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Because most women do not naturally gravitate to being the provider, aka "man of the house". In an ideal situation, she would be at home raising the children while the man provides. Back in the 50s, a nuclear family of a man, wife and two kids could live on just the man's income. The rise of women financially has now created the mandatory two income household, some women deciding to not have kids at all in large part because it's become prohibitively expensive especially in the high COL areas of the country. This is much more pronounced in Japan where young people dont even bother dating or getting married because its just too expensive. The US is headed the same way.
So yeah, it was a much better idea for women to be dependent on a husband.
The 50's was a very unique time in American history and really can't be duplicated again.
WW2 had just ended and we were the pre-eminent superpower in the world along with the USSR. Europe was in shambles trying to rebuild and so the U.S., dominated. Men worked in an office, women stayed at home and it was Leave it to Beaver for many.
Before urbanization and even suburbanization......most folks were farmers. Women AND men worked together on the family farm and it was understood that each would participate equally in the duties of the homestead. If your family didn't own a farm, there's a decent chance that the wife worked in a factory while the husband worked in a factory, steel mill, coal mine, oil field etc. Women in the workplace isn't as modern of a concept as we think...it's really a return to how things have been for generations. The stay-at-home wife was probably common in the upper classes but not so much for working class women. The big difference between the old days and now is that men and women (working the same jobs) can earn salaries that are much closer. The wage gap exists but is MUCH narrower than it used to be.
BEFORE Glorious Socialism (1933+), the usual practice was to have a lot of children, so when you were old, they could afford to care for you. Otherwise, you had to rely on private charity.
ALONG comes socialism with the notion that you would be supported by "taxing other people's children."
Guess what happened ?
All those socialist taxes depleted the value of earnings of the "man of the house."
Now that women are compelled into the workforce, and can't / won't have large families, the birthrate is TANKING.
So as the recipient population grows, the taxpayer base shrinks.
This will not end well.
(See: The Graying of Europe. Their situation is even worse than the USA.)
So the end of the world as we know it is all the fault of women and socialists....see this is what I just said in the post #160 above.
I think some of these posts reflect an old fashioned mindset. Younger women are more likely to work throughout their lives. There are now more female uni students, than male. Traditionally female careers such as teaching and nursing pay more, and offer pensions. And there are many female doctors and attorneys actively practicing.
For every female working a low paying job, I am sure there is a male doing same.
But for women of my generation, yes. We are often at a disadvantage if we remained single, or divorced and did not remarry. For my generation, it was hard to find good jobs. There was discrimination against women.
There still is, unfortunately. A woman I've known since she was an engineering trainee and is now in her 50s, who has overseen and managed large projects in the public sector worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and who was Number 2 in her department, had to sue to be considered for the Number 1 spot after her boss retired. The employer made a big to-do of the position being open and spent bucks to hire an executive search firm, and she was pretty much dismissed when she inquired as to why she wasn't being considered when she knew more about the job than anyone else. She said fine, I'm going to retain counsel to look into it, and she did so...and the next thing you know, she was being hailed publicly by the same employer as the first woman to ever hold the position. They made it look as though it was their idea all along. This happened within the last five years.
Choosing Mr. Wrong and ending up a single mother has got to be the biggest single cause of financial hardship for older women these days.
Society should implement a concerted Just Say No campaign to educate young women to the dangers of single parenthood before it's too late. Crime rates would probably benefit greatly from such a campaign too.
Most of the women that I know started working right out of college, had their own place or shared one with housemates, built up a nest egg in their 401Ks before getting married and buying a house. Babies came after that groundwork was laid between their late 20's to mid 30's or so. I was 34 before I had my first baby. Doing it this way made it possible for me to quit work and stay at home when my first baby was born. I've seen lots of other women do it the same way.
I think that it would have been way harder to start having children in my early 20's. I know people do it successfully but I think that my life would look far different today, and not in a good way, if I had gone that route.
Choosing Mr. Wrong and ending up a single mother has got to be the biggest single cause of financial hardship for older women these days.
Society should implement a concerted Just Say No campaign to educate young women to the dangers of single parenthood before it's too late. Crime rates would probably benefit greatly from such a campaign too.
For all women. It's a drag to live in poverty at any age, but definitely later in life. While I wouldn't want anyone to mandate who can and can't have babies, it would help if there were more education and societal understanding of the pitfalls of single parenthood in general. It's not impossible to raise a family as a single, but it can be a heck of a lot harder, and doesn't really serve the needs of parent or child very well.
I (and my sibs) was raised by a frequently single mom (4 marriages, 4 divorces, multiple long term partners in-between) and I missed out on a lot, and she found herself always scrambling to keep us fed and housed. Everything else (health/dental care, education, extra-curriculars, mental health) was a distant second to keeping that roof over our head by any means possible, even staying with an abusive partner who helped pay the bills was more important than anything else.
1.) Women live longer, so they have to make their money stretch further.
2.) Men of all personality types want money whereas (I think) a lower percentage of women are driven to make big money. Ladies want education since it opens up more doors but there seems to be much more variance from woman-to-woman with regards to how they are driven by money.
3.) There are more avenues for men to make $$$. Just use sports as an example. While there are quite a few female professional leagues, there's no MLB/NHL/NBA/NFL/EPL etc., equivalent exclusively for women where they can go from broke to multi-millionaires overnight. Blue collar and trade work is still heavily male-dominated. Basically, women almost HAVE to receive 4 or more years of post-secondary education just to have a fighting chance in the marketplace. Women that don't earn college degrees have a considerably harder uphill slog than men (and it's a struggle for men too).
Number one is an excellent and very salient point. A lot of the women I work with at the rehab facility haven’t just been widows for two or three years, they’ve been widows for 22, 23 years. My grandmother was a widow for the last 27 years of her life.
BEFORE Glorious Socialism (1933+), the usual practice was to have a lot of children, so when you were old, they could afford to care for you. Otherwise, you had to rely on private charity.
ALONG comes socialism with the notion that you would be supported by "taxing other people's children."
Guess what happened ?
All those socialist taxes depleted the value of earnings of the "man of the house."
Now that women are compelled into the workforce, and can't / won't have large families, the birthrate is TANKING.
So as the recipient population grows, the taxpayer base shrinks.
This will not end well.
(See: The Graying of Europe. Their situation is even worse than the USA.)
This is utter nonsense. Birth control is a big driver in having smaller families, for one thing. And you are male, no? Women don’t want to be walking wombs. Early in the last century, plenty of women died while giving birth.
The birth rate is tanking because of several factors. But they have nothing to do with what you term as socialism.
Choosing Mr. Wrong and ending up a single mother has got to be the biggest single cause of financial hardship for older women these days.
Society should implement a concerted Just Say No campaign to educate young women to the dangers of single parenthood before it's too late. Crime rates would probably benefit greatly from such a campaign too.
Well, I chose Mr. Wrong, but getting rid of him and becoming a single parent was a financial advantage, because he just cost too damn much money with all his bad habits. I even told the lawyer not to bother with asking for child support since he was never going to pay anyway, but the lawyer said I had no choice. The state required that it be in the divorce papers. He rarely paid, as expected. But at least I didn't have to feed HIM anymore.
As for your "Just say No" campaign, how about all those programs they already do or have done to deter teenage parenthood, like giving the kids dolls or bags of rice or eggs or whatever that they are assigned to be responsible for as if it's a child. In the two-pound-bags-of-rice case I read of, which I think was in a Bronx ghetto high school, the girls started carrying their bags of rice to school dressed in expensive baby clothes.
In another case that astounded me because of the mother's idiocy, a coworker was furious when she found out that her 18-year-old daughter was pregnant because "I've been telling her since she started her period to just keep her legs together!" Yeah, how'd that birth control method work out, Mom?
Number one is an excellent and very salient point. A lot of the women I work with at the rehab facility haven’t just been widows for two or three years, they’ve been widows for 22, 23 years. My grandmother was a widow for the last 27 years of her life.
Very true. My mom is going on 25 years without the love of her life (my dad). She wasn't that much older than I am now when dad first went into the nursing home which is a sobering thing to think about.
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