and the rest will work itself out.
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The fallacy at the heart of this debate is a ridged ideal that the so-called nuclear family is “the foundation of every other political good.” This 1950s-artificial consumerism based construct doesn’t work for most people for the long term.
6
This sounds like one of those, "When I was young, I had to walk twenty miles to school." stories. The Washington Examiner is one of those tightly-wound, ultra-conservative, pro-"my way or the highway" publications that support many, if not all, of the crazy legislation AGAINST the poor, working class, women and families and old. In the past two years, I have acquired the distinct impression that the GOP hates anyone who is not white, kills the sick, starves the hungry and poisons the environment. Ugh.
10
Clearly the stratification by income and the yuuge yawning chasm that has gaped wider between the 1% and the rest of us has had a massive effect on societal and familial norms. Only the wealthy, such as a trust fund baby from Swarthmore that I know, whose existence has been subsidised by Mummy and Daddy's shrewd investments can afford to espouse conservatism. That creed includes anti-Semitism, homophobia and racism. Maybe those nasty aspects and women's rejection of them should also be explored as a reason why "conservatism" for women is withering on the vine...
6
“...those women who would prefer . . .a one breadwinner family like the one they grew up in”
Really? Like my dear friend who never worked, was left by her husband for a newer model. Now hubby is spending all of his money on lawyers to fight her and getting away with not paying alimony and always being late on child support. She is overwhelmed, unable to get a job in her forties, cries every day trying to care for her children and a father with a stroke. I had a career. When the marriage didn't go well, I had a high paying job that supported me and my kids with no help from anybody.
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Not all of us want(ed) a husband or kids. But it sure would have been nice to make the same as the men doing the same job!
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You have got to be kidding me. If social conservatives wonder where all the female voices are, maybe they need to look in their own kitchens. Maybe they need to stop encouraging their young women to fill up their houses with more and more babies. Maybe they need to be socialized to understand that they are entitled to use their voice and don’t have to bow down to a male hierarchy.
But, God help us all if their policy solution is to use government influence to ensure male earners earn more. Don’t we have an entire social system that’s already taking care of that?
7
This article is absurd. Fortunately my sister (as one of countless examples) did not leave her career and “stay home.”
My brother in law became ill and died when she had 2 little children. Consider the position she would have been in if she had relied on her husband.
We simply cannot go backwards. As a country we need to face the fact that we have no universal health care, no support for either parent who would take time from work to care for children, and the cost of those choices we make as a society when we worship capitalism.
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A typical right-wing approach to problem solving. Rather than tackling the problem of men's underemployment by generating more and better JOBS for men, propose solving it by cutting women's wages and squeezing women out of the work force.
The writer is absolutely right about one thing, though: leading such a regressive, anti-woman crusade would have been the perfect job for Phyllis Schlafly.
7
Socially conservative women in 2019 - subservient to male patriarchy, church, and systems that devalue your work (80 cents to the dollar)? Sure, you can find examples that run counter to this narrative but not many.
If you want to unleash the US economy's true potential, unleash the creative and moral spirit of women and all currently-oppressed minorities. I see socially conservative women as, in one way or another, carrying the water for old white men whose time is done. Period.
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If America is truly a meritocracy, companies should be employing those who are the best at their jobs and be paying them accordingly. Sometimes that’s a woman. And sometimes a man is better suited to child rearing than bread winning. We should all be permitted to self-actualize to the greatest extent possible within the environmental and economic limits of our society. Enough with the social engineering and gender stereotyping. If all women were so happy with their lot in the 1950’s, second wave feminism wouldn’t have occurred.
6
Where are all the women in this fight?
Perhaps they are at home, where they have been told they belong, lamenting the fact they have no control over their reproductive systems.
Just a guess.
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This sounds like a problem UBI (universal basic income) could solve.
1
Well, if you are advocating that things need to change so woman can stay home and raise children, you better change the alimony laws. Because if a woman who leaves the work force to stay home, raise children and maintain the household, is told that when she divorces, the man she supported by child rearing and homemaking will not contribute to her support, then she would be a fool to stay at home. Plus, if they are told, as the are in my state, that regardless of how long they have been out of the work force, if they are getting divorced, they must go back into the work force (often in a menial or low paying job because having been out of the workforce that is all they can get), they would also be foolish to stay home.
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I thought America was supposed to be about freedom, not social engineering to retain male dominance. Apparently not.
5
As Phyllis Schlafly railed against women working outside the home, she was busy with her own career and working hard outside the home. Hypocrisy. This article says low wages for men because women compete have caused a crisis. Many women choose to become educated, to have a career and delay or God forbid, avoid pregnancy. This situation is not a crisis. Our population is out of control, and any woman or man, who chooses not to have babies for whatever reason, gets my vote. Schlafly hated the bra burners and would have rather seen women in corsets. She caused more harm than good in her lifetime, and it sounds like Andrews drank the Kool-Aid.
10
This seems to be an article right out of the 1950s to 1960s, a time when every woman in their twenties who have a satisfying and well paying job considered themselves as being an old maid already and went hubby-hunting for a man with a high income to support a family with children.
Marriage Ueber Alles was the slogan for women.
In my native Germany there was a slogan for the delegated duties of the wife in a family, being the sole care take of the three K's:
Kueche, Kinder, Kirche - Kitchen, Children, Church, - to which one might add Cleaning, Chauffeuring, Nurse, kid- Psychiatrist, Dinner Hostess, School-home-work enforcer, etc.,etc., etc.,
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